It didn't just look back.
It moved.
The shadow inside the obsidian coffin peeled itself away from the black stone like wet paper coming off glass.
It hit the hallway floor with a sound like raw meat slapping concrete.
Heavy. Wet. Wrong.
"Ren," his grandmother whispered. Her voice was barely there. "Don't move."
Ren couldn't have moved if he wanted to.
The air pressure in the hallway had dropped so fast his ears popped. Made his sinuses ache. The smell of burning sage was gone, replaced by something metallic and sharp.
Iron. Ash. The smell of old blood.
The shadow rose.
It wasn't just darkness. It was a writhing mass of black hair—thick strands that moved like they were underwater, protecting something that glowed faintly at its center.
A soft, pulsing light. Like a heartbeat made of phosphorus.
The thing hissed.
Static on a dead radio channel. White noise with teeth.
Tick.
The sound came from inside Ren's skull.
[ SYSTEM INITIALIZATION... ]
Text burned itself across his vision. Not a hallucination—he could feel it searing behind his eyeballs. His mind was trying to make sense of the chaos, translating ancient intent into something that looked like a computer interface.
[ ENTITY DETECTED: CORRUPTED GUARDIAN ]
[ THREAT LEVEL: LETHAL ]
The Guardian lunged.
Not at Ren.
At his grandmother.
She didn't scream. Didn't freeze.
She moved with the kind of speed that comes from years of practice. Her hand shot into her cardigan pocket and came out with a yellow paper talisman covered in red ink symbols.
She snapped her wrist.
The paper ignited in mid-air with a burst of green flame that made the hallway smell like ozone and burned copper.
WHOOSH.
A translucent green barrier shimmered into existence between them and the monster. Like a wall made of emerald glass.
Ren's eyes widened.
It's real.
For eighteen years, he'd thought his grandmother was just... eccentric. The prayer beads, the sage burning, the way she wouldn't let him hang mirrors in certain spots.
But she'd been holding back the dark this whole time.
CRACK.
The barrier shattered instantly.
The Guardian's claws tore through the green light like it was tissue paper. The beast was too strong. Too hungry.
It kept coming.
Ren stepped forward.
He didn't think about it. Didn't plan it.
Instinct took the wheel.
His hand moved on its own. Thumb pressed against middle finger. Index finger raised.
The gesture felt familiar. Like muscle memory from a life he'd never lived.
"Kneel."
He didn't shout.
He stated it.
The air above the Guardian hardened into an invisible hammer.
BOOM.
The beast slammed face-first into the hardwood floor. The boards cracked under the impact. The whole house shook like something heavy had been dropped from a great height.
His grandmother gasped, clutching her chest with both hands.
She stared at Ren's hand position, her face draining of all color.
"That gesture..." she whispered. "That exists in sealed execution manuals. Not public ones."
She backed away from him slightly.
"That is the Imperial Suppression Art. That magic has been lost for two thousand years."
Ren ignored her. He couldn't hear her properly—there was a humming sound in his ears, coming from whatever was trapped inside the writhing shadow.
He twisted his wrist downward.
"Compress."
The shadow imploded.
All that darkness crushed into a single point, then nothing. Gone.
**Clink.**
A small object fell onto the floorboards.
It wasn't a crystal or a gem.
It was a white jade hairpin, carved in the shape of a phoenix with its wings spread. Delicate. Beautiful. Ancient.
Ren fell to his knees.
The numbness in his arm turned into agonizing pain, like someone was driving nails through his bones. He reached out with shaking fingers and picked up the hairpin.
It was warm.
Body temperature.
Like it had just been taken from someone's hair.
[ ARTIFACT RECLAIMED:
THE PHOENIX PIN ]
[ MEMORY FRAGMENT UNLOCKED: "THE BOND" ]
Grief hit him like a sledgehammer to the chest.
Not sadness.
Amputation.
He felt phantom pain in a part of his soul he didn't know existed. A presence. Someone important. Someone lost.
The weight of a promise made in blood—a bond that had defied death itself.
*"Wait for me,"* he had told someone.
*"I will anchor you,"* she had promised back.
Tears blurred Ren's vision. Hot, confused tears that didn't belong to an eighteen-year-old boy who'd never lost anyone important.
"Ren?"
His grandmother was standing over him now. She wasn't looking at the spot where the monster had been anymore.
She was looking at him.
With suspicion.
"You just destroyed a Spirit Guardian with a single word," she said, her voice trembling. "And you used a Royal Mudra that shouldn't exist outside of imperial archives."
She knelt down to his eye level.
"Ren... look at me."
Ren looked up. His eyes were fading from green back to brown, but the sadness in them was centuries old.
"Who are you?" she asked quietly. "Because my grandson gets C's in History. He thinks 'Qi' is a type of tea. He definitely doesn't know execution-class magic."
Ren wiped the tears from his face with the back of his hand.
He felt disoriented. Like waking up from two different dreams at the same time and not knowing which one was real.
"I'm Ren," he said softly. "I'm still me, Grandma."
He stood up slowly, swaying like he'd just gotten off a carnival ride.
He held up the hairpin. It caught the hallway light, throwing tiny rainbows on the walls.
"But when I touched that coffin... I felt *him*. The Shaman's memories. They aren't just pictures in my head. They're... heavy."
His grandmother stared at him for a long moment.
Then she looked at the hairpin—clearly an artifact that didn't belong in the 21st century.
"Old family records," she whispered, touching the amulet at her neck. "Fragments. Half-burned manuals. Warnings passed down in whispers."
Her voice got smaller.
"They said our bloodline was a lock, not a gift. We were meant to keep the power sleeping, Ren. We were the jailers."
She looked at the empty obsidian coffin, still sitting in its wooden crate.
"And you just turned the key."
Suddenly, the blue text in Ren's vision started scrolling faster.
[ SYSTEM STATUS: ONLINE ]
[ WELCOME BACK. ]
[ IDENTITY PARTIAL MATCH: MINISTER-CLASS SIGNATURE ]
[ ALERT: UNAUTHORIZED MAGIC DETECTED. ]
[ UNDERWORLD NETWORK: SIGNATURE REGISTERED. ]
[ DELETION PROTOCOL INITIATED. ]
[ PURGE WINDOW ESTIMATED: 72 HOURS. ]
Ren's blood turned to ice water in his veins.
"Grandma," he said, his voice hardening. "We have a problem."
"What is it?"
"That spirit wasn't just guarding the hairpin. It was a *seal*," Ren said, clutching the phoenix pin so tight his knuckles went white. "And by breaking it, I just pinged their radar."
He looked up at the ceiling, as if he could see through the roof and the sky, straight into whatever dark dimension was now watching him.
"The Underworld knows I'm here."
His grandmother grabbed his arm. Her grip was tight enough to leave bruises.
The color had completely left her face.
"The Underworld?" she choked out. "Ren, if they tracked that energy signature... they will send Enforcers. They will send Reapers."
"Reapers?" Ren asked, trying to force a laugh. It came out as more of a cough. "Like... skeletons in black robes? Like in the movies?"
"Movies are fiction," his grandmother said grimly. "Reapers are bureaucratic executioners. And to them, you are a glitch that needs to be deleted."
Ren looked at his right hand. He could still feel the echo of the 'Kneel' command buzzing in his nerves like electricity.
"I have this power," he admitted, clenching his fist. "It feels like... like a nuclear reactor hooked up to a car battery. But I don't know the controls yet. If they come for us tonight, I can't fight them. Not properly."
His grandmother took a deep breath.
The fear in her eyes was replaced by something harder. Steel resolve.
She wasn't just a grandmother anymore. She was the Protector of the Wu Family bloodline.
"Then we don't fight," she said sharply. "We hide. We use the Old Ways."
She pointed toward the kitchen.
"Go. Get the jar of coarse salt from under the sink and the cinnabar ink from my sewing kit. If we line every threshold and window before midnight, we might be able to mask your spiritual signature."
[ NEW OBJECTIVE: ASSIST IN WARDING PERIMETER ]
[ TIME SENSITIVE: COMPLETE BEFORE MIDNIGHT ]
Ren nodded. He slipped the hairpin into his jeans pocket.
It felt heavier than it should have. Like carrying a piece of tombstone.
"I'll get the salt," he said.
He paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked back at the demolished hallway. Shattered floorboards. Glass from the broken lightbulb. The empty obsidian coffin sitting in its wooden crate like an accusation.
"Grandma?"
"Yes?" She was already pulling more yellow talismans from her cardigan pocket.
"I have school tomorrow," Ren said. It sounded ridiculous even as he said it, but he needed to know. "Do I still... do I still have to go?"
His grandmother paused in her preparation.
She looked at the glowing green embers of her spent talisman, then at her grandson who was now a target for the entire supernatural bureaucracy.
"Ren," she said seriously. "Reapers hunt for spiritual anomalies. If you stay home from school, you look suspicious. If you go to classes, you're just another face in the crowd."
She met his eyes.
"You need camouflage, Ren. Being normal is your best defense right now."
Ren nodded slowly.
The logic made sense, even if everything else had stopped making sense.
"Camouflage," he repeated. "I can do normal."
He turned and ran toward the kitchen, his socks sliding on the hardwood.
They had seventy-two hours.
And the war had just begun.
---
[END CHAPTER 2]