She crossed the room.

  The distance between two people, no—it was the crossing of worlds. One soul reaching for another. No shame. No demand. Her hand didn’t tremble as she laid it gently on Feiyun Xing’s shoulder. It was a small gesture. Almost nothing. Still, his breath hitched.

  He did not look at her, could not. His face stayed buried in his hands. However, her touch remained. Not insistent. It was soft, most importantly, it was there for him.

  “Feiyun Xing,” she said at last. “It is not shameful. You are not weak.”

  His head shook, as if to toss the words off like dirt. But they clung.

  “You think the world expects you to be made of iron,” she continued. “But iron rusts. It breaks. It forgets how to feel. You are weeping for what was real, for what was loved. What else is left of us, if not that?”

  He gave no reply. Perhaps he couldn’t. Perhaps words had become too heavy.

  Circling, grounding, her hand moved slightly. She did not demand his gaze, nor his explanation. There was no interest in confessions—not tonight. The truth was already there, unraveling in his breath, in the trembling of a man who had hid his grief until the poem. God damn—had struck too deep.

  Beside him she remained, the air still thick with candle smoke. She said nothing more. What could be said? The dead would not return. But at that moment, Ren Lin became an anchor.

  “She was my little sister,” he said, voice low, worn thin. “And I—” He paused, swallowed. “I was meant to protect her.”

  The words hung in the air, clinging like burrs to skin.

  “She always looked at me like I was stronger than I am. Like I could hold the whole world back with my bare hands.” He gave a bitter laugh. “Still… I wasn’t there. I didn’t even see it coming.”

  Ren Lin listened, her gaze on the wall, but her attention fixed on him. She didn’t console. She didn’t contradict. She allowed the guilt to breathe, because grief needed air, even if it reeked of failure.

  “You did not kill her.”

  “No,” he murmured, “but I should have stopped it. I should have known. I should’ve—”

  “—Known what no one told you?” Her voice was steady. “Seen what was hidden? We always believe we should have seen more. That if we’d looked harder, we’d have changed the ending. That’s the lie grief tells. To keep itself alive.”

  He said nothing. The words didn’t comfort him. But they didn’t lie to him either—and that, perhaps, was better.

  Thinning into uneven breaths, Feiyun Xing’s sobs softened. His hands slowly lowered from his face, fingertips trailing down his cheeks as if surprised to find them wet. He drew in a shaky breath, then another—deeper this time. Not steady, but closer.

  Ren Lin sat him down at her desk chair. All it took for him was leaning back, just slightly. He didn’t meet their eyes, his expression had shifted—loosened, wearied, the kind of tired that went deeper than bone. His gaze flicked to the candlelight, then to the paper, and then… to nowhere at all.

  “I should…” he began, voice barely more than a rasp, but he didn’t finish. The thought—whatever it was dissolved in the air.

  Bam.

  His body hit the floor. The trembling in his hands faded into stillness. His breath slowed.

  “Prince!?” Lai Tan rushed forward.

  But his eyes were already closed. It was as if sleep had crept up behind him and wrapped its arms around him.

  They eased him onto the mat, where the blanket waited. His body lay loose, one arm hanging off the bed, his head tilted to the side. The tension that had clung to him like a second skin had finally let go.

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  Like a rock, he didn’t move a bit.

  The investigator exhaled, standing straight with a shake of his head. “Didn’t think he’d go out like that.”

  “He held on longer than most could,” Ren Lin said, adjusting the blanket over his shoulder. “But no one outruns exhaustion forever.”

  He pulled out the liar’s orb and poured his essence in. “Will you harm the prince if I let him stay here?”

  “Naturally not.”

  “Good, just to make sure.” Lai Tan’s gaze lingered on Feiyun Xing as he pocketed his Core. “I will head home and sleep. Then tomorrow I will pick him up. Watch over that little fella.”

  She nodded as the investigator stepped out. Ren Lin sat down near the mat, all she could hear was the sound of the vanishing gallops, and the breathing of the sleeping man. The candle’s fire drew dimmer, while outside, the night pressed against the glass with a thousand silent, watchful eyes.

  The world held its breath for the prince—no, the man who had, at last, allowed himself to fall.

  But he fell into the wrong arms.

  Ren Lin planned all of this. She even knew the prince would collapse. She just needed to keep him here for a bit. After he wakes up, her true first step would begin.

  Her hand played with his black nightsky of hair.

  Yet his mind didn’t rest even in his sleep. Thoughts moved like hungry wolves, hunting memories and fears, chewing at the edges of what he’d forgotten. This was what dreaming was. It was complicated. Sometimes, you dreamed of what you feared most. Other times, of things you wished you could forget. And sometimes, your mind simply invented nonsense to survive.

  What exactly did Feiyun Xing dream of? It was a story everyone knew. But to him, it meant more—he clung to it, because he used to tell it to his sister when they were small. Back then, she would fall asleep to his voice, curled beside him like a question mark, asking again and again how the world began. And so, he’d tell her…

  Before anything had shape, there were only ideas.

  From a circle to a flame.

  They all drifted in a realm without matter or time—pure concepts, waiting to be born.

  Sometimes, rarely, an idea slipped through.

  First stone, then air, water, fire—each element slipping from pure idea into flesh. Causing the world to emerge.

  But the most important escape was man.

  He came empty, washed clean of the place he had come from. Yet even without memory, something stirred in him—a tension, a pull. Gazing at the river’s curve, he questioned why water should ever choose one path over another. Fingertips grazing rough bark, he puzzled over the world’s textures. Five fingers—why not four? Why not six?

  Wandering the newborn world, he followed that relentless pull. Other humans appeared over time, but they did not share his hunger. They questioned how to survive. He questioned why anything existed at all.

  While they built shelters, he vanished beyond the horizon.

  They spoke of seasons, of routine, of the safety in knowing what tomorrow would bring. Recoiling at the thought, only the unknown stirred his blood. The unnamed, the unshaped. Wherever the trail ended, he stepped off it.

  They called him cursed, insane. It didn’t matter.

  Instead, he laughed at them. “How could a person who clings to comfort do anything? You are pathetic, naming what I do insane. How could anything be invented if people only stuck to what they know? How can someone evolve if they can’t handle failure? Call me crazy, cursed and whatever else! Ease your mind with mocking and justify staying ordinary.”

  So, his search continued. Until one day, in a place where the wind had no direction and time hung suspended, he found it.

  An idea that had escaped.

  It had no form, no sound—but it was present. A chord struck deep in his chest—its resonance impossible to ignore. It was the concept of an answer.

  Not particularly the one answer. But the idea of resolution itself. A closing of loops. A coming to clarity.

  Not seen, but instantly recognized.

  However, when they met, it was not as man and entity. It was as question and answer. Curiosity and completion. Their union was not violent, but inevitable—like flint striking steel.

  And the world cracked.

  The single landmass shattered into four, torn apart by the gravity of their joining. Beneath the rupture, the realm of ideas tore open. From that aperture poured the first cores—fragments of thought made solid. That magical power, the essence and naturally the dimension that kept and allowed connection to that power—the Veil came into being.

  Thus, the world was not remade by sword or meteor, but by a man who could not stop asking, and the answer that finally found him.

  Now, people call him…

  The Great Ancestor.

  That rift began to close. Its edges blurred, collapsing like ink dissolving in water. Feiyun Xing’s vision shifted, it blurred. His nose filled with that old wooden ink-stained smell. The room spun as if still splintering. It was a stranger’s room, nothing compared to his own. However, it didn’t feel weird to him. It felt somewhat good. When his eyes opened fully, they found Ren Lin’s face—soft in the half-light, her hair loose around her shoulders, the line of her cheek luminous.

  Leaning closer her voice gentle as a breeze. “How are you feeling?”

  Blanket slipping to his waist, the prince pushed himself upright. His throat was dry, eyes raw. Thinking about last night made him feel nothing but shame.

  “I apologize… for my behavior and the issues I brought you. I am usually not like this.”

  “It’s no issue,” Ren Lin said, brushing it off as though his grief had bothered no more than a passing wind. “We all break sometimes. The only difference is who’s nearby when we do.”