The single curving line sat upon the weave, stark against the luminous fiber. Lin Xiu lay prone on the damp moss where he had tumbled. Yunhe released the bamboo stem. Pine soot splattered across wet shale, pooling near the boy's motionless sandals.
He knelt by the junior, whose respiration came thin against the roar of the falls. Lin Xiu’s pulse was sluggish beneath his thumb, the boy's brow cold as river silt. The meridians were undisturbed, yet their circulation had halted. Yunhe gathered the roll of weave resting on the rock table. Along its edge, a chill pulse fluttered through the threads—neither qi nor blood-heat, but a starved, arid suction.
Tying the silk shut with hemp cord, Yunhe tucked it deep into his sleeve and lifted the unconscious youth. In the lower dormitories, the other disciples stepped aside on the flagstones, their voices hushed, attributing the sudden swoon to some esoteric cultivation backlash.
He settled Lin Xiu on a straw cot and traced a perimeter of vegetative qi across the threshold before retreating up the terraced slopes. Concealed within a thicket of dwarf cypress above the infirmary courtyard, he watched the gravel path below as twilight turned the stone navy.
Past midnight, a lantern-less shape ascended the steps: Elder Yue Fengmian, his gray outer robe trailing noiselessly over the damp steps as he pushed into the infirmary.
Through a small, unlatched window, Yunhe saw it. Yue Fengmian stood over Lin Xiu’s cot, his back to the window, but the angle allowed Yunhe a glimpse of the elder’s right hand. It was not the strong, supple hand Yunhe knew. It was shriveled, withered like an ancient root, the skin drawn taut over skeletal bones, the nails yellowed and brittle. A faint, sickly green luminescence pulsed from it. The elder extended this hand, placing it gently over Lin Xiu’s chest, directly above the boy’s heart. A silver-blue mist, ethereal and shimmering, began to rise from Lin Xiu’s still form, drawn inexorably towards Yue Fengmian’s withered hand. As the mist flowed, the green pulse in the elder’s hand intensified, and with each stolen wisp, a subtle, almost imperceptible rejuvenation spread across the elder’s skin, filling out the sunken flesh, smoothing the wrinkles, restoring a youthful sheen. The silver-blue mist was not qi. It was life essence, the very spark of being.
The artifact in Yunhe's sleeve thrummed in unison with that green glow, sharing the same hollow suction. The elder was not guiding a disciple's brush toward peace; he was using Yunhe's ink to feed on living souls.
Yunhe backed into the gloom of the crags until the sick bay was lost behind him. In a damp cavern curtained by wild creepers, he laid the silk flat across a granite slab. The dark mark on its center pulled faintly at his fingers. Grounding his heels into the gravel, he channeled his intent directly into the wet pigment. Mist and indigo light swallowed the stone walls.
Cold earth hardened under his cloth boots. Dried ink had the smell of scorched bone and stagnant marsh water. Ahead, where the flat current curled through flat reeds, a small skiff bobbed beneath a gray sky. Kuang Zongtu sat on the thwart, gripping a bamboo pole, his crimson breastplate flattened and streaked with wash.
The brawny warrior jerked his cord from the water and glared toward the bank, ink-lined brows gathering violently. “Scholar! You dare enter your own cell?” He splashed off the skiff, stomping across flat gray pebbles. “Come to gloat over your handiwork?”
Yunhe kept his hands folded within his wide sleeves. “I require the truth of this place, Kuang Zongtu.”
“Truth?” Kuang spat into the reed-bed, the saliva vanishing like wiped pigment. “You think your pretty little rendering holds secrets beyond my humiliation? It holds nothing but stagnation! Every drift is the same, every carp I hook is empty charcoal. But you—your breath is still warm. You are flesh.”
His ink-stained fingers clamped tight onto Yunhe’s collar, dragging him forward. “You confined me here! Do you not smell what seeps beneath this current? Not clean iron or blood, but rotten grease!”
Kuang dragged him into the gray shallows and forced him under. The river felt shockingly icy against Yunhe’s neck. Through the murky wash, past still, two-dimensional fish, the bed revealed itself. It was neither gravel nor silt, but vast lattices of calcified human remains: rib cages woven like wicker, femurs stacked into dikes, hollow craniums serving as ballast for the current.
Surfacing, Kuang hauled Yunhe onto the gravel bank, gasping, “A charnel pit. The old dog has been harvesting men for centuries, and you handed him another net.”
A convulsion split the firmament overhead. The gray sky ruptured into veins of orange fire, curling inward like scorched paper. Ash rained over the reeds as heat blistered the surface of the stream; outside the silk, Yue Fengmian had brought a flame to the canvas.