Underground, Astrology Tower. Moonlight seeped through the skylight.
Shen Yuzhu opened his eyes.
He knew--that stone at the bottom of the well was still trembling.
Not that someone had told him. At the bottom of his empty space, the pressed trace left behind when that village had been covered--trembled on its own.
But the way it trembled had changed--not between existence and non-existence, but between existence and being remembered.
He did not rise. His empty space was open. Depth 0.41, waveform normal, breath lines smooth. Everything as usual.
But he knew--a layer had just been laid over it.
Not pressed on from outside. Grown on its own--from the bottom of the empty space. Like water beneath ice, after freezing, the surface showed no change, but the flow below had already been locked.
The empty space was still there.
But a layer lay over it--making it indistinguishable from "never having existed."
The transparent segment of his left arm extended from his neck all the way to his fingertips, in the moonlight almost invisible. In that instant, it trembled ever so slightly. Not fading. Pressed by another kind of "completeness."
He did not touch that arm. Only continued breathing.
Inhale--empty--exhale.
Then he tried to speak it.
He opened his mouth. Vocal cords prepared to vibrate. Tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth--the initial consonant of the character "Fu."
Then--that sound did not come out.
Not that he swallowed it back. The event of "producing this sound" was no longer permitted by the moments that followed.
He paused. Tried another way. He picked up a brush and wrote on the stone slab: "The empty space was--"
Before the last character landed. The strokes of the character "Fu" (cover)--by the second stroke--the ink contracted on its own, like water being sucked away. Not disappeared. Never written.
He looked down at that unfinished line.
He knew there should have been something there--a sentence, a description, an arrow pointing to that layer. But when he read it, he read only a sentence already complete.
Not blank.
That line refused to admit it was "unfinished."
It was complete on its own. So complete it did not need him to continue writing.
He set down the brush.
The characters on the stone slab were neat, symmetrical, without hesitation. Like another person's handwriting. Like no one had ever written anything "incomplete" there.
From the shadows, footsteps. Extremely light. Like snow falling on snow.
Helian Sha walked out. Fainter than the last time they met. His form was like ink washed many times, edges blurred, nearly dissolving into the shadows of the stone wall. His voice had no inflection, as if the stone wall itself were speaking.
"Not covering."
A pause of one breath.
"Not allowing it to be asked."
Shen Yuzhu did not press further. He only let that sentence stay in his empty space. At the bottom of that sentence, an extremely fine pressed trace began to grow.
Helian Sha said nothing more. Footsteps. One step. One step. One step. Disappearing into the shadows.
After he left, Shen Yuzhu tried to sink to the bottom of his empty space--to touch that layer that had just grown.
That road was still there. He had walked it a thousand times.
But this time, the starting point of the road was different.
He closed his eyes, letting his perception descend along that invisible passage. The passage was still there. Width unchanged, direction unchanged. But he descended for a long time--long enough that he should have reached the bottom--and touched nothing.
Not that the empty space had deepened.
He was not moving.
He tried another way. Instead of "walking," he let the shadow of Gu Changfeng's crack inside his empty space--touch it. That shadow was the residual resonance between his empty space and Gu Changfeng's. It was more sensitive than his consciousness.
The shadow touched something.
Then--was repelled.
Not pain. Not refusal.
That thing did not acknowledge "shadow" as an object it could respond to.
The third breath.
The empty space opened on its own.
Not that he entered it. The entrance pulled him in.
He sank to the bottom. There, a new layer had appeared, one he had never seen before--not grown by him. Pressed into being. The surface of that layer was smooth as a mirror. Not a single crack. Not a single gap. Not a single arc.
Exactly the same as the ice at the mouth of that village's well.
The entrance closed.
But he did not open his eyes immediately.
He tried, in his mind, to mark that position again.
"There is the bottom of the empty space."
This sentence, in his mind, paused for one breath.
Then--
The word "bottom" became unstable.
Not disappeared. It no longer knew for certain that it pointed to that place just now.
In that instant, he saw a character. Not "Qi." The position of the fourth stroke of the character "Qi"--there was no stroke there, but a pressed indentation. One breath later, that image disappeared. He was not sure whether he had truly seen it or whether it was an illusion produced when his empty space was pressed.
The entrance closed.
His empty space returned to normal: depth 0.41, shape complete, breathing smooth.
But he knew--something had just happened. That thing was not remembered by him. It was remembered by his body.
He tried to return to that state.
Could not enter.
Not that the door was locked. The door--no longer acknowledged him as "someone who had entered."
He continued breathing.
Inhale--empty--exhale.
Empty space depth 0.41, waveform normal, breath lines smooth.
But he knew--that thing no longer needed to be confirmed.
The transparent segment of his left arm faded another half degree. Not fading. That layer of "cannot confirm" had grown into his body on its own.
Breathing continued.
Inhale--empty--exhale.
[CHAPTER 224 · END]