- Midnight in the Stelae Forest
Qian Yiyan vaulted over the broken wall, her toes touching ground.
The ground was soft. As if stepping on the hide of some living creature, it yielded with a faint springiness. The moonlight, pallid and cold, illuminated the scattered stones and wild grass—everything that should have been hard and unyielding.
But sensation did not lie.
She crouched, pressing a finger into the soil. Hard. Cold. Yet, as she held it there, something seemed to pulse beneath her fingertip—a dull, distant thump… thump… sluggish as a heart buried deep.
Rising, she scanned the courtyard. The shadows were wrong.
With the moon sinking in the west, the pillars’ shadows should have stretched eastward. Instead, they lay scattered in disarray, forming a broken…
Nine-Palace Grid.
The shadows moved on their own. She took a step forward; the dark shapes slithered in response.
She produced a copper coin, closed her eyes, and tossed it upward.
The coin did not fall. It hung in mid-air, spinning. Its obverse side, inscribed with ‘Kaiyuan,’ gleamed with a faint blue light. Strangely, with each revolution, it drifted half an inch westward—as if pulled by an invisible thread.
“The Nine Palaces shift, the dragon veins tilt west…” She caught the coin, a shiver of cold running through her fingers.
Her gaze lifted to the courtyard’s center. There, the darkness was deepest, and within that black heart, a tiny point of light pulsed—thump, thump—in perfect sync with the subterranean heartbeat.
A fragment of the Star Chart. The one lost by the Ministry of Works, the one hidden between the Empress Dowager’s words, the one that might be connected to her father’s disappearance.
She drew the Starlight Thorn from her boot. Its blade shimmered with andim and gloomy and blue.
She stepped forward.
With the first step, all shadows trembled.
With the second, the wind died.
With the third, the ruins’ hum rose into a piercing shriek—
Three masses of shadow seeped forth simultaneously from the remnants of the broken pillars.
- The Scavengers
Qian Yiyan had never seen such things.
They seemed sculpted from “congealed night,” their outlines fluid, shifting between humanoid forms and dissipating mist. Embedded within the fog were specks of dark red metallic residue, gleaming under the moonlight like rusted blood.
They had no faces. Only three swirling vortices: one depicting a burning palace, one a collapsing mountain, and one… a melting star.
A throbbing pain shot through her temples. Not from fear, but from the vortices forcibly injecting… as if someone were shoving a segment of memory directly into her consciousness.
Her father’s voice exploded in her mind: “Yiyan, some things pollute perception directly.”
She bit the tip of her tongue sharply—the pain jolted her awake. The foremost shadow was now ten meters away. It moved without sound or wind, its motion akin to skipping frames in space.
She slid left, thrusting the blade.
The tip passed through the mist, but the fog crawled up the weapon instead, flowing onto her fingers the instant it made contact—
Her left little finger was gone!?
Not severed, not numb—she had suddenly “forgotten” she even possessed that finger. Her eyes could see it, the sensation was still there, but its existence had been erased from her awareness.
“Erasure-type corruption…” She sucked in a cold breath, flicking her right wrist urgently.
The starlight points on the Thorn blazed with intense light. The black mist shrieked and recoiled, and the sense of her little finger was forcibly hammered back into her mind—
But what returned was not just the finger.
It was a cold, alien tactile memory that flooded in alongside it: a withered finger, scraping against a stone wall in absolute darkness, over and over. The feeling of nails cracking and wearing down, the despairing friction, was unbearably real.
She grunted. Her left little finger curled and trembled uncontrollably. The real pain was now mingled with that false, icy sensation of abrasion. She knew this splinter would be permanently lodged in her perception.
The other two shadows had flanked her.
She leapt back, tossing coins to deploy talismanic threads. Flames coiled around the shadows, but three seconds later, the very concept of “fire” was wiped clean from that patch of space.
Seizing the moment, she retreated to a pillar, her eyes scanning the Nine-Palace shadows on the ground. Her father had said this formation was both a trap and a test.
A test of her fate.
No time to waste. Her focus locked onto the faint light at the center.
She suddenly let go. The Starlight Thorn plunged into the shadow of the Li (Fire) position.
A wave of dry heat spread. The three shadows faltered for an instant.
She shot forward like an arrow, changing direction mid-air, diving straight for the shadow with the melting star. But at the last moment, she pulled out a scorching-hot jade pendant and smashed it onto the ground!
“Clang—!”
The sound reverberated like a great bell through the ruins. The shadows convulsed violently, the images within their vortices flashing madly—palaces rising, mountains growing, stars solidifying and melting again, their logic of existence thrown into chaos.
She landed, snatched a piece of broken tile, and hurled it at the Kan (Water) position.
A burst of moisture exploded, filling the air with white mist.
Eyes closed, she charged forward.
Fifteen meters, twelve, nine—her hand closed around the faint light.
It was cold, smooth like polished bone. She clenched it tight.
A tremor, Weak yet vast, compounded from a billion heartbeats, traveled up her bones and slammed into her own heart—her heartbeat skipped a single, definitive beat.
- Far Away · The Eastern Sea
03:27. Sub-level Three.
Lu Baoyi stared at the monitor, his eyelids heavy as lead. Forty consecutive hours. The sour taste of stale coffee clung to his throat.
On the main screen, the calm curve representing the background radiation of the Gate spiked without warning—its waveform, in mathematical terms, showed a 97% congruence with the precise moment Qian Yiyan’s heartbeat skipped.
“Which idiot is messing with the test environment again?” was his first thought.
But this was the North China Station’s feed. It had blipped once seven hours ago, its waveform resembling residual patterns from the “Laojun Furnace” incident on the Yellow River 17 days prior.
Rubbing his temples, he opened the comms log. A message from Lin Wan: “Hardware checked 11 times. Not a false positive. Waveform encrypted via ‘Xuan Niao.’ Also, Logistics is pushing again. Your code name is flagged yellow. They say you’re becoming a ‘key monitoring target.’”
He typed with a bitter smile. “Noted. Code name yellow? Might as well rename myself ‘Lu Bayi.’ Sounds like a laborer forever stuck working overtime on Army Day.” His drifting fingers mistyped it as “681.”
Sent.
Lin Wan replied instantly: “Comrade 681, take care of yourself. The revolution is not yet complete, comrades must still burn the midnight oil.”
He closed the window, missing her entry in an encrypted log: “Boss self-deprecatingly used code ‘681.’ Logged. Access Level 3.”
His attention returned to the main screen. He loaded the waveform. The 3D pulse model’s tail bore an eerie harmonic ripple.
Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.
He did something against protocol: bypassing the sanitization filters, he accessed the raw underlying frequency domain.
In the ultra-high frequency band, there was a stretch of excessively regular patterning.
Amplifying and denoising, he isolated twenty-seven micropulses. Their intervals followed a Fibonacci sequence, their amplitude decaying in a perfect sine wave.
Encoding.
“What kind of ghostly scribble is this? Some genius’s year-end prank?” He checked the logs, grim-faced, running a full system scan.
Clean.
Silence. He pulled up the classified archive: “Primordial Signal Analysis Report (Top Secret).”
Something captured by Project Chiyou twenty-one years ago, from a prehistoric stratum in Shaanxi. Never deciphered, but regarded as the “primordial template.”
He dragged it in for comparison.
Match: 87%.
“Holy hell.” Conclusive. Same origin.
He grabbed the phone and dialed the encrypted line: “Connect me to the Great Wall. Emergency. Verification code: Houyi-Seven-Nine-Four.”
In the droning wait for connection, his eyes swept over the side monitor feed—the corridor was empty, lit only by sterile white light strips.
At the edge of the frame, the shadow beneath the fire door leading to the auxiliary server room twisted for an instant.
Simultaneously, the screen of the black watch on his left wrist erupted in a blinding red light. The Rules Activity Index shot from 3.2 to 127, then flatlined to zero.
The watch screen went black. A searing pain emanated from the inner side of the watch face. A faint red circle was branded onto his wrist.
Low-temperature burn.
The call connected. “This is Lu Baoyi, Project Chiyou East China Division, ID 7304. Requesting to report: North China Station has captured an anomalous pulse, probability of shared origin with Primordial Signal exceeds 85%. Furthermore… I suspect the division has been infiltrated by a non-standard information entity. Request initiation of the ‘Suirenshi Protocol.’”
Three seconds of silence. “Received. Verification passed. Suirenshi Protocol initiated. Emergency team will arrive within seven minutes. Remain in place. Avoid contact with any suspicious data streams.”
“Understood.”
He hung up. His fingertips drummed unconsciously on the desk—the tune of ‘The East Is Red,’ the one his father always whistled during all-nighters in the server room.
He suddenly realized he was afraid. Not of death, but of the possibility that if he died here, he would never uncover the meaning of the word his father had circled in red in his logs: ”The Rust-Sound.”
He took a deep breath, compressing his fear into pure focus.
Just as he fixed his entire attention on the monitor—a phantom whisper seemed to brush past his ear: from a vast distance, the drawn-out, stifled grunt of a woman.
He shook his head violently.
The auditory hallucination vanished. Attributed to extreme fatigue.
The hum of the servers now sounded like the heavy breath of a great beast in the dark.
- Bianjing · The Fragment and The Rust-Sound
Qian Yiyan clutched the fragment and burst into a frantic retreat!
The moment the object was taken, the ruins’ hum crescendoed—then ceased abruptly.
Dead silence.
The white mist dissipated. The three shadowy figures stood frozen, their outlines beginning to crumble from the edges. The dark red metallic residue peeled away, rusting, eroding, weathering into black dust that sifted down.
Where the ashes touched, things turned bizarre:
A single withered leaf simultaneously displayed the hues of late autumn and early spring.
The growth rings on a piece of broken wood reversed their direction.
The Nine-Palace shadows twisted and recombined, finally coalescing into a star chart she had never seen—a depiction of the world’s fissures, drawn in the simplest of lines.
She understood. What Shao Yong had recorded was not celestial phenomena, but wounds. The Scavengers were rot. The Star Chart fragment was a medical record.
She looked down at the object in her hand. Milky-white, its lines flowing slowly. Along its edge, an extremely faint inscription: “Vault Xuan · Bingyin · Seven-Nine-Four.”
It had been in the Imperial Inner Treasury. Then someone had taken it out and placed it here. For her.
Who?
She stored the fragment and turned to leave. A chill shot up her spine.
There were eyes. From a high place two hundred paces away, their gaze fell upon her—cold, sharp, assessing her like a tool’s functionality, scraping against her back like a blade.
And at the exact moment that gaze adhered—a brief, piercing screech of metal grinding against metal flooded her ears, as if a rusted gear had been forced to turn one notch in the void.
“The Rust-Sound.” Mentioned in her father’s notes: ”The noise scraped upon the film of rules when The Other Side turns its gaze.”
Her body tensed. She did not look back. Pushing off the wall, she melted into the darkness.
The gaze clung to her for three breaths, then vanished. But the metallic resonance lingered in her skull for ten.
She lay prone in the wild grass for ten breaths. No pursuit.
She exhaled, pressing her left hand to her left shoulder—where the shadow had grazed her. The skin was intact, but it felt as if touched through frosted glass. Worse, when she tried to recall the summer night her father had taught her to recognize star charts, the edges of the memory blurred. Like ink washed over by water, the details bled away.
Informational damage. This time, it had struck at what she cherished most.
Gritting her teeth, she rose and sped towards Bianjing.
- The Watchers & The Assessment
Half a cup of tea’s time after she left, two figures landed in the center of the ruins.
Their black clothing absorbed light. Their movements were synchronized, as if sharing a single mind.
The taller, thinner one knelt, grinding the ash between his fingers, sniffing it. He stood and reported in a flat, toneless voice:
“Scavengers triggered and eliminated. Target survived. Performance: Second Class, Upper Tier.”
“Successfully retrieved key fragment. Performance: First Class, Lower Tier.”
“Resisted perceptual corruption and retained primary cognition. Performance: First Class, Middle Tier.”
He paused, looking at the log with reversed growth rings.
“Induced localized temporal reversion. Unanticipated. Observation item added. Comprehensive assessment: Threat coefficient adjusted to seven. Value coefficient adjusted to eight.”
The shorter, sturdier one recorded this, then asked, “Contact strategy?”
“Shift from observational inducement to limited cooperation and continuous evaluation. Target has demonstrated stability as a tool, and unpredictability as a variable.”
“The Other Side’s gaze? Rust-Sound marking coefficient?”
The tall one paused for two seconds.
“Unknown variable. Mark with ‘X.’ Long-term high-priority observation. Does not affect current weighting for now.”
“Withdraw. Report. Recommend the Master accelerate the Cao family channel while preparing alternate contact avenues.”
The shadows vanished.
The ruins returned to silence. Only the log with reversed rings remained, like a foreign object forcibly inserted into this world.
- Chen Hour (7-9 AM) · The Knife and The Salt
At three-quarters past the Mao hour (around 6:45 AM), Qian Yiyan scaled the wall back into the small courtyard of the Astrological Bureau.
Pushing the door open, she sensed something amiss. The scent of a stranger lingered inside—the smell of cosmetics.
Two palace maids stood by the window, postures deferential, but their positioning blocked all lines of movement.
“Your handmaidens, Chunying / Qiuyan, by oral decree of the Empress Dowager, are here to attend to you.”
Chunying had a faint strap mark on her wrist. When Qiuyan turned, the still water in the bronze basin by the door rippled with a tiny, counter-rotating vortex.
Two sheathed blades, warm with body heat.
“You are too kind. I am well and require no attendance,” Qian Yiyan’s tone was placid.
“The Empress Dowager insists you rest and recuperate properly.” The words were flawless, impenetrable.
She nodded. The maids withdrew to the outer chamber.
She removed her outer garment to examine her left shoulder. The sense of tactile separation remained. The false memory of scraping fingers occasionally surged.
Applying a soothing salve brought a temporary, cool relief.
Seated at her desk, she took out the fragment. In the morning light, the lines slowly rearranged, outlining an unfamiliar asterism—southern stars displaced northward, the primary star’s position vacant. Three arcs intersected, forming the shape of a gate.
At the lower right corner of the gate, a mark resembling a feather.
Frantically, she flipped through her father’s journals. The diagram attached to his last letter was precisely a feather.
Beside it, in her father’s hand, a small note: ”This is a beacon of The Other Side. Should you see it, leave. Immediately.”
The Other Side. Appearing in Shao Yong’s Star Chart.
A knock. “Astronomer Qian, a message from the Cao family.”
Qiuyan entered, presenting a plain card with暗金色纹 (dark gold tracery) and elegant script: “From the Cao Family’s Inkstone, respectfully to the Lady Historian Qian of the Astrological Bureau.”
She unfolded it. An invitation for tomorrow afternoon to “seek counsel regarding the XING州 (邢州) mine tremor.” A postscript added:
“Additionally, my uncle has recently obtained a bundle of fragmented pages in the hand of the late Chief Astronomer Qian. They bear undeciphered sigils suspected to be secret Bureau symbols. We hope to examine them together with the Lady Historian.”
Her fingertips tightened imperceptibly.
The false pain in her shoulder and the blurring of her father’s memory twisted into a knot of nausea. She needed those pages, a need that felt like admitting her own memories were no longer sufficient.
The Cao family had just sprinkled salt into her freshest wound.
“Understood. Reply that I will await their visit tomorrow.”
Qiuyan withdrew, her gaze subtly grazing the surface of the desk.
Qian Yiyan sat still. Clues prickled like pins and needles. The morning bell tolled outside the window.
At the corner of her desk, a newly delivered document slid into view. Stamped with the seal of the Secretariat-Chancellery.
Its title: 《By Imperial Decree, the Astrological Bureau is Ordered to Provide Detailed Analysis of Anomalous Celestial Phenomena and Seismic Events Occurring This Year, Listing Potential Ramifications, to Clarify the Balance of Yin and Yang – A Memorial》.
The signature at the bottom was forceful, ink penetrating the paper: ”Respectfully Submitted by Your Servant, Lü Yijian, Tong Zhongshu Menxia Pingzhangshi (Co-Manager of Affairs with the Secretariat-Chancellery), Scholar of the Jixian Hall (Academy of Assembled Worthies).”
She stared at that signature, her fingertips turning cold.
The door was pushed open soundlessly.
Not a maid. It was the old eunuch always keeping his eyes downcast by the Empress Dowager’s side, Zhang Maoze. In his hands, he carried a black lacquer box inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The lid was not fully closed, and a thread of strange fragrance, mixed with the faintest scent of metallic rust, wafted out.
“By oral decree of the Empress Dowager,” Zhang Maoze’s voice was flat and uninflected. “Astronomer Qian was frightened last night. She is bestowed one ‘Nine-Cycle Revitalizing Elixir’ to calm the spirit, settle shock, and replenish vital energy.”
He placed the box on the desk. Opened it.
The elixir was the size of a longan, gleaming with an amber hue. Against the gilt-edged official document, it looked like a solidified, ominous eye. That wisp of rust-scent was a red thread, connecting the Scavengers in the ruins, the Empress Dowager, and the false sensation currently in her left shoulder.
“My thanks for Her Majesty’s profound grace.” Qian Yiyan’s voice betrayed no ripple.
Zhang Maoze bowed and retreated, slipping out the door like a shadow.
She did not touch the elixir. It pulsed faintly in its box, like a tiny, careful heart. The Empress Dowager was telling her, in the gentlest possible way: I see you. I can feed you medicine. I can reason with you using rules (the decree), and I can silence you using elixirs (corruption).
A third nail, in the name of concern, was driven into the fate assigned to her.
The Empress Dowager’s maids were a cage. The Cao family’s bait was a noose. And this inquiry in the name of Yin-Yang order was the blade suspended above her head—the most rule-compliant guillotine.
The board was set.
She was a piece, but she must also be a player. She had to prove, before the blade fell, that she was not an anomaly to be purged by the established order.
The new day had begun.
She knew every day from now on would be more perilous than walking on thin ice.