Qin Lan moved like shadow across the landscape, swift and silent, avoiding the main roads and sacred paths. The provinces here were riddled with forgotten history — once battlefields, now buried under forest and fog. Perfect for someone like him.
He didn't need the light.
He had long since stopped trusting it.
By nightfall, he reached the edge of Blackroot Hollow, a region whispered about in older sects — a place cultivators avoided due to its history with forbidden arts. The sky here seemed heavier, like the stars themselves watched in silence.
An old shrine stood in a sunken grove, half-devoured by vines, its roof cracked and stone offering bowl filled with rainwater and bones of birds.
Qin Lan stepped into the shrine without hesitation. He knelt beside the stone bowl and pressed a finger into the water. With one slow motion, he drew a sigil onto the cracked stone floor: a circle with three slashes through its center — the brand of a forgotten sect known only to the shadows.
The wind shifted.
And then a voice.
"You summon the Unseen."
The shadows at the edge of the shrine twisted and re-formed, gathering into the shape of a robed figure with no visible face. The air grew colder, as though something had drawn the warmth from the very earth.
Qin Lan didn't flinch.
"There is a boy," he said evenly, "named Jin Yue. He travels with someone you will not engage — not yet. But you will watch him."
The shadow tilted its head. "And if this boy is shielded?"
Qin Lan smiled thinly. "Then you test the shield."
The shadow remained silent, waiting.
Qin Lan stood, brushing dust from his sleeves. "I want no harm done to the boy. Not yet. He is a tether. A weight. If he begins to unravel, so will Li Feng."
At the name, the air stirred again.
"That name," the shadow rasped, "was buried."
"And now he walks again," Qin Lan said. "But he walks blind. Pretending to be human. Pretending to belong."
The shadow bowed slightly. "Orders?"
"You will place whispers in the ears of the weak. Stir the hungry. Let small threats rise around them like weeds. He will think it's coincidence. Random. But each one… will be a test. And we will learn how much of him still remains beneath that calm face."
"And when he breaks?"
Qin Lan's gaze darkened.
"Then we welcome him home."
The shadow slipped away, melting into the trees, leaving only the faint echo of its footsteps behind.
Qin Lan lingered a moment longer, staring at the broken shrine.
He remembered standing beside Li Feng once — blood-soaked, unshaken — when they had been younger and the world had feared them both. Not because of what they represented… but because of what they were willing to become.
Weapons. Tools. Monsters.
And now, Li Feng had abandoned that.
He'd chosen restraint. Mercy. Company.
Foolish.
Qin Lan turned away, the wind ruffling his cloak. "You can run from your name, Feng," he muttered, "but you can't run from me."
Not forever.
And not with that boy at your side.