The sect was drowned in silence that felt wrong.
The night air should have carried the scent of pine and the distant hum of insects, yet everything hung still—like the world itself was holding its breath.
Yan Zhi sat alone in the training hall, sweat dripping as he guided his vein flow. But when his arm sliced through the air, the shadow on the wall lagged behind. It did not follow him—it watched him.
He froze.
The shadow froze too.
And then, slowly, it moved… even though his body remained still.
A sound slid into the silence.
Not a voice, but something like cloth dragging over stone.
"Zhi…"
Yan Zhi clenched his jaw. The sound wasn't from outside the chamber—it seeped from the dark corridors of the sect itself, from cracks where no one should ever be.
---
By morning, the sect looked normal.
Disciples chatted and laughed in the courtyards, yet something was off. A boy stuttered mid-sentence, his gaze losing focus. A girl turned to Yan Zhi, eyes hollow, and whispered—not with her voice, but with his.
"You can't run, Yan Zhi."
The next heartbeat, she was laughing again with her friends, oblivious.
A cold shiver ran through him. They didn't know it, but Yan Zhi did: The One Who Waits in the Corridor was brushing against their souls.
---
The pressure inside him grew heavier.
Two currents clashed within—his ever-hungry Vein of Devourer, and a foreign whisper pressing, tempting, invading.
Sometimes the whisper was his own thought.
"Why resist? We are the same. You've always known it…"
He shut his eyes, but the voice echoed in the rhythm of his heartbeat, weaving itself so perfectly into his mind that he no longer knew which thoughts were his… and which belonged to it.
---
That night, he walked through the corridor toward the cultivation chamber.
The walls pulsed faintly, as if in time with a hidden heartbeat.
The lantern's flame flickered, and on the floor stretched a shadow—too long, far longer than any body could cast.
The shadow crawled toward him, inch by inch, though there was no source to give it life.
And from the far end of the hall, a thin laugh trickled—not through the air, but through the very stones, vibrating in every brick.
Yan Zhi's breath hitched. The corridor itself felt like a throat tightening around him.
---
And then he understood.
The One Who Waits was no longer waiting. It was searching—for a door. Not of wood or stone, but the kind carved between soul and reality.
The shadow slid closer. His heart thumped, but the beat was no longer only his.
"If it breaks through the first crack…" he whispered to himself,
"…then it won't be just me it devours—it will be the entire sect."
The lantern sputtered out. Darkness swallowed the hall.
And in that silence, a long, alien breath rose—drawn from lungs that weren't his.
---