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The house was on a side street three turns off the main road, the kind of street that got narrower at each turn until it felt less like a street and more like something the city had forgotten about.
Wei Liang saw the house from twenty meters away and understood immediately. The front wall had a crack running from the window frame to the eave. Two of the three steps leading to the door had rotted through and been replaced with flat stones someone had found somewhere. The paint was gone, not peeling, just gone, worn down to bare wood that had then grayed out from seasons of rain. A single light burned inside, visible through a curtain that was too thin to be a curtain.
He said nothing.
Elias walked ahead of him up the path, stepping over the stones without looking down. He put his hand on the door, and then he stopped.
He stood there with his hand on the door and did not move.
Wei Liang waited.
"Brother." Elias's voice had gone quiet. The adrenaline was still in it but underneath that was something else, something that had been there the whole walk over. "I'm scared."
Wei Liang set his pack down on the step beside him.
"What if." Elias stopped. "What if she's already dead."
Wei Liang looked at the boy's back. His shoulders were rigid. His hand on the door was not pushing.
He knelt down.
When Elias turned around, Wei Liang could see his face properly for the first time since they had left the shelter. His eyes were wet, his jaw tight, holding everything in the way children hold things in when they have decided that crying is not allowed and then discover they were wrong about themselves.
"It will be all right," Wei Liang said.
Elias shook his head, jaw working. "You don't know that."
"No," Wei Liang said. "I do not. But I am here, and I have treated worse conditions than what you described. We will go in together. I will examine her, and we will know exactly what we are dealing with. One step."
Elias pressed his lips together hard. His eyes spilled over anyway. He made no sound, just stood there with tears running down his face, breathing through his nose in controlled pulls, the way someone breathes when they have decided they will not let it become audible.
He had been carrying this for a long time. Wei Liang could see the weight of it in how he was standing, in the rigid set of his small shoulders, in the way his hand on the door had frozen the moment fear became more real than momentum.
Wei Liang put his hand on the boy's head and held it there.
"It is okay to be scared," he said. "You do not have to carry this alone tonight."
Elias's face crumpled.
He stepped forward and put his face into Wei Liang's shoulder, and Wei Liang wrapped both arms around him and held on while the boy cried. Not loud. The kind that comes out in shudders, that has been stored up for hours and finally finds the release point. Wei Liang felt it move through the boy's small frame in waves.
He did not say anything else. He kept one hand on the boy's back and waited.
After a while the shuddering slowed. Then stopped. Elias pulled back and wiped his face hard on his sleeve, the quick angry motion of someone erasing evidence.
He took one breath. Then another.
"Okay," he said. Voice rough, steadier.
"Okay," Wei Liang agreed. "Let us go in."
He reached for his pack.
He felt a sharp sting at the back of his neck.
His hand came up immediately, fingers closing on something thin and cylindrical. He pulled it out and looked at it.
A syringe. Empty. The plunger already depressed.
He had time to register what that meant, and then his body locked.
Not pain. Not unconsciousness. Every muscle in his body simply stopped accepting commands, all at once, cleanly, the way a power cut kills every light in a building simultaneously. He was completely awake. He could feel his feet on the stone step, the syringe between his fingers, the night air on his face. He could not move any of it.
He looked down at Elias.
The boy was looking up at him.
The expression on his face was not the expression of a frightened child. The eyes were dry. The jaw was level. The mouth had pulled into a slow grin that Wei Liang had seen before, not on this boy, not on any face he could name, but in a memory from childhood, a clown mask in a carnival poster, the smile too wide and too still to be a real smile.
It was not Elias's expression. Wei Liang understood this with perfect clarity and could do nothing with the understanding.
The door behind him opened.
Elias stepped back and planted one foot against Wei Liang's hip and shoved him through the doorway. Not rough. Efficient.
"See you, Golden Heart Scholar," the boy said.
The door closed.
.
.
.
The room was dark except for the lamp. Wei Liang was on the floor, seated upright, back against the far wall, arms at his sides. The Awakened Anesthesia was thorough. He could not turn his head, only move his eyes. He moved them.
A man was standing near the window. Leather jacket over layered clothing, hood up, lean build, the kind of stillness that was not passivity. His face was covered entirely by a white porcelain mask, featureless, no beak, no lenses, no expression. Just smooth white surface and two eye openings. A single diagonal crack ran across it, sealed over but visible.
"What," Wei Liang said. His voice worked. "Who are you."
He heard it come out slightly unsteady and could not correct it.
The man did not answer immediately. He walked toward him, unhurried, and crouched down to his level. His hands rested on his knees. He looked at Wei Liang the way someone looks at a document they have read before and are now reading again to confirm the details.
"Wei Liang," he said. "Hunter, originating from Qintara. B-rank, registered through the Qintara Hunter Bureau. Best-ranked scholar in the country." He paused. "Holds the title Zhouguan. Guild affiliation: the Dao Guild."
Wei Liang said nothing.
The man walked toward him, unhurried, and crouched down to his level. His hands rested on his knees. He looked at Wei Liang steadily through the eye openings of the white mask.
Up close the mask was worse than from across the room. It was not worn over the face. It sat too flush, too still, the surface breathing in the way skin breathes. Wei Liang had studied enough cultivation texts to know what a soul-bound object looked like. He had never seen one worn as a face before.
He placed one hand flat on the floor beside Wei Liang, palm down, and leaned in slightly.
"Hello, fellow guild member," he said.
His voice was calm. Almost warm.
"My name is Nox. The Hollow Doctor."
He let that settle for a moment.
"And I am the one who is going to make you born again." A brief pause. "Your new father."
Wei Liang looked at him. His body could not react. His face could not react. He had only his eyes.
"What are you going to do to me," he said.
Nox did not answer that question. He reached into the inside of his jacket with his free hand, and from somewhere that did not correspond to any visible pocket, he produced a small surgical instrument that was black and slightly wrong-looking, the kind of object that appeared ordinary until it moved.
He set it on the floor between them with the care of someone preparing a workspace.
"Try not to panic," he said. "It will go more smoothly if you do not panic. You cannot move regardless, so panicking is purely an internal exercise and it will not help you."
Wei Liang looked at the instrument on the floor.
He had been a healer for fifteen years. He had seen surgical tools in every configuration he could think of. He had never seen anything like that.
"I have questions," he said.
"You will have answers," Nox said.