The child's voice did not echo.
Not because it was quiet — but because the air itself refused to carry it.
Kaifeng stood frozen.
Zhui stepped back instinctively, and Yun Shou narrowed her eyes, gaze locked on the child as if seeing something she once buried.
"You know me," Kaifeng said, slowly.
The boy nodded.
"I know the name they gave you.
But not the name you carried before they tried to erase it."
The mist shifted.
And behind the dais, a wall of carvings slowly revealed itself — shapes and lines, not in the stylized elegance of the sects, but raw, jagged marks, made by fingers bleeding truth.
Kaifeng stared at them.
Somehow, he understood.
Not because he'd studied them.
But because he had written one.
Zhui whispered behind him:
"That one there… it matches your movement."
"No," Kaifeng said, quietly.
"It matches my memory of movement."
The child stood now, barefoot on stone.
He was no older than ten.
But the weight behind his eyes… felt like it had waited a hundred years.
"Before Qingwu," he said,
"before sects named their forms and locked them behind titles, the first blade wasn't drawn."
"It was heard."
Yun Shou's voice was tight. Careful.
"And you are its keeper?"
The boy turned to her.
"I am its echo."
Kaifeng stepped closer.
The child did not flinch.
"If I had another name," Kaifeng asked, "why was it taken?"
The child studied him a long time.
Then said:
"Because they feared what it would become if you remembered it fully."
He stepped toward Kaifeng.
Raised a single hand.
And tapped his chest.
"Your name isn't just Lián Kaifeng."
"It is Xún Jian."
Silence.
Even Yun Shou turned sharply.
Zhui muttered the name again, tasting it like iron on his tongue.
"Xún… That's a sealed family name."
"Extinct," Yun Shou added. "After the Pavilion War."
"Not extinct," the child said.
"Erased."
He pointed to the carving behind him.
"This was the mark of your family.
The ones who first walked the blade inward instead of outward.
The ones who struck without cutting.
Who moved without being seen.
Who taught form to listen to itself."
Kaifeng said nothing.
His hands hung loose. His breath shallow.
For a brief moment, the world around him blurred — not from dizziness.
From clarity returning too fast.
Xún Jian…
A name he had heard only once — in a firelit dream, in the breath of a woman dying with no one to call mother.
The child reached forward.
Pressed something into Kaifeng's hand.
A stone. Smooth. Etched with that jagged glyph.
Kaifeng closed his fingers around it.
"Why now?" he asked.
"Because someone else has remembered too," the child said.
"And they are coming.
To kill what remains of your name — and take what you never knew you carried."
Yun Shou stepped forward.
"Who?"
The child turned.
"His name… was forgotten by the sects.
But in the underpaths, he's called:
The Severed One."
The mist thickened.
And far in the east, beyond the gorge, a wind began to rise.
It did not whistle.
It screamed — but only inside the bones of those who'd drawn steel too early, or left it sheathed too late.
End of Chapter 8