The rain of light fell harder.
It wasn't water. It was cold fire, a million silver needles stitching patterns through flesh and bone. Li Muye's hands were glued to the jade hollow. Across from him, A-Chuang's palm pressed the same cupped recess. Between their hands, the hollow widened like a pupil waking to daylight.
Captain Lei threw himself forward and bounced off empty air. Something soft yet implacable barred the way—a wall woven from force and intent.
"Stand down!" he snapped, one arm pinning Old Yu's wrist as the man tried to draw his gun. "Shoot and you bury us here."
Old Yu's voice shook with fury and fear. "He's being cooked alive, Captain!"
Zhou Zhan, trembling, took frantic notes even as tears filmed his lenses. "It's a transmission field—no, an engraving array—no, both! This is a… a civilization interface!"
The light pierced Muye's skin, then slowed, settling into the blood like lines of molten silver cooling into script. Not letters. Structures. Every drop drew a shape, and every shape nested within a greater one, until his breath became a hymn to geometry.
From inside the stone and salt of the world, the voice returned—neither male nor female, older than grief and colder than winter.
"Descendant… do you accept my path?"
The bronze pillars thrummed. Runes crawled across the walls like constellations blazing one by one. The jade dais pulsed to a rhythm that was not rhythm at all but order asserting itself.
Muye tried to ask who the speaker was and found his tongue carved from wood. His lungs burned. Somewhere far away, a drum beat in slow, thunderous heartbeats.
"Refuse," said the voice, "and all within these walls returns to dust tonight."
The world narrowed to a single hinge. On one side, terror and the small life he knew. On the other, a door.
He didn't know if he spoke aloud or inside his bones, only that the word left him like a blade.
"I… accept."
The light went still. Then it struck like lightning.
The First Trial: The Battlefield
Wind screamed. The chamber vanished. Muye stood on a plain paved in armor and bone.
The sky was a torn wound stitched with black lightning. Rivers of swords fell through the clouds—no, flew—guided by wills like iron. Across the field, beasts the size of houses crashed against lines of men and women in lacquered armor. Some rode blades; others stood inside glowing circles, chanting sigils that made the air ripple.
A bronze-masked general turned, eyes blazing through the slits. "Bearer—take the rune!"
Every head snapped toward Muye. The ground at his feet flared. A sigil circle surged up around him, lines bright as spilled mercury.
The swords fell.
Panic clawed his throat. Instinct—that new, alien instinct—answered first. The sigil carved over his heart erupted, cast as a bell made of light.
Boom.
The first wave shattered against it, shock hammering his ribs. He tasted blood. The bell flickered, reformed. A second wave slammed down in a shrieking rain of edges.
"Stand—" he gasped to himself, half prayer, half command.
The bell held, but fractures spider-webbed its face. Swordlight clipped his shoulder; heat tore flesh. He cried out, not with sound but with the raw certainty of dying.
Images flashed—the cramped hospital room, his father's thin hands; Captain Lei's iron order: Success only. No noise. Somewhere in the noise, a colder thought: If he fell, the others would be buried with him.
He dragged breath into his chest and fed it to the rune. The bell deepened in tone, mass settling around him like a mountain's shadow. The third wave struck and broke, shards spraying into ash.
Silence fell as if a curtain had dropped. The battlefield froze. Cracks raced the sky, and the world fell in bright flakes, like a fresco flaking off damp plaster.
Muye dropped to one knee, chest heaving, blood warm down his arm. The plain shattered beneath him. He fell through.
The Second Trial: Reading the Wall
He hit stone hard enough to rattle teeth and rolled onto his back, panting. When he lifted his head, he saw the wall.
It went up and up past the reach of sight, a cliff of slate carved with sigils. Some were blades. Some were birds. Some were snakes eating their tails. They moved—not with motion but with pressure—a tide pushing against his lungs.
A voice threaded the chamber, the same voice but less patient.
"Read correctly—live. Read falsely—die."
Three bands of sigils glided out from the wall to hang in the air before him.
The first band burned clean and gold.
The second band was dull, like ash in snow.
The third bled a dark, arterial red.
His palm still bled where a swordlight had slit it. He wiped it on his shirt, laughed once (too high, not sane), and reached for the first sigil in the gold band.
It detonated. Blades of light cut across his wrist. Pain came late and then all at once. He stumbled back, dizzy. The wound did not bleed this time; the light cauterized as it cut. He could smell his skin.
"Wrong," he told himself through clenched teeth. "Not letters. Intent."
He shut his eyes, slowed his breath, and listened. The sigils hummed at different pitches. Not sound—relationships. He thought of the gate in the corridor, the grooves and the cords, the way an error became a stone needle to the throat. He thought of lines as paths, of strokes as orders.
He reached for the second sigil in the ash band.
It slid into his palm like a coin passing skin and bone without resistance, dropping straight into the bell over his heart. His ribs vibrated, a pleasant ache spreading along the cartilage.
"Okay," he whispered. "Okay."
He kept going. Every three correct, one wrong—every wrong, a punishment. Once, the red band flashed, and the floor under him tried to become sky; he vomited from spinning and clung to the sigil glow until up and down clicked back into place. Twice, a wrong choice wrapped him in wires of cold fire, squeezing until black blossomed at the edges of his vision.
He did not stop.
He learned the taste of the Guard rune as a weight settling into his forearms, a sense that tools would not shatter when he needed them most. He learned the touch of the Breath rune as a cool thread stitched through his lungs, pulling panic apart and rebuilding breath into rhythm.
By the time the wall sighed and crumbled, he was shaking and slick with sweat, his shirt stuck to him, his hands raw. He lay there and laughed once more, a broken sound bright with terror and relief.
The floor opened its mouth and swallowed him whole.
The Third Trial: The Peak
He stood on a peak so narrow his boots could barely share it, wrapped in wind so cold it scored the bone. The world fell away on all sides. The sky above was a bruise about to split.
The voice did not ask this time.
"Bearer of runes must endure the lightning."
The first bolt was a column of white. He threw Guard up from his arms out of reflex; the shield bloomed and shattered, hurling him sideways. For one horrible instant he pinwheeled over an abyss, boots scrabbling on glass-slick rock, then slammed back into place, lungs empty.
The second bolt came without warning, splitting in midair. He threw Breath into his chest, and the world slowed, pain narrowing into bars he could step between. He moved wrong anyway—too slow—and lightning raked his back. The smell of burned cloth filled his nose.
He laughed again, because the sound kept him from screaming. "One more," he told the sky hoarsely. "I know what you want."
The cloud tore itself in half. The third bolt was a blade aimed at the crown of his head.
He didn't raise a hand. He struck his chest with an open palm and fed the bell. The Suppression rune rang, and the world vibrated into another shape. The bell was not a shield; it was authority. Sound crashed into plasma and the bolt buckled, turned, bled sideways into the peak's rim.
The mountain cracked. The sky went out.
Muye tumbled into dark.
The Chamber Again
Light returned as color first—blue from the runes, red from blood, green from the jade. Then sound—the drone of pillars, the breath of other men.
He was on his knees, palms still pressed to the hollow, A-Chuang's hand hot against his. The light that had pierced him now ran faint courses under his skin like the seams of a precious stone.
"Muye!" Captain Lei's voice was sharp, urgent. "Speak."
Muye swallowed ash. "I'm here."
He pushed to his feet and nearly fell. Lei caught his elbow hard enough to bruise, then let go at once as if remembering a rule he would not break: Help, but do not hold.
Old Yu stared, mouth working. His eyes were not only afraid. They were hungry. "You… you did something. You turned them off."
Zhou Zhan was crying openly now and didn't seem to notice. "Engraving complete. Breath, Guard, Suppression—three primary runes—do you realize what this means? It's— It's—"
A-Chuang pulled his hand away last. The skin of his palm bore a mark too, but it was fractured, like a rune miscopied by an impatient child. His eyes—narrow, bright, hungry—never left Muye's chest.
"Not bad," he said softly, almost approving. "You didn't drown."
Muye was too tired to read the undertone and too wary not to feel it as a blade's kiss. He took a step back without meaning to, and A-Chuang smiled with only one corner of his mouth, as if that, too, had confirmed something.
The light in the chamber guttered and went out.
For a heartbeat there was only the sound of men breathing. Then, from beyond the walls, came a deeper sound.
Thoom.
Outside the Field
To the others, everything had taken the length of a held breath. The light rain. The ring of something impossible. The boy who was not a boy any longer.
Captain Lei cataloged facts and discarded comfort. Old Yu rolled greed and fear between his teeth until they tasted the same. Zhou Zhan tried and failed to turn awe into language. A-Chuang stood very still and listened to a drum no one else could hear.
The drum thumped again. Thoom.
Dust fell from the ceiling in a powdery veil. The jade underfoot thrummed in sympathy. The bronze pillars complained in long, low groans like ships grinding against ice.
"Movement," Lei said. "Weapons down but ready. We hold."
Old Yu's gun didn't lower. It tilted—an accident or an intention—until the muzzle pointed at Muye's sternum. "You give me whatever that is," he whispered through a jaw too tight to move properly. "You share. We came together."
"Point it somewhere else." Lei didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to.
Old Yu didn't. "He's a damned key, Captain. Keys get used. Or they get taken away."
Zhou Zhan took an involuntary half step between the barrel and Muye, then flinched away, ashamed of his own courage. "Please—this is history—don't—"
A-Chuang chuckled under his breath. It was not a nice sound. "If you aim at him, make sure you can live a second past the pull."
"Enough." Lei's blade whispered out and down, not in threat but in promise.
The drum hit a third time, the loudest yet.
Stone split somewhere. Air rushed like a sucked breath. At the far end of the chamber, part of the wall slid—no, peeled, like a scab coming off at last. Beyond it, steps led down into a dark that breathed cold.
From the throat of that dark, the voice came again, quieter than before but closer, pressure instead of volume.
"Bearer. Your trial has not begun."
Muye's runes flared in answer, a quick hot pulse that left him dizzy. For an instant, a shard of the battlefield replaced the chamber—the bronze general pointing, the sky cracking.
He exhaled, tasted metal, and nodded once.
"We go," Captain Lei said. Command, not question.
Old Yu barked a laugh that wasn't a laugh at all. "Into the gut of the beast? With the kid who set the drums off?" He swung the muzzle back and forth, then lowered it by inches. "Fine. But if he starts glowing again, I'm running."
Zhou Zhan wiped his face with the back of his sleeve and peered into the stairwell, ravenous and terrified. "The main tomb…"
A-Chuang spun his blade once in his palm and followed as if strolling into a tavern. The step he took placed him directly behind Muye, near enough that a lunge would close the distance. He didn't lunge.
They went down, Captain Lei first, then Muye, then Zhou Zhan, then Old Yu, last of all A-Chuang, their shadows joined and stretched by the light.
The air grew colder. The drum slowed. Somewhere below, something enormous was breathing with the patience of stone.
At the first landing, Muye heard the voice again. It did not speak words. It struck the bell in his chest and let the tone fill him.
Welcome, it seemed to say. Or farewell.
He kept walking.