At midnight, the stars sank low, and the moon, pale in the northern sky, bathed the quilt in its light.
Silver light sifted through the bamboo tips, mingled with the cold dew on the roof tiles.
Only in the stillness could one hear the sound of light; in the depths of the night, its silence was palpable.
The wind rustled the eaves bells, their delicate tinkling sound like immortals chanting under the moon.
Li Wei opened his eyes.
The snores of the seven people sharing the room rose and fell in rhythmic waves on the communal bed, a mixture of sweat, the astringent smell of herbal dregs, and the cloying sweetness of cheap fasting pills, all blending into a stagnant mist. He rose silently in this mist, like a fish gliding out of a sleeping pond. The sound of his coarse linen clothes rubbing together was lighter than a mouse's paws treading on the roof beams—an instinct honed by three years of menial labor: the humble must learn not to attract the world's unnecessary attention.
Under the bed lay a coarse cloth bundle. He unpacked it; inside were not gold or silver, not secret manuals, but a pile of parts considered scrap by the sect: fragments of a broken array plate, an observation crystal drained of spiritual energy, and copper plates with ruined runes. His fingers meticulously identified each piece in the darkness, like a musician caressing the strings of a zither. He tightened three sections of copper tubing, inserted a concave lens, and polished a discarded "Heart-Cleansing Talisman" base into an eyepiece holder—a crude "radio-optical copper mirror" was assembled in his palm, the joints glued together with chewed rice paste.
He pushed open the back window. The winter night's chill pierced his pores like icy needles. He took a deep breath; white mist bloomed like a fleeting ephemera in the moonlight.
Tonight's target: Gamma Cancer, marked "Tiancang Four" on the Xuanmeng star chart, governing "concealment and change."
He placed the copper mirror in the groove of the window frame, a natural support worn down by three hundred nights. He attached the eyepiece to his right eye. The world suddenly shrank into a circular, trembling expanse of deep blue.
At first, there were only blurry spots of light.
Li Wei adjusted his breathing, slowing his heartbeat. As a menial laborer, he wasn't qualified to cultivate advanced mental techniques, but he created his own clumsy method of concentration: imagining his consciousness as an infinitely fine silver needle, piercing the confines of his eyeballs, piercing the atmosphere, piercing the vast emptiness between the stars. Gradually, the spots of light coalesced. Gamma Star emerged from the chaos, like a slightly pulsating blue-white diamond embedded in velvet.
With his left hand, he pulled out a charcoal pencil and a self-stitched parchment book, the cover bearing his neat, mortal handwriting: "Star Observation Log - Year of the Snake (癸巳)".
His right hand continued to stabilize the bronze mirror, while his left hand began recording. This wasn't painting, nor poetry, but a string of dry numbers and symbols:
"Zi Zheng, Tian Cang Si, estimated brightness +2.15. Color index leans towards blue, suspected high-frequency radiation overflowing the boundary of the regular spiritual spectrum."
"Note: Compared with the sect's *Zhou Tian Xing Xiang Pu* records, the brightness fluctuates periodically by ±0.03, with a period of approximately… three and a half hours. This fluctuation is less than a hundred breaths off from the tidal interval of the 'Qian Long Yuan' spiritual spring in the back mountain."
The charcoal pencil paused. A faint ripple rose from the depths of his dantian.
His spiritual root, according to the entry-level test, was "mixed and chaotic, with all five elements present but none outstanding, resulting in poor spiritual absorption efficiency." At this moment, the chaotic vortex that had been stagnant and lifeless in his dantian, in sync with a barely perceptible flicker of the gamma star's light, tightened slightly.
Like a distant pulse reaching the heart of another body.
Li Wei held his breath. He had been intermittently recording this phenomenon for seventeen months. The breath of the stars, the spiritual veins of the earth, and the deepest part of his depleted body resonated with a ghostly resonance. No one taught him, no one believed him. In the orthodox understanding of the Xuanmeng, stars were symbols high above, projections of fate, distant backdrops—they did not directly participate in the circulation of spiritual energy; that was a matter of the earth's veins and the cultivator's own microcosm.
But the curves gradually accumulating in his parchment book, those undulating lines drawn with charcoal like mountain ranges, were coldly telling another story. A story about connection.
He concentrated intently, his silver needle of consciousness trying to pierce deeper. Look, not only the starlight, but also the subtle "halos" around it, invisible to the naked eye and ordinary magical artifacts. Like the distorted vapor rising from distant scenery on a hot summer day, the dark space around Gamma Star contained ineffable "folds." His bronze mirror couldn't capture it, but his intuition, or rather, the almost pathological sensitivity brought about by his strange spiritual root, was "sense" it.
Just as he was struggling to perceive that spatial fold—
In the center of the bronze mirror's field of vision, next to the point of light of the γ star, a symbol appeared without warning.
It wasn't a star. It was extremely small, extremely dark, like writing in the palest ink on deep blue paper. A geometric pattern consisting of three nested arcs, with a twisted vertical line running through the middle. It didn't conform to any star official, any rune, any known system of markings in the Xuanmeng. It appeared for less than the time it takes for a heartbeat to pass before vanishing, so quickly that Li Wei thought it was a hallucination.
But on the parchment, the charcoal pencil had already unconsciously slid across. A strange symbol, possessing a certain cold beauty, remained in the corner of the "Notes" column.
Li Wei abruptly moved the eyepiece away, his heart pounding heavily in his chest. The night wind suddenly became biting. He looked up at the real starry sky; the Four Stars of the Celestial Empire hung peacefully beside the Milky Way, serene and unchanging. No symbols, nothing unusual.
Was it an illusion? A hallucination born of mental exhaustion?
He looked down at the parchment. The symbol lay there quietly, its lines clear. The charcoal marks didn't lie.
A shiver, a mixture of fear and extreme excitement, crept up his spine. He remembered a passage from an ancient book: some knowledge will manifest itself the moment you are ready to "see" it.
The faint sound of a night watchman's clapper reached his ears in the distance; it was the hour of Yin.
Li Wei quickly put away the bronze mirror and logbook, hiding the bundle under the bed. He lay back down on the communal bed, the rough linen clinging to his skin, the chill lingering. The snoring of his roommates continued; no one knew the silent expedition that had just taken place in this corner.
He closed his eyes, yet the starlight and the burn mark of that strange symbol remained on his retinas. Within his dantian, the faint spiritual energy born from the pulse of the stars had not yet completely dissipated, like a strange seed that had strayed into barren soil, quietly lying dormant.
Outside the window, the light of Gamma Cancer continued its ancient, rhythmic twinkling, piercing through billions of miles of void. But tonight, within that twinkling rhythm, there seemed to be a hint of something imperceptible…
Expectation?
Li Wei didn't know. His monotonous, desert-like life of menial labor had, from this moment on, cracked open. Beyond the crack lay the whispered stars, the vast, boundless unknown, full of danger and allure.
Li Wei had no intention of holding it in his palm; he grasped the mystery under the full moon.
The golden key had not yet revealed its location; the bronze key was hard to distinguish as the treasure chest.
Light leaked through his fingers, making him suspect the lock was broken; a thought arose in his heart, leading to a long and uncertain path.
The treasure and the prison were both unknown; he would simply follow the stars into the vast night.