Li Yao woke beneath a sky that had forgotten how to move.
The clouds hung motionless, frozen mid-curl like paint trapped before it dried. Dust drifted around him in lazy spirals, each grain falling at its own reluctant pace, as if time itself were debating whether to continue.
He did not remember his name—yet when the thought who am I? surfaced, the answer arrived on instinct, dry and detached:
Li Yao. Probably.
He found it strange that even his certainty felt borrowed.
When he sat up, rubble slid from his shoulders. The stones were the bones of something greater—a temple, maybe, or a sect hall whose purpose had long since leaked out of memory. Pillars of cracked jade jutted from the earth, carved with symbols that glimmered faintly in and out of existence. The air tasted of ash and lightning.
His chest ached. When he looked down, he saw why.
An hourglass was set into his sternum, its frame fused with flesh and bone, its glass pulsing with pale light. Inside, the sand moved upward, defying everything that should have been true. With each grain that rose, he felt his heart skip a beat and then resume, slightly out of rhythm—as if his life were being counted in reverse.
He touched it, half-expecting pain. Instead, the glass was cool, almost kind, humming faintly with a sound too low to be heard but too clear to ignore.
The hum spoke of repetition. Of debt. Of something unfinished.
He stood slowly, taking stock of the ruin around him. Statues lay decapitated. Time-worn banners hung like dried tongues. The sigil carved into the central dais read Sekte Arus Abadi—though half the letters had already dissolved into air.
"So," he murmured to nobody, "either I survived the apocalypse or I'm very late for morning prayer."
His voice echoed strangely, returning a heartbeat later, slightly older.
He brushed dust from his sleeves. His body looked young enough—skin unlined, muscles steady—but the tips of his hair had gone white, as though age had started from the ends and worked backward. He laughed once under his breath. "Stylish. Mortality with highlights."
He tried to remember anything beyond the moment he'd opened his eyes. Nothing came—only a single phrase, carved into the inside of his mind:
Pay for every second.
The words lingered like the taste of iron.
Wind shifted; somewhere nearby, a bell rang—no, not a bell. A heartbeat of metal. The world exhaled, and time began to move again.
For a fleeting instant, everything around him breathed.
Then, within the silence that followed, a voice cut through his skull—cold, sardonic, and far too familiar to belong to a stranger:
"You owe time a debt. And time rarely lends interest, boy."
The voice faded like dust swept under thought. Li Yao waited for another quip, but the silence that followed was almost mocking. Only the wind answered, threading through cracked walls and half-collapsed corridors.
"Debt," he muttered. "Wonderful. I wake up broke before I even start living."
He stepped over a shattered statue of some forgotten saint; the head rolled aside, eyes carved wide in eternal surprise. Beneath his boots, the floor shimmered faintly—as though memories had been burned into the stone. Images flared for a heartbeat: disciples kneeling, chanting, sand spiraling upward in perfect rhythm. Then the vision flickered out, leaving only the scent of ozone and incense.
He crouched and touched the mark left behind. The instant his fingers met the pattern, the hourglass in his chest pulsed once. A ripple passed through the ruin. The air thickened, sounds blurred, and for one breath he saw the temple whole again.
Hundreds of figures filled the hall, their robes bearing the insignia of the Eternal Current Sect. At the center, a grand hourglass hung from chains, its sand glowing crimson. A man stood before it—face hidden beneath a mask of gold—reciting words Li Yao somehow understood without learning:
"To halt the stream is to drown the past. To rewind it is to lose the self."
The image shattered. The ruin returned. Li Yao found himself kneeling on the same spot, heart racing. "Hallucination," he told himself. "Or nostalgia for a life I never had. Take your pick."
He forced a breath and kept moving. Outside, the sky had resumed a sluggish drift. Mountains sagged at the edges, their silhouettes bending as if seen through warped glass. The world looked tired—like it had repeated one day too many.
A skeleton sat against a nearby pillar, clutching a broken timepiece. Li Yao knelt beside it, brushing away dust. The clock's hands ticked backward, slow and stubborn. On its face, a single line was etched:
Regret is the slowest form of motion.
He stared at it longer than he meant to. "That's… unnecessarily poetic," he said, and slipped the clock into his sleeve. "I'll keep it. Maybe pawn it for common sense."
As he straightened, his chest throbbed again. The upward sand surged, spinning faster, and a faint whisper rose from the hourglass—words too broken to understand. He gritted his teeth. "If you're going to haunt me, at least form complete sentences."
No answer—only the faint sound of footsteps echoing somewhere deeper in the ruins.
He froze. Someone else was here.
Li Yao ducked behind a fallen column and peered around its edge. Through the drifting dust, a silhouette appeared: a woman in tattered sect robes, her eyes luminous silver, her skin marbled with cracks that bled light instead of blood. Each step she took rewound the air around her; petals that had already turned to ash briefly blossomed before fading again.
"Temporal wraith," he breathed. "Fantastic."
She paused, head tilting as if she'd heard him. Her voice when it came was distant, echoing through mismatched seconds.
"Return… the Heart…"
Li Yao glanced at the hourglass embedded in his chest. "Ah. So that's what this is called. Terrific."
The wraith raised her hand. Time bent toward her palm, folding like silk. A blade of condensed seconds formed—its edge transparent, its weight immeasurable. She moved without sound.
Li Yao threw himself sideways. The blade carved through stone, freezing it in mid-shatter; fragments hung motionless before disintegrating into light. He landed hard, rolling to his feet. "Listen, senior sister, I just woke up dead and confused. Can we not?"
The wraith didn't answer. Her next swing sliced through the air where he'd been. The world around them staggered; birds in the distance flew backward, screams un-echoed.
Instinct moved faster than logic. Li Yao raised his hand—and the hourglass obeyed. Sand burst upward through the glass, flaring into a spiral that wrapped around his arm. When the wraith's blade struck it, the collision rang like a bell being un-struck. Both of them were hurled apart by the recoil of reversed time.
He slammed into a wall, coughing. "Note to self," he wheezed, "don't block swords with cosmic debt."
The wraith knelt several paces away, cracks spreading wider through her form. Her voice trembled. "You carry his mark… the one who rewinds…"
Li Yao blinked. "You mean me? Or my tailor?"
Before she could answer, her body fractured into motes of light that streamed upward, dissolving into the slow sky. The ruin fell silent again.
He leaned back against the wall, breathing hard. The hourglass in his chest dimmed, settling into its usual pale glow. Bits of white hair fell into his eyes. He brushed them aside and laughed softly. "Great. First day alive and I've already been cursed, attacked, and insulted by the undead. Must be Thursday."
The echo of his own voice followed a moment later—older, amused, cold.
"You owe time a debt, remember? And time rarely lends interest, boy."
Li Yao closed his eyes. "Yeah," he murmured. "I'm starting to notice."
The wind had teeth now.
It hissed through the ruins as Li Yao stepped past the last fallen pillar, his boots crunching over the bones of what once was faith. Each breath he took carried the scent of something long expired — dust, regret, and faint electricity. The sun, or what passed for it, hung in the sky like a cracked coin, bleeding pale gold across the horizon.
He paused at the threshold where the temple gave way to wilderness. Before him stretched the world — or at least, what the world remembered of itself.
Mountains twisted upward, coiling like frozen serpents. Rivers ran in spirals instead of lines. The clouds didn't drift; they looped, repeating the same motion again and again as though the heavens had a nervous tic. Every few seconds, Li Yao's shadow flickered forward and backward, chasing itself in indecision.
"So this is… Venae Terrae," he said softly, the name forming without permission. It tasted familiar. Old.
The hourglass in his chest hummed in reply, a heartbeat too late.
He looked down at it and sighed. "If you're going to glow every time I say something profound, we're going to have a very shiny relationship."
No response, just a faint vibration. He could've sworn it sounded smug.
---
He wandered for what might've been hours — or minutes; time felt flexible here, like a suggestion instead of a law. The path descended into a valley where the earth rippled with veins of quartz and slow-moving light. Trees grew in reverse; petals folded back into buds, and fallen leaves climbed into branches, pretending autumn had been a bad dream.
Li Yao knelt near a pond so still it looked carved from glass. His reflection stared back at him — same calm eyes, same faint smirk, same white-tipped hair. But beneath the reflection, deeper in the water, another face flickered — older, colder, watching him from beneath the surface.
He blinked. It vanished.
"…Great. Now I'm haunted by myself."
He flicked a pebble into the pond. It rose instead of sinking.
A dry chuckle echoed behind him.
Li Yao turned sharply — nothing. Just empty air and the aftertaste of laughter.
He exhaled. "I'm really starting to miss being dead."
---
He walked until the valley opened into an ancient courtyard half-buried in time. The stones were etched with looping symbols that pulsed faintly, as though they were veins of the world's own heartbeat. In the center stood a broken monument — a sundial that pointed in every direction at once.
At its base, something was written in faint, fading script:
"To rewind is to remember. To remember is to suffer."
He brushed dust from the inscription, murmuring, "Sounds optimistic."
Then, unexpectedly, the sundial moved. Its shadow twisted backward, slicing through the ground — and the moment it crossed his feet, everything froze.
The air turned solid. The sky stilled mid-breath. Even the hum of the hourglass ceased.
And in that perfect silence, he heard it again.
The voice — that same cold, sardonic echo — spoke not in his ears, but in his pulse.
"You wake in debt and yet wander as though you owned the world."
Li Yao's lips curved faintly. "And you lecture like a disappointed accountant."
"You mock what keeps you alive, boy."
He folded his arms. "Alive? That's generous. I'm technically furniture with a heartbeat."
"Then understand your function."
"You were rewound, not reborn."
"Every grain of sand you breathe was stolen. Every second you move must be returned."
The words struck deeper than they should have. Li Yao's grin faltered for the first time.
"…And if I don't?" he asked quietly.
"Then time will collect what it is owed."
The sundial cracked down the middle. The frozen air shattered like glass, releasing sound, motion, and gravity all at once. Li Yao staggered backward as the monument collapsed, scattering shards of light that evaporated before touching the ground.
The voice faded, but its weight lingered.
He stared at the empty space where the sundial had been. His hand trembled slightly — whether from fear or fury, he couldn't tell.
"'Rewound, not reborn,' huh?" he muttered. "Guess that means someone wound me up for a reason."
He glanced at the horizon, where the sky bent inward like a clock face. The sun ticked backward an inch.
Li Yao smirked. "Then let's find whoever's keeping time."
He turned away from the ruins. As he walked, the hourglass in his chest began to glow again — each upward-falling grain casting faint golden motes across the ground behind him.
By the time he disappeared into the distance, the ruins had already begun to rewind — stones rising, walls reforming, history stitching itself together just to erase itself again.
And from far, far above, a voice barely audible through the folds of time whispered one last sentence, cold and amused:
"Tick well, little debt. Tick well before you pay."