The heartbeat that followed them out of the tomb didn't fade.It followed like an echo that refused to die — faint, but always a step behind.
Li Muye stumbled into the narrow corridor, one hand pressed to his ribs.Each thud of that hidden heart answered the one beneath his skin, slightly out of rhythm, like two clocks trying and failing to sync.
"Status!" Li队's voice was a whip crack."Everyone sound off!"
"Alive," Zhou Zhan gasped, clutching his pack like a lifeline. His glasses were cracked, one lens gone completely."Half-alive," Old Yu muttered, wiping dust from his mouth. "But that ain't the problem. Captain… it's following us."
He pointed behind them.Down the corridor, the darkness seemed thicker than before — not the natural dark of shadow, but something with weight.Every few seconds, a faint shimmer ran through it, like ripples on black water.
"Light up," Li队 ordered.
Three torches flared at once. The glow barely reached ten steps before being swallowed.But it was enough for Li Muye to see the faint reflections flickering along the wall — countless small, circular mirrors embedded into the stone, each no larger than a coin.He hadn't noticed them on entry. None of them had.
And yet now, each mirror was breathing.
Not figuratively — the surfaces pulsed, expanding and contracting as if exhaling invisible mist.A low hum ran along the walls, too low for hearing but felt through bone.
Zhou Zhan turned slowly, horror and fascination mixing in his eyes."These weren't part of the original tomb layout," he whispered. "They… they're growing. The material's reflective jadeite, but it's alive."
"Alive or not, they're blocking our exit," Li队 said curtly.He took one step forward, testing the air.
The nearest mirror trembled. For a second, it reflected him perfectly — then the image blinked.Not flickered — blinked.
Li Muye felt his stomach twist. The reflection of Li队's eyes closed, then opened again — a heartbeat out of sync with the real man.
"Back!" Zhou Zhan hissed. "That's not a reflection — it's a surface gate! A resonance mirror!"
"What does that mean?" Old Yu snapped.
"It means it's not showing us. It's showing where the tomb wants us to go."
The hum deepened.Every mirror on the wall suddenly flared with faint light, turning the corridor into a tunnel of flickering eyes. The floor vibrated — soft at first, then rhythmic, familiar.
Thump.Thump.Thump.
The drum again.
Only now, the beat didn't come from behind.It came through the mirrors.
Each pulse of sound sent ripples across the mirrored surfaces, and with every ripple, the reflected corridor changed — stone giving way to faint outlines of another world.Through the shimmering distortion, Li Muye saw shapes: mountains hanging upside down in an endless sky, rivers of molten bronze, constellations that spun like clockwork gears.
"幻境..." he whispered under his breath.The word came out instinctively, half-Chinese, half-memory.An illusion realm — the same one from his earlier trial.
But this wasn't a projection in his mind.This was a door.
The sigil under his ribs flared like a brand.In the reflection nearest to him, his mirrored self lifted a hand — half a second before he did.
A chill ran through his veins. "Captain…"
"I see it." Li队's tone was controlled, but his knuckles were white around the knife hilt. "We move. Single line. Eyes front. Don't touch the walls."
Old Yu cursed softly. "You sure you wanna march into a hallway that's watching us?"
"Would you rather stay and wait for what's behind us?"
That ended the argument.
The five of them advanced, the echo of their boots swallowed by the strange air.For every step they took, their reflections followed — but slightly delayed, like ghosts rehearsing their deaths.
At twenty paces in, the mirrors began to sing.A low, keening tone — neither human nor mechanical — wove through the corridor, harmonizing with the drumbeats that rolled from somewhere far below.The sound was beautiful in the way storms were beautiful: vast, uncaring, inevitable.
Zhou Zhan's hands shook as he scribbled fragments into his journal."Resonance layering… The tomb's using harmonic interference to open spatial overlap. The mirrors are forming—"
He didn't finish.Because the wall to his right opened its eyes.
Every tiny mirror — hundreds of them — blinked in unison, revealing within their depths not reflections but pupils.A thousand mirrored eyes turned toward him.
The sound cut out.Silence fell like a dropped shroud.
Then, one by one, the mirrors began to peel away from the wall — detaching like scales from skin, floating into the air.
"Contact front!" Li队 barked.
The floating mirrors rotated midair, rearranging themselves into a circle the height of a man.Light bent inward, folding like fabric — and in the center, space itself seemed to liquefy.
Through the warped circle, Li Muye glimpsed something impossible:The same chamber they had just left — but reversed.The bronze coffin floated above the floor, suspended by chains that hung from nowhere, and around it moved spectral figures — translucent, shifting, ancient.
Each figure carried a drum.
And every time one struck, the echo hit both worlds.
The vibration passed through the portal, slamming into Li Muye's chest hard enough to steal his breath.His sigil flared in response, runes blazing under his skin.The mirrors quivered, their light turning from silver to red.
"Get back!" Li队 yelled.
Too late.
A'Chuang had moved to intercept the floating formation, his blade already in motion. The instant steel touched the edge of the mirror circle, light exploded outward.The entire corridor twisted — ceiling becoming floor, mirrors becoming sky — and for a moment, none of them knew which way was down.
Li Muye felt his feet leave the ground.The world inverted, folded, then snapped back — and suddenly, they weren't in the corridor anymore.
They were inside the mirror.
They fell without falling.
Space turned viscous, then thin as paper. The corridor's grit, the smell of rust, even the bite of torch smoke peeled away like layers of breath on frozen glass. For a heartbeat there was nothing—no weight, no up or down—only a rust-red glow pressing against Li Muye's closed eyes and the sense that his bones were being tuned, one by one, to an instrument he could not see.
Then the world clicked.
He struck floor—soft, not stone. A skin of light took his impact and flexed like a drumhead before settling. His stomach lurched. The air tasted metallic, like a coin held too long on the tongue.
"Count!" Li队's voice snapped across the emptiness, calm riding the edge of urgency. "Muye!"
"Here," Li Muye coughed, rolling to a knee. His palm slid across the surface—it wasn't floor; it was reflection. A taut, dimly luminous plane shimmered under his hand, and dark shapes moved beneath it like fish under ice.
"Zhou Zhan?"
"Present," came the shaky answer. Pen scratched on paper; the scholar's reflex survived even transit. "Recording. Don't know how long any of this will last."
"Old Yu?"
"Wish I wasn't, but yeah," the old soldier growled. "If I throw up on the afterlife, you think they'll send me back?"
"A'Chuang?"
A pause. Then, "Here."
They rose into a place that looked like the corridor in outline and nothing like it in content. Walls existed where you expected them to, but they bent at impossible angles, leaning toward each other in a way that made distance a guess instead of a fact. Everywhere, surfaces gleamed: tall panes, coin-sized scales, hairline slivers—mirrors—not set into stone but grown out of it, slick as fresh sap.
And in every mirror, there were eyes.
Not human eyes. Not even animal. Each pupil was a tiny drum, the iris ringed with runes. They dilated and contracted, beat after beat, and with each pulse the air around the team thickened and thinned, like the world was breathing on them.
"Captain…" Zhou Zhan's voice shrank to a reverent whisper. "We're inside a resonance lattice. The tomb's mirror field folded us into—into a harmonic subspace. This is between places."
Old Yu squinted at a nearby panel that reflected his face a half-second late and a shade paler. "Between places my ass. If there ain't a way out of places, it's a coffin, that's what it is."
Li队 didn't answer. He was staring over Li Muye's shoulder at something beyond the team.
Li Muye turned.
The corridor—or the memory of it—opened into a circular chamber that could not be, because it hovered where a ceiling should have been. Chains hung up to it, not down, gleaming with a wet, inner light. In the center, suspended like a trapped heartbeat, was a bronze coffin—their coffin—except its lid was ajar and the handprint at its center glowed brighter, veins of gold branching out from that spot like lightning frozen in metal.
Every mirror in the chamber pivoted toward the coffin. Tiny drum-eyes dilated in unison.
Thump.
The sound didn't come from coffin or mirror or air; it came from everything at once. Li Muye's ribs thrummed. The sigil under his sternum burned and answered.
Thump.
His breath hitched. The world took the rhythm and divided it: echoes split into left and right, near and far, past and not-quite-yet. He could feel the beats, the way you feel a storm through the soles of your feet before the wind knows.
"Stay tight," Li队 said, and they moved—slow steps on the tensile floor of light, weapons low but ready. The mirrors didn't show them. They showed almost them. A fraction of a heartbeat behind. A fraction of a choice different.
At ten paces, the plane buckled—no, tuned. The surface underfoot rose in a low swell as if a wave were coming through the material and out the other side. A row of coin-mirrors peeled up ahead of them like scales on a fish caught against the current.
"Here it comes," A'Chuang said. Not fear. Not excitement. Cataloguing.
The peeled mirrors swiveled midair and clicked together, forming a lens the width of a doorway. Runes around its rim flowed like writing done and undone at once. Through the lens, a figure walked: Li Muye—no, a Li Muye—shoulders squared, blade in hand he didn't carry, expression fixed in focus he didn't feel.
The lens-li Muye looked straight at him and spoke; no sound came through, but he didn't need it. He read the words in the set of the jaw, the shape of clenched teeth:
Turn back.
The real Li Muye stopped dead.
Thump.
The lens popped like a bubble.
Light splashed the room and scattered gravity like dropped beads. The team staggered. Mirrors clinked together and apart in a chain reaction, snapping into different configurations faster than eyes could track. Each time they made a shape—a gate, a square, a wheel—something stepped half-out: a forearm banded in bronze and glyphs, a mask with eyes like empty wells, a drumstick the size of a femur. Each withdrew again as if the lattice were trying to make a decision and couldn't.
"Captain, the field's not stable," Zhou Zhan said, breathless with fear and fascination. "It's searching—matching patterns. It wants a dominant signal."
Old Yu snorted. "What's that mean without your scholar pants on?"
"It wants a leader," Zhou Zhan said simply, then blanched at his own choice of word.
Five heartbeats passed where no one spoke. The mirrors' eyes narrowed. One by one, they turned to Li Muye.
A'Chuang moved without seeming to. He went from at-ease to interposed in a blink, blade angled across Li Muye's body, not threatening him but subtracting angles the mirrors could see.
"Captain," he said, tone almost bored. "If the field wants him, we deny it line-of-sight."
Li队 didn't argue. He shifted left, knifepoint low, Old Yu drifting right to close the last gap. Zhou Zhan, wide-eyed, ducked behind them and bared his pen like a talisman.
The mirrors narrowed their pupils further. Drum-eyes flashed from red back to blue.
Thump—thump.
A double-beat rippled outward. The floor tightened underfoot, the way skin tightens when it chills. Where the pulse passed, runes surfaced in the reflection-plane beneath their boots, pale gold lines turning like gears. They pulled into a pattern that made no sense and too much sense at once: a circle inside a square inside a path with no end.
"Muye," Li队 said, eyes still scanning. "What does it want?"
Li Muye swallowed. "It's not… words. It's rules. It's—" He winced as the sigil flared. Half of him wanted to run; half wanted to kneel. "It's asking me to commit. To hold the beat. To stop resisting."
"And if you do?" Old Yu asked.
"Then it has a mouth," A'Chuang answered for him. "And we become its teeth."
Silence again, heavy as chain.
The mirrors chose.
They folded outward like shutters. Ten gateways bloomed in an arc, each leading to a space that was not the chamber and not the corridor and yet a sibling to both: a canyon made of letters; a river boiling with bronze coins; a black staircase descending into a sky where stars hung like fruit. The farthest gate opened onto a field of broken drums. Dust blew. Something walked between them with patience and no hurry, and when it turned its head, it had no head.
Zhou Zhan made a sound he probably didn't know he'd made, half-laugh, half-prayer. "Trial arrays," he whispered. "They're… they're giving us options."
"Not options," Li Muye said. The words came from deeper than his throat. "Orders."
He didn't remember taking a step. He only knew that he had, and A'Chuang's blade kissed his sleeve to remind him.
"Don't," A'Chuang said, soft.
Li Muye nodded, shame and compulsion warring in him. The sigil in his chest beat against bone like a locked thing, asking to be let out.
Thump.
The field heard that nod. Or perhaps it heard the conflict and mistook it for assent. The nearest gate convulsed, widening—not outward but inward. Space twisted, a spiral in a mirror becoming a tunnel.
The gateway showed a place he knew and didn't: a hollow the size of a city, with a drum for a heart and steps carved into the air itself. And on those steps, four figures: a captain with a blade shaped like an order; a scholar holding a pen like a candle; a soldier with a rifle aimed at his own fear; and a quiet man with a knife who never chose the wrong line.
They were them. Or the idea of them. Or the memory of the idea.
The quiet man looked up—not at Li Muye, but at the top of the steps. His mouth moved around a word.
Choose.
A'Chuang exhaled once, almost a sigh. "Captain," he said, "we can't stand here while it builds itself. Every beat it takes is a beat it owns. Give the order."
Li队's jaw flexed. He didn't look at the gates. He looked at his men. Old Yu, jaw set in defiance at anything that tried to scare him. Zhou Zhan, too brave not to be afraid. A'Chuang, already seeing angles no one else saw. Li Muye, light under the skin and something else inside that did not belong to this world and had chosen him anyway.
"Fine," he said. "We choose."
He pointed—not to the city-sized hollow, not to the stair or the coins or the headless walker. He pointed to the smallest portal, barely twice as tall as a man, set with runes that rotated like gears on a watch. Its interior was… simple. A bridge over dark, and at the center of the bridge, a mirror that was not a mirror but a sheet of still water.
"We go low. Tight. We control the sides." He glanced once at Li Muye. "And we don't let it take our beat."
They moved. The gate accepted them like a throat accepts breath. Cool rushed over skin. The bridge underfoot was smooth, too smooth, like the stone had been poured and set with no seam.
The dark below was not water and not air and not void. It was memory. Shapes slid through it: hands that had pressed clay into bricks; the shine of a chisel; a child offered a drumstick by a father whose face Li Muye couldn't see. Each memory released a sound as it passed, a note that joined a growing chord.
Halfway across, the mirror of water in the bridge's center shivered.
Li队 raised a fist—halt. The team froze.
The mirror cleared.
Inside it, five faces looked back—theirs, but few heartbeats ahead. Li Muye saw himself raise a hand and press a palm to the water.
"Don't," A'Chuang said, reflex-fast.
Li Muye held still. In the mirror, his other self did not. The water dimpled under the touch. Runes woke. The bridge underfoot thrummed, a single string plucked.
Old Yu swore softly. "That's a lie. That's bait."
Zhou Zhan shook his head, eyes bright. "It's a calibration. It's telling us the right pressure, the right timing. It's—"
"Shut it," Li队 said, but not unkindly. "We're not taking moves from a pond."
"Captain," Li Muye said, voice low. "Let me try."
A'Chuang didn't move his blade from where it covered Li Muye's reach.
"I won't press," Li Muye said. "I'll listen."
He knelt, close enough that his breath fogged the mirror. The sigil under his ribs beat in time with the chord below the bridge. He let his hand hover over the surface, feeling for the moment where the water wasn't water—where it was medium, like air in a drum or wire on a string.
There.
He didn't press. He sang—not with voice, but with the beat in his chest, the way a man hums through his teeth to check if a glass will ring. The sigil flared once, softly.
The mirror rippled. A pattern appeared, delicate as frost: three circles nested, lines crossing at angles that weren't Euclidean but felt honest in the bones.
Behind him, Zhou Zhan made a strangled noise. "It's the same geometry from the sarcophagus lid…"
The pattern rotated ninety degrees.
From the dark below, something lifted its head.
It didn't rise to the bridge. It surfaced into the mirror. A face—no, a mask—breached the water: bronze turned black with age, features worn to a permanent expression of almost-sorrow. It had no eyes. It did not need them. The emptiness where they had been looked through Li Muye and placed him on a shelf.
"Back," A'Chuang said, blade tipping half a degree.
Li Muye didn't move. The pattern in the mirror had settled to a tick he could breathe with. His hand hovered there, unchanged, and in that tiny refusal to touch lay all the control he had left.
The mask tilted. Its non-eyes narrowed. The three circles in the water contracted to one.
Thump.
The chord below the bridge snapped taut. The bridge wanted to bow like a harp-string. The gate behind them flickered.
"Muye," Li队 warned.
"I hear it," Li Muye said, and he did. The beat in his chest matched the beat in the mask. Not enslaved to it—paired with it. A duet on the edge of a knife.
He drew his hand back an inch.
The mirror did not like that. The water shivered with a sound like a scale dropped in a basin. Runes along the bridge's rail faintly glowed, asking, asking—
"No," Li Muye whispered. "We keep time."
He lowered his hand—not to the surface but to the air an inch above it—and beat once, twice, a third time, soft and stern, his rhythm.
The mask listened.
The drum below answered.
The gate behind them steadied.
A'Chuang let out a breath he hadn't admitted he'd been holding. His blade stayed up, but some sliver of it moved from threat to readiness.
Old Yu chuckled once, too loud in the quiet, relief and frayed nerves coming out sideways. "Would you look at that. The kid's a metronome."
Zhou Zhan's pen scratched like frantic rain. "He's establishing lead-tempo… overriding follower-phase… Captain, if he can hold this, we can walk out."
"Then we walk," Li队 said. "Pairs. Watch your feet. No touching the goddamn water."
They moved, slow, a procession with the drum for a priest. The mirror did not break. The mask watched them go. At the far edge of the bridge, the gate they'd come through was already unknitting itself, mirror scales folding back into wall.
They stepped off onto an island of stone, and the air changed—dryer, colder, threaded with a smell like old lightning. Ahead, the world opened onto another lattice of mirrors, this one bigger, its pupils wider, its beat slower.
A'Chuang touched Li Muye's shoulder then—the barest tap. "You did well."
Li Muye nodded without looking away from the lattice. He didn't say I didn't do it. He didn't say it let me. He didn't say I think it was measuring how far I'll bend before I break.
He didn't have to. A'Chuang's silence said he knew.
Behind them, a soft sound like a throat cleared.
They turned as one.
The mask had followed.
It did not rise from the mirror. It pressed through it, deforming the surface like a face pressed to glass from the other side. Runes along its cheeks lit one by one, a counting that reached ten and reset, reached twelve and reset, reached thirteen and held.
The drum's beat changed.
Thump… thump-thump.
The double-beat again, but lower. The mirrors' pupils dilated, then dilated past their rims, eclipse becoming maw.
"Time to go," Li队 said, as if he were calling a retreat from a training exercise and not a false sky that wanted them to agree on what was real.
They ran—not a sprint, but the tight, efficient gait of men who intend to run for as long as it takes. The lattice tried to anticipate them. Gates blinked open a stride ahead, showing promises both beautiful and practical: a ladder of light; a door that looked exactly like the door they used to get here; a daylit path through pine and frost. They ignored all of them. They went toward the gate that didn't promise anything: a rectangle of black with a single line across it like a closed eye.
At two strides out, the line opened.
And behind it lay their corridor. Stone, dust, torch-smoke. The breath of the real.
"Through!" Li队 snapped.
They burst from the mirror world like swimmers breaking a skin of oil. Weight hit ankles. Sound came back in a rush—the hiss of their breaths, the choke of torches, the slow roll of chain on bronze somewhere far below.
Only the beat remained the same.
Thump.
Not around them now. Within him. Li Muye staggered on the threshold, one hand braced against stone, his other clamped to his ribs. The sigil there pulsed, warm as blood, cold as an oath.
"Seal it," Li队 said.
A'Chuang didn't ask how. He and Old Yu went to work, torch-soot and oil smeared across the coin-mirrors; Zhou Zhan chalked sigils faster than he could name them; Li队 scored the stone with his blade in an old pattern that made the wall remember pressure and resist it.
The mirror field quieted. Pupils shrank. Drum-eyes closed, one by one, until the corridor was only a corridor: damp, cramped, indifferent.
They held still a long moment, listening for the sound that meant all their work hadn't mattered.
It did not come.
Zhou Zhan's legs went out from under him. He sat with a thump and laughed once, sharp and near-hysterical. "We just walked through a liminal resonance gate built by a lost civilization older than literacy and came back with—" He lifted his notebook. "—notes."
Old Yu grinned despite the shake in his hands. "You came back with breath, scholar. Notes are just the tax you pay."
Li队 glanced at Li Muye. The young man's face was pale under dust. Light still lived under his skin, faint and steady.
"You keeping the beat?" Li队 asked.
Li Muye nodded. "For now."
"Good." Li队 wiped his blade clean on a rag and sheathed it. "We move. The tomb just learned we won't play its tempo. It won't like that. Next it'll try to teach us a song with teeth."
A'Chuang's mouth tipped at one corner. "Then we bite back."
They went. The corridor stretched ahead, ordinary in a way that made Li Muye ache with gratitude. Every so often, a mirror scale in the wall sighed, as if disappointed, and lay back down to sleep.
They reached the junction where the passage bent toward the outer ring. The air there was cooler, cleaner, touched with the ghost of pine from some crack in the mountain letting the world outside remember them.
"Captain," Zhou Zhan said softly, almost apologetically. "I think… I think it marked a time."
"What time?"
Zhou Zhan tapped his notebook. On the page was a pattern of circles nested and crossed, the same frost-lace Li Muye had coaxed from the mirror. "This isn't just geometry. It's a clock. The double-beat we heard? It's a countdown."
Old Yu grimaced. "To what?"
No one answered.
The drum did.
Thump… thump-thump.
Closer now. Not louder. Closer. The kind of closeness that has nothing to do with distance.
Li Muye felt the beat in his bones and somewhere behind his eyes. The world sharpened around the edges. Colors deepened. The taste of metal sweetened into something like rain. He knew, with the certainty that comes before thought, that when the beat hit a certain pattern, a door would open whether they stood in front of it or not.
He looked back down the corridor. The wall was dark, unbroken. The soot-smears and chalk-sigils held.
But in the tiny scratch between two stones—smaller than a fingernail, blacker than shade—something gleamed. Not light. Not glow. Attention.
The tomb was listening.
"Captain," he said, and his voice sounded calm to him in a way that frightened him more than panic ever had. "It heard us walk away."
Li队 nodded once. "Then we don't stop."
They didn't. They moved toward the outer ring, toward air, toward the kind of danger that didn't own their pulse.
Behind them, deep in the dark, the drum found the next phrase of its song and added one more note.
The corridor hummed. The mirrors sighed. And somewhere above, far beyond stone and chain and the hollow-throated statues that should not move, a gust of wind changed direction, as if the mountain itself had turned its head to listen.
Thump… thump-thump.
—to be continued inChapter 8 – Echo Below.