"Not All Wounds Are Seen"

Morning didn’t come with sunlight.

Only a thinner shade of gray.

The mist had rolled down from the mountains overnight, curling through the valley like something alive. It draped across trees, swallowed paths, and blurred the world into a ghostly painting. Nothing moved. Not even the wind.

Tyan Shi stepped out into it, careful not to wake the child still sleeping beneath the shrine’s broken roof. Her small form rose and fell in slow, steady breaths—too deep to be stirred by cold. He had given her the last of his cloak. His own robe, damp and worn, hung open at the chest where the faint lotus mark still glowed with ember-like softness.

He didn’t know where to go.

But staying meant being seen.

The shrine was old. Abandoned. There was no food left, and the girl couldn’t travel far. His fingers brushed the hilt of the sword tied across his back—a blade half-wrapped in old talismans. He hadn’t drawn it in days. Something inside him always flinched when he touched it, as though the weapon itself carried memories he didn’t want to remember.

A sound broke through the fog—

Not loud. Just a low rustle. Leaves brushing.

He turned fast. Stillness.

Then he saw her—an old woman, no taller than the girl, standing crooked under the twisted limb of a tree. She wore a hat made of rice straw, heavy with dew. Her eyes were almost white with age.

“You carry a weight,” she said simply.

Tyan didn’t answer.

“You walk like a man who’s already lost everything, and yet…” She tilted her head. “Still afraid to lose more.”

He glanced toward the sleeping child behind him, then back at the woman. “What do you want?”

“Nothing from you,” she replied. “But the world will. Soon.”

Before he could speak again, she raised one bony finger to his chest—hovering just above the lotus scar.

“That mark,” she whispered, “was not given. It was left behind.”

And with that, she turned, vanished into the mist like she’d never been there.

Tyan stood alone again. Heart pounding.

Meanwhile, beyond the Rain Gate Mountains, in the southern bloom provinces of Yunling, Xuneer stood before a scroll of prophecy so old that its ink had faded into the parchment like bruises. She held the corner of it gently, afraid it might crumble.

“Do you believe in fate?” her brother figure, Yun Zhi, asked behind her.

Xuneer’s eyes didn’t move. “No,” she said. “But I believe in warnings.”

The scroll spoke of a time when the Heavens would weep and the dead would walk wearing skin lit by lotus fire. A time when love would become the last weapon left to the living. And a girl of phoenix blood would be asked to choose between her heart… and the world.

She wasn’t sure if it was about her.

She hoped it wasn’t.

But the dreams kept returning.

Always the same masked boy. Always that haunting melody, the broken guqin on his back, and the way he never turned to face her—only bled in silence.

Tyan Shi knelt beside the sleeping child again. He brushed a strand of hair from her face. Something warm had settled in his chest, and he hated how easily it had rooted there.

He wasn’t made for softness.

And yet here it was, growing quietly like moss in the cracks of his soul.

Above them, the clouds shifted.

Somewhere very far away, a bell rang once… and a girl across the mountains paused, her hand over her heart, though she didn’t know why.

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