Two weeks passed.
In the mornings, Baimu drilled Shenhai in breathwork, movement, and sword-drawing so precise that even the wind had to respect it. In the evenings, they sat by the ruined bell tower, and the monk spoke in riddles of rivers beneath the world and stars that had names only swords remembered.
But on the fifteenth day, the winds shifted.
Baimu froze mid-sentence, eyes narrowing. "Something's coming."
By noon, the sky had dimmed. A caravan of robed riders passed along the ancient road below—emissaries of the Obsidian Registry, enforcers of a law older than the empire. With them came one figure not in black robes, but red lacquered armor, a curved blade across his back and a hawk tattoo etched over his neck.
"A Sword Registrar," Baimu murmured. "They've sensed the scroll awakening. We must move."
That night, they fled west into the hills. And by dawn, they met the girl who would change the rhythm of their journey—and challenge Shenhai's idea of loyalty.
They found her in a clearing surrounded by burned maps and broken compasses.
She crouched over a parchment glowing with red lines that writhed like living veins. Her fingers traced the paths, muttering names Shenhai had never heard:
"Path of Thundersigh… Dead Spiral… Widow's Meridian…"
She didn't look up as they approached, only waved a hand lazily. "Don't step there. You'll rupture the silk line and misalign the memory trace."
Baimu raised a brow. "You're using astral-thread mapping?"
"Obviously," she said, still focused. "How else do you find cities that were erased from time?"
She finally glanced up, eyes gleaming gold.
Only one eye.
The other was covered with a black cloth etched with celestial runes.
"I'm Yu Meiyan," she said. "I map places that shouldn't exist."
Over a fire of river-bark and dried pine, Meiyan explained.
She had once been an apprentice cartographer in the floating libraries of Tianque. But during an expedition into the Southern Mirrorlands, she uncovered an ancient map that burned itself into her eye—literally.
Now, her left eye could see threadlines—invisible currents of memory, fate, and qi that stitched the world together. Unfortunately, it also came with a price: the ability to sense when something was unmaking those threads.
"There's a pattern unraveling," she said. "Old threads breaking. New ones being forced into place. It all started… about the time your scroll cracked."
She turned her gaze on Shenhai.
"And you," she said, "have one of the brightest knots I've ever seen."
"Like a sword waiting to be unsheathed… from a poem that hasn't been written yet."
Shenhai flushed, unsure if she was mocking him.
Baimu asked, "Can you lead us to the Celestial Threading Grounds?"
Meiyan blinked. "You want to walk across the Sky Loom? That's suicide."
"Not if the boy wants to understand what the scroll truly is."
Meiyan was quiet. Then smirked.
"Fine," she said. "But I have conditions."
She tapped her covered eye. "First: when we reach the Loom, you help me find the origin of my eye's curse."
She pointed at Shenhai.
"Second: if we die, you carry my maps and finish them. Don't let the world forget where it came from."
"And third," she added with a grin, "you stop looking at me like I'm going to explode."
"I wasn't—" Shenhai started.
"You were."
That night, Shenhai stared at the stars and wondered:
Was this trust?
Not the blind kind born of blood—but the real kind. Built in ash, among strangers who had no reason to stay but still did.
The scroll pulsed faintly at his side.
The rust was gone from his sword.
The road ahead wound like fire through silk—but he would walk it.
Not alone anymore.