The soul echo moved like thought, bending through space without displacing it. Its claws tore fissures into the air, raking toward Li Fan's chest.
He twisted his wrist mid-chant, flipping a brush carved from qilin bone into his hand. With one precise stroke, he drew a horizontal slash in the air.
The creature's claw met the line and stopped.
Yan Mei's eyes widened as time stuttered for a breath. The echo froze mid-strike, suspended by a single calligraphic stroke.
"You inscribed a barrier... with a brush?" she asked, incredulous.
Li Fan didn't answer immediately. His hand blurred again, sketching runes into the very fabric of space, trapping the soul echo in a web of shifting symbols. With each glyph, the forge chamber reacted flames dimmed, walls pulsed, shadows thickened.
"This is not ink," he said finally, his voice low. "It's soulfluid. Drawn from my core."
The soul echo snarled. Its hollow body expanded, pressing against the edges of the glyphs. Cracks began forming in the script.
Yan Mei shifted her stance. "Whatever you're doing, it's not enough."
Li Fan nodded grimly. "Then we do this the old way." The seal lines vanished.
The creature exploded outward in a screech, surging toward them with a hundred needle-thin tendrils. Yan Mei was already moving, her blade humming with wind Qi. She vanished and reappeared mid-air, slicing three tendrils in one arc, dodging two more with a twist of her waist.
Li Fan slammed a talisman onto the floor. The paper burned with violet light as a jagged stone pillar erupted upward, spearing through the echo's midsection. It didn't die. It laughed.
"You think this is my true self?" it whispered, face splitting open into a grin of bone and blood. "This is a whisper of a whisper. And still, you bleed."
Li Fan's hand came away red. A tendril had sliced across his ribs deep, sizzling.
He stumbled, barely able to complete a defense sigil.
Yan Mei landed beside him, blood on her lip but eyes wild with excitement. "You really did learn all the forbidden arts."
"Not all," he muttered, gritting his teeth. "Just the ones I wasn't supposed to."
The soul echo gathered its tendrils again, forming a spear this time crackling with dark Qi. It hurled the weapon at them with a howl.
Yan Mei moved, faster than before. But she didn't deflect. She used her body. The spear struck her directly and shattered. The echo screamed in confusion.
Yan Mei stood unflinching, steam rising from her body where her defensive array flared.
"You hit me with shadow," she said, raising her sword. "Let me show you what real killing intent feels like."
Her blade vanished from sight. It reappeared inside the echo's chest.
The creature's body froze, then began to unrave lthreads of memory and hatred drifting away like dust caught in a tide.
Its eyes locked onto Li Fan one last time. "You'll see the truth... soon. You'll dream of fire. Of doors. Of chains..." And then it was gone.
Silence returned to the Soul Forge.
Yan Mei knelt beside Li Fan, her fingers pressing against the bloody slash on his ribs.
"You're reckless," she said, voice quieter now.
"So are you," he shot back, wincing. "You took a shadow spear to the chest."
"I knew it wasn't real," she replied.
He arched an eyebrow. "You weren't sure."
"No," she admitted. "But I wanted to see if you'd flinch."
Li Fan chuckled, despite the pain. "You're terrifying."
"And you're intriguing," she replied, wrapping a strip of cloth around his side. "You weave scripts into space, bleed soulfluid, and challenge entities from the past. You should've died five times today."
"Yet here I am," he whispered.
She met his eyes darkness and fire, locked with his.
"Don't die," she said simply. "Not before you teach me everything."
And for a moment, the deadly Phantom Blade looked like a girl grasping at something just beyond her reach.
Far above, in a celestial observatory lined with mirrored glyphs, a hooded figure watched the scene play out within a hovering jade slip.
He tapped his quill once, twice.
"Confirmed compatibility," he murmured. "Resonance between Scholar-Class and Blade-Type artifact wielder. Initiate Soulbind Surveillance Tier Two. If they reach the Gate of Echoes... execute the Yan mei."