The moment the white light arrow took shape,
Wei felt as if his lungs had been scooped clean.
There was no time to gather strength.
No careful aim.
No final adjustment.
The arrow was forced out of him.
It trembled once in the unstable space around him,
a brief shudder born of imbalance—
and then it surged straight forward.
It carried no radiance.
There was no blazing glow,
no flare of triumph.
Only a line.
A line of white compressed so thin it was almost nothing at all.
—Hiss.
The white line pierced the dark node.
There was no explosion.
No violent rupture.
No dramatic breakthrough.
It was like a needle slipping into skin.
Precise.
Cold.
Perfectly placed.
It struck exactly at the narrowest point of the reversed flow.
The dark flames were yanked backward,
their flow severed as if sinews had been cut clean through.
At the point of impact, everything contracted sharply.
The assassin's movement locked.
Its crawling posture halted mid-motion,
hands and knees still braced against the planks,
its spine twisted into an unfinished arc.
The next second,
its entire body collapsed inward.
Not falling.
Not collapsing outward.
It simply lost all support.
Gray fire poured violently out of it,
flooding backward through shattered pathways,
spilling into the air where it dimmed and cooled almost instantly.
The assassin let out a short hiss.
The sound never fully formed.
It was cut off inside its throat.
Its head struck the wooden boards.
And it did not move again.
The white line vanished.
After the arrow was released,
Wei felt no relief.
Only—
emptiness.
Deep in his lungs,
it was as though a piece of him had been carved away.
His breathing did not stop at once.
But no matter how hard he inhaled,
his chest would not fill.
He drew in a breath.
The air entered.
But it did not stay.
On the next attempt,
his chest seized sharply.
The pain arrived late.
Not as a stabbing sensation.
Not as tearing.
It was a continuous hollowing,
a slow inward collapse that refused to end.
The white light did not return.
There was no recoil.
No lingering warmth.
It had been expelled,
consumed,
spent in a single use.
Wei staggered a step forward and caught himself on the railing.
His fingers were cold.
He lowered his head.
His awareness sank inward.
At the position where his lung-fire should have been—
a corner was gone.
Not dimmed.
Gone.
Like a hollow carved out of him,
a missing piece that no flow of remaining white light could ever cover.
In that instant,
he understood.
This was not temporary weakness.
Not exhaustion.
Not overuse.
This was a part of him that had been cut away.
And it would never grow back.
He tried again to gather white light.
The response was slow.
Fragmented.
Each attempt sent a faint but unmistakable tearing sensation through his chest,
like a dull blade scraping over an old wound again and again.
Wei's eyes were unfocused.
He did not lift his head.
He did not look back.
He only exhaled slowly.
Even that breath broke midway,
dissolving before it could fully leave him.
He smiled.
The motion was small.
Barely there.
"…So that's how it is."
It was not spoken softly.
It sounded more like confirmation.
Wei knew he had won.
Barely.
By chance as much as by will.
And he knew something else just as clearly—
every battle from now on would cost him more than it would cost others.
His awareness began to blur.
His meridians felt dry,
emptied,
as though everything inside him had been siphoned away.
It was a state dangerously close to death.
Then—
a flicker rose into his vision.
Like an ember from a dying campfire drifted upward,
light as ash,
caught by the wind and carried slowly into the night.
Wei froze.
He stared at the ember floating into the air.
It was small.
So small it felt like nothing more than a single remaining trace of warmth.
That was Chun's fire.
He recognized the color instantly—
a stubborn red,
bright and fierce,
like the light that always danced in her eyes when she smiled.
But now,
the ember pulsed unevenly,
its glow dimmed, then brightened again,
struggling to hold its shape.
It did not fly away at once.
It trembled slightly in place,
as if turning back.
Wei's chest tightened violently.
For a single moment,
he thought he heard something—
a sound so faint it was almost unreal,
like someone softly calling his name from inside the wind.
But the air was too chaotic.
He could not be sure.
Instinctively, he reached out.
"Don't go…!"
His hand passed through nothing.
He was only a consciousness now,
unable even to touch his own body.
The red fire seemed to respond.
It paused—
not pulled, but choosing to linger.
Then, instead of drifting away,
it rose a little higher and held its place,
hovering just above the railing where he had stood.
It glowed a little brighter—
not fierce,
not strong,
but steady.
As if it were waiting.
As if it remembered.
Wei stared at it,
his vision already beginning to fray at the edges.
The ember remained,
a point of red light in the swirling dark,
a mark that had not yet been erased.
He did not know whether that ember truly was Chun.
He did not know whether she was still alive.
He did not know whether this was nothing more than warmth conjured by a dying mind.
He only knew—
she had left.
Light as wind.
Painful as fire.
Then his strength gave out.
He could no longer hold on.
He sank into deep unconsciousness.
The world went dark—
but above the place where he fell,
the red ember still glowed.