The Heartwood Seed rested in Li Ming's hands, not as a physical object, but as a condensed sphere of spiritual presence in the True Archive. It pulsed with a slow, green-gold rhythm, a sleeping heartbeat of forgotten millennia. The weight of it was different from the martial echoes, not heavy with pride or rage, but with a profound, patient sadness, like a mountain mourning its own erosion.
He carefully willed it to a quiet corner of the psychic space. It settled, not among the scroll-shelves of the dead styles, but against a "wall" that felt like the memory of deep, damp earth. It belonged to a different wing of his internal library.
The four great echoes gathered around it, their attitudes a spectrum of reaction.
"A sapling of sorrow," the Silent Abbot observed, his presence a gentle rain over the Seed. "We must ensure its sleep is not a nightmare. It must feel safe, or its memories may curdle."
"Safe?" Lady Silken Death's threads prodded delicately at the Seed's aura. "It is a vault of non-human intelligence. 'Safe' means isolated. Its knowledge is a potential weapon, or a bargaining chip. We should not let its roots tangle with ours."
"…makes the place smell nicer… like a forest after rain… I could get used to this…"
"Enough of that," Bai grumbled, though his presence, usually so rigid, seemed subtly softened by the Seed's ancient, earthy essence. It reminded him of the bedrock upon which mountains stood. "The decision is made. Now we must deal with the consequences. The Keeper has just announced to any spirit sensitive enough to listen that this archive now houses more than martial ghosts. We have painted a new, exotic target on our door."
Li Ming felt the truth of Bai's words settle like a chill. His act of compassion was also an act of exposure. "What do we do?"
"We fortify," Bai stated. "Your cloak of dust is for casual seekers. This requires a wall. We must deepen your roots further, until they are not just connected to the Archive, but are indistinguishable from the mountain's own bones. If the Serpents return, or worse things come knocking, they must find a mountain, not a door."
The training that followed was brutal. Bai's concept of "deepening roots" was not a gentle meditation. It was an act of spiritual excavation. He forced Li Ming's consciousness down, past the familiar hum of the Archive, into the darker, older memories of the stone itself, the crushing pressure of geologic ages, the slow, indifferent flow of magma, the silence before life.
It was terrifying. Li Ming felt his individual self becoming chaos, insignificant. He was a mayfly on the face of eternity. The urge to pull back, to cling to his identity as "Li Ming," was overwhelming.
"Let go of the leaf, Keeper," Bai's voice was a distant tremor in the deep stone. "You are not the leaf. You are the branch. You are the tree. You are the mountain. Your fear is the leaf trembling in the wind. Release it."
It was a battle of surrender. He had to relinquish the very fear that had defined his life, the fear of being nothing, of being blind and small. To become the mountain, he had to accept that he was small, and that it didn't matter.
Days bled together. He ate, slept, and drilled. Silken Death ran constant poke attacks against his growing fortification, teaching him to maintain his deep-rooted stillness even while his surface cloak mimicked the frantic scurrying of a mouse or the idle drift of pollen. The Abbot and the Still Iron echo worked in tandem to reinforce his inner vessel, making it resilient enough to contain this vast, new sense of scale without shattering.
He was changing. The frantic, reactive boy was being compressed under immense spiritual pressure into something quieter, denser.
It was during one of these deep-rooting sessions, his consciousness merged with the mountain's deep, seismic whispers, that he felt the new disturbance.
Not a knock. Not a scream.
A drilling.
A thin, piercing, intensely focused strand of spiritual intent was poking the base of the mountain. It was not searching broadly like the seekers. It was excavating. It sought a specific frequency, the unique psychic resonance given off when he had accepted the Heartwood Seed. The Librarian's transaction had created a tiny, temporary ruckus in the spiritual fabric of the region. Something had detected that ripple and was now backtracking it with terrifying precision.
This was no Stone-Serpent seeker. This was a specialist. A spiritual water witch.
"They have found the scent," Silken Death's thought was a razor of alarm. "Not of you, but of the Seed's integration. They are tracking the anomaly."
Li Ming held his root, but his cloaking instinct flared. He layered on his "archive dust" signature, making his spiritual location vague and bland.
The drilling probe paused. It seemed confused. It had been following a faint trail of vibrant, ancient life-energy (the Seed). Now it hit a wall of dusty decay (his cloak). It retracted, then lashed out in a wider, more aggressive scan.
This scan was different. It was hot, hungry, and tinged with a familiar, cold arrogance. Stone-Serpent, but of a far higher grade. An Elder. Perhaps Elder Kun himself.
The scan washed over the hidden entrance. It found seamless rock. It pressed harder. Li Ming, deep in his mountain-root identity, felt the pressure like a thumb on his temple. He didn't flinch. He was the rock.
The poke withdrew again. But it didn't leave. It settled at the mountain's base, a watchful, patient presence. A snake coiled at the door.
"They cannot find the door," Bai assessed. "But they are certain the anomaly leads here. They will not leave. They will set a watch. They will wait for you to make a mistake, or for another 'anomaly' to draw you out."
"We're trapped?" Li Ming asked, pulling his consciousness back to a more manageable level. The harmony in his spirit buzzed with tension.
"Not trapped," Lady Silken Death countered, her mind working fast. "Contained. This changes the game. They are the hunters outside the burrow. We are the badger within. We have time. And we have a new resource." Her attention turned to the sleeping Heartwood Seed. It contains memories of this land, older than any serpent sect. It may know things about this very mountain they do not.
It was a desperate hope. The Seed was a memory of a forest, not a fortress.
"How do we ask it?" Li Ming said. "It's sleeping. The Librarian said it was dormant."
"All living things dream," the Silent Abbot offered. 'Even memories dream of when they were alive. You are the Keeper. You do not demand answers from a book; you read it. Gently. Seek its dreams of this place."
Li Ming approached the sleeping Seed. He sat before it, not as a warrior or a strategist, but as a librarian. He extended his awareness, not as a poke, but as an invitation. He shared with it his own memory, he feel of the mountain's stone, the cold, probing touch of the Serpent Elder's will, the sense of being besieged.
He asked no questions. He simply presented the situation and opened himself to resonance.
For a long time, nothing.
Then, a sprout of dream-thought emerged from the Seed. It was not words. It was a sensation of depth, and of veins.
An image-sense formed in Li Ming's mind, seen through the "eyes" of ancient, deep-running roots. The mountain was not solid. It was a honeycomb of old watercourses, collapsed magma tunnels, and fissures created by forgotten earthquakes. Most were sealed. But one… one vein ran deep, from the high snowmelt pools all the way down to an underground river that fed the very stream where Lao Jiang fished, miles away.
This vein was not a cave. It was a crack, a fault line wide enough for a badger, or a determined boy, but invisible from the outside. Its entrance was hidden beneath a landslide of boulders on the mountain's north face, a place no one went.
An escape route. Or an entrance.
The dream-sense faded. The Seed returned to its slumber, having shared a fragment of the mountain's ancient body-memory.
Li Ming relayed the information to the echoes.
"A back door," Silken Death purred, delighted. "Perfect. But we cannot use it yet. The moment you leave, their watcher will feel the shift. They will find the entrance and block it, or follow you."
"So we're back to being trapped," Li Ming said, frustration simmering.
"No," Bai said, a new, grim plan forming in his warrior's mind. "We use the door as a distraction. But not you. We give them something else to chase. Something loud, and angry, and very, very distracting."
All eyes turned to the most chaotic, unpredictable presence in the archive.
"…uh oh," the Drunken God's echo hiccuped. "I don't like the sound of that."
"You," Bai said, his focus landing on the wobbly spiritual signature. 'Your nature is imbalance, misdirection, and glorious, annoying chaos. The Keeper will lend you a wisp of his spirit, a temporary pathway. You will not be strong. But you will be… memorable. You will stumble out of a crack in the mountain five li from here, singing drinking songs and radiating a faint, confusing spiritual signature they will mistake for a weak, escaped treasure-spirit. You will lead them on a merry, frustrating chase through the woods, away from the true back door."
A stunned silence.
"…you want me… to go outside?" Zhao's echo was a mixture of terror and glee. "By myself?"
"For a short time. A glorious, drunken stagger under the open sky. A last taste of freedom before you return to the shelf. You will do this for the Keeper. For the Archive. For the chance to be a hero one last time.'
The Drunken God's echo swelled with a complex emotion, fear, longing, and a spark of its old, reckless bravado.
"…alright, you stone-faced bully. For the boy. And for the best damned run I've had in a century!"
The plan was insane. But it was the only one they had.
Li Ming looked at the coiled serpent at his door, felt the ancient escape route in his mind, and the chaotic, willing spirit of the drunkard ready to cause a scene.
The siege of the Azure Archives was about to be broken. Not by force, but by a perfectly staged, spiritual bar fight.