Rain came down like a curtain, each drop stitching silver lines across the terraces of Moonlight Peak. The mountain seemed to breathe in slow, old rhythms — wind hollowing through crags, the distant roll of thunder that belonged to the sky rather than any storm. Feng Kael stood with his hands tucked into the sleeves of a borrowed robe and felt absurdly small and absurdly large at once: small because he had been yanked from a bus with wet seats and a stale coffee smell; large because the world around him thrummed with a power so immediate it made his teeth buzz.
He did not belong here. That fact settled in him like cold water. The body he wore was young, trained enough to have blade calluses on its palms; the mind was someone else's — his, but rearranged by memory and a lifetime of small, modern habits. He glanced down at his hands, waiting for the dissonance to resolve into meaning. The rain staccatoed on the stone — drip… drip… — and then, inside his skull, came a sound that had nowhere to come from: a clear, electronic bell, a small mechanical hum. bzzzt… ping — DING.
An interface unfolded behind his eyes, not words as he'd learned them but sigils and a voice that felt less like a presence and more like the edge of a blade.
> SYSTEM ONLINE.
✦ Crimson Dao System — Desire Conversion Protocol ✦
Host: 冯凯 (Feng Kael).
The voice was cool and neither male nor female, a tone that might have been fashioned from glass. It gave him options — terse, efficient, clinical.
Heart Seal Technique: Locked.
Desire Gauge: 0%.
Available Quests: Moonlight Peak relic; Heart Seal primer; Investigate demon activity.
Kael blinked as if the emptiness in his head had been described aloud. The world at the terrace's edge reasserted itself: wet pine, moss-slick stone, the distant glow of linternlight from the Azure Cloud Sect below. A figure moved across that glow and into the rain.
She stepped out of shadow like a blade draws light. Liuyue — the name fit the way she appeared, graceful and sharp as a poem — wore a robe of deep indigo trimmed with silver. Rain clung to her hair, outlining the slope of her shoulders. Her eyes were ice and attention, and the tilt of her chin said she had measured him already and found him interesting, or dangerous, or both.
(soft footstep… hush)
"You shouldn't be here," she said. Her voice had no theatrics; it was the quiet of someone used to giving orders and expecting them to be followed. The wind took her breath and scattered it. "This is a forbidden terrace."
He opened his mouth to offer the usual modern excuses — wrong turn, memory lapse — but the system's small bell chimed again and overlaid itself on his thought.
> Physical proximity detected.
Bond potential: Liuyue (柳月) +1%.
(plink… rise)
The notification was clinical, but when his sleeve brushed hers as she stepped closer, something hot and precise settled in his chest. Not desire, not exactly; something the system labeled and he felt as attention — the same sharp alert a chess player gets when an opponent makes an unexpected move.
He kept his voice level. "I don't know how I came here." It sounded truer than any rehearsed line. "But I'm not lost if you tell me where I stand."
Liuyue's jaw tightened a fraction. A heartbeat. The rain eased into a fine spray. "You stand where the mountain tests the living. Either you learn how to meet the test, or the mountain swallows you."
There was a small humor in his modern mind at the phrasing — as if a mountain could actually make moral decisions — but it died in his throat because she was already moving. Her hand carved a sigil through the air: a practiced motion, the kind a person performs until muscle memory owns the pattern. Frost-silver trailed from her finger into the night, lines of pale light that hung an instant like web threads and then stitched through the damp.
(tink — faint chime)
Kael felt the thread of her rhythm like a metronome. A thought from the system popped up like a tooltip.
> Heart Seal Primer available. Recommended: synchronize breath and motion with partner. Expected reward: Bond Potential +8%.
"Match my breath," Liuyue said, low. Not an order so much as a test. "Breathe with me. Flow with the sigil."
There was nothing dignified about following someone's breathing in the rain, yet the motion itself simplified the world. Breathe in — the air cold and sharp; breathe out — a puff of steam. Liuyue's chest rose in a steady cadence. He mirrored it. For a second they were two lanterns swaying on a sea-bright ledge.
(whoosh… hum)
He could feel the system measure the alignment like a gauge needle finding its rest. The bond was not romantic; it was a technical thing, an attunement to resonance.
> Resonance: +8%.
Passive unlocked: Crimson Aura (Minor).
That last note felt like a small bloom beneath his skin. Energy threaded from him to her and back — faint as the heat one feels when sunlight slides across stone. A voice in his head noted it without drama.
"Good," Liuyue said. She wasn't smiling, but something softened the edges of her look. "You have rhythm. That will help."
They did not have time to explore further. A sound ripped up from the valley like a long, angry scraping — kyahhh—uuuu — and the terrace vibrated with the impact of a stone struck by a falling tree. The night's quiet splintered.
Liuyue's posture changed then, whole. Training replaced inspection. She stamped a foot; frost etched the stone in a jagged web. "Demon scout," she said. "It came in here. We cannot let it reach the sect."
(boom — crack — echo)
There was an animal that lunged from the dark — a shape like a shadow stitched into teeth. Its maw opened with a sound that was more like hunger than any animal call. Liuyue's hands moved, and the sigils she had been drawing glowed with a crystalline light. Kael, still new to the system but not to reflex, found his hand answering before his thought could form.
(snap… whoosh)
The Crimson Dao System offered a choice like a prompt: Project focused pulse at the demon's flank to disrupt its momentum; synchronize with partner for amplified effect. He selected the option with his mind as a muscle would select a tool.
A wave of warmth gathered in his palm and ran up his forearm like the trace of sun on a cold morning. He followed Liuyue's motion, let his breath find the cadence they had matched, and released.
The collision rang like struck crystal. The demon's cry fragmented into small, surprised sounds. Frost met flame, web met pulse. When the smoke cleared it lay as ash and dark dust, and for a long stretch the world only heard rain.
(shatter — whisper — drip)
Liuyue was breathing hard, rain lacquered to the hair at her temple. She looked at him with a scrutiny that had shifted away from suspicion and toward appraisal. "You reacted as if you had done this before," she observed. "Not many can make the connection that quickly."
Kael let the system's little bell fill the silence. Bond Milestone: Crimson Link (微印) achieved. Desire Gauge: 12%.
He blinked. The words sounded clinical and oddly intimate all at once. "I used to pace by rhythm," he said. "Counting, timing. It's useful sometimes."
A ghost of humor twisted Liuyue's mouth. "Timing keeps life from breaking." She extended a hand, not to touch, but to indicate the way down the terrace. "Come. If you survive Moonlight Peak's first lesson, maybe you'll learn the second without falling."
They walked in a companionable step, not close but not distant either. The path down the peak led between lantern-lit pines and stone carved with names older than the sect. Every so often a recruit or elder glanced at the new pair with curiosity. Kael felt eyes latch, evaluate. The system pinged again, unobtrusive and steady.
> Quest acquired: Moonlit Lotus Mirror — partial coordinates discovered.
(plink… soft chime)
The mention of an artifact brightened Liuyue's expression. "You have the system," she said. "Relics answer systems."
That spoke of a world where things had meaning beyond brute strength. Relics were not trinkets. They were memory, will, and hunger given shape. The Moonlit Lotus Mirror, if they found it, would not only amplify their practice; it might change the scale of what they could do.
"Then we seek it," Kael said. He had no illusions. There would be no simple treasure map, no polite quest-giver. Everything was a test — politics folded into relic hunts, allies masked as rivals. Still, curiosity burned in him. It had been the fuel of the other life; now it warmed this one.
(soft footstep… rustle)
They passed a recruit who spat into the mud and muttered something about "another newcomer; let the mountain have him." The recruit's voice had the brittle edge of someone who had learned to mock because fear was harder to show. The world clung to a rough courtesy in places like that.
As they moved, Liuyue spoke once without looking at him. "Do not assume the system is a guide that will make things easy," she said. "Systems demand tolls of their hosts. Each gain has a cost. The Heart Seal feeds on attention, focus, and a kind of mutual surrender. Do not confuse it with love. It is not that."
He considered the words. The system's label — Desire Gauge — had an economy to it, as if emotion were currency. But the currency was not only pleasure; it was attention, trust, cadence, choice. "Noted," he said. "I'll remember the price."
Up ahead, within the trees, the lanterns of a sentry post glowed like watchful eyes. Beyond them, Moonlight Peak uncloaked farther ridges and the deeper dark. In the ridge's shadow there was a silhouette, still as stone, watching them with a patience that felt too calm for one so distant. The system flagged it, a tiny alert that pulled the corner of his attention.
> Interest detected: unknown observing presence.
(silence… low hum)
Liuyue glanced at the ridge, then back at him. "Warn the elders at the sect," she said. "Someone has been watching the terrace these nights." Her jaw tightened as she said it, an old unease returning.
For the first time since his awakening, he felt the weight of being a player in a game that had been ongoing for centuries — a plot in which he had been dropped mid-move. This was not a pleasant place to be naive. The system supplied him with prompts, aids, and currency; the world supplied tests.
At the bottom of the path the gate to the Azure Cloud Sect gaped like a mouth. Lanterns swung; a dog barked and then fell silent. The elders moved like tide, polite and purposeful, wrapped in robes that smelled faintly of incense and old paper. Kael was catalogued by glance and then allowed to pass — strangers who arrived on forbidden terraces had a way of becoming fates or debts.
Inside, life contracted to a new tempo. Training halls smelled of oil and heated metal; incense coils burned with slow patience. The Moonlit Lotus Mirror was not a thought anymore; it was a destination. The system's presence in his head felt less alien and more like a compass whose needle he was learning to trust.
That night, in the small room the sect provided to new recruits, he lay awake with the rain as his lullaby. The Crimson Dao System hummed softly in the background of his awareness, a machine that measured not only strength but attention. He thought of Liuyue's words — not love, but a different kind of offering — and of the silhouette on the ridge, and felt the faint thrill of survival already blooming into something else.
A bell rang from the practice yard downstairs. DING. It sounded like a calling.
> Quest update: Heart Seal primer complete. Moonlit Lotus Mirror coordinates updated.
System note: Practice with partner increases Bond Potential faster than solo meditation.
(plink… soft swell)
He closed his eyes and, for a moment, let the system and the mountain keep watch together.
Outside, somewhere below the lanterns, the watcher moved again. The shape's retreating figure washed into the night like ink into water. The world continued to breathe, patient and indifferent, and Kael — newly arrived, slightly out of place, with a system in his head and a rhythm he had to learn — let the rain speak him into sleep.
(drip… whoosh… hush)