One year.
The word itself felt fragile when spoken, as if saying it aloud risked breaking the thin membrane of time that had somehow stretched this long without him. A year since the courtroom collapse, a year since the Tribunal's return in shadowed form, a year since Jin Mu had looked them all in the eye—and then vanished like smoke between their fingers.
No trace.
No farewell.
Not even a page left behind.
The four of them had carried on. Not because they wanted to, but because the world had demanded it.
Camellya sat high now, the youngest to ever bear the mantle of Interim Arbiter of the Seer's Academy. Her hair was longer, her robes cleaner, but her eyes had dulled. In one year, she had mastered more secrets of sequence binding than most elders could in five. And yet, the girl who used to tease Jin about cultivation techniques had grown quieter. Stern. The type who looked through people instead of at them.
Shen Yan was different too. His missing arm had been replaced—not by flesh, but by an artifact prosthetic forged of divine ore and sequence marrow. The sword saint who once blazed with raw aggression was now… slower. Sharper. Every swing he taught, every word he spoke, carried the weight of someone who had already paid the price of arrogance. And though he laughed sometimes, that laugh no longer reached his eyes.
Su Lin… she wore freedom like a fragile cloak. She had cut her slave mark away and replaced it with her own sigil, a crude tattoo she inked herself. For a year, she had been the blade in the dark—the one ensuring the Tribunal's old bindings stayed broken. But there was a restlessness in her too. She worked like a woman who didn't expect tomorrow to come.
And then there was Xue Yiran.
The ice-princess, the pride of the sect, who once scorned him yet secretly helped him step into the archives. She had refused every chance to return home. She had refused every offer of promotion, every marriage arrangement, every order to detach from "the rebels." For one year, she remained. For one year, she waited. Her excuse to the sect was that she was "monitoring" them. The truth was simpler: she couldn't leave the place where Jin Mu had last been.
Her nights were restless. She would sit by the old chambers where he once stayed, eyes tracing the empty floor. She hated herself for it. For caring. For missing the way he scowled when confused, the way he smirked when victorious, the way he carried burdens no one else could see.
She hated herself most for never saying what she felt before he was gone.
But time did not stop.
The Concord was fractured. The Tribunal never fully returned after Jin's defiance, but neither did it vanish. Shadows lingered, whispering verdicts across cities. Sometimes an entire village would wake to find themselves condemned, with no trial, no explanation. The four of them had fought tirelessly against it, carving out sanctuaries where narrative law couldn't reach.
Yet the cracks were showing.
Camellya had begun to lose sleep, drowning in calculations of sigils and counter-runes.
Shen pushed his body harder than his prosthetic could endure.
Su Lin's missions left her bloody more often than not.
And Xue Yiran… she lived on the edge of desperation.
Because deep down, each of them carried the same thought:
What if he never came back?
One night, the four gathered in an abandoned shrine hidden within the roots of the Eternal Forest. Rain beat down on the canopy, a low rumble echoing through the stone. They had gathered often here, but tonight was different.
Su slammed her dagger into the table. "We can't keep doing this. One year, and still no sign of him. For all we know, he's dead."
Xue's eyes narrowed like sharpened glass. "He isn't."
"You don't know that!" Su shot back, anger trembling in her voice. "You just want to believe it."
"Enough," Shen's voice cut through like a blade. He sat, one hand resting on his artifact arm. "We've all wondered the same thing. But arguing doesn't bring him back."
Camellya's gaze was fixed on the stone floor. Her voice, when it came, was quieter than the rain. "He's alive."
The others looked at her.
"I know," she continued, "because I can still feel the ripple. The Book he carried wasn't destroyed. I can sense its residue in the weave of sequences. He… he burned himself into the fabric of this world. If he were dead, that echo would've collapsed. But it hasn't."
Shen frowned. "Then where is he?"
Camellya's lips pressed thin. "…That's the question, isn't it?"
The silence stretched.
Then, almost bitterly, Xue whispered: "He left us."
The words hurt more than she expected.
But outside the shrine, the rain bent wrong for a moment.
A droplet fell sideways. Another hung suspended midair before striking the ground.
And then—just as the storm reached its loudest pitch—someone far away opened their eyes.
They were black. They were gold. They were filled with script.
Jin Mu had not died.
But the place he had woken in was not the world he remembered.
It was something older.
Something the Tribunal itself had once feared.