The ancestral shrine of the Ten Sun Sect was not open to disciples. It was a sacred place, sealed under layers of formations, guarded by silent talismans and a pressure that bent the air itself.
Yao Yi should not have been there.
But the mirror hummed.
It had been days since Ling Yue's warning. He had returned to his routines—task scrolls, cultivation drills, emotionless greetings. But the mirror refused to sleep. At night, it pulsed with a dull heat. During meditation, its whispers echoed inside his thoughts, forming incomplete words.
Tonight, he couldn't ignore it anymore.
He stepped into the shrine through a narrow crack in the barrier wall—a flaw only someone barefoot, desperate, and guided by madness could discover. His feet bled against jagged stones. The moon overhead flickered like it disapproved.
Inside, the air tasted of rust and incense. A thousand ancestral tablets lined the walls, their names worn by time. But in the center stood a sealed stone pillar, banded with copper rings and ink-black runes.
The mirror at his side burned.
It leapt from his waist and struck the pillar with a clang.
The runes flared red.
Yao Yi's blood rushed backwards.
A whisper seeped from the stone—not in sound, but in thought.
"Ten suns fell. One remained. Bound in mirror. Fed by blood."
He stepped back. His body trembled like a broken reed in a storm.
Then—
The copper bands unwound, slowly, like serpents stirring from ancient sleep.
A creak sounded. The base of the stone pillar split open with a hiss.
Inside was not treasure. Not scrolls. Not a secret weapon.
Inside lay a shrine within a shrine—a miniature altar carved from obsidian, lined with bone.
And in its center, a drop of blood hovered in mid-air, glowing faintly.
Yao Yi's legs buckled.
He had seen that glow once—ten years ago—on the night his father vanished.
Suddenly, footsteps.
He turned, muscles screaming.
A figure in silver stood at the threshold.
Ling Yue.
She looked pale, shocked. "You… activated it."
"I didn't mean—"
"You couldn't have unless…"
She stepped forward slowly, hand twitching toward her waist. Her eyes shimmered with something unreadable. Fear? Awe? Envy?
"Only someone with full inheritance can awaken the altar," she whispered. "Not even the elders can do this."
Yao Yi couldn't speak.
Behind them, the obsidian altar began to sing. A sound like a child humming in reverse, made of wind and metal and dying breath.
Ling Yue's voice cracked. "Get out. Now."
The mirror at Yao Yi's waist trembled violently.
Then something else moved.
From the altar, a thin arm of shadow extended, reaching toward the blood in Yao Yi's veins.
And he felt it—it wasn't trying to kill him. It was calling him home.