The slide was not a fall, but a descent—smooth, steep, and endless. Lìngxiāo rode it on the soles of his feet, a dark surf on a stone wave.
His small spirit lantern, a captive wisp of light, zipped to his side, casting frantic shadows on the smooth walls rushing past. His hair streamed behind him like a banner, but the red veil remained, anchored to his crown as if grafted there by grief. The space widened, becoming a vast, subterranean throat.
"This path feels like it has no end," Mò Qīn commented, his voice echoing in the hollow dark.
"Everything has an end," Lìngxiāo replied, his voice calm in the whirl. "Some are simply… deeper than others."
Suddenly, the smooth channel terminated, dropping away into a vertical shaft. Lìngxiāo braced himself against the walls, grinding to a halt at the precipice. He peered down.
His lantern floated obediently over the chasm, illuminating a sight below. Not treasure. Not an exit.
Bones. Piles of them. Some animal, many unmistakably human, tangled with rags of fine, rotting silk.
"A charnel house," Lìngxiāo murmured. "A secret ossuary."
He stepped onto his hovering lantern, and it bore his weight, descending slowly into the pit like a leaf on a still pond. The full horror came into view.
"These were cultivators," he whispered, kneeling beside a skeletal hand still clutching the hilt of a shattered spiritual sword. "Powerful ones, by the remnants of their robes." He touched the frayed silk, its embroidered clan sigil faded but recognizable. A memory, sharp and invasive, pressed against his closed eyelids.
[FLASHBACK]
A man in guard's uniform, breathless with panic, kneeling in a grand hall. "Dàozǔ, the town's curses grow stronger by the day! We must act against the lantern-maker clan! They are the source!"
The clan leader on the throne, face etched with weary wisdom, shook his head. "The source is a poison, not a people. The Dàozǔ of the Gùqín Bāi Chén clan was my friend. His heart was as bright as the lanterns he crafted. Someone is painting a target on his back."
"But the evidence—"
"I have spoken." The leader's hand cut the air, a gesture of finality that was also a dismissal. "Do not let fear make villains of the innocent."
The guard rose, frustration in the set of his shoulders, and left.
The scene shattered, reforming in this very pit. Fresh corpses in fine robes, eyes wide in final surprise.
The same guard from the vision stood at the edge, looking down at his handiwork. Another figure, shrouded in shadow, spoke from the darkness, voice cold as buried iron: "No one who stands in my way will survive. Dispose of them."
The unseen man kicked the closest body into the pit.
[END FLASHBACK]
---
Lìngxiāo's eyes flew open. The vision was a fragment, a single bloody piece of a much larger mosaic. But it was clear: a calculated, personal vendetta had been waged against the Gùqín Bāi Chén clan—the Lantern-Weavers, known as much for their exquisite guqin purification melodies as for the whispered horrors that later consumed them. That vendetta had festered, poisoning the town's very soul, birthing the curse that now wore a red robe.
His thoughts were a storm. Was the ghost the victim? The avenger? Both?
A presence shifted.
Lìngxiāo looked up. A figure in pristine white robes stood at the far end of the bone-strewn chamber, its back to him. It had not been there a moment before.
The six-headed key at his chest flared, hot and urgent against his skin.
Slowly, Lìngxiāo stood. He offered the figure the same ghostly, polite smile he reserved for the dead—a mirror's reflection of emptiness. "Hello? May I ask who you are?"
He took a careful step forward.
The figure twitched, then turned—not fully, just a quarter profile, enough to suggest a jawline, the slope of a shoulder. It was a gesture of unbearable sorrow.
Then, from somewhere deeper in the dark, a child's cry echoed—sharp, terrified, real.
The white-robed figure flinched as if struck, then broke into a sprint, vanishing into a fissure in the wall from whence the cry came.
"Wait!" Lìngxiāo gave chase, his lantern bobbing ahead.
He plunged into the narrow tunnel, the sound of the child's sobs pulling him forward, around a bend, through a curtain of hanging roots—
And into blinding daylight.
***
He stumbled, not into another chamber, but onto the packed earth outside the temple's western wall. He was back, standing directly before the compound of Chóng Fēi. The transition was so abrupt it stole his breath.
"A week day passed yet he did not come back."
"Did he get killed?"
"Fēi Gōngzǐ should not have done it."
"We are cursed forever."
'The shrine seems… can twist the timing into human head. Yet it has let me go?'
The crowd, which was small today, got back their smile of hope when they saw Lìngxiāo alive and back.
"Lìngxiāo Gōngzǐ made it!"
"He is alive!"
But then suddenly, the cheer died too—strangled in a dozen throats. Excitement curdled into sheer, unadulterated terror on every face.
Chóng Fēi, who had watched with dismissive expectation, now looked as if he had seen his own ghost. His face was bloodless.
It was Chóng Fēi who found his voice first, his words stumbling over disbelief. "That… that robe. Where did you get it? You were not wearing that."
'What robe?' Lìngxiāo looked down at himself.
The humble travel-worn clothes he had entered with were gone. He was clad in a robe of rare, luminous white silk—a style said to have vanished in the "Bù Wàng" Era.
The one from his vision. But this robe was not pristine.
It was painted in blood. Old, dark blood that had soaked the fabric and dried into a grotesque, glittering embroidery, catching the sun like a million tiny crimson crystals. His red veil remained, a violent accent against the ghastly white.
A weight dragged in his hand. He looked down, slowly uncurling his fingers.
Cradled in his palm was a human head. Desiccated, skin like old parchment stretched over bone, partially blackened by fire. It was light as a dried gourd, yet its presence was an anchor of pure horror.
Lìngxiāo's ever-present smile finally froze. His eyes, wide and uncomprehending, lifted from the head to the bloodied silk, then to the petrified crowd.
"What…?" he breathed, the word barely a sound.
"What?!" Mò Qīn echoed faintly from his neck, his small voice shrill with shared shock.
They had followed the ghost's desperate dance, plunged into its secret grave, and emerged wearing its skin and carrying its grief.
But why? And for whom?
He was not sure yet, but he was close to its breath already.