The moon was waning, but the sky burned silver.

  In the courtyard, the shattered Spirit Mirror still shimmered faintly with traces of what it had shown and what it had withheld. Lanterns flickered like uncertain hearts. Zhao Wei stood alone in the center of the cracked stone, her breath cold in her lungs, her heartbeat quieter than the world around her.

  She had smiled. That was the part no one understood.

  She had looked into a mirror that should have reflected her spirit...

  And it showed nothing.

  Not a glimmer of beast nor binding light. Just a void so pure, the elders thought it was cracked before the test began.

  But Lin Yuan had seen more. And she knew it.

  He lingered at the edge of the court now, arms folded, face unreadable. His robe caught the wind like a banner. He hadn’t spoken since the moment the mirror flashed that wound in the world, and Zhao Wei hadn’t looked his way since.

  Instead, she crouched beside the mirror’s remains, brushing one delicate shard with her fingertip.

  “You planning to piece it back together?” Lin Yuan asked finally, voice low.

  “No,” she replied. “I’m admiring how cleanly it broke. Some things shatter beautifully.”

  He approached, boots clicking on the stone. “They’re calling it an error. That the artifact failed.”

  “Mm.” Zhao Wei tilted her head. “Artifacts don’t fail. People do.”

  He watched her in silence, eyes narrowed slightly.

  “I didn’t see anything,” he said. “But I felt something. Like a cold wind through bone.”

  “Sounds like you’re aging,” she murmured dryly.

  Lin Yuan cracked a laugh, sharp and short but it tugged a bit of the tension from the air.

  “That tongue of yours is going to get you strangled one day,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” Zhao Wei replied, straightening.

  For a moment, they stood under the moon’s pale eye, two figures bound by threads only they could see her past cloaked in blood and silence, his in duties he hadn’t chosen. The academy around them was still asleep, unaware that something ancient had stirred.

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  Suddenly, a squawk split the stillness.

  A blur of fluff and flapping wings descended from the rooftop, Lanfen, Zhao Wei’s annoyingly loyal spiritual companion, a crow-like creature who had adopted her despite her insistence she wasn’t bonded to anything.

  Lanfen crash-landed on Lin Yuan’s shoulder, squawking loudly as if delivering a divine verdict.

  “Oh no,” Zhao Wei groaned. “Why is she.....get off him!”

  “I didn’t invite it,” Lin Yuan said, trying to pry the bird off. “Why is it glaring at me?”

  “Probably sensed you were thinking too hard,” Zhao Wei muttered, walking over. “She hates overthinkers. She’s a creature of chaos and impulse.”

  “So… she’s like you.”

  Zhao Wei froze. “Take that back before I feed you to the spirit foxes.”

  Lanfen let out an amused caw.

  Zhao Wei grabbed the bird by the scruff of its neck and held it up, face to beak. “What did I tell you about harassing pretty boys?”

  Lin Yuan blinked. “You think I’m...?”

  “Shush. You’re not supposed to hear that.”

  Lanfen squawked again and fluttered to Zhao Wei’s shoulder, smug as sin.

  They walked in companionable silence down the garden path. Lin Yuan’s gaze drifted toward her again and again, as if he wanted to ask something but hadn’t yet decided whether it was safe.

  “You weren’t scared,” he said at last. “When the mirror showed… that nothing. Why?”

  Zhao Wei didn’t answer right away.

  Instead, she glanced up at the trees bare branches scratching at the sky like claws and whispered, “Because I already knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That I’m not supposed to exist.”

  The words hung there, stark and unforgiving.

  But then she added, softly, “And because the things that aren’t supposed to exist… are usually the ones that rewrite the story.”

  Far across the capital, a figure in ash-colored robes moved through the fog like a shadow with purpose.

  The Whispering Scroll had been activated. The ancient wards binding the Spirit Mirror had hummed with a name they’d tried to erase.

  Wei Ning.

  The figure stopped at the gates of a temple lost to time, where lanterns never flickered, and the air tasted of memory.

  A second figure emerged from the darkness, wrapped in twilight silks, face half-covered.

  “She’s returned,” said the second. “Just as you warned.”

  The first one turned, lifting their hood enough to reveal a tattoo curling along the jawline—a vow written in blood oath script.

  “I told them fire remembers,” the first murmured. “And fire repays.”

  They both looked skyward. The moon blinked through clouds like a watchful eye.

  “Do we act?”

  The vowbearer’s lips curved. “No. We wait. She doesn’t remember yet.”

  “But she’s dangerous.”

  “All the best ones are.”

  Back in her dorm room, Zhao Wei stared at the ceiling as Lanfen snored softly beside her. Her thoughts ran like rivers through shadowed mountains.

  The Spirit Mirror had shown her nothing, but in that void… she’d felt something. A pulse. A memory wrapped in ash.

  She dreamed of a battlefield with no name, where armor clanged and her hands were red to the wrist. Of a crown broken beneath her heel. Of a man smiling as he drove the blade in

  Her eyes flew open.

  And in that silence, she whispered the name of a ghost.

  “…Feng Ren.”

  Lanfen twitched in her sleep.

  Outside, a breeze rustled the cherry trees, even though it was the wrong season for blossoms.