The words were gone. But the seal remained.
Luo Qinghan's fingers hovered above the mirror—never quite touching—while the faint glimmer of the grey candle glyph pulsed once, as though it too were listening.
In that breath of silence, she didn't see Shen Jin's face. Nor the threat at Ningyuan's court.
What surfaced instead was the moment she had stood beneath the jade dais of the Jing Sect, years ago, receiving her mirror.
Her master had said:
"You are a disciple of the Jing Sect. You act under Lingyuan's command. But our order is older. Jing law comes first."
She had nodded, believing it no more than a formal redundancy.
Now, she knew better.
That had not been advice. It had been a warning.
The Jing Sect and the Lingyuan Council shared an uneasy truce. Outwardly cooperative. Privately distrustful.
She—the recorder—was nominally under Lingyuan command, yet functionally a planted eye of the Sect, tasked with observing and recording the Seal's anomalies.
Lingyuan had never trusted her fully.
They let her close—
But never to the center.
And this message—
"If the Seal cannot be controlled—take the mirror. Leave the bearer."
—had gone directly to her.
No sign that Lingyuan had seen it.
No dual-authority seal.
No shared encryption.
This was not a mission directive. It was a private order. A shadow command.
And worse—It presumed that she had already chosen.
Take the mirror. Leave him.
It did not ask whether Shen Jin could be stabilized. Did not consider whether he mattered. It simply removed him—linguistically, ideologically—as though he were a temporary vessel.
And the worst part was—
He was.
Shen Jin had no bond to the Jing Sect. He was never sent by them. Never served them. He was, to them, nothing but a point of intersection.
But to her—
He had been more.
Not in name. Not in doctrine. But in shared dreams.
In that first blurred dream-image, when the mirror flared and the mark burned—their minds had brushed. Briefly. Brutally.
Not as allies. But as two people written by the same force.
And now—
They wanted her to forget it.
Forget him.
Forget herself.
Her voice was barely above breath:
"…The Jing Sect trusts me. But they do not trust that I've… changed."
This wasn't an order.
It was a test.
A way to see if she still belonged to them—
Or if she'd been corrupted by too much feeling.
If she left him behind, she'd prove her usefulness.
But would she still be herself?
She didn't write a reply. Not yet.
Because even silence—
Had its cost.
The grey flame mark still lingered within the inner of the mirror, unfading after the words had dissolved.
Luo Qinghan frowned slightly.
She reached for the measuring rod on her desk—a tool for aligning mirror-planes—and let a thin thread of light slide from its tip into the heart of her mirror.
The surface rippled, a faint chime breaking the stillness.
It did not resist—if anything, it guided.
The more she looked at the mark, the more she knew it was not of the Sect's current make.
The stroke-lines bent where they should have run straight, the threadwork curved like a flame's tongue, and deep within the pattern, almost invisible, were glyphs meant to draw heat away—a design she'd only ever seen in seals built to contain unstable dream-forms.
A thought stirred.
From the corner of the desk, she drew an old scroll—
Jing Sect Codex: Fragments.
Its cover was split, the edges ink-stained.
She turned to the third volume—Miscellaneous Seal Forms from Experiments.
Before her fingers touched the page, the parchment turned itself—settling on the seventh leaf.
A sketch waited there, faint from age, with a single marginal note:
"Grey Candle Seal: Used in Phase Six of the Zhulong Cognitive Conduit Trials. Holds steadily under fusion, but must never share host with spiritual root. Risk of reverse incursion."
Her hand stilled.
This mark… belonged to the Zhulong Trials.
That line of work had been shut down twenty years before she entered the Sect.
Its researchers are dissolved.
Its name was erased from official records.
She remembered one elder from the Sect, long ago, saying:
"The Jing Sect never seals experiments.
It seals people."
She closed the book, drew back the rod.
The mark appearing in her mirror tonight—
It was no accident.
No relic misplaced.
It was chosen.
The Sect's words were cold.
But the grey candle mark…
It whispered something else.
It did not feel like a courier's addition.
It felt as though—
Someone was warning her.
Or testing her.
She looked at the mark and felt an odd distance open inside her.
It came from the Jing Sect.
And yet—
It did not belong to the Sect as it was now.
It was like a loose thread from a lineage long erased, stirring in some sealed vault, waiting for the right hands—the obedient hands—to carry it out again.
She watched it for a long time.
Her hand stayed still.
The mirror kept its silence.
At last, even the mark dissolved, falling back into the light, dust and nothing.
Only the old scroll's lifted page remained—tilted upward, as though it still had more to say.
Luo Qinghan closed the old scroll. The scroll spine scraped faintly beneath her fingers.
Her paper mirror, which had been still all night, took on a thin halo—so faint it might have been moonlight caught in dust, though the room's shadows seemed to step back an inch .
She turned the paper mirror toward herself. Deep beneath its surface a trace of fire shimmered—the flame mark.
Each time her fingertips drew near, the mark trembled—not because she willed it, but as if answering some breath from beyond the pane. The quiver felt pulled by something outside the room, or by a half-forgotten echo of a shared moment.
In that stillness a question brushed through her mind—quiet as a tide, sharp as a stone dropped in deep water:
"Who is it you intend to take with you?"
It was not a voice, nor a spell. It was the shape of a question made audible only to the thought. For an instant she could not tell whether the question rose from the mirror or from the memory in that side hall—when she and Shen Jin had the shared writing of dreams.
She did not answer.
She set the mirror back on the desk. A page of the old scroll at the corner of the table lifted with the passing draft, as if the book, too, felt the inquiry. Outside, a soft wind rattled the eaves; a chime struck twice and let the tone spill into the room, offering its own thin echo.
She lowered her gaze; her fingers did not move. The mirror's glow calmed, but the question remained, lodged like an unset seal—warm without flame, still like ash.