The first day passed like smoke.
The Seal at Xu Pingsheng's throat glowed faintly each time someone spoke to him about the Lanterns.He learned to nod instead of answer.He learned that silence could bruise.
Li Yan filled the space with noise."Say something," he said. "Anything. Even cough twice if it's profound."
Pingsheng lifted an eyebrow.
"That's not talking," Li Yan complained. "That's philosophy."
Elder Qinghe walked the courtyard each morning, cane tapping steady rhythms."The Seal tightens when defied," he warned. "But it also listens. What you think matters more than what you say."
So Pingsheng began to think in whispers.
He thought of the wheel behind his heart—how it turned slower now, muffled by silk and silence.He thought of the shard sealed in the Council Hall, and how sometimes, at night, he could hear it hum through the stone.He thought of the lantern on the far shoulder of the mountain, the one that had died without a bell.
By the third night, he stopped trying not to hear.
The Outer Court slept early.Pingsheng sat under the crooked pine in Pine Court, eyes closed, listening.
Rain slid off leaves in perfect rhythm. Beneath it, faint as breath, came another pulse:One… two… three…
He followed it inward. The Seal stung, warning.He went deeper anyway.
Inside his chest, the Soulwheel waited like a sun behind glass.He reached for it—gently, carefully.
The rings did not turn. They trembled.
Then a spark leapt from the first ring to the second, bridging the gap the Seal could not see.Blue light flared behind his eyelids.He opened his eyes to find the pine's shadow bending toward him, each needle tipped with light.
From the darkness beneath the roots rose a shape: thin, human, flickering.
Li Yan's voice whispered from the dormitory doorway. "I knew you'd sneak practice. If you explode, aim uphill."
Pingsheng smiled without sound and gestured for him to stay back.
The figure of light formed fully now—his own outline, hollow, the Seal's script crawling across its throat.It tilted its head, mirroring him.Then it lifted a hand, palm forward.
On its wrist glowed a mark identical to his: the small circle left by the Ledger Keeper's Thread.
The phantom moved its mouth. Words formed without air:"You are being rewritten."
The Seal seared.The phantom shattered.The pine screamed—a sound like wind breaking—and fell still.
At dawn, Qinghe found him kneeling among scattered needles.
"The Seal pulsed," the elder said quietly. "You called something."
Pingsheng shook his head.He pointed to the ground where the phantom had stood. The soil was marked with concentric rings, burned deep.
Qinghe's face darkened. "A reflection of your thread. The Seal is not just a gag; it's a mirror. Heaven is trying to write through you."
Li Yan stumbled out with two bowls of rice and sleep in his eyes."Through him? Like—using him as ink?"
Qinghe didn't answer. He turned to Pingsheng. "You have nine days of quiet. Use them. Find a way to listen without letting it hear you."
He placed a small stone on the ground. It bore a single carved symbol: 耳—the ancient rune for "ear.""When you hold this," he said, "it will echo the sound you cannot make. The rest is your will."
The days blurred.He meditated through dawns, traced the rune until his fingers bled, learned the sound of his heartbeat in twelve variations.The Seal still burned, but now it flickered in rhythm with the wheel, as if conceding that silence had patterns too.
Li Yan brought gossip like rations."Three Rivers team still missing," he said one morning."Lantern records frozen," another.On the seventh night: "A Council elder left the mountain. No bells, no escort. Qinghe told me not to ask which."
Pingsheng didn't ask. He didn't need to.He knew who it was.
On the ninth dawn, the crooked pine split down the middle.No wind. No sound.From the crack spilled a line of pale light, curling like smoke, stretching east—toward Three Rivers Prefecture.
The Seal at his throat loosened, just enough for one breath of air to form a word.
A single whisper, raw and cracked:
"Go."
Li Yan looked up from his broom. "Did you just—?!"
Pingsheng was already moving.
By the time he reached the main gate, Qinghe was waiting, travel cloak fastened, eyes unreadable."The Council thinks you're confined," the elder said. "Good. Let them think."
Li Yan jogged after them, breathless. "If we die this time, I'm haunting you."
"You'll have to catch me first," Qinghe said.
The gate opened. Mist spilled through like another silence waiting to be broken.Pingsheng stepped into it. The Seal burned once, a farewell.
If silence is Heaven's price, he thought, then every word I steal will be a prayer.
The wheel turned.
— End of Chapter 9 —