Li Xiao Bai sat in the boy's body beneath a collapsed service ramp and listened to the new world breathe. Above the broken concrete, something moved in the distance, engines humming low, lights passing like indifferent stars. No one stopped. No one searched the rubble. No one looked down into the pocket of shadow where a stolen soul had just taken root.
Good.
He flexed the boy's fingers once, slow and controlled, then let them rest again. The body was light, wiry, trained by repetition and hunger, not by cultivation. The heartbeat was quick, restless, too honest. A human machine that would fail if pushed too hard, but also one that did not carry the same foreign weight his immortal flesh had carried.
That was the point.
He reached into the boy's jacket and found a thin ID strip, bent at the edges, worn from being handled too many times.
GRAY.
English letters, sharp and official. Beneath them, smaller Chinese characters printed with the same cold certainty.
He read it once and put it away.
A name was utility. A name was also a hook. He did not allow himself to linger on either.
His attention went to the boy's forearm.
The mark was there.
Not ink. Not scar tissue. A pattern beneath the skin, too clean to be an accident, too deliberate to be disease. It looked like a brand that had never touched flame, as if reality itself had decided the flesh should carry a rule.
The moment he focused on it, something answered inside his skull.
Not Fang Yuan's leash. Not the chain that still pressed his soul with dull, constant authority.
This was thinner. Colder. Impersonal.
A system.
Gray's memories rose on their own, dragged up by the mark like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
A wall cutting the horizon into two worlds.
Inside the wall, clean streets, controlled air, bright panels that never flickered, people who walked with the confidence of owners. They lived like humans and called it normal.
Outside the wall, the truth Gray had been born into.
Not romantic ruin. Not tribes gathered around warmth. Just neglected infrastructure, broken routes, abandoned structures repurposed into shelter, and a constant understanding that if you made the wrong kind of noise, the city would notice you for the wrong reason.
In the outskirts, everyone knew the same story. They told it in different tones, but the meaning never changed.
When the mark appears, you are on a clock you cannot see.
They had a name for it, and the official name was always spoken the same way, careful and flat, as if saying it too loudly would invite it closer.
The Nightmare Spell.
It was not religion. It was not myth. It was procedure.
You could delay it with stimulants, with pain, with fear, with desperate pacing through a night that never felt safe. You could keep your eyes open until they bled and convince yourself you had won.
But the Spell collected eventually.
And when it collected, it did not take the body.
It took the soul.
Gray had watched it happen to others. Not the Nightmare itself, no one saw that, but the aftermath. The empty collapse. The hours where the body stayed alive and useless. The days that followed, waiting to see whether the person woke up screaming, woke up changed, or never woke up at all.
Those who returned came back with an Aspect and a Flaw, terms spoken like contracts that could not be renegotiated. They were no longer only human. Something in them had been rewritten into a weapon.
Dormant.
Awakened.
Ranks continued above that, names that made the outskirts go quiet whenever they were spoken. Gray did not know the full ladder, but he knew the shape of power when he saw it.
He had seen an Awakened once from far away, across fencing and floodlights. The person moved too cleanly, too fast, as if the world gave them permission to ignore limits. The memory carried no worship. Only the cold realization that some people were allowed to survive differently.
He had also seen what hunted beyond the wall's certainty.
Nightmare Creatures.
Not a single kind, not a single face. A hierarchy of threats that turned streets into slaughter when they slipped past patrol lines. People outside did not need a scholar's taxonomy. They needed one rule that kept them alive.
If an Awakened fights it, run.
If something higher fights it, pray you are already far away.
Gray had learned that rule early. He had learned it well.
And now Li Xiao Bai owned the body that had learned it.
He did not feel disgust. He did not feel pity.
He filed the information away and kept searching the memories for what mattered.
The Academy surfaced like a bruise you pressed by accident.
Not a school in the gentle sense. A place where those who returned were processed, trained, sorted, assigned. Inside the wall, families spoke of it as opportunity. Outside the wall, people spoke of it as a machine that turned the marked into assets, and the unmarked into background.
Gray had been avoiding registration.
Not because he believed he could escape the Spell forever.
Because once the city recorded your mark, you stopped being a person and became inventory with a file.
Days ago, the mark had appeared.
And since then, Gray had stayed awake too long.
Li Xiao Bai felt it now in the tremor of the boy's muscles and the way the mind flickered at the edge of sleep. The body wanted to fold. The brain wanted to shut off. Not because of weakness, because the Spell had patience and the body did not.
The system was waiting for the condition it required.
Sleep.
Li Xiao Bai let the boy's exhaustion settle into something usable.
He could fight it and buy time measured in minutes, then pay for it with mistakes. In this world, a small mistake did not look heroic. It looked like a quiet disappearance.
Or he could choose the moment.
He preferred choosing.
He shifted a piece of rubble with two careful movements, enough to break the outline of a crouched figure from any casual glance. Not a fortress. Just concealment, the kind Gray's body already understood.
Then he sat back against cold concrete and slowed the boy's breathing into discipline.
Inhale.
Exhale.
He did not invite fear. Fear was a door.
He did not invite curiosity. Curiosity was another door.
He allowed only readiness.
The mark on Gray's forearm warmed, subtle at first, then clearer, like a brand being pressed from the inside. The pressure in his skull sharpened into certainty without sound, without language, without negotiation.
Initiation.
Deep in his mind, the sealed name remained quiet, locked behind his thoughts, patient in a way that made patience feel like a threat.
Li Xiao Bai closed Gray's eyes.
Not in surrender.
In acceptance.
Let the Spell come.
Let it show its rules.
And let it learn what kind of soul it had chosen to drag into a nightmare.