The court hall echoed with murmurs—nobles, officials, and retainers shifting uneasily beneath the weight of unspoken fear.
Two days had passed since the sky split open like a divine wound. Since Heaven itself had roared.
And yet, the silence from the inner chambers had been more terrifying than the storm that came before it.
The Emperor sat on the high dais, but not at ease. His fingers tapped the armrest of the throne in a slow, deliberate rhythm. Waiting. Listening. Eyes half-lidded, yet sharp.
A flicker of motion drew every gaze to the grand entrance.
The heavy doors creaked open.
A gust of cold air swept into the hall, carrying with it the quiet return of the group, their mission left unfinished
Daita stepped in first, his normally pristine robes askew, the hem darkened with soot. As he crossed the threshold, silence fell like a blade. Behind him came the others—cultivators bearing quiet frustration, and at the rear, Commander Zhou, his face clouded with restrained disappointment.
The murmurs that had rippled through the chamber died instantly.
High above, the Emperor rose. His gaze swept over the group, cold and calculating—searching for a person that wasn't there. He didn't wait. His steps echoed sharply as he descended the stone dais, robes trailing like storm clouds behind him.
"Your Majesty…" a minister murmured, almost rising in protest—only to fall silent beneath the weight of the Emperor's expression. Who stopped before Daita.
"Where is the Crown Prince?"
Daita stiffened under the sudden weight of the question. The Emperor's gaze bore down on him like a blade held just above his throat.
"Where is he?"
Before Daita could form a response, Commander Zhou stepped forward with a slight bow, his voice calm.
"I saw His Highness heading toward the west wing… just after he spoke with the Seventh Prince. He said something to him, though I couldn't hear what."
The Emperor's eyes narrowed. "West wing?" His voice was quiet, but it made the entire hall feel colder.
Daita's jaw tightened. He shot a sharp glare at Zhou, silent fury flickering in his eyes while thinking,
Of course he'd use this to get back at me for breaking the rules. Next time I get the chance, I swear—I'll stab you Commander Zhou!
Commander Zhou's disappointment had vanished, replaced with a faint look of satisfaction.
The Emperor took a step forward. "Daita. Answer me."
A heavy sigh slipped from Daita's lips. He lowered his head slightly, resigned. " He said… he wanted to check something. In the Umbral Sanctum."
The words hit the hall like a thunderclap.
The Emperor's jaw tightened. His fists clenched at his sides, rings biting into skin. He turned without another word.
"The gathering ends now, Disperse!" he said coldly, voice like iron drawn through ice.
As he strode away, the ministers stumbled to their feet in confusion, unsure whether to follow or fall silent.
Daita exhaled hard, dragging a hand down his face as the storm of murmurs rose behind him.
"…Told him not to go," he muttered, more to himself than anyone else.
———
The silence inside the Umbral Sanctum was thick like the breath of something ancient held for centuries. Dust curled in the cold light filtering through cracked glass above, catching on the motes that hovered like ash in the air.
Akira stood before a towering shelf, his gloved fingers brushing the spine of a massive, timeworn book. With a soft exhale, he blew away the dust. It scattered like faded memories before he carefully opened the tome, its pages groaning in protest.
He flipped through them slowly deliberately searching for something. His eyes moved with sharp intent, but his body remained still, taut with anticipation.
Then he froze.
A heatless wind curled through the sanctum. His spine stiffened. He didn't need to turn around to feel the weight behind him rage, quiet and absolute, like the sky just before a storm.
"I…" Akira's voice was low, almost reverent. "Your Majesty. Forgive me… I was only trying to—"
A voice, colder than the stone walls around them, interrupted.
"It's forbidden for you to come here."
The voice echoed low and steady through the sanctum, reverberating through stone and silence. Akira didn't move at first, his fingers still resting on the open page, words half-read and already sinking into his mind like thorns.
"Why?" he asked, quietly. "Why is it forbidden?"
There was a pause.
Then came the sound of footsteps measured, deliberate, the weight of authority in each one. The Emperor emerged from the shadows, his robes trailing like stormclouds over the floor.
"Because knowledge kept here was never meant to be passed down." His gaze dropped to the book. "What's written in these pages… are records of truths the world wasn't ready for. Still isn't."
"Truths about what?"
The Emperor didn't answer. Instead, he reached out and slammed the book shut with a force that sent a plume of dust rolling off the cover.
"No one should know what's inside these pages," the Emperor said, voice low but absolute. "Not unless they're ready to bear the price of remembering it. The same goes for the contents of the Forbidden Vault—buried deep within those black rooms even light refuses to touch."
Akira's hand hovered over the worn edge of the tome. "Then why do they still exist?" he asked quietly. "Shouldn't they have been destroyed already?"
The Emperor slowly lifted his hand from the book's surface. Dust clung to his palm like ash.
"They can't be destroyed," he said. "Not even by the Five Elements."
Akira turned his head slightly, the corner of his mouth twitching in something too brief to be a smile. "Not even by fire?" he asked, voice light but only on the surface.
The Emperor's eyes darkened. "Fire. Water. Wind. Earth. Spirit. It doesn't matter. These relics belong to an age that predates balance itself. Even heaven's wrath left them untouched."
"I wonder what's hidden there…" Akira murmured, as if to himself.
The Emperor's gaze sharpened. "Akira," he said, stepping closer, the weight in his voice unmistakable. "What do you mean by that?" His tone hardened. "And why did you come here the moment you returned without presenting yourself before the court?"
Akira finally turned to face him. "Your Majesty, is there anyone alive who truly knows what lies beyond those black doors?" He paused, letting the question settle. "If someone does, if anyone carries knowledge of what's hidden in that vault—doesn't that make them a threat? A danger no seal could contain?"
The Emperor didn't answer at first. A shadow crept across his expression, "No one," he said slowly, "has ever stepped inside. The sanctum was buried beneath the palace long before our time. The protection seal was carved by our ancestors. its script older than any language still spoken. No inscription survives. No spell remains in the archives. And no one alive remembers how to pass through it."
He took another step forward—then without warning, his hand shot out and grabbed Akira by the shoulder, wrenching him sharply around.
"Why?" the Emperor demanded, voice low and fierce. "Why are you asking this now? What is it you're really after?"
Akira didn't flinch under the Emperor's grip. "I'm not after anything," he said, tone maddeningly calm. "But it's strange, isn't it?"
The Emperor's eyes narrowed.
Akira tilted his head slightly, voice silk-soft, deliberate. "For something that no one remembers how to enter… for something so deeply sealed that even flame and time leave it untouched… you're very sure it must stay hidden." His words lingered like smoke in the air. Then he smiled, faintly, "Unless someone already tried," Akira murmured. "Unless something already slipped through."
The Emperor's fingers tightened on his shoulder. Akira pressed on, his voice soft but deliberate each word chosen like the point of a blade.
"That's what makes me wonder…" he said slowly, "is it really true? That the black rooms, sealed and silent for centuries, have remained untouched? That no one… no thing has passed through those doors?"
The Emperor's expression twitched barely a shift, a flicker of something dark and uncertain.
"You don't know what you're talking about," the Emperor said, but the words lacked their usual weight.
"Don't I?"
The silence that followed was heavy charged. The air between them crackled like a wire pulled too tight.
Then, the Emperor exhaled sharply, jaw locked with frustration. He pulled his hand back from Akira's shoulder, more as if scorched than restrained.
"So this is what you're after," he muttered bitterly. A cold, joyless laugh escaped him. "You already knew. And yet you played coy, asking questions you had answers to."
His voice dipped, dangerously low now. "Perhaps I should ask how you know. Or better yet how to erase that knowledge from your cursed mind." He stepped forward again, looming.
"That wouldn't work—not for you. You're the one soul in this empire doomed to remember every pain you have ever known."