The fall resembled nothing Lin Yuan had ever experienced before.
It was not like falling from a tree, nor tumbling down a slope, nor being thrown into water.
It was as if space itself had lost meaning.
Up and down ceased to exist. The air did not strike his face like wind, but like currents—shattered, fragmented, violent. The darkness was not merely the absence of light: it was a depth without shape where distant flashes sometimes appeared, like lightning buried behind layers of broken glass.
Lin Yuan tried to scream.
He could not.
The pressure crushed his chest. His stomach lurched into his throat. His ears rang with unbearable intensity.
Instinctively, he clutched the medallion so tightly that its edges bit into his skin.
That was when it happened.
A layer of pale gray light burst from the dull disk and wrapped around his body like a thin sphere, barely visible. It was not bright or grand. It was faint, ancient, almost silent. But it was enough.
The pressure threatening to tear him apart lessened.
It did not disappear. It simply ceased to be immediately lethal.
Lin Yuan forced his eyes open.
What he saw made no sense.
Fragments of rock suspended in the void.
Currents of light splitting through one another.
Shadows crossing at impossible distances.
Threads of energy that seemed to be born and die in the same instant.
And him, falling through all of it inside a weak protection issuing from the medallion.
He tried to extend his free hand.
He touched nothing.
He felt one brutal jolt and then another even stronger. The sphere of light vibrated violently. For an instant he saw hairline cracks racing across its surface.
Terror pierced his bones.
If that thing broke, he would not even live long enough to understand how he died.
Then a fleeting image appeared.
Not in front of him.
Inside his mind.
A bloodied woman's hand clutching that same medallion.
A burst of wild radiance.
An infant's cry.
A distant voice speaking words he could not understand.
The vision unraveled as quickly as it had come.
The fall continued.
Lin Yuan clenched his teeth so hard his jaw hurt. The pain in his chest and head increased. He felt as though his body no longer belonged to him in a simple way. As if every bone vibrated separately.
Then the darkness changed.
The current of suction grew more brutal, narrower, more defined.
The crack through which he was falling was shrinking.
The medallion's sphere of light gave one final pulse and seemed to compress around him.
A shrill sound, like glass breaking underwater, exploded in his ears.
And then there was ground.
Not exactly beneath him.
More like a total sensation of impact.
Stone.
Pain.
Darkness again.
For some stretch of time he could not measure, Lin Yuan felt nothing.
When he regained consciousness, the first thing he noticed was the cold.
Not the clean cold of open night air.
A trapped cold. Damp. Stagnant.
The kind of cold that lives in underground places where the sun never enters.
He opened his eyes very slowly.
Everything was dark except for a strange light filtering from somewhere high above, bluish and weak. He blinked several times until the shapes began to separate.
Stone all around him.
Split rock.
An uneven floor.
And a high vault, full of cracks from which dry roots and dull minerals hung.
It took Lin Yuan several seconds to understand one simple thing.
He was still alive.
He tried to sit up. His entire body protested immediately.
His shoulders, back, side, and legs all hurt. He had the impression of having broken inside, though by some miracle nothing seemed entirely useless.
He forced himself into a sitting position, breath catching.
The medallion was still in his hand.
It had gone dull again.
Silent.
As if nothing had happened.
Lin Yuan stared at it wide-eyed, unable to decide whether he wanted to thank it or hurl it against a wall.
He took one deep breath.
Then another.
Then a third.
His head began to clear enough for him to examine more carefully the place where he had fallen.
It was a cavern.
But not entirely a natural one.
There were the remains of broken pillars near one wall. Fragments of carved stone. Half-erased lines on the floor, like traces of an ancient formation or ceremonial paving consumed by time.
It was not just any hole in a mountain.
And it was definitely not the orphanage yard.
Lin Yuan looked upward.
He saw no open crack, no hole through which he could have fallen in any ordinary sense.
Only rock.
Rock and more rock.
The real thought hit him then with full force.
He had been swallowed by a crack in space.
The medallion had reacted.
He had survived an impossible fall.
And now he was in a place he could not explain.
A dry, incredulous laugh rose from his throat and died before fully escaping.
"All right," he muttered into the emptiness. "This is definitely new."
His voice bounced through the cavern with a short echo.
There was no reply.
He braced himself against a rock and stood up.
His legs trembled, but held.
He looked around more closely.
To one side lay a collapsed stone archway. Beyond it, a corridor half sunk in shadow. At another end, some kind of broken platform etched with nearly erased inscriptions. The air smelled strange, a mixture of mineral dust, dampness, and something ancient that was difficult to name.
He heard no animals.
No water.
No wind.
The place possessed the silence of somewhere forgotten for far too long.
Lin Yuan took one step.
Then another.
Every movement reminded him how battered his body was. Even so, moving was better than standing still and thinking about impossibilities.
He passed a broken pillar.
Brushed the stone with his fingertips.
Cold. Real.
This was no dream.
He reached the edge of the shadowed corridor and stopped. The walls were marked here and there with engraved lines almost completely eroded. Some looked like symbols. Others like nothing more than wounds left by time.
The medallion grew faintly warm against his palm.
Lin Yuan tensed.
He looked down.
No glow.
Only a subtle sensation, like a needle of warmth piercing frozen metal.
He turned his face toward the depths of the corridor.
The sensation increased slightly.
The medallion was reacting again.
Not as strongly as in the forest. Not with the violence of the crack. But enough to indicate something.
Lin Yuan swallowed.
Every prudent instinct in him said to get away from that object and from anything connected to it.
He also knew that if he did not follow it, he would never understand anything.
So he advanced.
The corridor sloped downward little by little. The bluish light faded behind him, replaced by a gray gloom with no clear source. Lin Yuan passed fallen stones, broken slabs, and the remains of what might once have been a statue.
Every few steps, the medallion gave a faint vibration.
Guiding him.
Warning him.
Or both.
The corridor ended suddenly in a small circular chamber.
At its center stood a black pedestal, cracked and covered in dust.
And above it, floating a few fingers' breadth above the surface, hung a point of dim light.
It was not a flame.
It was not a stone.
It looked like a drop of liquid silver suspended in the air, pulsing in an extremely slow rhythm.
Lin Yuan froze.
The drop of light pulsed once.
The medallion answered with a stronger vibration.
Then, without warning, a cold and ancient voice echoed through the chamber.
It came from no visible corner.
Not exactly from the air.
It seemed to sound both in front of him and inside his head at the same time.
"Condition detected."
Lin Yuan went cold.
The silver drop shone a little brighter.
"Compatible bearer."
His heart hammered so hard he could feel the pulse in his throat.
"Initial recognition in progress."
He did not know what any of this was.
He did not know whether running would help.
He did not even know whether the voice was real or whether he had died in the fall and all of this was the final delirium of a broken body.
He took one step back.
The entire chamber filled with lines of light.
They appeared from the walls, the floor, the pedestal, the air itself, forming circles, symbols, and pathways he could not understand.
The medallion burned in his hand.
The voice spoke again:
"Conditions fulfilled. Initiating legacy protocol."
And in that instant, Lin Yuan understood only one thing with absolute clarity:
The longest night of his life was not over yet.
It was only beginning.