Zhen prodded the garish tapestry with his sword tip. "Didi. Either I''m drunk..."


    "You''re always drunk," Lián muttered, his back turned as he unbuckled his vambraces.


    "...or your interior decorating is trying to seduce me."


    The woven foxes'' ruby eyes glinted as a draft slithered through the room. Up close, the work was cruder than Zhen had first thought. One woman''s hand was larger than her head, the grapes she held misshapen lumps, but the colors still burned unnaturally bright despite the dust. The dyes hadn''t faded so much as concentrated, pooling in the threads like old blood.


    Lián finally turned, his gaze flicking over the scene. "Third rate brothel art," he said flatly. "Probably stolen."


    Zhen traced a finger along the picnic blanket''s edge. The threads hummed under his touch. "Odd choice for an inn called The Celestial Jade Suite, don''t you think?" He gasped dramatically. "Didi, is this a love nest? Have you brought me somewhere scandalous?"


    Lián''s boot connected with the bed frame hard enough to shake the wall. "It''s a death trap. Look at the stitching."


    Zhen leaned in until his breath stirred the threads. Up close, the tapestry''s flaws became something far worse than poor craftsmanship.


    The crude stitches weren''t clumsy. They were mimicry. Each thread deliberately imperfect, as if someone had tried to replicate celestial embroidery from memory and gotten it just wrong enough to unsettle. The foxes'' fur bristled with tiny, near invisible characters: blessings, wards, fragments of poetry, all sewn backward or half unraveled. The hu 祜 character glared up at him, its looping strokes intact, but the next character had been cut away so cleanly the silk around it hadn''t even frayed. As if the word had never existed at all.


    Zhen''s fingers hovered over the gap. "Didi, look at this."


    A flicker. A twitch of red at the edge of his vision.


    He froze.


    The woman''s hand, the one too large for her body, had relaxed since he''d last glanced. Her fingers, once curled around a grape, now lay open. Palm up. Beckoning.


    Zhen didn''t blink. "Lián."


    A beat.


    Then Lián''s shoulder pressed against his, sword angled toward the fabric. "I see it."


    They stared. The tapestry stayed stubbornly, mockingly still.


    Then Lián exhaled through his nose and turned his head just slightly to scan the room.


    Zhen saw it in his periphery: the woman''s head tilted. Not much. Just enough that her painted cheek now touched her shoulder. Her lips, once pursed around a laugh, parted.


    He whipped his gaze back.


    The tapestry froze mid movement.


    Lián''s sword hissed free.


    Zhen grinned. "Ah! It wants us to stay."


    Lián''s sword cleared its sheath in a silver arc just as a cloying sweetness flooded the room. The incense burner''s smoke thickened, pooling like syrup in their lungs.


    Zhen''s knees buckled first.


    "Ge?" Lián''s voice slurred as his blade clattered to the floor. "The... crane..."


    Through drooping eyelids, Zhen saw it: the bronze crane''s bowed head had lifted, its beak now aimed directly at them.


    The last thing he heard before darkness took him was the click click click of the hooded man''s jade bead, rolling rhythmically across the floor below, each tap louder than the last, as if ascending toward them without ever touching the stairs.


    The dream came sweet as poisoned honey, borne on the wings of bronze cranes.


    No decadent delight, but a gilded snare.


    Cold silk brushed his skin. The scent of scorched sugar filled the air. A voice stretched thin across centuries whispered in the dark.


    The white-robed figure stood at the foot of the bed, its back to him. Moonlight passed through it, illuminating nothing but the endless fall of its hair, black as the void''s edges, moving in currents no air could stir.


    "You looked away too soon, ge."


    Lián''s voice. Almost. The way an echo resembles a shout. The way a corpse resembles a sleeper.


    Zhen tried to sit up. His body refused. Not the paralysis of fear, but the weight of something older: the press of a god''s palm against his ribs.


    The figure tilted its head. Not a gesture of curiosity.


    The motion of a predator catching a scent.


    "It remembers your face."


    Then it unfolded.


    Not with the grotesque snapping of bones, but with the terrible grace of a scripture scroll unfurling in reverse, silk sleeves whispering secrets as they rearranged the air between them. Its spine arched like a bridge between worlds, neck elongating not with the jerk of broken vertebrae, but with the liquid slowness of ink dispersing in water.


    And then.


    The face.


    Not blank. Not anymore.


    Lián''s features surfaced beneath that alabaster skin, but wrong in ways that made Zhen''s divine blood turn to ice. Too symmetrical. Too flawless. The curve of his cheekbones sharp enough to draw blood, his lips the exact shade of peach blossoms dipped in frost. Every detail perfected, polished, amplified, as if someone had taken the memory of Lián and refined it into something that no living being could, or should, ever be.


    His eyes were the worst.


    Still dark as the void between stars, but now luminous, lit from within by a glow that pulsed in time with Zhen''s hammering heart. When he blinked, his lashes left afterimages, like comet trails across the dark.


    "You looked away too soon," the thing murmured, and its voice was Lián''s if Lián had never known pain, never known loss. A voice that had never been roughened by laughter or hoarse from screaming.


    Zhen''s breath caught.


    It was beautiful.


    It was wrong.


    And the worst part?


    Some traitorous part of him ached to reach out.


    A wet click came from the corner.


    The tapestry''s foxes had turned their heads. Not woven thread anymore. Flesh. Teeth. Tongues lolling between needle-sharp fangs.


    The largest bared its bloody gums.


    "You''re still inside," it giggled.


    Zhen sat up.


    The incense burner''s crane had rotated, its beak spewing smoke that coiled into the character for hunger (饥).


    Across the room, Lián sat rigid, his sword across his knees. Awake. Watching.


    The tapestry''s foxes had all shifted to stare at him.


    One paw, once embroidered, now left damp prints on the floorboards.


    Lián''s voice cleaved the darkness like a blade through air:


    "Tell me what you saw ge."


    Not a question. A confession.


    Zhen watched the way Lián''s head tilted, that unnatural, avian jerk, and understood. The too-smooth motion of his neck. The unblinking stare.


    He''d seen it too.


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    Lián moved like a blade through moonlight.


    One fluid motion, no hesitation. The steel slid between Zhen''s ribs with the cruel precision of a calligrapher''s final stroke.


    Zhen gasped. Not from the pain (that would come later), but from the shock of cold metal parting his flesh. His hands rose instinctively, fingers curling around the blade as if he could push the reality back through his own skin.


    Blood welled between his fingers, impossibly bright against the silver.


    A wet cough wracked his body. Hot iron flooded his mouth, spilled down his chin in thick ropes. Through the blur of tears, he looked up.


    And saw the eyes.


    Not Lián''s dark, expressive gaze. These eyes burned with corpse-light, twin suns eclipsed by the void. The face was perfect. Too perfect. Every beloved feature polished into something inhuman.


    "D...didi?" The word bubbled from his ruined lungs, mixed with blood and something worse.


    Hope. Even now.


    Even like this.


    The sword twisted.


    —


    Zhen woke with a sound like a drowning man breaching water, a raw, punched-out gasp that tore his throat. His hands flew to his chest before his eyes fully opened, fingers scrambling across sweat-slick skin, searching for the wound, the blood, the sword''s kiss he could still feel burning between his ribs.


    The room tilted.


    Moonlight cut through the warped window, painting everything in liquid silver. The incense burner''s crane had rotated, its beak now empty, the last wisp of smoke uncoiling from its throat like a dying breath. The character for hunger (饥) lingered in the air for a heartbeat before dissolving. Only the scent remained, cloying and thick, like peaches left to rot in honey, but even that was fading, leaching away along with the unnatural stillness that had held them down.


    His heartbeat was a trapped bird against his sternum. Too fast. Too loud. He could hear each frantic thud-thud-thud as if his ribs had become a drum.


    No blood. No blade.


    But his skin remembered. The phantom pain lingered, a cold brand where steel should have been.


    Beneath the bed, Lián lay where he''d collapsed, his limbs slack from the drugged smoke. Moonlight softened his features into something almost peaceful, if not for the tension still clinging to his jaw. His sword had fallen beside him, its polished blade scattering thin slivers of light across the floorboards, the only movement in the still room.


    He hadn''t stirred through any of it.


    Zhen’s gaze snapped upward, suddenly remembering the grotesque wall hanging above him.


    The tapestry’s foxes had all turned their heads to stare at him. Their ruby eyes gleamed wet in the moonlight, no longer embroidered shapes but living stares. One creature had peeled a paw free of the fabric, flesh made real, not thread, veins and muscle now connected in weft and weave.


    Wet paw prints tracked down the wall and across the floorboards. The trail glistened, a dark echo leading from the tapestry to his didi’s throat and back again.


    Zhen’s body moved before his mind could follow, centuries of battle-honed instinct overriding fear. His fingers dug into Lián’s shoulder just as the fox’s damp paw flexed, claws unsheathing with a sound like iced glass splitting under velvet.


    Lián woke the way a blade leaves its scabbard, all lethal grace. His hand found his sword mid-breath, the steel flashing upward in an arc that should have severed the creeping paw. But the fox rippled backward into the tapestry, threads knitting themselves closed with a sound like old parchment being folded.


    The severed claw-tip dissolved into black vapor that smelled of scorched tanghulu. That moment when the candy-maker’s sugar tips from amber to bitter, the scent of childhood summers turned to smoke.


    Lián’s free hand flew to his throat, where the paw prints glistened. His voice was a blade sheathed in morning frost. "What the hell..."


    Above them, the tapestry’s foxes grinned with needle-teeth. The largest licked its chops, tongue stitched with minuscule characters, the same celestial script from the void’s vision.


    Zhen’s phantom wound throbbed quietly as the shimmering needlework began to slow.


    The moon had sunk lower, its light now the color of tarnished silver. The tapestry finally hung inert, its foxes stiff as if they’d never moved but the damp claw prints on the floorboards remained.


    Zhen crouched by the incense burner, tilting it toward the weak light. The bronze crane’s beak was clogged with a residue that smelled of burnt tanghulu syrup and something medicinal.


    "This isn’t just sleep incense. It’s memory incense. The kind archivists use to redact sealed scrolls." He scraped a fingernail along the interior, revealing a layer of blackened sugar laced with ground ghostgrass, an herb that didn’t just knock you out, but made you forget why.


    Lián’s sword tapped the floor where the fox’s claw had dissolved. He rubbed at his neck with his free hand, fingers pressing hard as if he could scrub away the memory of those damp paw prints.


    "Ghostgrass explains it," he muttered. "I don’t remember anything after we examined the tapestry…. no wait." His brow furrowed. "There was... tapping? Clicking? Outside our door. But it’s..." He gestured vaguely at his temple. "Like I drank two jugs of haojiu and tried to recite scriptures backward."


    Zhen stiffened. “找到了！(Zhǎo dào le!)” The words burst from him like a sword leaving its sheath, half triumph, half warning. His fingers danced through the air, tracing the arc of that damned jade bead rolling across the hooded man’s knuckles. “The clicking, it was that guy downstairs!”


    Lián was already moving, sword tip testing the door''s bolt.


    The iron shrieked as it slid, but held fast. "Still locked. He never crossed this threshold." A muscle jumped in his jaw. "Then how?"


    Their eyes fell simultaneously on the jade bead shard by the threshold.


    "Because he didn’t need to enter."


    Zhen held up the shard, the remnants of the jade bead wedged beneath the doorframe.


    Its warmth pulsed like a second heartbeat against his palm. "He planted this like a ward. Let the incense do the rest. drag us under, feed us dreams. Classic memory-herb manipulation." He flicked the shard with his thumbnail. "You really didn''t dream at all? Just... nothing?"


    Lián''s fingers stilled on his sword hilt. "Blackness. Then waking to your hand shaking me and those…" A jerk of his chin toward the tapestry''s now-frozen foxes.


    "You saw something else?"


    Zhen rolled the jade between his fingers, buying time. The carved characters burned now, spelling warnings he refused to read aloud.


    "Some wandering spirit in scholar''s robes," he muttered. "Pale as a corpse-wraith. Spouted cryptic nonsense about ''looking away too soon.''" A hollow laugh. "Probably just my own thoughts dressed in ghostgrass fumes."


    Every word tasted like ash.


    He doubled down and shrugged, "Ghostgrass hallucinations. You know how it is, cheap wine and bad dreams."


    Every word true, yet false as a mirage.


    No mention of the way its stolen face had mirrored Lián’s exactly, the curve of its brow, the slant of its smile, before twisting into something too perfect to be real.


    The figure’s stolen features haunted him, but naming them would make them real. Would weave them into the world.


    Lián’s gaze weighed the silence between them.


    Lián exhaled through his nose. "We track the bead’s owner. Now." He moved toward the door, then paused. "And Zhen?"


    "Yes, Didi?"


    "Next time you lie to me," he said softly, "do it better."


    Lián’s thumb brushed the edge of his blade, his voice deceptively light. "At least tell me this yaoguai in scholar’s robes was handsome. If I’m to be haunted, I’d prefer something pleasing to look at."


    Zhen rolled his eyes and shouldered past, though his fingers lingered half a breath too long on the doorframe. "Focus, Didi. Our mystery host didn’t dose us with memory-herbs for a courtship."


    Beyond the threshold, the inn held its breath. No creak of floorboards, no rustle of robes, just the hollow silence of a snare waiting to spring.


    They stepped out…and the world split.


    The hallway before them no longer existed.


    Where there had once been polished wood and the murmur of other guests, now only ruin remained. The floorboards yawned open like rotten teeth, revealing a black maw beneath. The roof sagged, its beams skeletal fingers clutching at the remnants of plaster.


    A draft whistled through gaps in the walls, carrying the scent of mildew and long-dead ashes.


    Zhen whirled back. Their room still stood intact behind them, the rumpled bed, the cold incense burner, even the damned tapestry’s foxes frozen mid-snarl.


    Through the doorway, it looked exactly as they’d left it: worn but lived-in.


    A sanctuary.


    A lie.


    Lián’s sword hissed free. "We didn’t move," he said, very softly. "The inn did."


    Above them, a single roof tile cracked loose and shattered on the broken floor. The sound echoed like a bone breaking.


    Zhen nudged a rotting floorboard with his boot. It crumbled like stale cake into the darkness below. "I’m not sure about that ''the inn moved'' theory. Feels like we’re in the same place." He cocked his head. "Unless we slept for two hundred years. You don’t look two centuries dustier, Didi."


    Lián flicked a cobweb from his sleeve. "If we did, at least the spiders have fine taste. They wove you a proper burial shroud."


    A gust of wind howled through the gaps in the walls, making the entire structure groan like a tired ghost.


    "Well," Zhen said brightly, "no matter what eldritch nonsense this is, I vote we don’t stay to admire the décor."


    "Finally," Lián sighed, "something we agree on."


    As if offended, the building gave a final creaking shudder—half warning, half farewell.


    The stairs groaned underfoot, each step exhaling a puff of dust that glittered in the thin moonlight. Zhen led with his sword drawn, Lián a half-pace behind—close enough to share breath, far enough to strike.


    The inn’s main room sprawled before them, preserved in grotesque perfection.


    It was exactly as they remembered: the same overturned stools, the same smudged counter where the innkeeper had slammed her cleaver, even the same half-peeled mural of a mountain spirit on the far wall. Only the decay betrayed the truth. The wood had grayed, the colors bleached by time. The hearth lay cold, its ashes long since scattered to the wind. And the air…


    Zhen wrinkled his nose. “Smells like a library’s ghost.”


    Lián’s blade tip lifted toward the shadowed corner where the hooded man had sat.


    “There.”


    The table stood untouched by dust, its surface polished as if by anxious hands. On it rested a single jade bead, twin to the one they’d found upstairs. This one pulsed faintly, casting greenish light over the grain of the wood—illuminating a single character carved into the table beneath it:


    忘


    (Wàng: Forget)


    Zhen reached for it.


    Lián’s hand clamped around his wrist.


    “Don’t.” His grip was iron. “That’s not a trail. It’s a trap.”


    Above them, the rafters creaked.


    A sound like laughter.


    “UP!” Lián’s command tore through the chaos as he vaulted back up the stairs, Zhen half a step behind.


    The inn flickered around them.


    One heartbeat, a corpse-shell of rot, floorboards gaping like ribcages.


    The next, alive with yesterday’s smoke and spilled wine.


    Then back again, faster, faster, a lantern’s stuttering death throes.


    Zhen’s phantom wound pulsed in time with each shift, the pain a blade twisting deeper with every flash. He grabbed for the railing, but his hand passed through it as the wood dissolved into another era.


    Then the real laughter came.


    It wasn’t a sound. It was a violation. A screech of splintered bone dragged across the strings of a broken erhu, vibrating inside their skulls like a parasite burrowing into meat. Lián’s knees buckled, his hands slamming over his ears, but the noise wasn’t outside him anymore. It was in his veins, in his teeth, chewing through his divine bones like they were kindling.


    Zhen’s scream was lost in the onslaught. His phantom wound ruptured. Not memory, not illusion, but real. Hot blood seared down his ribs as the world tore apart beneath them. The floor didn’t collapse. It unraveled, threads of reality snapping one by one, each a whip-crack of agony against their senses.


    Then.


    Falling.


    Not through air, but through nothing. No wind, no sound, just the suffocating press of the void against their skin, cold as a corpse’s gasp. Zhen flailed, grasping for Lián, for his sword, for anything. But his fingers closed on emptiness. His lungs burned. His golden core sputtered like a guttered candle.


    This isn’t falling, he realized, wild and half-mad with terror.


    This is being unmade.


    Somewhere in the dark, Lián choked on a gasp. Not pain, not fear, but recognition. The raw, animal understanding of prey that knows it has no teeth.


    Gods weren’t meant to feel this!


    The void swallowed their screams.


    "Quiet at last, Zhen thought, before remembering that only the dead get silence this deep."