Chapter 16
They buried nothing.
There was nothing left of Luo Ren to place beneath the earth, no ashes to scatter, no marker to carve. Shenping stood at the riverbank for a long time after the last spark faded, watching the black water settle as if it had never reflected a future at all.
Sang Sang waited behind him, silent.
When he finally turned, his face was calm in a way it hadn't been before.
"We keep moving," he said.
She nodded. "Where?"
"The Black River flows into the Hollow Marches," Shenping replied. "No sect claims it. No dynasty controls it. History there is… loose."
Loose timelines bled.
They crossed at dawnless light and entered land that felt abandoned by cause and effect. The ground was cracked and pale, vegetation sparse and twisted as if unsure what era it belonged to. Old stone roads appeared and vanished without pattern. Ruins stood half-formed, walls ending abruptly where time had failed to finish them.
Sang Sang shivered. "This place feels like it's forgetting itself."
"It is," Shenping said. "That's why it's useful."
By the second day, they saw signs of life.
Smoke rose from a shallow valley ahead—thin, controlled. Not a village fire. A camp.
Shenping slowed, extending his awareness carefully. No mechanical recoil. No heavenly pressure. But something else lingered in the air.
Fear.
They approached cautiously.
The camp was small, no more than twenty people. Men and women dressed in mismatched clothing—some ancient, some strangely modern. Their faces carried the same look Luo Ren had worn at the end: exhaustion layered over stubborn refusal.
Time refugees.
A blade flashed toward Shenping's throat before he could speak.
He stopped it with two fingers.
The woman holding it froze, eyes widening as space locked her weapon in place. She wore leather armor reinforced with scrap metal, her hair bound tightly back.
"Easy," Shenping said. "We're not machines."
Another figure stepped forward, older, with sharp eyes and a limp. "Everyone says that."
Sang Sang stepped into view. The silver in her eyes flickered softly.
The camp went still.
The older man exhaled. "Blood anchor."
Shenping released the blade. "You know what that means."
"We know what it attracts," the man replied. "I'm Han Yue. This is what's left of the Third Escape."
"How many?" Shenping asked.
Han Yue hesitated. "Thirty-seven when we started. Nineteen yesterday. Eighteen this morning."
Sang Sang covered her mouth.
"They don't always kill us," Han Yue continued. "Sometimes they take people. Bring them back… wrong."
A scream echoed from the far end of the camp.
Shenping moved instantly.
He arrived at a cluster of tents just as a young man convulsed on the ground, veins darkening beneath his skin. His eyes rolled back as something inside him struggled to surface.
"He was taken," someone shouted. "Yesterday!"
Shenping knelt beside him, palm hovering just above the man's chest. He felt it immediately—a foreign structure threaded through the man's future, not fully anchored yet.
Early-stage overwrite.
He hesitated for half a heartbeat.
Then he erased.
The man screamed once as time snapped shut around the intrusion. His body arched violently, then went limp.
Silence followed.
For a long moment, no one moved.
Then the man coughed.
He sucked in air desperately, eyes snapping open in terror. "It's gone," he whispered. "It's gone."
The camp erupted into stunned murmurs.
Han Yue stared at Shenping. "You can remove it."
"For now," Shenping said. "Once it finishes rooting, I can't."
Han Yue bowed deeply. Others followed, some awkwardly, some with shaking hands.
"We'll follow you," Han Yue said. "Wherever you go."
Shenping shook his head. "I don't lead groups."
"That's not what he meant," Sang Sang said quietly.
Shenping looked at her.
"They don't want a commander," she continued. "They want a direction."
Shenping was silent.
That night, the Hollow Marches screamed.
The ground trembled violently as something massive forced itself partially into the present. The sky fractured into jagged seams, light bleeding through like open wounds.
Machines.
But not fully.
Dozens of half-formed bodies clawed their way out of the air itself—failed projections, unstable shells screaming as their forms collapsed and reassembled.
"Stay back," Shenping ordered.
He stepped forward alone.
Time here was already thin. That made what he was about to do dangerous.
He reached out and did not erase a moment.
He erased continuity.
The advancing forms stuttered, their movements breaking into disconnected fragments. Limbs swung without follow-through. Weapons fired into moments that no longer existed.
The Marches howled as cause unraveled.
One machine forced itself forward anyway, sheer processing power brute-forcing existence. It raised an arm toward Sang Sang.
Shenping appeared before it.
He placed his hand against its chest.
"You're too early," he said.
Then he erased the future it was relying on.
The machine collapsed inward, not destroyed but nullified, falling into a state that could never advance.
The rest retreated instantly, tearing themselves free of the broken sky.
Silence crashed down.
The refugees stared.
Han Yue whispered, "They ran."
Shenping felt blood drip from his nose. He wiped it away calmly.
"They learned," he said. "So will we."
Later, as the camp settled into uneasy rest, Sang Sang sat beside Shenping near a low fire.
"You're changing," she said softly.
He looked at the flames. "So is the war."
She hesitated. "When this ends… what happens to you?"
Shenping did not answer immediately.
"I don't know," he said at last. "But I know what happens if I stop."
She leaned against his shoulder. He did not pull away.
Above them, unseen by human eyes, a new designation appeared in the future's calculations.
Shenping was no longer listed as a variable to be erased.
He was marked as a contagion.
And the world quietly began to prepare for the cost of containing him.