The heat of the crater had been an artificial thing—a remnant of the sky's tantrum—but the cold of the mountain was eternal. As Mo Ran's massive weight slumped against him, Xie Yan felt the true scale of the task he had stumbled into. The man was not just heavy in body; he was heavy in concept. His aura was a jagged, thrumming discord that threatened to shatter the delicate composure Xie Yan had maintained for a century. It felt like trying to hold a collapsing star inside a porcelain jar, the glass already beginning to spider-web under the pressure.
"Mu!" Xie Yan called out, his voice cracking against the rising wind. "Elder Mu! Assist me, or we both become ash and forgotten ink!"
A flurry of yellowed paper swirled at the lip of the crater, coalescing into the anxious, flickering form of the library spirit. Mu looked down at the scene—the white-robed scribe holding the soot-blackened demon—and his parchment skin turned a shade paler.
"You've picked up a corpse, Xie Yan!" Mu wailed, his robes rustling like a thousand turning pages. "He is riddled with the Emperor's Light. If you bring that... that thing into the Archive, the wards will incinerate us both! The library is a sanctuary of order! He is the literal definition of chaos, an ontological error in the flesh!"
"He is breathing," Xie Yan countered, his fingers digging into the rough, scorched fabric of Mo Ran's tunic. The heat was blistering his palms, the smell of singed silk filling his nose, but he did not let go. "And if the wards try to burn him, I will rewrite the laws of this mountain stone by stone. Now, help me move him. The Scouts will return with a Legion once they realize their vanguard has been silenced. We have less than a bell's chime before the sky opens again, and I do not intend to be found standing in a hole."
With a reluctant, wheezing groan, Mu extended his hands. He didn't use physical strength; instead, he commanded the gravity of the library's domain. A platform of solidified air, shaped like a giant, flattened scroll and inscribed with the characters for "Lighter than Down," slid beneath Mo Ran.
Slowly, the unconscious giant was lifted from the molten stone. Even floating, he looked like a mountain being moved. Every inch of progress back up the hidden path was a battle. Xie Yan's lungs felt as though they were filled with ground glass. His body, weakened by a century of sedentary study and the thin, spirit-starved air of exile, screamed at him.
Each time Mo Ran convulsed, a wave of Abyssal Dissonance radiated outward. To Xie Yan's sensitive, scribe-trained ears, it sounded like a golden bell being struck inside his skull. It made his nose bleed, the crimson drops freezing into tiny rubies before they could even hit his robes. The environment itself began to warp; the snow around Mo Ran's floating form didn't melt—it turned black and began to float upward, gravity losing its grip in the presence of a dying Abyssal Prince.
"He is a reactor about to melt," Mu whispered as they finally reached the massive, iron-bound oak doors of the library. "The poison is looking for a way out. It's a divine executioner's script, Xie Yan. It's designed to find the spirit root and twist it until it snaps like a dry twig. If it doesn't find a host or a vent, he will explode, and this valley will become a permanent scar on the map of the realms."
Xie Yan didn't answer. He kicked the doors open. The library hissed in protest. The thousands of books on the shelves shivered, their spirits sensing the intruder. The air grew thick with the smell of ozone. Xie Yan ignored the spiritual alarm and directed the air-platform toward his private sanctum—a room filled with the scent of cinnabar, sandalwood, and the quiet, rhythmic hum of his most powerful preservation wards.
He laid Mo Ran out on a stone plinth usually reserved for drying the world's most fragile, thousand-year-old scrolls. The contrast was stark: the dark, violent edges of the Abyssal Prince against the sterile, jade-white purity of the room. Mo Ran looked like a bloodstain on a masterpiece.
"Mu, fetch the Obsidian Inkwell and the Needle of Eternal Record," Xie Yan commanded. He was already moving, his hands a blur as he stripped away the burnt, fused remnants of Mo Ran's armor. The metal was hot to the touch, branded with the solar seals of the Heavenly Court.
"The Needle? You mean to... to write on his soul?" Mu's voice rose to a terrified shriek. "Xie Yan, that is the Forbidden Stroke! You'll be erased! The Court doesn't just kill Scribes who do that—they remove your name from every book ever written, from every memory ever held. You will have never existed! You will be a hole in history!"
"I have already died once," Xie Yan said, his voice dropping to a terrifyingly calm whisper. He reached into a hidden compartment beneath the jade desk and pulled out a small, pulsing vial. It contained his own distilled spirit-blood, harvested over decades of deep meditation. It glowed with a soft, melancholy silver light.
"I am going to perform the Soul-Binding Symmetry."
Xie Yan knelt by Mo Ran's side. The heat radiating from the warrior's skin was enough to singe Xie Yan's eyelashes. He took the Needle—a sliver of bone from a primordial god of memory—and dipped it into the silver blood.
He began to write. He didn't write on paper; he wrote directly onto the skin over Mo Ran's heart. The character was "Anchor." The moment the needle pierced the skin, the library went berserk. The windows caught a phantom wind, rattling in their frames. A localized storm of ink erupted from the nearby wells, swirling around the room like a cloud of black crows.
Mo Ran's eyes snapped open.
They weren't focused; they were two pits of boiling, crimson lava. A hand like a vice—scarred, soot-stained, and impossibly strong—clamped around Xie Yan's wrist. The pressure was so immense Xie Yan heard his own radius bone groan, a hairline fracture forming under the demon's grip.
"Be... still," Xie Yan hissed through clenched teeth, sweat rolling down his face and mixing with the ink. "If my hand slips now, your soul will scatter into the void like ash. Anchor, Mo Ran. You must remain."
The golden veins on Mo Ran's neck thrashed like live wires. Xie Yan felt the poison's intelligence then. It wasn't just a toxin; it was a sentience—a literal "Divine Will" sent to execute a target. It realized it couldn't kill Mo Ran quickly enough, so it saw a new, purer target: Xie Yan's high-grade, refined Celestial core. The poison began to leap across the gap, traveling up the Needle toward Xie Yan's fingers.
Xie Yan realized he couldn't stop it. He couldn't lock it away. There was only one path left: he had to become the filter. He had to take the poison into himself and use his Linguistical Cultivation to "edit" its lethality.
"You want a path?" Xie Yan whispered to the golden light, his eyes wide and wild. "Then take mine. But you will have to follow my syntax."
He turned the needle on himself. With a swift, agonizingly precise motion, he carved the mirror image of the "Anchor" ward into his own chest, slicing through his white robes and deep into the skin over his own heart.
The world vanished.
Xie Yan didn't scream; there was no air left in his lungs to do so. A bridge of white-hot lightning established itself between their two hearts.
Suddenly, Xie Yan wasn't in the library anymore. He was falling through the kaleidoscope of Mo Ran's memories. He felt the crushing weight of the Abyssal depths, where the water is so heavy it turns to ice. He felt the sting of a thousand blades in a forgotten war. He saw a young boy standing in a field of bone, holding a broken sword against a sky full of golden, judgmental eyes. He felt a loneliness so sharp it was physical—a hunger for a touch that didn't end in a wound.
And Mo Ran, in his delirium, felt the library. He felt the century of silence. He felt the cold, meticulous care Xie Yan gave to every fading word. He felt the Scribe's quiet, desperate rebellion against a perfect, heartless heaven. For a second, they weren't two people; they were a single, blurred consciousness.
The golden poison began to travel. It left Mo Ran's body, flowing through the "Symmetry" link and into Xie Yan.
Xie Yan's body arched, his head throwing back in a silent plea for air. His white robes began to glow with a sickly, divine gold. His Linguistical Cultivation—the habit of a lifetime—immediately went to work. His mind frantically began to "edit" the poison's definition as it entered his veins, rewriting the "Damage" into "Weight."
You are not an executioner, he thought, his vision swimming in gold. I define you. You are not Death. You are... a Burden. You are... shared.
The golden light slowly began to dim, receding from the edges of the room. The violent thrumming in the air softened into a low, rhythmic pulse that matched the ticking of the library's great water-clock.
Xie Yan fell forward, his chest heaving, his fingers slipping from the needle. His heart was no longer his own. It beat with a strange, syncopated rhythm—the "Double-Thump." One beat was his own—light, fast, and precise. The second beat was Mo Ran's—heavy, slow, and powerful.
He was cold. So cold. But inside his chest, there was a new, terrifying heat that threatened to consume him from the inside out.
On the plinth, Mo Ran's body finally relaxed. The golden veins had vanished, leaving behind a faint, silver-inked scar in the shape of Xie Yan's ward. The Prince looked younger in his sleep, the lines of rage around his mouth smoothing out into something resembling peace.
"You... you absolute, brilliant madman," Elder Mu whispered from the corner. He was hugging a heavy tome as if it could protect him from the heresy he had just witnessed. "You've done it. You've tied your life-thread to the very thing the Heavens want destroyed. If he dies, your heart stops. If he is tortured, you will feel the blade. You aren't his doctor, Xie Yan. You are his twin soul. You have committed the ultimate typo in the Book of Fate."
Xie Yan didn't have the strength to respond. He reached out, his ink-stained fingers trembling as they brushed a stray lock of dark hair from Mo Ran's forehead. The warrior's skin was no longer a furnace; it was just warm. Human.
"Not a twin," Xie Yan murmured, his eyes finally fluttering shut as the darkness of exhaustion rushed in to claim him. "A... co-author. We will write... the next page... together."
He collapsed onto the floor beside the plinth, his head resting near Mo Ran's hand. The silver and gold light in his chest continued to pulse, a secret lantern in the dark.
Thousands of miles away, in the highest tier of the Celestial Palace, the Bell of Divine Order—a relic that had not rung in ten thousand years—suddenly cracked down the middle. A single, mournful, earth-shaking note echoed through the halls of the gods, signaling that the Record had been changed by a hand that was not theirs.
The Emperor of Eternal Script opened his eyes. He looked toward the Exile Valley, his expression as cold as the stars. "Find him," the Emperor whispered. "And erase the ink."