The command did not fade.
Bring me the anomaly.
It hung in the frozen air of the shrine the way smoke hangs before a wind decides which direction to carry it, and for three full heartbeats, nobody in that crimson corridor moved. Then, one by one, every veil that had turned to face Lin Yue began to rise.
Not fall. Not billow, the way cloth ought to when disturbed. They rose, slow and deliberate, peeling off the walls and the ceiling and the very stone of the shrine itself, thousands of them, red as old blood and thin as a held breath, drifting upward into a hall that Lin Yue was almost certain had not been tall enough to hold them a moment ago.
"That's—" Zhou Ke's voice cracked halfway through the word. "That's not possible. There weren't that many veils in this whole shrine."
"There are now," Xu Ran said, and his scholar's composure had gone thin and brittle, stretched over something close to panic. "Or there always were, and we just weren't allowed to see them until now."
