They left the restricted wing in silence deeper than any veil.
Yue Li walked half a step ahead, sword hand never straying far from the hilt, eyes scanning every shadow for patrol lanterns or worse. Lin Feng followed—steps measured, face blank—but inside him something had begun to fracture in slow motion.
The regret did not arrive as a sudden vision.
It arrived as **weight**.
Every breath pulled heavier air into his lungs. Every heartbeat carried the faint, wet echo of Scholar Wei's silenced gasp. The man hadn't screamed. Hadn't fought. He had simply… stopped being a person with memories of the last six hours.
Lin Feng could still feel the exact texture of the thread as it wrapped the scribe's vocal meridians—like silk dipped in ice. He could still see the precise moment the man's eyes glazed over: confusion giving way to blankness, then to nothing.
Six hours of a life erased.
Not killed.
Erased.
And Lin Feng had been the eraser.
By the time they reached the shadowed corridor leading back to the alcove, the silver vein under his eye had gone dull—almost gray. The Spirit Song inside him no longer hummed. It whimpered.
A single, broken note repeating over and over:
*Why.*
*Why.*
*Why did you let me become this.*
Yue Li stopped abruptly at the turn.
She turned to face him.
Her expression was calm—too calm. The kind of calm that comes right before something shatters.
"You're shaking," she said quietly.
Lin Feng looked down.
His hands were indeed trembling—fine, uncontrollable tremors running from fingertips to elbows.
He tried to clench them into fists.
The tremors only spread to his shoulders.
"I can still feel it," he whispered. "The thread. The way it slid into his meridians. Like I was threading a needle through living silk. And then… nothing. Just quiet. I made quiet where there used to be a man thinking, remembering, breathing words."
Yue Li stepped closer.
She took both his hands in hers—firm, callused, warm.
"You saved Xiao Qing."
The words sounded hollow even to her.
Lin Feng's eyes lifted to hers—red-rimmed, pupils blown wide with something worse than fear.
"Did I?"
His voice cracked like thin ice.
"Or did I just buy one more day by stealing six hours from someone who never hurt us? Someone who might have had children waiting for him to come home tonight. Someone who might have smiled at a flower this morning, or remembered his mother's voice, or planned to eat a bowl of congee tomorrow. And I took tomorrow away. Not with a blade. With a thread. Because it was convenient."
Tears slipped down his face before he could stop them—silent, burning tracks.
"I keep telling myself there was no other way. But there was. There's always another way. I just… didn't look hard enough. Because looking hurts. Because choosing the harder path means more pain right now. And I'm so tired of pain."
He sank to his knees in the corridor—slow, graceless.
Yue Li dropped with him, never letting go of his hands.
She pressed her forehead to his—hard enough that it hurt them both.
"Then hurt," she whispered fiercely. "Hurt with me. Cry with me. Break with me. But don't you dare stop feeling it. Because the moment you stop regretting… the moment you tell yourself 'it was necessary' and believe it… that's when the system wins. That's when you become the hollow thing in the visions."
Lin Feng's shoulders heaved.
A raw, choked sound escaped him—half sob, half shattered laugh.
"I wanted to be strong for you. For her. For the song. Instead I'm sitting in a hallway crying because I muted a stranger's life for six hours. What kind of savior does that make me?"
Yue Li pulled him against her chest—arms locked around him like iron bands.
"The kind who still cries," she said, voice thick. "The kind who still asks 'why.' The kind who hasn't let the devourer eat the part of you that remembers other people exist."
From the direction of the alcove, Xiao Qing's soft footsteps approached—she had slipped out when she heard the muffled voices.
She knelt beside them without a word.
Small hands found Lin Feng's back—gentle, hesitant, then firmer.
"I don't know what happened," she whispered. "But I know you didn't want to do it. I can hear it in your breathing. It's shaking the same way my little brother's did when he broke my mother's favorite bowl and tried to hide it."
Lin Feng's laugh was wet, broken.
"I'm not a child."
"You're hurting like one," she answered simply. "And that's okay. Let it hurt. Let it all the way through. Because if it stops hurting… then you've already lost."
The three of them stayed like that—kneeling in the shadowed corridor while morning light crept closer.
Lin Feng cried until there were no more tears left—only dry, heaving breaths and the dull ache of a heart that refused to numb itself.
When he finally lifted his head, the silver vein under his eye flickered back to life—dim, wounded, but present.
The Spirit Song stirred.
Not triumphant.
Not powerful.
Just… there.
A single note—soft, cracked, imperfect—slipped from his throat without conscious thought.
It wasn't beautiful.
It was honest.
And in that honesty, the regret didn't vanish.
It simply found a place to live inside him—beside the love, beside the grief, beside the stubborn refusal to let the system turn necessity into apathy.
Yue Li pressed a kiss to his temple—slow, reverent.
"We keep going," she whispered. "One breath. One regret. One note at a time."
Xiao Qing nodded against his shoulder.
"Together."
Lin Feng closed his eyes.
The system panel did not appear.
But he knew it was watching.
Waiting.
Counting down to the next "necessary" choice.
And when that choice came—he would regret it again.
Deeply.
Painfully.
Humanly.
Because that was the only way left to stay human at all.