Fen Wei broke the silence. "You can feel it, can't you? The way every choice rattles like a pebble in a dry well. The Hollow keeps its echoes."
His voice was small against the plain's breath, but it carried the bright impatience of someone who wanted answers carved quickly and publicly.
Luo Xin nodded without haste. "It is not the echoes that hold danger," he said, "but what people whisper into them." His fingers brushed the carved edge of an old walking stick as if reading its grain. "The Hollow remembers how vows were phrased, which promises were softened, and which threats were simply not spoken aloud."
They walked into the hollow proper — a natural depression in the earth where the wind moved in spirals and shadows lingered longer than they should. At its center stood a ring of stones, each one scored with shallow runes that seemed to drink light instead of reflecting it. Travelers told tales of voices that rose there: not loud, but precise, like the turning of a key. To stand in that ring was to be held by the memory of choices.
Villagers gathered at the rim. Their faces had the patient hardness of people who had learned to keep small fires of hope smothered rather than risk a blaze. Children clung to their mothers, and elders watched with a stillness that looked like a failed defiance. Luo Xin could feel the imprint's pulse in the space between them — a thread stitched with fear and a stubborn, private courage. It wanted acknowledgment, not spectacle.
Fen Wei walked ahead, unconcerned with ritual. He tossed a pebble into the ring and laughed once, quick and sharp. "Let it speak," he said. "Let the stones tell us what the village cannot."
A wind moved through the circle. It was as if a hundred soft voices tried to speak at once, overlapping and contradicting. The Hollow did not shout; it offered fragments: a broken oath about a harvest, a vow that bound a family to silence for a generation, the shadow of an agreement made to prevent a needless war that never came. Each fragment arrived wrapped in the emotion that birthed it — fear, relief, shame, pride — and those feelings hit the listeners like blows.
Luo Xin closed his eyes and let the pieces come. He did not attempt to force the impressions into tidy narratives. He allowed the pattern to linger until the edges sharpened: an elder had bargained with an outsider long ago to hide evidence of a violent feud. The bargain kept blood off the streets, but it had required the erasure of certain names from memory and the burial of a child's lineage. The village's present peace was held together by that omission.
"Why hide blood?" a woman whispered behind him. Her hands trembled as she clutched a bundle. "Why hide harm?"
"That is the crux," Fen Wei said, voice almost gentle. "Because to name it would make it real again. To speak would force choice. People prefer slow rot to sudden pain."
Luo Xin felt the imprint's heat. The Hollow offered a test: reveal and risk shattering families, or conceal and let a quiet corruption poison future generations. The academy taught method—observe, interpret, present—but the method assumed that truth and consequence could be parsed without cruelty. The Hollow proved otherwise.
"You could tear the web apart," Fen Wei said. "Expose everything and force the world to rebuild with clean nails."
"And then what?" Luo Xin asked. "How many will the rebuilding kill? Truth is a blade; not everyone is meant to be cut."
The villagers' eyes turned to them—some hopeful, some terrified. An elder with hands like knotted roots stepped forward. He had the hollowed look of someone who had kept a secret for so long it had become a second region of his life. His voice did not waver when he spoke.
"We bound ourselves to silence once," he said. "It kept a greater harm from falling on the village. We promised to close the matter. But with time the promise has become a shackle, and the price is in the children, who carry what we refuse to say. If you would know, ask. But know this: if truth comes, some of us will leave, and some will stay to feed the hunger it creates."
Fen Wei's smile was the brief flare of someone who loved risk. "Then ask. Let the truth decide."
Luo Xin felt the imprint align with the elder's words. This was not a puzzle to be solved by definition alone; this was a moral instrument that demanded a choice from the people themselves. He stepped into the ring of stones. The wind sharpened like breath on glass. He placed his palms on the cool rune-work and spoke in the quiet cadence the academy taught: descriptive, precise, gentle where gentleness would not betray clarity.
He narrated what the imprint revealed: the name withheld, the reason for concealment, the bargain struck in fear and haste. He avoided accusation and melodrama. He explained the effect of concealment — how soil and memory are starved when truth is denied; how lies become roots that choke later growth. He did not demand confession. He offered a map of consequence.
Words fell around him like measured stones. Some listeners wept quietly at the recognition of their invisible load. Others stilled into a defensiveness so sharp it hurt to look at them. Across the ring, the elder's jaw tightened like a closing fist.
When Luo Xin finished, Fen Wei stepped forward and asked the question he always did: "Now what will you do with what you know?"
A thousand small decisions stirred. A woman whose son had recently been apprenticed to a smith spoke first. "If we speak, our smith will be called to answer for his father," she said. "He is young. He will be ruined before he begins. We swore to spare his innocence."
Another voice, higher and colder, cut through. "Spare him from what? The truth? His shame? Who decides which innocence is worth protecting? If we do not name the debt, our children will inherit it like a sickness."
Arguments rose, not loud but hard as hammer blows. Loyalties clashed with the desire for clarity. The Hollow offered no comfortable solution. People argued as if trying to carve themselves out of the problem without cutting their own hands.
Watching, Luo Xin felt the imprint shift. It was not satisfied with a crowd's noise. It wanted the particular, the personal. The mark had been placed on an act committed by a named few; its logic demanded that those who had bound themselves be the ones to unmake the bond if that was to be done. The Hollow, in its stern way, preferred remedy from those who created the wound.
The elder on the stool rose, knees creaking. He looked at the villagers, then at Luo Xin and Fen Wei. His face was not the face of someone seeking forgiveness. It was the face of someone who had lived under a verdict and now felt it lift enough to breathe under. He placed his hands on his heart and said simply, "I bound us. The choice then was fear. I will unbind us now if the village wishes it."
For a moment the air froze. Then voices swelled—people pleading not to be made into instruments of a past sin; others demanding the courage to live without the bargain's shadow. No clean consensus emerged. The village fractured into two camps: those who chose the painful clearing and those who chose quiet survival.
Luo Xin's method had been to shape understanding, not to decree action. Yet by describing the mark, he had forced the village toward a decision that would change lives. The Hollow had taken his measured narrative and turned it into a blade of action, as if the stones themselves desired a result.
When at last a narrow vote was held, the outcome was so tight it felt like a draw between two equally heavy truths. Half the village resolved to reveal what had been hidden, to open the old ledger and call forth names. The other half swore to carry the bargain into another generation, convinced it still offered protection. Families that had stood together for decades found themselves sleeping in separate rooms that night.
Fen Wei watched with a satisfaction that was almost predatory, but not cruel; he loved the raw honesty of fracture. "You see?" he said softly. "This is what it does—truth forces motion. Sometimes motion cleans; sometimes motion destroys."
Luo Xin did not answer. The imprint in him had settled into a new tonal pattern, something like a question folded into an answer. He had helped the village decide, yet the price of that decision sat like a pebble in his mouth. He thought of Mistress Qian's injunction—do not impose—and wondered if telling truth could ever be truly non-imposing. The lesson was not new: knowledge carries consequence, and consequence is often brutal.
As the village dispersed under a sky that had already begun to bruise with late afternoon cloud, a messenger arrived at a trot from the north — a young man with a saddlebag and a look of weariness that had nothing to do with travel. He dismounted, bowed once, and delivered his breathless message to the elder who had unbound himself.
"The World Court vessel passed the Primordial Gate this morning," he panted. "They carry a delegation of Arbitrators. They seek to survey recent anomalies of Soul Imprint resonance. They are coming south."
Silence dropped like a stone. Fen Wei's grin thinned. The elder's face paled in a way that had nothing to do with age. Even the children sensed the shift: it was one thing for a village to argue; it was another for the world's judges to arrive and weigh those arguments with the force of law and history.
Luo Xin felt the imprint inside him flare with a new seriousness. The Hollow's decision was no longer merely local; it existed under the possible scrutiny of the World Court — a body that measured interpretation as law and sentenced entire communities to restructuring when their readings were deemed dangerous.
He had not come seeking summons from the highest judges. He had come to read a mark. But the act of reading had threaded into larger forms. His small method, practiced under the Dao-Silent Tree and honed in the academy, had become a trembling lever.
Fen Wei's eyes met his. "You did not merely pry," the Flux disciple said. "You pulled a cord that connects to the scaffolding above us. The Court will come. They will like certainties, not messy mercy."
Luo Xin swallowed. The hollow's echo dimmed to a steady hum in his chest. "Then we prepare simply," he said. "We clarify what we must, and we accept whatever consequence follows. The truth does not ask for permission."
As dusk dragged itself across the plains, and the village lit small lamps to keep out the further dark, Luo Xin sat alone for a moment outside the ring of stones. The imprint's edge—sharp and patient—had given him something he had not expected: not merely a puzzle's solution but the knowledge that his interpretations had weight. They altered people's lives in ways he could not fully foresee.
He wrapped his cloak more tightly and rose. The road to larger things had opened a little further, and behind that opening the Origin Sanctuary watched, not with malice but with the cold interest of things that have long memories and longer plans. Whatever the World Court would bring, Luo Xin now knew the shape of his responsibility: to see clearly, to speak precisely, and to carry the consequences of comprehension.
He did not pretend to welcome the burden. He only accepted it like a scholar accepts a difficult text: with patience, with a readiness to be changed. The Hollow's whispers chased them as they left — not a voice to follow blindly, but a warning that some echoes, once heard, never truly stop.