The captain of the damaged Orushan vessel had not turned because the passage was unstable.
He had turned because he saw someone walking through it.
The admission came shortly before dawn.
Captain Marek Voss sat in the Hall of Clear Water wearing a borrowed palace robe over bandages that crossed his chest and left shoulder. Passage residue had greyed the edges of his hair. The skin beneath his eyes held the yellowed pallor of affinity shock.
Two registry physicians stood behind him.
Commander Han Qingshan stood closer.
Xuanyue remained beside her mother at the royal table, still wearing the blue-and-silver robe from her birthday dinner. Fifteen extinguished moon-lights drifted beyond the open lattice walls.
The captain had repeated the first half of his account three times.
Each version began with the emergency turn.
Chancellor Qiao placed the official statement in front of him.
"Your report says the vessel entered the western line at the appointed hour."
"Yes."
"Transit proceeded without incident."
"Yes."
"You ordered an emergency reversal seventeen minutes later."
The captain looked toward the paper.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"The route pressure changed."
"Registry technicians found no instability."
"They were not aboard."
"Then describe what changed."
Voss swallowed.
The motion pulled against his bandages.
"The star-lines bent."
Minister Shen of Passage Commerce leaned forward.
"Bent how?"
"Around something."
"A vessel?"
"No."
"Debris?"
"No."
"What, then?"
The captain looked at the open doors.
Dawn had not yet reached the garden.
Nothing waited there except darkness, stone, and the remains of a celebration.
"A person," he said.
No one spoke.
General Pei's expression did not change.
Minister Shen's did.
"A person was standing inside the passage?"
"Walking."
"Upon what?"
"Nothing."
Master Wen rested both hands upon his cane.
"Were they moving with your vessel or against it?"
"With us."
"Beside you?"
"At first."
The captain closed his eyes.
The physicians watched his breathing.
Voss opened them again.
"They were far ahead when we first saw them. Or I thought they were. Distance does not behave properly inside a passage."
"That is true," Master Wen said.
"One breath they seemed beyond the next turn. The next, they were beside the forward hull."
Minister Shen looked toward the registry report.
"No lookout recorded a person."
"The lookout remembers wings."
"Did you see wings?"
"No."
"Then why did he?"
"I do not know."
The captain's hands tightened upon his knees.
"One engineer says the figure was surrounded by fire. Another says frost formed across the outer glass. My navigator heard singing. I heard nothing."
Xuanyue looked at the original witness summaries.
Heat.
Cold.
White light.
Darkness.
Wings.
No visible form.
Every account contradicted the others except for one detail.
Each witness had perceived something outside the vessel.
"What did the person look like?" she asked.
The captain turned toward her.
For the first time since entering the hall, embarrassment appeared beneath his fear.
"Human."
"Man or woman?"
"I thought a man."
"Thought?"
"Their face was turned away."
"What were they wearing?"
"Dark robes. Perhaps black. There was silver along the shoulders."
"Did they carry a weapon?"
"I saw no weapon."
"Did they look toward your vessel?"
The captain hesitated.
"Yes."
"What happened then?"
"I ordered the turn."
Minister Shen unfolded the technicians' assessment.
"The damage occurred during the reversal."
"Yes."
"So the figure did not attack you."
Voss stared at him.
"No."
"Did they move toward the vessel?"
"No."
"Raise a hand?"
"No."
"Speak?"
"No."
"Then what caused the damage?"
The captain's voice roughened.
"I do not know."
Minister Shen looked toward the council.
"A panicked reversal in a confined passage can overload exterior wards."
The captain stood too quickly.
One physician caught his arm.
"The outer wards failed before the turn completed."
"Because the vessel was under strain."
"The pressure gauges emptied."
Minister Shen frowned.
"Emptied?"
"They did not rise."
Voss pulled his arm free of the physician.
"They went blank. Every measure. Affinity density. Route pressure. Hull resistance. The needles did not break. The ink did not burn. The instruments simply stopped claiming they understood what was outside."
Master Wen's attention sharpened.
"Did the figure restrain its presence?"
"I do not know what that means."
"It means," General Pei said, "that if your account is accurate, the vessel may have survived because the person intended it to."
The captain's face lost what colour remained.
Xuanyue looked at the damage report again.
Three missing crew.
Seven injured.
The outer formation broken.
Cargo intact.
No confirmed strike.
The figure had not pursued them.
It had not spoken.
It had merely continued walking through a road that did not exist.
"Why did the official statement omit this?" Mingyuan asked.
The captain sat slowly.
The registry courier answered.
"The first clerk classified the visual testimony as passage shock, Your Majesty."
"Before the captain was examined?"
"Yes."
"Before the other witnesses were questioned separately?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
The courier looked toward Minister Shen.
Minister Shen looked displeased with everyone, including the architecture.
"Registry procedure permits the exclusion of internally contradictory testimony from preliminary incident summaries."
Chancellor Qiao folded his hands.
"It permits the testimony to be marked uncertain."
"The clerk believed—"
"The clerk summarised a decision as an observation."
Minister Shen bowed his head.
"Yes."
Xuanyue read the four words again.
Transit proceeded without incident.
The sentence had not been a lie.
Not exactly.
It had been written by someone who decided an impossible incident did not qualify as an incident.
"What happened after the vessel turned?" she asked.
Captain Voss rubbed one hand across his face.
"The figure remained behind us."
"Did you see where they went?"
"No."
"Did anyone?"
"The rear lookout did."
Every head turned.
"What did he report?" Chancellor Qiao asked.
Voss stared at the table.
"He said the passage opened."
Minister Shen looked toward the technicians' assessment again.
"There was no registered branch route."
"I know."
"What did he mean?"
"He said there was darkness in front of the figure. Then stars. Not passage lights. A sky."
The captain's voice fell.
"He said the person stepped through and vanished."
Master Wen was silent for long enough that Xuanyue noticed.
"What Realm?" she asked.
"No one recognised it."
"Was anything visible beyond the opening?"
"Mountains."
"What kind?"
"Black."
The council waited.
Captain Voss looked toward the extinguished moon-lights.
"And burning."
The full report occupied thirty-eight pages.
Twenty-two pages concerned damage.
Nine concerned the emergency reversal.
Six contained witness statements.
One described what occurred before the captain gave the order.
The council remained until sunrise.
Registry officials were instructed to preserve every account, however contradictory. The witnesses were examined separately. The vessel's instruments were removed and delivered to Moonwell's formation faculty.
No hidden branch route was found.
No passage opening appeared in Tianjing's records.
No black mountains burned along any known western connection.
The figure could not be identified.
By midday, three explanations had become popular within the palace.
The crew had suffered collective passage shock.
The vessel had crossed an unregistered spatial reflection.
The captain had encountered a powerful Realmfarer using a private transit art.
Master Wen disliked all three.
"They may be true," Xuanyue said.
"Yes."
"Why do you dislike them?"
"They arrived before the evidence."
"They are explanations."
"They are furniture placed where a door may be."
Xuanyue looked at the witness statements spread across his desk.
"Do you believe the captain?"
"I believe he turned."
"That is not the same thing."
"No."
"Do you believe he saw someone?"
"I believe seven people saw something and failed to agree upon the shape."
"That sounds less useful."
"It may be more."
He lifted one of the damaged pressure gauges.
The glass remained unbroken.
The measurement needle rested at zero.
Moonwell's formation masters had tested it repeatedly.
It functioned perfectly.
"What could make an instrument stop measuring without damaging it?" Xuanyue asked.
"Something outside its defined range."
"Too much pressure?"
"Possibly."
"Too little?"
"Possibly."
"Something the formation was never designed to recognise?"
Master Wen looked at her.
"Possibly."
"You have become very helpful."
"I am preserving uncertainty."
"You preserve it aggressively."
"Certainty attracts officials."
The Orushan incident left Lanyue's western registry within four days.
A shortened version travelled first.
A vessel had suffered damage after encountering an unidentified spatial disturbance.
The longer account followed through restricted channels.
By the time it reached Tianjing, a passage journal had already published the preliminary explanation.
By the time Tianjing requested the full testimony, two merchant guilds had repeated that the captain struck an unstable route wall while attempting an unauthorised turn.
By the time Captain Voss returned to Orushan, the person walking outside the vessel had become a rumour told by dockworkers.
The rumour grew wings.
The official record did not.
Xuanyue asked Chancellor Qiao to create a shared register for events excluded from preliminary reports.
He objected to the phrasing.
"Excluded suggests intent."
"Events removed from preliminary reports."
"Removed suggests intent."
"Events not included."
"Passive language conceals responsibility."
Xuanyue stared at him.
"You object to every direction."
"That is why the kingdom employs me."
Master Wen sat beside the chancellor with a cup of tea.
"Call it the Precursor Register."
Chancellor Qiao looked toward him.
"Why?"
"Because it records what happened before officials began paying attention."
The name remained.
The Precursor Register began with one vessel and one impossible figure.
For three months, nothing joined it.
Xuanyue returned to Moonwell.
She completed two examinations, failed one practical exercise involving wind-weighted calligraphy, and discovered that Lu Jian could produce flame hot enough to melt steel but not low enough to warm tea without frightening the cup.
The Cangyuan exchange continued.
The ink-eating beetle appeal was denied.
Master Wen filed a second.
Nara sent a mechanical umbrella that opened whenever it detected rain, waterfalls, spilled tea, or emotional instability in nearby engineers.
It opened frequently around Chancellor Qiao.
Torgai sent a letter informing them that Tianjing had offered to forgive the stolen garden rail if Dazhur returned it before the next Concord.
We have therefore decided there will be no next Concord.
Xuanyue wrote:
Tianjing may possess other rails.
The answer arrived:
Then diplomacy remains possible.
Summer deepened.
The western routes stabilised.
No one else reported a person walking through the dark.
The Precursor Register acquired dust.
Then a damaged merchant vessel entered Tianjing from an eastern route with three lines cut through its upper hull.
The cuts were too clean for debris.
No weapon residue remained.
The crew reported no attacker.
The captain insisted the vessel had passed through an empty corridor.
A deckhand claimed a human silhouette had stood above them for one breath.
Another crew member remembered a sound like distant thunder.
The preliminary report attributed the damage to metal fatigue.
Tianjing added the full witness accounts to the register.
Nine days later, refugees arrived through a northern Grand Realm.
They came from a world whose name Xuanyue had never seen upon a map.
Thirty-one people entered the transit court.
Fourteen were children.
Most carried nothing.
Their home Realm had lost its central capital.
The first reports called it an affinity catastrophe.
The second blamed civil war.
The third described a red-clad man standing above the imperial district while fire spread across the sky in the shape of immense wings.
No confirmed image survived.
Formation crystals placed near the capital had melted without recording heat.
The destruction extended across the palace, military compounds, three noble districts, and a fortified research complex beneath the eastern hill.
The lower markets survived.
So did two residential districts directly between the palace and the research complex.
The fire had passed over them.
Not around.
Over.
Roofs remained untouched beneath a sky that reduced imperial wards to ash.
The Realm's government declared the survival pattern random.
Master Wen read the statement over breakfast.
"Fire has become politically fortunate."
Xuanyue examined the map.
The spared districts formed no defensive pattern.
They possessed no stronger formations.
They were poorer than the destroyed quarters.
"What was inside the research complex?" she asked.
"The report does not say."
"Was it empty?"
"No survivor account mentions its purpose."
"Then why call it a research complex?"
"Because officials dislike the phrase sealed underground structure."
The refugees' statements remained inconsistent.
Some described one man.
Others described several figures moving through the fire.
One claimed the attacker had no wings, only light behind him.
Another insisted the wings covered half the city.
A child said the fire bent away from people who were hiding beneath a collapsed kitchen roof.
An imperial officer said everyone outside the designated evacuation zones died.
The child was alive.
The officer's account entered the official report.
The child's entered an appendix.
Xuanyue requested the appendix.
Chancellor Qiao obtained it.
The child had also said something else.
The burning man had not looked toward the palace first.
He had looked beneath the hill.
The third report reached Lanyue through a trade envoy.
A collector's estate in a distant Realm had been destroyed during the night.
The main residence collapsed.
The private guard barracks split open from foundation to roof.
A vault beneath the estate was emptied.
No ordinary valuables were taken.
Gold remained stacked against the walls.
Spirit stones remained sealed inside marked chests.
Three royal weapons belonging to the collector's own dynasty remained untouched.
The missing inventory was classified.
Public reports described the event as theft by an unknown high-tier cultivator.
The collector, his adult heirs, his private guards, and twelve visiting merchants were killed.
Fifty-six servants survived.
So did every prisoner held beneath the western wing.
The prisoners disappeared before local authorities arrived.
"Escaped?" Minister Shen suggested during the minor council session.
"The cell doors were removed," Xuanyue said.
"Yes."
"From the outside."
"Perhaps the attacker freed them."
"Why?"
"Unknown."
"What were they imprisoned for?"
The minister checked the summary.
"No charges appear in the estate record."
"Then were they prisoners?"
Master Wen sat behind Xuanyue.
"They were inside locked rooms beneath armed supervision."
Minister Shen's mouth tightened.
"The legal category remains unclear."
"The physical category does not."
The vault inventory remained sealed for another month.
When Tianjing finally obtained a partial copy, the list described preserved bloodline materials, antique bones, rare scales, horn fragments, feathers, and organs attributed to creatures considered mythical.
Most scholars dismissed the labels as collector's fraud.
Ancient markets had sold dragon teeth that belonged to river lizards and phoenix feathers dyed from ordinary birds for thousands of years.
The materials had not been independently verified.
The report entered the Precursor Register because the attacker had taken them and left everything else.
The fourth account came from a sect envoy.
His vessel reached Hengshan with half its formation crew dead.
The envoy described a man standing upon a shattered route marker while lightning moved through the passage without touching him.
The man carried no visible weapon.
Three immense claw-shaped wounds crossed the hull.
No one aboard saw him strike.
The envoy claimed the figure spoke one sentence.
The language could not be identified.
Nara sent the testimony to Xuanyue through their cipher.
Beneath it, she added:
My engineers believe the claw marks were formed by controlled lightning compression. They also believe that is impossible. This has improved their mood considerably.
Xuanyue read the witness translation.
No one agreed upon the words.
One heard a demand.
One heard a name.
One heard nothing.
The sect envoy believed the figure had asked where something had been taken.
"What?" Xuanyue wrote back.
Nara's reply came two weeks later.
He refuses to say.
Beneath that:
Someone from his sect attempted to buy the damaged hull before Hengshan completed inspection.
The fifth account was religious.
A temple in an Established Realm announced that the ancient beasts had returned to punish the living for forgetting their names.
The proclamation named dragons.
Phoenixes.
Qilins.
Pixiu.
Qiongqi.
The same temple had declared seventeen other endings of the age within the past century.
Master Wen considered its predictive record poor.
"The age has ended repeatedly and remains inconsiderate enough to continue."
Xuanyue read the proclamation anyway.
Its descriptions came from fragmentary pre-Cataclysm scripture.
Dragons who commanded the heavens and seas.
Phoenixes whose flames ended and renewed worlds.
Qilins who governed harmony.
Pixiu who held treasure and fortune beneath divine mandate.
Qiongqi who embodied ruin, war, and merciless judgment.
The text treated them as symbols.
Not people.
Not civilisations.
Not races with cities, families, rulers, laws, grief, or memory.
Myths became easier to fear after everything human had been removed.
"Were these races ever real?" Suyin asked.
They sat in Moonwell's lower archive surrounded by copied temple records.
Lu Jian had fallen asleep over a bestiary and was breathing into an illustration of a horned lion.
Master Wen turned a brittle page.
"Probably."
Suyin stared at him.
"That is not what instructors teach."
"Instructors teach what can be supported."
"Can this be supported?"
"Not to academy standards."
Xuanyue looked at the old images.
Most contradicted one another.
Dragons with two wings, four wings, no wings, or bodies extending around mountains.
Phoenixes drawn as birds, women, flames, stars, or suns.
Qilins with antlers, horns, scales, fur, or all four.
Pixiu depicted as treasure guardians, war beasts, judges, or merchants with unusually aggressive expressions.
Qiongqi shown as tigers with wings, men wearing armour, shadows beneath battlefields, or mouths in the sky.
"These are not descriptions," Xuanyue said.
"No," Master Wen replied. "They are memory after enough generations have used it for decoration."
"Then how would anyone recognise one?"
"They might not."
Lumei entered carrying tea.
She placed one cup beside Lu Jian.
He woke immediately.
"I was studying."
"You have ink on your face."
"That proves contact with knowledge."
Cai Rong pointed toward the temple proclamation.
"Why those five?"
Master Wen's expression grew quieter.
"They appear together in several surviving traditions."
"Only five?"
"Only five remembered consistently."
"What happened to the others?" Suyin asked.
"No one knows."
Outside, an academy bell rang.
Students began crossing the nearby bridge.
Xuanyue looked at the copied names.
Five races remembered as myth.
Five names repeated by a temple that had never seen any of them.
The reports did not prove their return.
A man surrounded by fire was not necessarily a phoenix.
Lightning claws did not make someone a dragon.
Collectors lied.
Temples interpreted.
Witnesses shaped terror into whatever old symbols their cultures already possessed.
The rational explanations remained.
But they had begun requiring more effort.
By the beginning of autumn, the reports no longer arrived alone.
One vessel became three.
One destroyed estate became seven.
A capital lost to fire was followed by a mountain sect erased beneath ice so clear that surviving buildings remained visible through it.
A fortress in a Higher Grand Realm collapsed under a single descending pressure.
A hidden market vanished.
A royal laboratory opened from within, though no one survived in its upper halls.
A fleet sent to reinforce a border Realm returned without its commanders.
The crews insisted the commanders had been taken from sealed cabins.
No doors had opened.
No wards had broken.
Their blood remained upon the chairs.
Public bulletins began using the same phrase.
Unprovoked Primordial aggression.
No authority had confirmed that any attacker belonged to a Primordial race.
The phrase spread anyway.
It crossed Realm Passages faster than evidence.
Merchants used it to raise insurance prices.
Rulers used it to request military assistance.
Temples used it to fill halls.
Collectors used it to hide inventories.
Three distant Realms closed their passages entirely.
Five others began expelling travellers whose affinities resembled fire, lightning, ice, wind, earth, water, or metal.
This excluded most people.
The restrictions remained for twelve days.
Cangyuan's imperial court issued a formal statement condemning attacks upon recognised governments and requesting shared intelligence through Tianjing.
Tianjing opened an emergency archive.
Hengshan circulated technical assessments.
Dazhur sent scouts.
Sylvaran offered healing support to refugees.
Lanyue strengthened the western passage wards.
Commander Han increased Xuanyue's academy escort to twenty-four.
"None of the incidents occurred within ten Realm connections of Yunluo," she said.
"Distance is an agreement between roads."
"That sounds like Master Wen."
"He has become contagious."
The public fear reached Moonwell before any confirmed threat did.
Students argued in dining halls.
Some believed the Primordial races had awakened from ancient sleep.
Others insisted powerful cultivators were borrowing old names to terrify governments.
A history student claimed Prime Realms had fabricated the entire crisis to control trade.
Lu Jian believed the fire-wreathed man was probably real.
"You believe every report involving fire," Suyin said.
"Fire produces honest witnesses."
"It produces smoke."
"Smoke is evidence."
One afternoon, a group of students gathered around a newly posted passage bulletin.
The notice described the annihilation of a military order in a distant Realm.
The order's mountain headquarters had been cut from the surrounding range and reduced to fragments.
The nearby town survived.
So did the farms beneath the mountain.
The bulletin called the attack indiscriminate.
Xuanyue read the word twice.
"What?" Suyin asked.
"The town survived."
"Yes."
"The farms survived."
"Yes."
"The road between them survived."
Lu Jian leaned closer to the map.
"The headquarters did not."
"No."
"Perhaps the attacker missed."
Xuanyue looked at him.
He reconsidered.
"The mountain was removed."
"Yes."
"Missing seems unlikely."
The bulletin named twelve villages affected by falling debris.
No deaths were reported among them.
The military order had lost every senior commander, every sealed archive, every private treasury, and every member of three specialist hunting companies.
"What did the hunting companies hunt?" Xuanyue asked.
The bulletin did not say.
She requested the full report.
Moonwell did not possess it.
Tianjing refused public release while intelligence review remained active.
Three weeks later, a damaged copy reached Lanyue through a merchant guild.
The final pages were missing.
The remaining pages referred repeatedly to restricted acquisition operations.
No targets were named.
One surviving quartermaster testified that the order had received rare materials from five separate expeditions over the previous two years.
The inventory attached to his statement had been removed.
"Expeditions where?" Chancellor Qiao asked.
Minister Duan reviewed the copy.
"Unknown."
"Then ask."
"The Realm's government has declared all military records sealed."
"After requesting assistance?"
"Yes."
Chancellor Qiao's expression became thin.
"Fear has not improved their manners."
Xuanyue looked at the dates.
The order's first restricted expedition predated the first reported Primordial attack by almost two years.
The second occurred eight months before the fire-wreathed man destroyed the imperial district.
The third returned shortly before the collector's estate acquired several supposedly ancient materials.
No proof connected them.
Only proximity.
Only timing.
Only records beginning after the mountain was already broken.
The Precursor Register expanded from one shelf to four.
Chancellor Qiao assigned two clerks.
Then six.
Moonwell's passage-law faculty established a parallel archive.
Cangyuan contributed sealed trade notices from eastern markets.
Hengshan contributed vessel inspections.
Tianjing contributed survivor depositions.
Some reports were obvious fraud.
A merchant claimed to possess a dragon's heart and produced a painted stone.
A noble family blamed a phoenix for burning its estate until investigators discovered three barrels of lamp oil and a disinherited son.
A cult announced that a Qilin had selected its leader as the next ruler of twelve Realms.
The leader could not cross a shallow river without assistance.
Master Wen classified the claims as spiritually ambitious.
Other evidence resisted ridicule.
A scale fragment recovered from a destroyed vault could not be cut, melted, weighed consistently, or identified by any living bestiary.
A feather-like strand continued producing heat six months after removal from its owner.
A black horn fragment absorbed the affinity from every formation used to examine it.
A vial labelled Primordial bloodline essence caused three testing arrays to collapse before Tianjing sealed it beneath nine wards.
No one proved the labels correct.
No one produced a plausible alternative.
The materials were not displayed publicly.
Rumour displayed them anyway.
By winter, copies of false copies circulated through markets.
People wore imitation dragon scales for protection.
Temple sellers offered phoenix ash gathered from ordinary fireplaces.
Children played at being Primordial destroyers and chased one another through Lanyue's streets with paper wings.
Xuanyue saw them from her carriage.
One child stood upon a fountain wall wearing a red cloth cape.
"I burn the wicked Realm!"
Another child threw a bucket of water at him.
"I am the frost dragon!"
The red-caped child slipped into the fountain.
Commander Han's horse stopped.
Xuanyue looked at him.
"We are not intervening."
"The dragon has gained advantage."
"They are seven."
"Conflict begins early."
The child climbed out of the fountain and declared himself reborn.
The game continued.
Xuanyue watched until the carriage turned.
The stories had become simple enough for children.
Ancient monsters returned.
Realms burned.
Heroes would rise.
No one in the game asked what the monsters wanted.
The first survivor who did arrived in Lanyue during the coldest week of winter.
His name was Edran Vale.
He had served as a translator for a merchant house operating across six connected Realms. He arrived through the western registry aboard a refugee vessel carrying eighty-three people from a city destroyed three weeks earlier.
The city had stood around a famous private auction complex.
The public report could not agree whether there had been one, two, three, or four unknown Primordial beings involved.
Edran described four.
A man surrounded by pale fire.
A man whose footsteps caused every defensive formation to lose cohesion.
A man carrying a chain that moved through walls without breaking them.
A man whose shadow split into winged silhouettes of stormlight.
None matched the witnesses from earlier incidents exactly.
All four were human in shape.
"That is the part no one prints," Edran said.
He sat in Moonwell's infirmary while Lumei changed the bandage around his forearm.
Xuanyue had been permitted to attend because his testimony involved passage law, refugee treatment, and trade records.
Commander Han stood beside the door.
Master Wen sat near the window.
"What part?" Xuanyue asked.
"That they looked like people."
Edran stared at the floor.
"Not beasts?"
"No."
"Did they call themselves Primordial?"
"No."
"Did anyone identify them?"
"The auction masters did."
"How?"
"I do not know."
"What did they say?"
His mouth tightened.
"One shouted that the specimens were legally purchased."
Lumei's hands paused.
Xuanyue felt the room change.
"What specimens?" she asked.
Edran looked toward Master Wen.
The scholar did not rescue him.
"I never saw them," Edran said. "The lower vaults were restricted."
"What did the auction house sell?"
"Artifacts. Bloodline materials. Rare bodies. Preserved organs. Royal relics. Living contracts."
"Living contracts?"
"People whose bloodlines carried unusual traits."
Lumei resumed wrapping the bandage.
More tightly than before.
Edran flinched.
"Sorry," she said without sounding sorry.
"What happened when the four arrived?" Xuanyue asked.
"They entered through the eastern wall."
"Destroyed it?"
"No."
"What do you mean?"
"The wall remained. They passed through it."
"Then?"
"The guards attacked."
"And?"
Edran closed his eyes.
"They died."
"How many?"
"Hundreds."
His voice became unsteady.
"The fire did not spread like fire. It moved from person to person. Some burned. Some did not. The formations collapsed around the man in white. The chain went beneath the floors."
"Did the attackers speak?"
"Not to us."
"To the auction masters?"
"I heard one question."
"What was it?"
Edran opened his eyes.
"Where are the children?"
The room became completely still.
Lumei tied the bandage.
Edran looked at her hands.
"I did not know there were children below."
"Were there?" Xuanyue asked.
"Yes."
"How many?"
"I saw nine brought out."
"By the attackers?"
"Yes."
"Were they harmed?"
"I do not know what had been done before."
Xuanyue waited.
Edran's face twisted.
"One of the men carried the smallest one," he said. "The child was unconscious, and the others followed the man with the chain."
"Did they look like the attackers?"
"Some."
"In what way?"
"I do not know."
"Try."
"Their eyes. Their hair. Marks beneath the skin when the formations failed."
"Did the attackers kill anyone outside the auction complex?"
"People died in the surrounding streets."
"How?"
"Falling stone. Broken wards. Guards firing into crowds. Some from the pressure."
"Did the attackers target the crowds?"
"No."
"Did they attempt to protect them?"
Edran hesitated.
"The fire curved."
Xuanyue remembered the child beneath the collapsed kitchen roof.
"Curved where?"
"Around the south market."
"Why?"
"I do not know."
"What was in the south market?"
"Servants. Porters. Food sellers. People waiting for the public auction."
"And the northern wing?"
"Private buyers."
"What happened there?"
Edran's voice fell.
"No one came out."
The official report recorded that four Primordial attackers had indiscriminately destroyed the auction district and abducted nine children.
Edran's testimony recorded four attackers.
It recorded that the children had been held in sealed lower vaults.
It recorded that the attackers asked where they were.
It recorded that ordinary wealth remained inside the complex.
It recorded that the private bloodline archives vanished.
The public bulletin omitted all four details.
"Why?" Xuanyue asked after Edran had been taken to rest.
Master Wen remained beside the infirmary window.
"Which why?"
"Why call it abduction?"
"Because the children left with the attackers."
"They were imprisoned."
"So says one witness."
"The auction masters called them specimens."
"So says one witness."
"The attackers asked where they were."
"So says one witness."
Xuanyue looked at him.
"You believe him."
"I believe his account deserves to remain intact."
"That is not the same thing."
"No."
"Why will you not say what you think?"
Master Wen's face looked older in the winter light.
"Because horror does not become virtue merely because another horror preceded it."
Xuanyue said nothing.
"Hundreds died," he continued. "Perhaps thousands across the district. Some were guilty. Some were not. Some may have been saved deliberately. Some may have survived by chance. We do not know."
"But the public report removes everything that would make motive possible."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because motive complicates fear."
Outside the infirmary, snow began falling across Moonwell's lower terraces.
Students crossed the bridges beneath pale umbrellas.
The academy continued around them.
"Do you think they were looking for their children?" Xuanyue asked.
Master Wen's gaze remained upon the snow.
"I think someone had children hidden beneath an auction house."
That answer followed her for weeks.
The public narrative hardened.
Destroyed Realms issued declarations of innocence.
Governments demanded collective defence.
Military alliances circulated lists of supposed Primordial weaknesses drawn from myths.
Temples declared the attacks divine punishment, demonic invasion, cosmic correction, or all three depending upon donations.
Survivors described impossible power.
A man freezing an entire royal fleet within a single breath.
A man drawing a bow whose light remained visible beyond the horizon.
A figure breaking a mountain fortress with a hammer blow heard across half a Realm.
A man walking through a treasury while every locked door opened before him.
A horned healer restoring a dying child before turning and destroying the laboratory behind him.
The accounts sounded like stories designed to become legends.
Then damaged formation crystals arrived.
So did empty fortresses.
So did refugee vessels.
So did maps with capitals crossed out.
One distant Realm lost its ruling dynasty, military high command, three sect councils, and every registered buyer connected to a private bloodline market.
Its agricultural provinces remained intact.
Its cities continued functioning.
The public declaration called the attack an attempt to exterminate the Realm.
Xuanyue placed the casualty map beside the trade registry.
The destroyed sites matched the buyers.
Not perfectly.
Too closely for comfort.
"Could the attackers have obtained the registry?" Suyin asked.
"They may not need it," Cai Rong said.
"What does that mean?"
He looked at the reports.
"No one escapes by changing names."
Rumours spoke of marks appearing upon the guilty before the attacks.
Black lines across the skin.
Burning seals above the heart.
Shadows shaped like chains.
Most accounts were secondhand.
Some were obviously religious additions.
Yet multiple survivors from separate Realms claimed that the attackers ignored people standing beside their targets.
One minister died while his wife survived in the same chamber.
One sect master burned while three servants holding his robes remained untouched.
A collector attempted to hide among refugees.
Witnesses said the fire found him.
No one knew how.
The phrase Primordial judgment began replacing Primordial aggression in frightened private correspondence.
Public governments rejected it.
Privately, they began destroying records.
Tianjing reported a sudden increase in sealed archive fires.
Hengshan intercepted three caravans carrying unregistered bloodline materials.
Cangyuan's imperial investigators uncovered a hidden auction network operating through Yunluo's eastern border cities.
The materials were mostly fraudulent.
Mostly.
One sealed case contained a strip of scale-like tissue that continued producing water-affinity pressure after removal from every external source.
The case had entered Yunluo before the first public Primordial attack.
That date troubled Xuanyue.
Then more dates arrived.
A confiscated feather fragment purchased eleven months before the fire-wreathed man destroyed the imperial district.
A horn sample auctioned privately before the collector's estate fell.
Bloodline essence listed in a military order's internal ledger nearly two years before the first recognised attack.
A royal treasury had acquired three preserved organs labelled as Primordial eight months before declaring itself an innocent victim of unprovoked retaliation.
The labels might have been false.
The dates were not.
Xuanyue began building a second chronology.
Not attacks.
Acquisitions.
Expeditions.
Missing trade convoys.
Restricted military operations.
Sudden increases in the price of rare bloodline materials.
Private invitations sent to collectors and rulers.
Laboratories expanded beneath sealed budgets.
Remote passage routes opened briefly and vanished from public registries.
The chronology did not prove where the materials came from.
It did not prove the attackers belonged to the races named upon the containers.
It did not prove the children beneath the auction complex were related to them.
But the attacks no longer appeared first.
Something preceded them.
Something governments did not include when describing how the violence began.
By her sixteenth birthday, the Precursor Register filled twelve shelves.
There was no festival at Moonwell that day.
The palace celebrated in the evening, warm and private, as Xuanyue requested.
Master Wen gave her Volume Ten of the concise administrative history.
"It had only nine volumes."
"History has continued."
Commander Han gave her a reinforced travel cloak.
Painter Cao painted the uneven wooden dragon beside two stacked archive boxes.
One moon remained in the window.
Xuanyue ate cake with her family.
She laughed when her father attempted to read Torgai's latest letter aloud with proper Dazhur emphasis and frightened a servant carrying tea.
For several hours, the wider Expanse remained beyond the garden.
The next morning, Chancellor Qiao summoned her to the restricted palace archive.
Three people waited inside.
Mingyuan.
Lanyin.
Master Wen.
A sealed inventory lay upon the central table.
Tianjing had obtained it from the ruins of a treasury destroyed four months earlier. The Realm's government had refused release until surviving officials discovered that several duplicate copies existed in foreign hands.
The inventory listed no ordinary wealth.
It belonged to a private royal collection.
Xuanyue read the first page.
Preserved scale sections.
Feather tissue.
Horn fragments.
Blood.
Marrow.
Organs.
Bloodline essences.
Royal weapons whose inscriptions did not match any known dynasty.
Personal relics.
Children transferred under coded classifications.
Her hand stopped.
"Are they alive?" she asked.
"No confirmed record says," Lanyin replied.
The inventory used numbers instead of names.
The acquisition dates extended across three years.
The final shipment arrived six weeks before the treasury was destroyed.
Every item was marked recent.
Not excavated.
Not inherited.
Not preserved from ancient ruins.
Recent.
Xuanyue turned to the verification appendix.
The treasury's own experts had described the materials as fresh when acquired.
Fresh blood.
Fresh tissue.
Affinity activity consistent with recent separation from living sources.
The Realm's public declaration claimed that mythical beasts had emerged without warning and attacked a civilisation that possessed no prior knowledge of them.
Xuanyue read the declaration beside the inventory.
The dates refused to align.
The treasury had possessed the remains before the world claimed the races had returned.
Her father stood across from her.
"What do you see?"
Xuanyue looked at the sealed pages.
At the coded children.
At the fresh tissue.
At the governments insisting nothing had happened before their capitals burned.
At reports beginning with emergency turns, collapsing wards, burning skies, and figures arriving in silence.
Never with the expedition.
Never with the market.
Never with the vault.
Never with the hand that first reached through the door.
She heard Edran's testimony again.
Where are the children?
Xuanyue placed one hand upon the inventory.
"If those races had truly vanished ages ago," she said, "where had their fresh remains come from?"