Lin Feng's eyes snapped open. The world was back to normal.
The pavilion was solid, the scrolls were dusty.
The black wood tablet in his hand was now warm.
He dropped it as if it were a hot coal, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
He looked around wildly, but the pavilion was empty. Silent.
Except it wasn't. He could still feel them. The whispers were gone, but the presence of those echoes remained at the edge of his perception, a silent, mournful chorus.
He had spent his whole life unable to perceive the world of cultivation.
Now, he was seeing the cemetery of its dreams.
And he had no idea what it meant, or how deep the abyss beneath his feet truly went.
Lin Feng stared at his hands, half-expecting them to be stained with the grey residue of the phantom world.
They were just his hands, calloused, scraped, ordinary.
The black wood tablet lay on the dusty floorboards where he had dropped it, inert once more.
But the memory of what he had seen was seared into his mind, more vivid than any dream.
Ghosts. I saw ghosts.
The rational part of him, the part that had survived three years of ridicule, screamed that he was losing his mind.
Spiritual exhaustion, perhaps. Malnutrition.
But the sensation of that internal crack had been terrifyingly real.
It felt less like something breaking and more like something… opening.
He took a hesitant step towards the tablet. He had to know.
Was it a fluke? A hallucination born of despair and Su Lingshan's resonant bell?
His fingers trembled as he reached for it.
The moment his skin made contact, the world didn't instantly grey out.
Instead, a low, persistent hum started in the back of his skull, like a distant beehive.
And with it came the faint, sourceless whispers again. Not words, but feelings.
…so close… if only I had another year…
…the third variation of the Cloud-Piercing Form, it was the key…
…forgotten… my name is… forgotten…
He squeezed the tablet, his knuckles white.
"Focus," he whispered to himself, the sound swallowed by the dusty silence of the pavilion.
He didn't try to push energy into it. He had none to push.
Instead, he did the only thing he could: he listened.
He opened his mind to the whispers, letting the tide of foreign regret wash over him.
The grey haze descended again, softer this time, less violent.
The phantoms flickered into existence around him.
The swordsman in the corner, the scribe at the desk.
He saw more now: a woman weeping over a shattered jade vial, an old man staring at his own withered hands in despair.
They were memories, trapped in an endless, silent loop.
His eyes fell on the frantic scribe. The phantom's hand moved in a blur, inscribing characters that faded as soon as they were written.
Lin Feng took a step closer. He couldn't read the text, but an understanding began to seep into him, carried on the current of the phantom's obsession.
It was a treatise on… herb refinement.
A method to stabilize a volatile catalyst spirit-grass using a lower-grade auxiliary herb, a method deemed inefficient and discarded by the sect.
The knowledge was simply there, in his mind, as if he'd studied it for weeks.
It was a trivial thing, a footnote in the vast library of cultivation arts, but to Lin Feng, it was a thunderclap.
'This is how I can… learn?'
The realization was intoxicating and terrifying.
He wasn't cultivating Qi. He was devouring the leavings of the dead.