The Hollow Market exhaled Lin Yan like a spent breath. One moment he was wading through vendors hawking bottled lullabies; the next the ground folded into a paper crane and cast him into open sky. He landed on nothing—an obsidian sheet stretching to every horizon, above and below—while the bazaar shrank to a single lantern receding into violet dusk. The lantern winked out, and the only light left was the borrowed syllable glowing above his heart: YAN, pulsing black-silver, counting heartbeats he no longer fully owned.
A path appeared—ivory planks floating edge-to-edge, each engraved with a face whose features had been chiselled away. The planks chimed as he stepped, releasing soft sighs—voices that might once have been names. First toll paid, he reminded himself, and walked.
After a hundred paces the sheet beneath him rippled, became liquid, became mirror. Reflected sky duplicated upside-down; twin moons regarded one another like strangers who had met in a dream. Gravity tilted ninety degrees without warning—Lin Yan's feet remained on the planks while his body leaned over an abyss of reflections. He did not fall. The lotus mark throbbed once, rewriting local law: Void recognises no direction.
Ahead, the path terminated at a circular plaza of standing mirrors—some taller than pagodas, others palm-sized, all angled inward like petals of a glass flower. Silver mist drifted between them, carrying whispers in languages that had never known tongues. At the centre stood a single slab of starlight: Truth Glass, smooth, patient, hungry.
He crossed the threshold. Every mirror snapped toward him, surfaces rippling like startled water. Reflections emerged—not copies, but possibilities. One wore the azure robe of Heaven's Will; another bore the golden crown of an emperor; a third was corpse-pale, eyes hollowed by despair. Each carried a blade shaped from absence—Nameless Echoes armed with fragments of the identity he had surrendered on the bridge.
The nearest reflection smiled with Wan-Er's face, flour still on her nose. "Stay," it pleaded. "I will believe in you forever. Why chase void when you can have this?" It opened its arms; inside them lay a lifetime of peach-bun mornings, snow-death nights, ordinary happiness.
Lin Yan's fingers brushed the memory—and crushed it. The reflection shattered into salt. "You are not her," he said, voice raw. "You are the price I already paid."
The mirrors screamed. A hundred blades lifted in perfect unison, edges singing the same sentence: Reflect or be replaced. They advanced, footfalls synchronised, forming a circle that shrank with each heartbeat. He drew Memory Blade—steel forged from the moment he had died beneath a raining sky of golden feathers. The sword felt heavier, as though every severed bond had added a layer of ore.
First clash—sparks of black fire. The Echoes fought with techniques he had not yet invented: Void Mirror Step reversed, Memory Blade duplicated, lotus petals used as throwing stars. They were him, only perfected, polished, cruel. Blood drew arcs across mirrored ground; droplets became tiny lotuses that bloomed and withered in the space of a breath.
He parried, spun, severed an arm that dissolved into smoke. Another reflection stepped over the smoke, wielding his own severed arm as a whip. Pain flared—phantom, real, remembered. The lotus mark drank it and asked for more.
A blade slipped past his guard, pierced shoulder. The reflection holding it leaned close, whispering with his childhood voice: "You were never enough. That is why they gave you away." He head-butted the reflection, felt cartilage crack, drove Memory Blade through its heart. It burst into petals that sliced his cheeks on the way out—scars shaped like question marks.
Circle tightened. Blades became a wall of lightless metal. He had seconds, maybe less. Instinct screamed: Break the source. He pivoted, kicked off a mirror, vaulted above the ring of steel. Mid-air, he inverted—gravity obeyed the lotus, not the world—and landed feet-first against Truth Glass. The slab did not resist; it welcomed, cold as a mother's forgiveness.
His reflection looked back—faceless, a silhouette of churning night. Where eyes should be, lotus petals spun slowly. He understood, then, what the trial demanded. Not victory over copies, but surrender of the original.
He pressed Memory Blade to the glass, tip against the blurred outline of his own throat. "I gave away my name," he said. "I will not give away my absence." He drew the edge downward, splitting reflection from reality in one clean stroke.
Truth Glass screamed—a sound like planets being dragged across iron. The mirrored silhouette cracked, fissures leaking void. Lin Yan poured every memory he had left into the wound: peach-bun mornings, snow-death nights, meteor frost, borrowed syllable, dying beneath golden feathers. The glass drank all, hunger unslaked, then detonated outward in a storm of silver shards.
Every mirror in the plaza shattered simultaneously. The Echoes froze, fissures racing across their bodies, and collapsed into drifts of glittering sand. Shards rained, each carrying a fragment of a face—nose, lip, eye, scar—spinning like snow. Where they touched his skin they melted, leaving behind pale patches that refused to bleed. The lotus mark devoured the rest, petals opening one by one until nine bloomed in a perfect circle around his heart.
A glyph ignited on his wrist—Second Law Severed: Mirrors—black characters writhing like hooked eels. From the ruins of Truth Glass rose a mask: half porcelain white, half obsidian black, split vertically down the centre. No eye-holes, no mouth-slit, only a surface so smooth it reflected nothing. He lifted it; the air behind him sighed, as though reality relieved itself of a burden.
True Face Mask, the lotus whispered. Wear me and be anyone. Wear me and be no one.
He placed the mask against his face. Porcelain fused to skin, cold becoming warm becoming skin again. For an instant he saw every face he had ever worn—orphan, grave-sweeper, rejected disciple, dying god—layering, cancelling, until only absence remained. Then the visions folded into darkness and he was simply Yan, syllable pulsing, features unreadable, identity negotiable.
The plaza collapsed inward, mirrors folding like petals at dusk. Gravity righted itself with a reluctant shudder. He stood on solid obsidian again, path behind him gone, path ahead a single bridge of starlight leading into violet distance. Lotus petals drifted across the sky, falling toward a mortal realm that had not yet realised its sun would soon be eclipsed.
He exhaled, touched the mask, felt it breathe with him. Three breaths, Kai's warning came back—three breaths of borrowed face, then debt collects. He would spend them sparingly.
Footsteps approached—light, familiar. Kai stepped out of nowhere, fox mask tilted, eclipse eyes reflecting the aftermath. "Quick work," she said, voice amused. "Most people try to win the mirror game. You simply stopped playing."
He did not answer; the mask had no mouth, yet sound came anyway, hollow, sourced from somewhere between ribs. "Next law?"
"Gravity," she replied, producing a tiny hourglass token identical to the one she had given him. Sand inside now flowed upward. "It believes everything must fall. Convince it otherwise. Or break its knees."
She tossed the token; he caught it without looking. When he glanced up she was already dissolving into eclipse smoke, last words drifting like ash: "Break wisely, Yan. Up is simply down that refuses to apologise."
He turned toward the starlight bridge. Somewhere beyond the violet horizon gravity waited—patient, absolute, certain. He smiled beneath porcelain, feeling the lotus beat a second heart against his ribs, and took the first step upward.
Behind him, the last shard of Truth Glass melted into the obsidian sheet, leaving only a faint scar shaped like a question mark. The wind carried the scent of iron and lotus—familiar, impossible—and the sky above the Hollow Bazaar cracked just wide enough for a single black petal to drift through, falling, falling, falling toward a mortal realm that had not yet realised its sun would soon be eclipsed.
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End of Chapter 4