In a myth older than any sect dared to archive, Ren Zu once sat beside the sea.
He cast a line into the depths, but caught no fish. Only echoes.
"Why do you fish where nothing lives?" asked the coral reef.
"Because this is where stories sink," Ren Zu replied.
Each echo he reeled in was not a sound, but a forgotten choice. Each coral thorn around him was not dead reef, but calcified regret.
He smiled once. Only once.
"Even Heaven leaves fossils."
Fang Yuan stood over a tide-washed vault stone within his aperture. No path refined it. No Gu aligned to it.
Yet it remembered salt.
His shadow touched it, and for a breath, something shifted beneath the surface — not within the stone, but beneath the script that defined it.
A faint whisper coiled around his thought:
"The fisherman spoke again."
He narrowed his eyes. The scroll he had discarded no longer fluttered — it was still, as if listening.
Not to him.
To the echo beneath the coral.
And far beyond, the girl stepped over a shoreline made of myth.
She did not see water. Only decisions that had forgotten their outcome.
The Gu at her spine pulsed once more.
The Vault cracked — not from force, but from resonance with something too old to be calculated.
— Spectral Soul, fragment-bound, stirred in a dream-layer grave. A dead scholar's soul flinched without knowing why. A sealed scroll rewrote its first word.
— Sea of Blood, vast and sluggish, recoiled for the first time. A tide of old names retreated. A single ripple climbed the wrong direction — toward air.
— In the Limitless Ruins, a recursive formation rotated backward. A void-path node flickered. A spatial scar re-folded into meaning.
— The Starlight Echo dimmed again. Not in confusion — in respect.
— Fang Yuan stood very still.
None of them acted.
All of them marked the page.
"It's not a move," Fang Yuan thought.
"It's the page before a move."