The mist thickened until even the oil lamp's flame flickered weakly, threatened by some invisible, creeping force.
Shen Jin pulled back his hand, resuming his seat before the battered desk, though his fingertips still tingled with lingering heat.
Across the room, Luo Qinghan bent once more over her scroll, her brush gliding in smooth, patient strokes, as if the brief, piercing exchange of gazes had never occurred.
Shen Jin forced himself to focus on the torn parchment before him.
But something was wrong.
Faint, almost imperceptible patterns emerged across the scroll's surface, like veins beneath thin skin, pulsing slowly under the quivering light.
A sharp tension gripped him, freezing his muscles where he sat.
The very air thickened — heavy, metallic, choking with the heat of molten iron.
At the center of the scroll, a tiny ember of red-gold light ignited —
flickering, beating —
calling to something ancient buried deep within the marrow of the world.
Shen Jin's vision blurred.
—
He stood upon a vast, scorched wasteland.
The sky boiled overhead, a roiling sea of blood-red clouds, raining down sparks and ash.
The stench of charred flesh and bone saturated the air; the ground was littered with the broken relics of forgotten gods — shattered wings, twisted horns, sundered altar stones.
And in the distance, circling above the dead earth, a colossal creature of flame —
a faceless bird, all burning wings and molten heart, casting shadows wider than mountains.
It cried once, a low, terrible sound that made the very bones of the world shudder.
The wind that followed seared Shen Jin's skin; he stumbled, forced to his knees by the pressure.
The burning bird descended.
As its wings swept low overhead, a searing agony slashed across Shen Jin's left shoulder —
—
He gasped awake.
The oil lamp guttered on the verge of dying.
Breath rasping harsh in his throat, Shen Jin staggered back from the desk.
Pain blazed along his left side; he tore open his collar and stared in disbelief.
There — seared into his skin — a faint, smoldering mark:
the silhouette of a faceless bird.
Across the room, Luo Qinghan knelt on the floor, her face pale, her torn scroll smoldering with faint, ember-like sparks.
They locked eyes across the fading lamplight.
Neither spoke.
Both understood —
what they had seen was no mere hallucination.
It was a calling.
A summons from somewhere deep within the Abyss of Ruins.
Shen Jin clenched his jaw, pushing himself upright.
Wordlessly, he slid the damaged scroll into the hidden compartment beneath the desk, sealing it away as if locking a nightmare behind glass.
The lamp flared once, desperate and brief, before the mist surged in again, swallowing the Archive Tower whole.