After leaving the pavilion, Chén Yè returned to his solitary black block.
The image of Bai Zixian's broken body wouldn't leave his mind. The crack of bone against stone. The blood trickling from his ears. The way the Elder hadn't even moved—just lifted a finger, and a boy who had been standing proud was suddenly a crumpled heap on the floor.
That could have been me.
The thought sat in his stomach like a cold stone.
He had been about to ask the same question. His hand had been halfway up when Bai Zixian spoke first. If the boy had been a second slower, if Chén Yè had been a second faster—
He shivered and pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders, even though he wasn't cold.
He sat on the edge of his surprisingly comfortable bed and stared at the blank wall. The room was too big. Too quiet. The silence pressed against his ears like water.
He had food here. Real food, not scraps stolen from market stalls or half-rotted vegetables fished from garbage heaps. He had shelter—walls that didn't leak, a roof that didn't creak in the wind. He had a bed with actual blankets.
I have a home now.
The thought should have brought comfort. For years, he'd dreamed of something like this: a space that was his, walls that didn't leak, a door he could close against the cold and the hunger and the danger. He'd stolen and scraped and survived for the chance at security.
And now he had it.
But he wasn't free.
On the streets, every day had been his to shape. Dangerous, yes. Hungry, yes. But his. He chose where to go, what to do, who to avoid. He decided when to wake and when to sleep, when to run and when to hide. The only master he served was survival itself.
Here? His days were planned. Wake when the bell tolled. Attend the lectures. Return to the domain. Eat what they provided. Sleep when they allowed. Prove his worth to a system that had dragged him here against his will.
Prove your worth, they said. As if he'd asked to be tested. As if he'd wanted any of this.
He lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
I never thought I'd miss the streets.
But he did. Not the hunger. Not the cold. Not the constant fear of bigger predators and crueler fates. He missed the freedom. The sense that his life, however miserable, was his.
This place was better in every material way. And it was still a cage.
Slavery, he thought. Just with better food.
His mind turned to the future.
He knew he couldn't just sit here and wait.
His mind drifted back to Bai Zixian. The boy had been stupid to ask that question—but he hadn't been wrong. They all wanted answers. They all felt lost. Bai Zixian had just been the one brave enough to say it out loud.
Brave or stupid, Chén Yè corrected himself. Same thing, sometimes.
But there was something else about Bai Zixian that stuck in his mind. The way the boy had approached him yesterday, calm and deliberate. The way he'd talked about alliances, about watching each other's backs. He hadn't been begging for friendship—he'd been looking for something useful.
Chén Yè understood that. He did the same thing.
Maybe...
The thought was half-formed, more feeling than plan. On the streets, the kids who survived were the ones who stuck together. Not friends, exactly—more like a pack. You watched each other's backs because it was useful, not because you cared.
They were alone. Two hundred scared kids with no direction, no guidance, nothing but fear and confusion. The ones who stayed alone would get picked off. The ones who found each other might last longer.
I could do that, he thought. I could find people. Watch them. Figure out who's useful.
It wasn't a plan. It was barely even an idea. Just a feeling that doing something was better than doing nothing.
And Bai Zixian... the boy would be angry after today. Humiliated. Looking for a way to get his pride back.
Angry people made mistakes. But they also made good allies, if you pointed their anger in the right direction.
Tomorrow, Chén Yè decided. I'll talk to him tomorrow.
He didn't know what he'd say. He didn't know if it would work. But it was something to do, something to think about that wasn't the endless dark room with the million lights.
He stood up and wandered toward the empty library in his quarters, hoping to find something—anything—to read. The shelves were bare, but the search itself felt good. It felt like doing something.
When he finally crawled into bed, his mind was still churning, but the fear had faded to something smaller, something he could hold.
He was still trapped. He was still powerless. But he wasn't going to just sit and wait for them to decide what to do with him.
He would watch. He would learn. He would find the cracks in the walls.
And when the time came, he would slip through them.
— — —
In the dead of night, in a chamber that existed outside of time and space, Heiyun Jue appeared.
He had just returned from a fruitless visit with Lu Feiyu, another of the Transcendent Rulers. Two hundred and seventy years he had pursued her, offering gifts and words and patience. Two hundred and seventy years, and still she looked at him as if he were furniture—present, unremarkable, easily ignored.
Her warmth had died somewhere on the road to Transcendence. Or perhaps it had never existed at all, and he had simply imagined it in the desperate hunger of his younger years.
He sighed, a sound that echoed in the empty chamber.
I cannot give up, he thought. Not yet. Perhaps after the ascension. Perhaps in a higher realm, things will be different.
It was a lie he told himself often. It brought no comfort, but it kept him moving.
He walked to a small counter and began to prepare a cup of coffee. The familiar motions—grinding the beans, heating the water, measuring the grounds—settled something restless in his chest. The aroma filled the chamber, rich and bitter and achingly mortal.
He didn't need it. He had shed the need for food and water and sleep centuries ago. His body was less a body now than a convenient shape, a vessel for the concept that defined his existence.
But his master had warned him, long ago, about the price of that power.
"Tie yourself to the small things," the old man had said, his voice like gravel and wind. "The taste of food. The feel of fabric. The smell of rain. Without them, you will forget what it means to be alive. And a god who forgets mortality is not a god—he is a disaster waiting to happen."
Every Transcendent had their anchors. Their small insanities. The rituals that kept them tethered to the world they had risen above. For Heiyun Jue, it was coffee. And sleep. And the foolish, stubborn hope that Lu Feiyu might one day look at him with something other than cold indifference.
He sipped the bitter liquid and let his divine sense unfurl, spreading through the pocket realm like water through cracks in stone.
He could see everything.
The children sleeping in their black cubes, their dreams troubled and dark. The guards on patrol, bored and restless. The Elders in their quarters, some sleeping, some lost in meditation.
And in a manor far removed from the others, a girl asleep in a bed of white silk.
The golden goose.
His prize.
He focused his attention on her, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest, the flicker of her eyelids as she dreamed. She had woken from her coma far earlier than expected. Two days instead of a month. The healers had been shocked.
Natural awakeners, he mused. They are never what you expect.
Four millennia since the last one. The history texts spoke of them in reverent, fearful tones—beings who brought glory or doom, never anything in between. Seven in all of recorded history, and now an eighth slept in his realm.
He didn't know her concept yet. She hadn't been through the formal testing, hadn't touched the Concept Stone. All he knew was that her body had manifested something powerful enough to nearly destroy itself in the process.
She might just make this war easier, he thought, if she can be trained properly.
He would need to be careful. Natural awakeners were unpredictable. Volatile. The power came to them unbidden, unearned, and that made them dangerous. They didn't understand the rules because they had never needed to learn them.
But danger could be shaped into a weapon, if you had patience.
He finished his coffee and set the cup aside.
Tomorrow. He would summon her tomorrow. See what she was made of. Begin the long, careful work of binding her loyalty to him.
He walked to his bed—a simple thing, deliberately so—and lay down. He didn't need to sleep, but he would pretend. He would close his eyes and retract his divine sense and let his concept run on its own, passive and automatic. For a few hours, he would be mortal again.
Weak. Vulnerable. Human.
It was a necessary risk. The only way to remember what he was, underneath all the power. The only way to keep the abyss at bay.
As he drifted into his meditative state, Heiyun Jue smiled.
He was a god pretending to be a man.
And as long as he remembered how to pretend, he would never lose himself completely.
End of Chapter 10