Chapter 13: The Stranger Beneath the Shrine
A chill clung to the early morning fog as it wove through the ancient shrine grounds at the edge of Mount Wuyin. The sect rarely sent disciples this far out—only a few old statues and forgotten spirit scripts remained beneath the moss-covered stones. But today, the silence was not empty.
A figure knelt at the base of a broken altar, robed in layered black and deep crimson. Their face was hidden beneath a porcelain mask carved in the likeness of an emotionless deity—featureless, smooth, inhuman.
The masked stranger's breath didn't fog the air. They weren't breathing at all.
In their hand was a tattered scroll etched with sigils long lost to modern cultivation—Forbidden-Class incantations that had once shaken the heavens. The stranger ran a gloved finger over the symbols, not to read them, but to remember.
"They've hidden him here," the voice whispered, and it was neither male nor female—more like an echo leaking through a crack in reality. "After all these years... the exile lives."
Behind the mask, their eyes flashed gold.
A raven landed near the altar, cawing once before turning to mist.
The masked one stood. The scroll vanished into their sleeve.
From a distance, nothing disturbed the mountain's peace. No earthquake. No storm.
But the shrine's faded runes had begun to glow.
Back in the main sect, Luo Qingshen's eyes fluttered open from his meditative trance. For a moment, his gaze turned north—toward the forgotten shrine. He felt… something.
A ripple. A disturbance.
The golden threads of Spirit Qi around him quivered.
He rose, slowly.
In the shadows behind the shrine, a second figure had watched the masked one kneel. They wore a dull green cloak, their presence muffled by a technique that no mortal sect should possess.
"So the hound has found the trail again," the cloaked observer murmured, fingers tightening around a sheathed blade.
The blade gave a low hum, as if it too remembered the name Luo Qingshen.