The road to Lingyuan wound through a forest that no longer remembered spring.Trees stood black and hollow, their bark veined with threads of pale light—the remnants of an old Lantern's reach.Each step made the air hum, as if the mountain still whispered what it had lost.
Xu Pingsheng walked at the front, the wind tugging at his gray sleeves.Behind him came Elder Qinghe, cane tapping stone, and Li Yan, who carried every pot, rope, and complaint the Sect owned.
"Remind me why we're the ones doing this," Li Yan said."Because the others bowed faster," Pingsheng answered.
Qinghe chuckled once. "Because none of them survived a Lantern twice.And because Heaven's eyes do not look kindly on this valley anymore."
They left the road by noon. The earth underfoot changed from dirt to ash.Ruined pillars jutted from the ground—remnants of a temple, its script half eaten by fire.At the center stood what had once been a Lantern Spire, toppled and broken, its core crystal cracked open like a ribcage.
Li Yan whistled. "Looks dead enough."
"Nothing stays dead if Heaven still remembers it," Qinghe said.He raised his cane; faint symbols flared along its shaft. The air thickened, heavy with pressure.
From the cracks in the spire seeped a blue mist, soft as breath.It gathered into the shape of a man—or what had been one—its edges rippling.Where eyes should be, two burning Threads coiled outward, searching.
Li Yan swore. "You didn't say there'd be that kind of remembering!"
"Stay back," Qinghe ordered.
The specter spoke without sound; its voice bloomed inside their heads:Who cut the Threads of Lingyuan?
Pingsheng felt the Soulwheel stir. The question was not meant for hearing—it was a pull, an order written into air.He clenched his fist. "I did not come to bind them again."
Then you came to erase what remains.
The specter lunged. Its arms stretched into dozens of Threads, seeking flesh and memory.Qinghe's cane struck the ground; seals burst in rings of white fire.For a breath the Threads slowed—but not enough.
Pingsheng stepped forward.The shards in his sleeve blazed. The wheel behind his heart turned once, twice, each spin louder than thunder.He saw the Threads, saw how they wove through air and bone, how they looped back into the broken spire.He reached—and pulled.
The Soulwheel flared blue.Threads tore free like silk under a blade. The specter screamed, collapsing into a thousand sparks that fled into the cracks.Silence followed, vast and sharp.
Li Yan peeked from behind a fallen pillar. "Is it over?"
"For now," Qinghe said. He walked to the shattered spire and knelt. Inside, among dust and glass, lay a shard of black crystal, its surface veined with gold.
"The fragment of the Roll," he murmured. "Heaven's eye, blind and bleeding."He turned it in his hand, then offered it to Pingsheng. "Take it."
The moment it touched his palm, the Soulwheel screamed.Light burst behind his ribs; visions rushed through him—Lanterns burning in cities he had never seen, Threads stretching across oceans, and in the center of it all a vast wheel of light turning in the sky.It slowed when he looked at it.
Second Ring — 2 / 10 Stars unlocked.
The vision shattered. He was kneeling, breathless, the fragment dim in his grip.
Qinghe's face was unreadable. "Every fragment you touch will answer. But each answer takes something."
"What did it take?" Li Yan asked.
"Time," Pingsheng said quietly. "A year, maybe more. I can feel it missing."
The elder nodded. "Heaven taxes those who rewrite its ledgers. Come—we have what we came for. Before night remembers us."
They turned back toward the forest.Behind them, the broken spire began to hum again, a low and endless note, as if the valley were trying to sing its name.
Pingsheng looked once over his shoulder.In the mist above the ruins, a faint line of blue light rose skyward, connecting the fragment in his hand to something unseen beyond the clouds.
If Heaven keeps counting, he thought, then I will keep stealing its numbers.
The wheel turned.
— End of Chapter 6 —