"Yue-jie!" Chaner's voice cracked with relief. "You're finally awake!"
Shen Yue's eyes snapped open. She was lying on hard-packed earth, the smell of damp stone and moss filling her nostrils. Above her, rough cave walls curved into darkness. The frost patterns on her fingers pulsed weakly, casting faint blue light across Chaner's worried face.
"What..." Shen Yue's throat was raw. She pushed herself up on her elbows, head spinning. "Where..."
"The cave," Chaner said, gripping her shoulder. "We've been here since sunset. You collapsed right after we found shelter. I was so worried when you wouldn't wake up."
Shen Yue stared at her. The words made sense individually but strung together they formed something impossible. "What do you mean collapsed? I was just..." She looked around wildly. "Where's Mei Lin?"
Chaner's brow furrowed. "Who?"
"Mei Lin, our host. She was teaching me about the realms, Qi cultivation, Spirit Foundation, Core..." Shen Yue grabbed Chaner's arm. "She was right here. We were at a shrine on the mountainside and someone was coming. "
The confusion on Chaner's face deepened into concern. "Yue-jie, there's no shrine. We're in a cave. Just the two of us." She glanced toward the cave mouth where Gu Tian stood silhouette against the night sky. "And Gu Tian."
Shen Yue's stomach dropped. She looked down at her hands, half expecting to see them different somehow, marked by the conversation she'd just had. But they looked the same. The frost patterns were there, faint and flickering, just as they'd been before...
Before what?
"How long was I asleep?" Her voice came out smaller than she intended.
"Four hours. Maybe a bit more." Chaner pulled a thin blanket tighter around Shen Yue's shoulders. "The sun set three hours ago. You fell asleep almost immediately after we stopped walking."
Four hours. Shen Yue had spent what felt like an hour, maybe two, talking with Mei Lin. Learning the structure of cultivation realms... She could remember the exact cadence of Mei Lin's voice, the way she'd held up her fingers one by one to count off the realms. It had been real. It had to have been real!
"Chaner, we went into a house." Shen Yue heard the desperation creeping into her voice but couldn't stop it. "Earlier before sunset, there was a wooden house with..."
Chaner shook her head slowly. "Yue-jie, we didn't go into any house. We walked until dusk and then found this cave. You said you needed to rest for a moment and then..." She bit her lip. "Then you just closed your eyes and I couldn't wake you. I tried shaking you, calling your name but nothing worked."
"That's not..." Shen Yue pressed her palms against her temples. The memories were so vivid. The worn wooden floorboards of the house. The smell of tea that Mei Lin had never actually served. The shrine with its crumbling stone walls and the distant figure approaching with pulses of golden light.
Gu Tian's voice drifted back from the cave entrance. "Something's moving up there."
Both women froze. Shen Yue felt her borrowed heart slam against her ribs. The words echoed with terrible familiarity. In her dream, if it had been a dream, Mei Lin had said almost the same thing. Someone just broke through the mountain's wards.
But there were no wards here. This was just a cave. Just a temporary shelter on an unnamed mountain.
"What kind of something?" Chaner called back, her hand moving to the small knife at her belt. It was a pitiful weapon against anything supernatural, barely more than a letter opener.
"Can't tell. It's above the cave mouth. It sounds like something big." Gu Tian hadn't moved from his position but Shen Yue could see the tension in his shoulders. "Sounds like..."
A growl rolled down from the darkness above them. It was low and grinding, like stones scraping together in a throat . The noise vibrated through the cave floor, through Shen Yue's bones settling somewhere in the base of her skull.
Chaner's face went pale. "Spirit beast?"
The growl came again, closer this time. Shen Yue heard the sickening scrape of claws on stone, the heavy suffocating weight of something massive shifting its position just beyond the firelight's reach. Her frost patterns flared suddenly, searing with an agonizing cold that felt less like magic and more like liquid nitrogen injected into her veins. The eruption was bright enough to cast the entire cave in a ghostly, stroboscopic illumination. Ethereal blue light danced frantically across the damp walls, revealing jagged, ancient markings carved into the stone. There were spirals and jagged teeth that seemed to writhe in the flickering glow. They were symbols she didn't recognize, geometry that defied Euclidean logic but looking at them made her eyes hurt and her stomach lurch, as if the stone itself was screaming in a language only the dead could hear.
"We need to move," Gu Tian said quietly. "Now."
But Shen Yue couldn't move. She was staring at the symbols on the wall, her mind racing. In her dream, Mei Lin had been about to tell her about Nascent Soul cultivators. She'd held up four fingers and started to speak and then something had interrupted them. It was something to do someone powerful approaching. This felt like an interruption too. Was her 'dream' really connected to reality. Was it really a dream or foreshadowing? These thoughts started racing up and down her mind making her feel as if she was going crazy.
"Yue-jie!" Chaner grabbed her arm, trying to pull her to her feet. "We have to go!"
"The symbols," Shen Yue whispered. "Do you see them?"
Chaner glanced at the walls and frowned. "What symbols?"
The frost light was bright enough to read by. The carvings covered every surface within reach, spiraling patterns interspersed with characters in a script Shen Yue had never seen. But Chaner was looking right at them and seeing nothing.
A horrible thought occurred to Shen Yue. What if she was still dreaming? What if she'd never woken up at all?