Deep within the underground palace, there was no light.
Only dust, which began to settle slowly the moment Chen Zhuo opened his eyes. He sat on a stone chair, its surface icy, a cold that seeped into the marrow. This chill did not come from the stone, but from time itself, from the nine thousand seven hundred springs and autumns he had spent sitting here in silence.
He moved a finger.
The joints emitted a dry, grating sound, like rusted machinery. A layer of ash, thin as a cicada's wing, cascaded from his body, revealing beneath it an old robe that had long since faded to the color of moonlight. The robe was clean, untouched by dust, unstained by time. It was the same one he had worn when he first entered this place all those years ago, yet now it looked as if it had been donned just yesterday.
Chen Zhuo slowly rose to his feet.
His gaze swept across the vast dome of the underground palace. The night pearls once embedded there had long since shattered, leaving only dried mortar. Surrounding him were nine coiling dragon pillars, their heads bowed, mouths holding empty sockets where lamps fueled by mermaid blubber had once burned. The oil had been exhausted long ago, leaving behind only a faint fishy scent, diluted by time to near non-existence.
He remembered the moment the last lamp had gone out. That point of light had struggled, flickered a few times, then died with a soft puff. Darkness had surged in like a tide, swallowing him whole. Then came absolute silence, and absolute blackness. He had sat within that silence and darkness, listening as the thunderous beating of his own heart gradually slowed, synced with the breathing of the earth's veins, until finally, even the heartbeat seemed to cease.
He had not been asleep. He had only been waiting.
Waiting for that wisp of suppressed "Qi" deep within the earth's veins to complete its final revolution. Waiting for this "Nine Netherworld Spirit-Suppressing Grand Formation" that had imprisoned him for nearly ten millennia, worn down by the ages, to reveal a gap for a billionth of an instant.
Now, the time had come.
Chen Zhuo lifted his foot and took a step forward.
The sole of his boot touched the ground with a sound almost too faint to hear, yet from the depths of the palace came an extremely soft, drawn-out crack. It was like the first fissure forming on ice, or like the internal spring of some immense, indescribable lock finally snapping.
Centered on the stone chair he had just vacated, the dizzyingly complex array patterns on the ground began to dim and flake away inch by inch. The lines drawn with True Dragon blood mixed with Stardust Sand lost their last vestige of luster, turning into mundane powder. The nine coiling dragon pillars collapsed soundlessly—not falling outward, but shrinking inward as if all their essence had been drained, crumbling in an instant into piles of ash-gray stone dust.
Dust rose again, spreading like mist.
Chen Zhuo walked through the mist, his steps steady, neither fast nor slow. He passed through the once-imposing black iron gate that had required the combined strength of generations of guardians to open; it decayed and crumbled before him. He walked down the long, sloping passageway; the murals depicting ancient techniques on the walls rapidly faded and blurred. He stepped over the bone-chilling pool of Netherwater; the moment his toe touched its surface, the water evaporated into a wisp of white vapor, revealing at the bottom a jumble of bleached beast bones, long devoid of any spirit.
The path that had imprisoned him, the one he had taken three days and three nights to traverse upon entering, enduring nine trials and having twelve sealing chains pierce his collarbones...
He now walked out of it in ninety-nine steps.
With the last step, he stopped before a mountain wall.
The wall was smooth as a mirror, a seamless whole, separating the underground palace from the outside world. This was the final barrier, named the "Heaven-Severing Wall," not something human strength could breach. Reflected on its surface was a blurred silhouette: a slender figure draped in a moonlight-colored old robe, hair ink-black and hanging to the waist. The face was indistinct, save for a pair of eyes—calm, unrippled, so deep they seemed to have settled all the sediment of ten thousand years within them.
Chen Zhuo gazed at the reflection for a long time.
Then, he raised his right hand and gently pressed his index finger against the very center of the mountain wall.
There was no deafening crash, no brilliant light.
The mountain wall, along with the unknowable thickness of rock behind it, began from the exact point his fingertip touched to silently, soundlessly, transform into the finest dust, sifting down like sand. A perfectly circular tunnel appeared, its diameter precisely matching his height. Beyond the tunnel was long-missed daylight, wind carrying the scent of grass and earth, the noisy, vivid, flowing world of men.
He narrowed his eyes slightly.
The light was somewhat glaring. The wind was somewhat clamorous. The breath of the mortal world was mixed and potent.
He stepped forward, out of the tunnel, into the sunlight.
Behind him lay the ancient, unfathomably deep forbidden ground. Before him stretched undulating green mountains, dotted at their feet with small villages, threads of cooking smoke rising. Further still, the shadow of what seemed to be a city sprawled on the horizon.
Sunlight fell upon him, warm and gentle, yet unable to penetrate that moonlight-colored old robe. The wind tugged at his sleeves and long hair, making them snap and billow.
He stood on the hillside, silently overlooking these familiar yet alien rivers and mountains. Nine thousand seven hundred years—enough for seas to turn to fields, for nations to rise and fall many times over, for immortal sects and orthodoxies to cycle through change. The world he had known was likely utterly unrecognizable.
But that did not matter.
What mattered was that he was out.
What mattered was that some debts needed collecting. Some people needed seeing. Some games needed resuming.
He opened his palm and caught a leaf blown down by the wind, slightly yellowed and withered at the edges. It was deep autumn.
"Autumn again," he murmured to himself, his voice carrying the hoarseness of long disuse, yet strangely steady. "The last time I saw autumn was..."
He did not finish the sentence. His fingers gently rubbed together, and the dried leaf crumbled into fine powder, sifting through his fingers.
He lowered his hand, his gaze fixed on the far distance, as if piercing through layers of mountains and settling on a place beyond any measure of distance.
"Time to collect debts."
He took a single step forward, and his figure was no longer on the hillside.
Only that calm, almost indifferent voice seemed to linger faintly, scattered by the wind amidst the mountains and plains of yellowing autumn grass.
Down in the village by the mountain, a woman washing clothes by the stream happened to look up. She thought she glimpsed a flash of white on the distant hillside—the one perpetually shrouded in mist, the one the elders called the "Forbidden Mountain." She rubbed her eyes and looked again, only to see mountain mist drifting, empty and still.
"Must have been seeing things," the woman muttered, bending her head to continue pounding the coarse cloth in her hands.
The stream gurgled merrily, carrying a few fallen leaves as it flowed into the distance. The autumn sun shone warmly, lazily, upon this ordinary, peaceful afternoon, as if nothing would ever change, as if nothing had ever happened.
Only in the highest, most unknowable, unfathomable reaches of the heavens, it seemed as if several wills, ancient as time itself, trembled ever so slightly in the same fleeting instant.
Like slumbering dragons stirred by the faintest itch upon their reverse scales.