---
The wind changed at midnight.
It whispered across the Temple's tiled roofs like a forgotten prayer, curling into stone corridors and torchlit halls — stirring paper scrolls, cracking wax seals, and waking something buried too deep to name.
Rei had felt its touch long before it arrived.
He stood already dressed by the time the Temple bells rang — twelve long, low chimes. Not the usual cadence for meditation or meal. This was older. Ceremonial.
A summons.
From the shadows of the western hall, Shān-Luò emerged, his robes wrapped tight against the restless wind.
> "The Sealed Hall has opened," he said.
Rei swallowed, feeling the glyphs on his skin stir again — not with pain, but with recognition.
> "Why now?"
> "Because it heard you," Shān-Luò answered. "And because you answered."
---
Beneath the Temple
Wèi, Jié, and Mìng joined them at the foot of the mountain, where a staircase of ink-black stone led into the earth. The entrance was older than the Temple itself, carved before writing had rules and Words had boundaries.
No torches. No sigils. Only silence.
> "None of us have seen the Hall," Wèi murmured. "Only the elders — and even they feared it."
> "What's inside?" Rei asked.
No one answered.
Mìng tilted his head, as if listening to something Rei couldn't hear.
> "A name that wants to be spoken again."
The staircase narrowed as they descended, the air thick with age. Rei's heartbeat slowed — not from calm, but from the heavy pressure of the glyphs on his skin, pulsing with each step like a second pulse.
When they reached the bottom, the passage ended at a great circular door carved from pale jade.
It bore no handles. No hinges. Only one thing: a single character at its center.
> 息 (xī) — To Breathe.
But the brushstrokes were broken, distorted — as if the word had been written mid-scream.
---
The Door Opens
Shān-Luò stepped forward. He extended one hand, palm facing the glyph, and for a moment, nothing happened.
Then Rei felt it — the Word buried in the jade... inhaling.
The stone pulled in air.
A breath.
The glyph shuddered and glowed faintly. Then, with a sound like wet parchment tearing, the jade split down the center and opened inward.
Darkness waited.
Not empty.
Listening.
> "Do not speak unless it speaks first," Shān-Luò warned. "Inside this chamber, Words carry their true weight."
---
The Hall of the Sealed Word
Inside was not what Rei expected.
No ancient library. No throne. No bones or relics.
The Sealed Hall was a vast circular space with a floor of glassy obsidian. Floating in the center — suspended in perfect stillness — was a single scroll.
Unrolled. Open.
And bleeding.
Dark crimson dripped from its edges into the void beneath it, vanishing into a pool that never filled.
Around it, thousands of lesser scrolls hung midair, circling like a storm of forgotten sentences — all blank.
The central scroll bore only one line of text.
But it was not in modern script. Not even Classical. Rei couldn't read it — but he felt it inside him, burning behind his teeth, curling through his ribs like smoke.
> "What is it?" Jié whispered, barely breathing.
Mìng turned toward the floating scroll, blind eyes wide for the first time.
> "A Word that no longer has a meaning."
> "Or a meaning too great to be spoken," Wèi added, voice reverent.
Shān-Luò approached the scroll.
> "This is the Root Name," he said. "The original Word from which all others were born."
Rei's knees weakened.
> "That's impossible."
> "And yet it exists," said Shān-Luò. "Written in a script older than history, with ink drawn from silence, on parchment made of Time."
> "What does it want?" Wèi asked.
> "To be heard again," Mìng answered.
---
The Voice Returns
As Rei approached the scroll, the glyphs on his body began to glow in rhythm — responding to it like echoes returning to a source.
The scroll pulsed once.
And the hall changed.
The obsidian floor cracked. The air shook. Rei felt his voice being pulled from him — not words, but meaning, the raw weight of his existence drawn forward like thread unraveling from the soul.
He stumbled. Fell to one knee.
Visions spilled into his mind — not memories, but possibilities.
A thousand selves.
A thousand destinies.
All bound to one spoken truth:
> You are the bearer of the Forgotten Name.
The scroll began to lower, inch by inch, bleeding more freely now.
Shān-Luò stepped back.
> "Do not touch it," he warned sharply. "Not yet."
Rei looked up, voice hoarse.
> "Then when?"
> "When the world is ready to remember what it lost."
---
The Seed of Descent
As they left the chamber, the scroll rose back into its place — slower this time, reluctant.
The hall sealed behind them with a whisper.
But Rei's skin still burned.
That night, alone in his quarters, he removed the bandages from his chest.
New glyphs had appeared — ones even Wèi couldn't decipher.
They formed a word.
Incomplete.
Yet powerful.
And it moved when he breathed.