The morning came pale and hollow.
Fog clung to the valley floor, heavy as breath. Nothing moved except the frost sliding from dead branches.
Even the horses were restless, stamping at the frozen ground as though something unseen brushed their flanks.
Zhen Yu tightened the saddle straps, eyes scanning the treeline.
"No tracks," Liang Hu muttered. "No scent, no sound."
"It's still here," Zhen Yu said quietly. "Watching."
Mei Lian stood apart, facing the white horizon. The mist curled around her ankles like smoke.
Her crimson eyes were dim — not from exhaustion, but from restraint.
The fox's voice still lingered in her mind. Worshiped. Loved. Desired.
She pressed a hand to her chest, as though to crush the echo out.
When they began their ascent northward, the world itself seemed to twist.
The trees bent subtly, the paths looped where they shouldn't.
Each step felt familiar and wrong at once — as if the forest remembered their thoughts and rewove itself around them.
By noon, they realized they were lost.
They halted in a clearing drowned in fog.
Liang Hu dismounted first. "We passed this tree before. I marked it."
His hand brushed the bark — but where his symbol should've been, another mark appeared instead:
a woman's name carved in perfect strokes.
His breath caught.
The letters glowed faintly, like the whisper of a memory.
Zhen Yu turned sharply. "Hu—"
But Liang Hu stepped away, drawn toward the deeper mist.
Voices floated through it — soft laughter, the rustle of silken sleeves, the name again, spoken like a promise.
"Ying…"
Before he could vanish entirely, Mei Lian's shadow lashed forward —
a thin black thread wrapping around his wrist, yanking him back.
Don't look, she signed, eyes flaring red. It's feeding again.
The forest seemed to breathe — a low, seething exhale.
The fog condensed, and the ground quivered beneath their feet.
Zhen Yu felt it next.
The earth rippled like water, and suddenly he was no longer in the woods.
A throne stood before him — gold, radiant, flawless.
Crowds bowed. Trumpets sang.
And beside the throne sat Mei Lian — not in black, not in violet, but wrapped in white silk.
Her eyes were gentle, her lips unsealed.
"Your destiny," whispered a voice behind him.
He turned. The Enchantress stood close, her nine tails curling around his feet like smoke.
"All you must do," she breathed, "is want it."
His heart pounded.
For one terrible instant, he almost believed.
Then — shadows tore through the illusion.
Mei Lian's form stepped into his dream, eyes burning crimson. Her darkness reached for the fox.
The vision shattered like glass — the throne collapsing, gold splintering into ash.
He dropped to his knees, sword drawn, breath ragged.
Mei Lian stood before him, the mist burning away around her like paper.
Her veins glowed with restrained light, her power twisting through the air like ribbons of fire and shadow.
She was consuming the monster.
The fox's form flickered — silver light unraveling into a hundred faces, each beautiful, each empty.
It laughed, a sound like breaking glass.
"Take me in," it whispered. "Become me… and I'll become you. We're the same, aren't we? Both of us wanting — everything."
Mei Lian's expression didn't change.
Her hands tightened, and darkness swallowed the silver whole.
For once, there was no scream.
No pain.
Her veins did not flare or bleed with corruption.
When the light faded, she stood still — calm, steady.
Almost too calm.
Zhen Yu stepped toward her, wary. "Mei Lian… are you—"
She looked at him, eyes glowing faintly gold beneath the red.
"I'm fine," she signed.
But her shadow lingered longer than it should have.
And somewhere in the distance, faint and mocking, a fox's laughter drifted once more through the mist.