A man stood at the mouth of the cave where Rae had once dragged himself out of the river.
Night sat heavy over the ravine. Far below, the water moved in a dark ribbon, striking the stone again and again. The sound climbed the cliffs in a dull, endless rhythm.
Cold mist clung to the rock. It curled around the man's boots, then drew back, as if it did not want to cross the line where the cave began.
He wore a dark travelling robe, stained by dust and rain. A longsword hung at his side in a plain scabbard bound with old cloth. The wrappings were frayed at the edges, but the hilt beneath his hand was clean and well-kept.
His face was not young.
Lines cut down from the corners of his eyes. Tiredness sat under his cheekbones, in the slope of his shoulders. It was the tiredness that comes after walking too long with no one beside you.
Even so, his back was straight. His gaze was clear.
Men who trained their bodies left one kind of mark on the world. Men who trained their minds left another. Whatever this man had trained, it was deeper still. The air around him felt a little too focused, as if the night itself was careful not to make sudden moves.
He looked into the darkness of the cave.
"At last," he said quietly. "Twenty years."
His hand lifted and brushed the rock beside the entrance. The stone was cold and rough. Old gouges marked the place where desperate fingers had once clawed for purchase. He traced one of those scars, following it until it faded into the wall.
"I will find you," he murmured, to the darkness, to the river below, to a memory. "No matter where they took you."
He stepped into the cave.
The mist did not follow.
Light from outside shrank behind him. In a dozen steps it became a pale blur at the mouth of the tunnel. In a dozen more it was gone. The world narrowed to stone, breath and the soft scrape of boots on rock.
The noise of the river changed. Outside, it had been wide and open. Here it sank into a low rumble that vibrated through the soles of his feet.
Cold wrapped around him.
Each breath came out white and faded at once. Thin films of ice clung to the walls like dull glass. The hem of his robe gathered frost. Metal fittings on his scabbard chilled until they burned the skin through cloth.
He walked without hurry.
There had been years for impatience. They had all passed. What remained in him now was something else. Not calm, exactly, but a kind of hard stillness, built from the simple choice to keep going.
To keep walking had become his way.
People used the word dao for many things.
For some it was a blade, for others pills or thunder that split mountains. Some wrapped it around fear of death, some around hunger for power.
But dao was not a trick or a technique.
Dao was the shape of a life when all the noise had been stripped away. The line that remained when excuses, comfort and fear were burned off like mist in the sun. The way toward happiness, toward fulfilment, toward the source of yourself, no matter how far away it lay.
Shed the fear.
Shed the comfort.
Shed the mortal coils that tried to hold you still.
Walk and be free.
The tunnel twisted between columns of stone.
Stalagmites rose from the floor like teeth. Stalactites hung from the ceiling in uneven rows. Water had carved this place over long, patient ages. It had not done so with people in mind.
Sometimes the walls narrowed until his shoulders brushed both sides. The stone there felt like iron under ice. Sometimes the path opened out for a few paces into small pockets of space where the air felt even colder, as if something had taken the warmth long ago and never given it back.
A single drip of water sounded in the distance, then stopped. The echo did not last long.
Time thinned.
Steps blurred. Breath and heartbeat took the place of any sense of distance.
Then, gently, the air changed.
The pressure in front of him grew thick, as if the tunnel were full of water that had forgotten how to flow. The rumble of the river faded to nothing.
The passage widened.
He stepped into a round chamber cut into the mountain's heart. The roof arched out of sight overhead. The floor was worn smooth and level, as if some slow weight had pressed it flat over an age.
The air here was utterly still.
At the far side of the chamber, the world had been interrupted.
A circle of stone sat in the wall.
It was the same rock as the rest of the cave, but its face was covered in lines that did not belong to any script spoken in this world. Strokes swept and hooked, crossed and turned, some deep, some shallow, meeting and breaking apart in patterns that refused to settle into sense.
The engravings were beautiful in a way that felt wrong.
Looking at them was like looking at writing from a dream. The eye felt that meaning was there, just beyond reach, and kept reaching, and kept failing.
A common person would have looked, frowned, and said it was nonsense.
The man did not.
He stopped a short distance away.
Up close, the circle changed the air. It did not send out heat or cold. It did not throw spiritual pressure like a cultivator releasing their aura. It simply sat, and the world bent a little around it, like water around a submerged rock that had fallen from a great height.
The man's hand rested for a moment on his sword hilt, then dropped.
"This is it," he said quietly. There was no triumph in the words. Only relief, and something like fear. "The road they should not have opened."
He walked the last few steps until he stood close enough to touch the stone.
He stopped before the stone door and slowly raised his hand, fingers brushing across the carved symbols. As his palm moved over each mark, something tight in his chest loosened.
"I can finally find you," he murmured.
The moment the words left his mouth, the engravings stirred. A deep blue light bled out of the lines, brightening in an instant until it shone like a thousand lanterns, painful to look at.
The chamber brightened.
Blue seeped along every cut stroke, filling shallow scratches and deep channels alike. The light joined and spread, tracing each curve and angle until the whole circle shone.
Dust lifted off the floor in a slow swirl.
The air began to hum.
The sound was low and steady, somewhere between hearing and touch. It made teeth ache and bones ring as if they had suddenly remembered they were hollow.
The sword at his side trembled inside its scabbard. The old cloth wrappings twitched as if a wind passed only through them.
The light grew sharper.
It did not burn his skin, but it was too clean to be comfortable, like looking straight into the heart of lightning. When he narrowed his eyes, the edges of the chamber blurred. Only the circle remained perfectly clear.
The stone stopped being stone.
Beyond the circle there was no second chamber, no tunnel, no mountain.
There was a space, and a wound, and a road, all at once.
Reddish black tendrils twisted together just beyond the opening. They were like roots of some vast tree that had grown through darkness instead of soil. Some were thick as pillars, some as thin as hairs.
They coiled and branched and ran off into distances that did not sit in any familiar direction.
Some seemed to sink downward, though there was no ground. Some arced up into nothing that did not feel like sky. Some curved sideways and vanished, and when his eyes tried to follow them, his thoughts slipped, as if a step had gone where there was no floor.
Each branch carried a different feeling.
Here was the sense of a broad road, worn and heavy, as if many unseen travellers had passed along it.
There was the sense of a thin line, fragile but piercing, as if it cut through everything without asking permission.
Some paths felt near, close enough that he could almost believe he had taken them before.
Others felt so distant that simply knowing they existed left a hollow ache in his chest, the way looking up at too many stars does.
Space here did not stretch straight.
Time here did not stand in a row of moments from first to last.
They folded and crossed and looped. Moments brushed against other moments. Places leaned against other places. It was a knot, not a line.
Everything touched everything else, very quietly.
He looked into that knot of roots and roads.
Somewhere in there lay the path that had opened above her feet, the day she was taken.
His chest tightened again, then eased.
This was madness. This was impossible. This was wrong.
It was also the first true road he had seen in twenty years.
"Dao," he thought, "is the way you refuse to let go of."
His hand fell from the stone and relaxed at his side.
He took a breath.
"Wait for me," he said into the light, into the tangle of roads, into the memory of a face that had not aged with him. "I am on the way."
He stepped forward.
The tendrils did not strike.
They shifted, just a little, opening a narrow gap that matched the width of his body. It was like the world itself was pulling its clothes aside to let him pass.
He did not hesitate.
Cold cave air vanished as he crossed the boundary. Pressure changed around him, thin and endless, like the feeling of standing under a sky that had no ground, no horizon, only distance in every direction.
Behind him, the circle of stone thickened again.
The blue light in the engravings surged one last time, filling every carved groove to the edge.
For a brief moment the chamber shone as if a second, alien moon had risen inside it.
Then the light went out.
The door closed.
It made no sound.
For a heartbeat, the cave felt wrong. The walls seemed too close, then too far, as if the mountain itself was smoothing out a wrinkle.
Then everything settled.
The circle sat dull in the wall. The lines on its surface lay dark and dead. To any eyes that came now, it would look like a strange, meaningless carving that someone had abandoned half finished.
What had moved did not stay there.
Something pushed out.
A ring of pressure rolled away from the sealed circle, through the stone of the chamber, through the mountain, through the skin of the world.
If the world had been a still pond at dawn, this was the droplet that fell into its centre.
The resonance spread in widening circles.
It moved through rock and soil, along old roots and buried bones, across veins of ore and narrow underground streams that had never seen light. When it climbed into the sky, clouds far apart shifted at the same instant, as if brushed by a wind they could not feel.
Most people noticed nothing.
For almost everyone, it was only a single breath that felt slightly wrong, a pause between heartbeats that they forgot the next moment.
But in certain places, where a particular kind of stone had been set and fed and watched, the wave found an answer.
It woke it.