Sleep had not been kind to Ye Chen.
He woke before dawn, drenched in cold sweat, the dream still clinging to the edges of his mind like smoke — that endless black spiral, that bottomless void, and the thing inside it that had looked back at him with ancient, patient eyes.
I see you. I have always seen you.
He sat up slowly.
The servant quarters were still dark. The four other servants around him were breathing steadily, deep in sleep. No one had noticed anything. No one ever noticed anything when it came to Ye Chen — he had spent seventeen years perfecting the art of being invisible.
He pressed his hand over his chest.
The mark was still. Cold skin. Dark pattern. Nothing.
As if last night had been a dream within a dream.
He exhaled and stood, pulling on his servant robe — grey, thin, the color of someone the world had decided didn't matter. He had two hours before morning duties began. Two hours in which the sect was quiet and the senior disciples were still asleep and no one would stop him in the corridors.
He knew exactly where he was going.
His mother's room had been cleared out three years ago.
The sect didn't believe in keeping the belongings of dead servants. Whatever Wei Ling had owned — her clothes, her small collection of books, her single wooden chair — had been thrown out or given away within a week of her death. The room had been assigned to someone else. Then someone else. It was now a storage room for broken cultivation equipment, dusty and forgotten.
Which was exactly why Ye Chen used it.
He slipped inside, closing the door silently behind him. In the far corner, beneath a cracked formation plate and a pile of discarded robes, was a loose floorboard. He had found it two years ago — or rather, his mother had led him to it. In a dream, she had pointed down at the floor and smiled, and when he woke up he had pressed every board until one gave way.
Beneath it: a diary. Half burned, the edges charred black. But half of it still readable.
He pulled it out now and sat cross-legged on the floor, opening it to a page he had read so many times the paper had softened under his fingerprints.
"Son, the curse upon you is not a curse."
He had memorized every surviving word. He had constructed stories around the burned parts, imagining what she might have written in the gaps. But tonight, in the grey pre-dawn silence, the diary felt different in his hands. Heavier. Like it was trying to tell him something he hadn't been ready to hear before.
He turned to the last readable entry.
"They are getting closer. I don't have much time. I have made arrangements — someone will find you when the mark awakens, and they will give you what I could not. I am sorry I could not tell you everything. I am sorry I made you carry this without knowing what it was. But beta — do not be afraid of it. The mark is not your curse."
"It is your inheritance."
He stared at that last line for a long time.
Your inheritance.
From what? From whom?
He turned the page. Blank. The rest was ash.
He closed the diary and pressed it against his chest, eyes shut.
"What am I supposed to do with this, Maa?" he whispered. "What does it mean? What—"
The door opened.
Ye Chen was on his feet in an instant, the diary hidden behind his back — but it was only Uncle Liu. The old caretaker stood in the doorway, one hand gripping the frame, his face still carrying that expression from last night. That pale, terrified look that had not faded with sleep.
The old man's eyes went immediately to Ye Chen's chest.
"Is it glowing again?" he asked quietly. His voice was different than usual — stripped of its normal warmth, replaced with something careful and urgent.
"No." Ye Chen kept his voice steady. "But you're going to tell me why you ran last night."
Uncle Liu stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He stood there for a moment, not speaking, looking like a man calculating the weight of a secret against the cost of carrying it alone.
"I promised your mother," he finally said.
"She's gone."
"Promises don't expire, boy."
"Uncle Liu." Ye Chen took a step forward. "She left me a diary with half the pages burned. I have spent three years trying to understand what I am and why this mark exists and why people look at me the way you looked at me last night." His voice was quiet but each word landed with the weight of three years of silence. "I am not asking you to break a promise. I am asking you to help me survive long enough for it to matter."
The old man was quiet for a very long time.
Then he moved to the corner of the room and lowered himself onto a crate with the careful movements of someone whose joints had stopped cooperating long ago. He folded his hands in his lap. Looked at the floor.
"Your mother came to this sect nineteen years ago," he said. "She came as a servant. That is what she told everyone. That is what I believed — for a while." He paused. "But servants don't have marks like yours. And servants don't speak in their sleep in a language that hasn't been used in ten thousand years."
Ye Chen said nothing. He sat down across from the old man.
"I heard her one night," Uncle Liu continued. "Talking in her sleep. Ancient Dao tongue — I recognized it because I had studied linguistics in my youth, before I came here. Before I gave up." He shook his head slowly. "I went to her the next morning and told her what I heard. I expected her to deny it. Instead she looked at me for a long time and then she said — 'then you are the one who will help him, when the time comes.'"
"Help me do what?"
"I don't know everything." The old man's voice was heavy with the admission. "She never told me the full truth. Only pieces. She said the mark on your chest is called the Dao Devouring Seal — it is not a curse, it is a container. Something ancient and enormously powerful locked inside you, waiting." He met Ye Chen's eyes. "Waiting for the right moment to wake up."
The word settled over the room like dust.
Wake up.
"Last night," Ye Chen said slowly. "When you saw it glowing—"
"That was the seal beginning to open." Uncle Liu's jaw tightened. "Which means the Elders will know. The Senior Elder who has been watching you since you were a child — who always made sure your cultivation tests came back as failures — he has instruments that detect Dao energy. If the seal is opening, his instruments would have responded." He stood, suddenly urgent. "We don't have much time, Ye Chen. They will come for you today. The Sect Master—"
"The Sect Master knows about the mark?"
Uncle Liu's expression told him everything.
"He's the one who's been keeping it suppressed," the old man said quietly. "There is a formation array built into your servant quarters. You've been sleeping inside a suppression field your entire life. Last night the seal was strong enough to break through it momentarily." He moved to the door, cracking it open to check the corridor. "They will have felt that. By tonight, there will be an order."
"What kind of order?"
Uncle Liu turned back to look at him. The old man's eyes were wet.
"The kind that doesn't leave survivors," he said.
The words landed like stones dropping into still water.
Ye Chen heard them. Let them sink. And then something strange happened — something he had not expected.
He wasn't afraid.
He pressed his hand over the mark on his chest. Still cold. Still dark. But somewhere beneath his palm, so faint he might have imagined it — a single pulse. Slow and deliberate. Like a heartbeat that had been dormant for seventeen years and was just now, finally, deciding to wake.
I see you, it seemed to say. I have always seen you.
"Then I won't be here tonight," Ye Chen said.
Uncle Liu stared at him.
"Boy—"
"Tell me the fastest way out of the sect's outer boundary." Ye Chen's voice was quiet. Completely calm. "Not the main gate. A real way out."
The old man opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at him for a long moment — and something shifted in his expression. The fear was still there. But beneath it, something that looked almost like pride.
"There is a drainage tunnel beneath the east storage hall," Uncle Liu said quietly. "It hasn't been used in forty years. The suppression formations there are weakest — if your seal pulses again, it might be strong enough to break through." He hesitated. "But Ye Chen — they will follow you. And you have no cultivation. Wherever you run, they will find you."
Ye Chen stood.
He tucked his mother's diary inside his robe, against his chest, against the mark.
"Then I'll have to find a way to stop running," he said.
He moved toward the door. Uncle Liu caught his arm — gently, with an old man's thin grip that somehow managed to stop him anyway.
"Your mother loved you more than she loved her own life," the old man said. His voice was barely a whisper. "Whatever is inside that mark — she chose to put it in you. That means she believed you were strong enough to carry it." He released his arm. "Don't make her wrong."
Ye Chen looked at him.
"Thank you, Uncle Liu," he said. "For everything."
He stepped into the corridor.
Behind him, he heard the old man settle back onto the crate, exhaling a long, slow breath — the sound of someone who has finally set down something very heavy and does not know what to do with their empty hands.
Ye Chen walked toward the east storage hall.
Above him, in the Sect Master's tower, a golden needle mounted on a lacquered board had just moved — rotating smoothly from west to east, pointing with perfect accuracy at a signal it had not detected in seventeen years.
The Elder watching it sucked in a sharp breath.
He was already reaching for the communication jade.