The Cloud-Thorn Sect had never opened its gates to an outsider in two hundred years.
And yet, they sent Kaifeng an invitation.
No pretense. No trap.
Just a single line carved into wood:
"Come. We wish to understand what we can no longer control."
Kaifeng arrived alone.
He walked through their gates like a shadow returning to a home that had never belonged to him.
The guards didn't stop him.
They didn't speak.
They simply watched as he passed — as if afraid that words might bend in his presence.
The elders greeted him in silence.
Seven seated. One standing.
Their eyes were calm, but behind them flickered the weight of centuries — of forms practiced without question, of a history polished so finely it no longer reflected the world.
The one standing elder bowed.
She was tall, old, and wore no blade.
"Lián Kaifeng," she said. "You've been called many things in the past year."
"Ghost. Heretic. Architect of collapse."
Kaifeng said nothing.
The elder smiled faintly.
"We'd like to ask you to explain… how you are doing what you do."
Kaifeng raised an eyebrow.
"I'm not doing anything."
"Then what is it that spreads in your name?"
"Memory," he said.
He stepped forward, barefoot, and traced a small line in the dust on the temple floor.
Then stepped beside it.
And waited.
Nothing happened.
Then one of the younger disciples, watching from the edge, twitched — as if he had just remembered something that had never been his.
The line in the dust blurred slightly.
One of the elders leaned forward, wary.
"You've created a form that teaches itself?"
Kaifeng shook his head.
"I've created nothing. You're still thinking in terms of style, scroll, legacy."
He turned toward them.
"What I do is only possible when the body forgets what it was told to remember."
"What you call error, I call return."
Silence.
Then the eldest among them — white robes, faded eyes — spoke for the first time.
"We once cast you out."
"And yet here you are."
Kaifeng met his gaze.
"You didn't cast me out. You buried me."
"I just learned to breathe underground."
From the hall's far end, a young woman stepped out of the shadows.
Kaifeng stiffened.
He knew her.
Elder Jiang's disciple.
She had tried to kill him once — in a courtyard duel no one recorded.
She bowed now. Not out of reverence — but out of something sharper.
"I want to unlearn everything I've mastered," she said.
The elders stirred in protest.
But Kaifeng nodded.
"Then you'll have to forget who you are before you learn who you were."
That night, in the courtyard of the Cloud-Thorn Sect, Kaifeng practiced a movement so flawed it made even the wind hesitate.
And across the chambers, behind shut doors, seven elders argued into the dark.
Because the question was no longer whether he was dangerous.
It was whether he had already won — by teaching people to forget what had never been theirs to begin with.
End of Chapter 18