Chapter 104: Chapter 104: The Heart of the Hollow Court
The image rippled—and vanished.
Li Wei’s breath caught in his throat. "Illusory apparitions... but why here?" His eyes narrowed, scanning the mirror-like basin that moments before had shown them a living garden. Now, it was just water. Still. Lifeless.
Such fine illusion arts were rare in the lower planes, a remnant of the high sects and sovereign enclaves where power bled into every breath. To encounter it here, in a forgotten ruin, was unnatural. No—it was wrong.
"Not sure," Leng Yue murmured, rising from her crouch. "It could be showing us something. This place was not always like this." She glanced around, her gaze catching on a branch above. "Perhaps the answer we’re looking for is closer than we think."
The leaves above hung in unnatural suspension—as if the fall of autumn had been commanded to pause. She reached up and plucked one.
It disintegrated between her fingers. Dust. No stem, no wetness, no life. A husk. An illusion.
Li Wei tilted his head skyward. "The sky is bright... yet it has no depth. This technique was cast eons ago, yet it holds form even now..." He muttered more to himself than her. "Such mastery lies beyond mortal ambition."
Ahead, the trail narrowed again, winding like a serpent through tilting stones. At its next bend, it stopped—cut clean between two stone colossi.
Lion-dragons. Guardians of old.
Statues weathered by time, yet untouched by decay. One bore an inscription at its feet, half-covered in moss. Li Wei bent and brushed it away, reading aloud: "First in fire, last in stone. I wait where no shadow lies."
He looked to Leng Yue. "What does the other one say?"
She approached the twin. "Bound by silence, I bear the weight of memory. Who am I?"
Her fingers tensed near the hilt of her blade. Her breath slowed.
She unsheathed the weapon slowly ~shhhh~. "We’re being watched."
Li Wei’s eyes did not move. "Worse," he said. "We’re being appraised."
His hand flicked outward—a shard of qi pulsed from his fingertip, silent and swift. It lanced into the shadows of a nearby alcove.
~SHIRRR~
A scream, high and gnarled, followed. Rustling—then silence.
From the brush emerged a creature’s corpse.
Its form was malformed, sinewy, and half-recognizable. Nails extended into hooked claws. Its pale face bore a vaguely human shape, but the eyes—empty sockets rimmed with cracked skin—and the mandible-like jaws spoke of something corrupted.
Leng Yue stood over the body, blade at the ready. "Not like the watchers on the bridge," she said. "This one was once human... perhaps. But not anymore."
Her eyes lifted, scanning the tree line. "There’s more in those woods."
The path beyond the guardians led into a wide circular glade. Crumbling columns ringed it like sentinels fallen to time. At its heart rose a stone dais. And upon it—a mask.
White. Smooth. Not a speck of dust upon it.
Gold inlay traced a radiant sunburst across the brow. It floated above the dais, unsupported, unmoved by the windless air.
Li Wei stepped forward. "Time for a closer look..."
The moment his foot touched the edge of the dais, the air thickened. His third eye opened—unbidden.
Energy leapt from the mask like tendrils of silk. They weaved through the soil, the trees, the stones. This garden, this ruin, this whole plane—it was rooted in the mask.
"What kind of relic is this..." he whispered.
Leng Yue stood beside him. Her voice was soft. "It’s a nexus. A heart."
He nodded slowly. "And it watches."
A low hum built within the glade. Columns shimmered.
~vvvmmm~
Light spiraled up from the base of the dais. The mask turned in place, slowly, deliberately.
Then a voice—not man, not woman, not echoing, but within them.
"Who possesses the gall to enter this place?"
Leng Yue answered first, voice like drawn steel. "I do. We will find the answers we seek."
Li Wei followed. "My spirit bears witness to the passage of time. What is contained within cannot remain bound forever."
A long silence. Then:
"If you seek to free this sacred ground from the rot that plagues it, then find the two glyphs buried in the valley ahead. Bring them to me."
The dais shifted—rings forming around its base, rotating like a puzzle box. Glyphs flared along the rims.
Leng Yue’s eyes narrowed. "It seems so simple."
"It never is," Li Wei muttered, forming a fist.
"Wait." She held up a hand. "Look."
The columns around them began to glow. Not with flame or magic, but with memory.
Faint, flickering visions surfaced: monks guiding children in meditation, rituals beneath starlit trees, a man scorched by battle placing the very mask upon the dais.
Li Wei moved among them, voice low. "These are the ones who came before..."
Leng Yue’s voice was colder. "And the ones who fell. Look—see how the light dims. The garden decays."
In one final column, a woman with a feathered headdress knelt before the mask. Her lips moved—but no sound emerged. A moment later, she crumbled to ash.
Leng Yue stepped to the rings. "I’ll guide the symbols."
Li Wei nodded, calling out from the columns: "Sun before moon. Fire beneath water. The breath of stone before the blood of wind."
Each symbol turned beneath her hand, smooth and precise.
~klik... klik... klik~
The hum ceased. The mask halted.
Breathless stillness.
The mask tilted toward them—no longer inert, no longer observing, but addressing.
"Find the rest. Only by doing so can the reel be completed."
And with that, the light dimmed, the columns grew quiet once more.
The ground sloped downward, and the air thickened as they descended beyond the glade. What light remained behind them—cast by the mask and its whispering rings—dwindled like the last embers of a hearthfire.
Here, in this new stretch of terrain, color fled. The trees bore no leaves, only twisted boughs reaching like blackened limbs. The soil was neither dry nor wet but gave beneath their boots with a hollow elasticity, like flesh long cooled.
Leng Yue paused at the first descent.
"Do you feel that?" she asked, fingers twitching against her scabbard. "It’s as if the land is tainted by something.
Li Wei nodded once, silent. His third eye pulsed faintly—exhausted, reluctant. Yet it showed him what mortal eyes could no, the spectral threads that drifted from beneath the soil like rising smoke. They did not spiral or dance, but wept upward, slow and broken.
"Beings linger here," he murmured. "But there presence here is not by choice."
The path narrowed again, hemmed in by stone and rotted vines. A great scar split the trail ahead, as if a blade of immense size had carved a wound through the valley. From the edges of that fissure, low mist seeped like breath from the jaws of some great beast.
They advanced slowly.
Here, even the shadows seemed to listen.