The veiled figure did not breathe like a man.
He breathed like dust — as though every word cost him a year.
Zhui stood behind Kaifeng, one knee still on the stone, pale with strain. Whatever this figure had summoned, it was still pressing down on the room.
Kaifeng stepped forward. The wooden blade stayed at his side.
"You know me," he said.
The figure tilted its head, veil brushing the floor.
"I knew you before your hands forgot the motion."
"You were Pavilion?"
"No," the figure rasped.
"I was denied Pavilion."
He lifted a hand. Bandaged fingers uncoiled like dying roots.
"I walked the Listening Path too early. Too hungry. I reached the final step before I could hear what it was warning me about."
"What happened?" Kaifeng asked.
"I survived," the man said.
"That was the mistake."
The shrine seemed to lean inward.
Kaifeng felt it again — the pull, the echo. But now it wasn't his name.
It was movement.
Some buried instinct in his limbs wanted to complete a form he had only seen once — never taught, never finished.
And he knew, if he moved now, if he obeyed that rhythm—
"You'll vanish," the figure whispered.
Kaifeng didn't flinch.
"You'll forget not who you are — but who saw you."
Zhui finally rose behind him, coughing hard, blood at the corner of his mouth.
"Kaifeng—don't—this… this is a trap."
The veiled man turned toward him.
"Not a trap," he murmured.
"A mirror. A choice."
"You could finish it," he said to Kaifeng.
"And become what the sects always feared. A blade drawn without needing steel. A cut made in silence. A technique that forgets its wielder."
Kaifeng took a breath.
"And if I don't?"
The veil stirred in a breathless laugh.
"Then someone else will."
Outside, the second bell rang.
Once.
Twice.
A wind tore through the shrine, peeling back the curtain on the final wall.
There, etched in iron ink, was the complete sequence — ten movements, each bleeding into the next.
Kaifeng stepped toward it.
Zhui coughed again, stumbling.
"If you move wrong—"
Kaifeng lifted the wooden blade.
His eyes didn't blink.
His fingers didn't shake.
And he moved.
Not to remember.
But to confront what had remembered him.
The room shook. The echo howled, not as sound — but as absence.
And then—
Kaifeng stopped.
On the ninth step.
Not ten.
He turned to the veiled figure.
"This form doesn't end in a strike," he said.
"No," the figure replied.
"It ends in surrender."
Kaifeng exhaled.
And dropped the blade.
The silence shattered like glass.
The veil was gone.
And the man behind it was already dying — not by blade, not by wound.
By relief.
"Thank you," he said.
"I forgot my name... trying to carry what wasn't mine."
Kaifeng caught him as he fell.
"Then give it back," Kaifeng whispered.
"To who?"
Kaifeng looked up.
To Zhui.
End of Chapter 5