The fog would not lift. It rolled across the path like an ocean without wind, heavy and suffocating. The stones beneath their feet were cracked and mottled, each fissure pulsing faintly with a ghostly glow—as if some dead thing had been buried in the marrow of the earth, and its last embers had yet to die.
Shen Jin slowed his pace. His fingers twitched unconsciously, tightening until the skin of his palm pressed hard against the burning brand that marked him—the Seal. Heat bled through his veins, every throb of his pulse a drumbeat echoing the heartbeat of something beneath the stones.
Beside him, Luo Qinghan walked in silence, her figure thin and steady as the fog curled around her shoulders like drapes of mourning cloth. Her eyes, cold as a blade pulled from the sheath, flicked toward the darkness ahead. Without a word, she let a sliver of mirror-light unfold from her sleeve. The shard hovered, casting pale light through the gray air, glinting against the broken chains of runes that hung like shattered constellations above the road.
The chains rasped together as the wind stirred. Sparks leapt from rune to rune, but the sparks were not the clean glow of steel—they were blood-dark flames, the kind that burned without heat, licking soundlessly along the mist, making the silhouettes of Shen Jin and Luo Qinghan ripple like broken reflections on water.
And then, it began.
At first, only a whisper: faint, almost harmless, like a child murmuring in sleep. Yet it carried a tone that had no place in a living throat. It was laughter and weeping woven together, a sound like ash grinding against ash.
"Bones… burn… dream…"
Luo Qinghan stopped. She drew her personal mirror. The light blanched her face. The pale gleam lit her cheek, showing a rare sharpness in her eyes. She said nothing, but her stillness was blade enough.
The whisper swelled. The fog surged forward, roiling like a tide. The path shuddered underfoot and split. Cracks opened wide, not to soil or stone, but into a hollow void. From the chasm surged a blaze of white fire—fire that gave no heat but carried the stench of marrow burning. Each pop of the flame sounded like bones snapping, one after another, in endless succession.
Shen Jin's chest convulsed. The Seal in his palm flared, searing him from inside. He staggered a step, teeth clenched, as if every thread of his blood was being pulled toward that light.
Luo Qinghan moved first. Her sleeve flicked, mirror-sigil darting into the air and spreading a veil of light across the fissure. For a heartbeat, it held. But then, the veil was torn apart like paper in the jaws of unseen beasts—shredded into glittering shards that fell and dissolved into the mist.
"Not ordinary dream-phantoms,"
She murmured, and her lips tightened, pale against the gray.
From the rift crawled a claw. It was not flesh but the crude puzzle of bones, fused from dozens of creatures and set ablaze in the same white fire. The bones scraped as the claw flexed, each movement hissing like molten wax poured onto frost. Where its nails touched the stone, the slabs blackened and collapsed to ash.
Shen Jin's breath caught. He had read of such things in ancient fragments, whispered in broken lines—but to see one… this was no beast born of soil or sky. This was nightmare incarnate.
The fog convulsed. A vast shadow pushed through, rising until it loomed over them like a mountain that had chosen to walk. Half its body was a burning skeleton, ribs glowing with coal-white light. The other half dissolved into a vortex of swirling dream-stuff, a distortion of void and phantoms. With every inhalation, the beast drew in bone-dust, exhaling sheets of ash that settled on the stones.
Shen Jin's voice cracked as he spoke the name: "A Bone-Burner…"
Luo Qinghan shook her head once, blade flashing higher. "Not just that."
The shadow rose higher, its head resolving from mist. The skull was not a skull—it was too long, the brow jagged, the jaw unhinged. Hollow sockets burned with pale fire. At each side of its head dangled a grotesque ornament: two black ear-shaped relics, torn and sewn back with ancient script etched into their surface. Symbols flickered across them like lightning trapped in scars.
The whisper returned. This time it was clear, every word slamming into the air as if the mist itself had been carved open.
"—Name… can you cast it aside?"
Shen Jin staggered again. The voice slid into him like a blade into water, leaving no wound but stirring chaos. It was the same tone he had heard in the Seal's visions—the call of something ancient, something broken yet endless.
The beast stepped forward. The road convulsed beneath its weight, each pace turning stone to ash. The runic chains overhead screamed as if they too were being ground down by the monster's presence.
Shen Jin wanted to retreat. He wanted to wrench himself free. But the seal on his chest pulsed harder, hotter, dragging his blood upward like threads toward a pen's tip, as if demanding he write, here and now, in the middle of this nightmare.
"It's the Bone-Burner Mok'er…"
Shen Jin uttered with a tremor in his voice.
Luo Qinghan stepped in front of him, grasping her personal mirror. The gleam lit her face in sharp lines.
"Mok… er…"
She repeated, and the syllables bit her tongue like shards of ice. The name carried weight, an echo that made her skull ache.
The creature—Mok'er—lifted its head, hollow sockets locking onto Shen Jin. The fire in its eyes flared. It was not hunger. It was recognition.
A silence fell, thick and suffocating. Then Mok'er laughed.
It was the sound of a thousand bones scraped together, of skeletons rattling in mass graves, of furnaces burning marrow. It was laughter without breath, without sanity, and yet it resonated like a memory carved into the earth.
"Write… my name."
The flame marks in Shen Jin's hand surged, searing down his arm in a pattern of jagged script. The blood in his veins quivered, as though every drop wanted to spill itself into ink.
Above them, the chains of law writhed, sparks falling like dying stars. The fog convulsed with each of the beast's steps.
And the world itself seemed to tilt toward madness.