The light had not yet faded from the paper-mirror. The ash still lingered.
Shen Jin sat alone on the stone bench within the side hall of the Ningyuan Judiciary. The paper-mirror lay open across his knees, its curled edge still warm. The dream ripple had yet to fully dissipate, and at the center of the page remained a faint burn-mark—slight as a shadow, flickering like the first breath of kindled bone-ash.
He extended a hand. Two fingers brushed the edge of the page, tracing the faint ridges with trained precision.
Shen Jin never wielded spirit energy—
He had been taught to read the pulse of the old, to find the resonance that lingered in ancient things.
He followed the scar's lines as he would a relic's etched bone, trying to peel away its imprint from memory.
The mark twitched.
But it did not vanish.
Instead, it began to spread, thin and dry like veins of ash creeping outward across the paper's border—no flame, no smoke, yet there came a sharp sting along the back of his eyes, a heat that bit not into flesh, but into thought.
Shen Jin frowned, applying more pressure with his touch, trying to force a separation—
But the mark pushed back.
It flowed up into him, as if the scar had tasted something it recognized.
A second later, heat bloomed in his chest—
That was when it struck.
A warmth surged across his chest—
The Seal stirred. Not in form, not in light, but within his sea of consciousness, a surge of old echo erupted.
Then—
"…The next stroke."
A voice. Deep, dreamlike. Indistinct.
More suggestion than sound, yet it carried something direct. A pull.
Shen Jin jerked his hand back. Sweat broke cold along his knuckles.
He looked down—
The flame-shaped scar had left the page.
It now marked the back of his hand, seared into his skin like ink beneath flesh—shifting slightly, alive. A burned pathway, like a fragment of a dream-script yet to be written.
No pain. Only a trembling beneath the surface, as if the seal itself had begun to embed a thread of intent beneath his skin.
The chamber was still. From the latticed window, dusk had not fully receded.
Shen Jin gathered the paper-mirror in silence, fingers curling around its brittle frame.
"This feels… somewhat familiar"
It wasn't Luo Qinghan's handwriting.
It was something else.
A response. From the Seal itself.
And that response had chosen him.
At that thought, a faint glow stirred in his chest—an arc of incomplete sigils hovering in the space behind his mind, a pattern half-formed, and in its center—
A suspended line.
An unfinished stroke.
Waiting.
—
The side hall remained still—untouched, undisturbed. Dusk had already passed, yet true night had not fully taken hold. The sky, pressed thin against the lattice windows, filtered in as a muted shade of grey-blue, too cold to be called dark, too pale to be dawn.
Luo Qinghan stepped in alone.
She lit no lamps. None were needed.
The paper-mirror had already been placed on the stone table—unfurled, its surface faintly aglow with the final breath of dreamlight, like ripples on a frozen lake. At the center, a burn-mark remained—thin, slanted, barely alive—following the mirror's etched veins like a sleeping thought.
She stood quietly before it, unmoving.
Her right hand hovered above the paper's surface. Even without contact, a cold tingle brushed across her fingertip.
Not wind.
A resonance.
She did not touch it immediately.
She let her gaze fall upon the scar—a flicker of shadow beneath the page, as if old fire still pulsed there, slumbering beneath layers of ink. The place Shen Jin had touched remained warm, a breath of residual dream-scent drifting like a thread along the mirror's root.
At last, she lowered her hand—two fingers together—lightly pressed to the center of the mark.
In that instant, the veins of the mirror shivered, faint and quick. Something stirred beneath the surface—something aware, brushing faintly against the edge of her mind.
Her brow furrowed.
This was not leftover spirit-trace.
This rhythm—held no divine origin, no binding flow of spellcraft.
It was—
A mark from the source.
Her heartbeat slowed. Then tensed.
She had once read, buried deep in the restricted tomes of the Jing Sect, of a forbidden phenomenon called:
"The Inverse Weave of Day and Night."
It only appeared when a mirror seal was about to break.
Now, she knew:
This scar—it didn't belong to Shen Jin.
It didn't belong to her.
Nor did it fall under any mirror-spells she had ever known.
It was a response.
A response… from the Seal, or the Yaoyuan abyss, itself.
She slowly drew her fingers back. The chill at her fingertips lingered—not cold, exactly, but something finer. A thread of echo that curled into her thoughts like silk in water.
She seated herself before the mirror and drew a mirror-sigil slip from her sleeve. With a whisper, she pressed it to the mirror's edge.
"Mirror align… transform threefold trace."
Her thought pushed the incantation gently into form.
A soft silver ripple flared along the paper-mirror's edge, growing outward in waves. The mirror surface shimmered—veils folding back—until layered reflections surfaced, like lights drawn from beneath the ink, unfolding scenes that weren't quite real.
She narrowed her gaze. Her thoughts pressed forward.
Thin dream-lines ran across the surface—normally, these were the spirit-trails left behind when dreamcraft surged beyond intent. Such traces moved and pulsed.
But here—
They didn't.
They were still.
She shifted her focus, summoning the second layer of mirror sense—the "Echo Net"—intended to map and untangle inscriptions left by dream impact.
Nothing.
No script. No signature. No mark of hand, or spell, or intention.
It wasn't written.
It was—
Projected from within the mirror itself.
A flicker of unease bloomed in her chest.
She had witnessed dream-traces before—hundreds of times. No matter how chaotic, how fractured, they always bore signs of a guiding will, a spellcaster's trace.
But this—
This scar held no such origin.
It wasn't drawn. It wasn't pressed.
It was breathed—as if the mirror had, for a heartbeat, been seen by something far older, and that vision had branded itself across the page like ash frozen mid-fall.
She let the sigil slip fade. No more chasing.
The paper-mirror might begin to resist.
Her gaze lingered on the trembling line—its shimmer no brighter than dust in dusk.
And she whispered:
"You were never meant to record."
It wasn't a memory.
Nor a dream.
It was—
A residue of presence. A trace left behind… by something that had once simply been.