The scream died as quickly as it had risen, swallowed by the trees before its echo had a chance to properly settle. For a moment none of them moved, the three of them standing at the village's edge with the fading sound still hanging somewhere between them and the forest.
Gu Chen kept his sword raised, eyes fixed on the treeline. "That came from the forest."
"No." Xia Qing's voice was tight, her artifact still glowing faintly in her grip. "It came from deeper. Further in than the edge."
Lin Tianren looked down at the fox instead of the trees. Its ears had gone rigid, angled toward the forest with a focus that had nothing casual left in it.
**[Spiritual Fluctuation: Increasing]**
**[Source: Unable to Determine]**
He held up a hand before either of his companions could commit to a direction. "We investigate first. We don't rush in blind."
Gu Chen glanced at him, something like reassessment crossing his expression, and nodded without argument.
They found the source of the scream a few hundred meters into the trees, the forest floor churned up around a figure crumpled against the base of an old spirit-oak. A spiritual herb gatherer, judging by the satchel still half-tangled around his shoulder, its contents scattered across the moss.
His injuries were the first thing that struck Lin Tianren as wrong, before he'd even fully processed the man's face. No claw marks tore through the fabric of his robes. No blade wound opened cleanly along his side. Instead, dark purple veins spread across his exposed skin in branching, deliberate patterns, radiating outward from a point somewhere near his sternum like something had been growing beneath the surface rather than striking from without.
"These aren't normal injuries," Xia Qing said, kneeling carefully beside him.
"Then what did this to him?" Gu Chen asked, scanning the treeline as if the answer might still be watching.
Lin Tianren asked the same question a different way, silently.
**[Analysis]**
**[Unable to Identify Source]**
The response unsettled him more than any specific threat would have. The system had catalogued demon generals down to fractional bloodline percentages, tracked corruption signatures across an entire war. A wound it couldn't classify at all was a different category of problem entirely.
He knelt and pressed careful pressure against the worst of the wounds, drawing on the same balanced circulation that had carried him through every crisis since a forest half a world away had first taught it to him. The man's eyes fluttered open partway, unfocused.
"Run," he whispered, the word costing him visibly.
"What happened here?" Lin Tianren asked, keeping his voice low and steady.
The man's gaze drifted toward the forest beyond them, something in it that looked less like fear and more like the specific, exhausted certainty of someone who'd already accepted what was coming for him. "We found something," he said.
"What did you find?"
His breathing had gone ragged, each word arriving slower than the last. "It wasn't a beast." A long pause stretched between the words, long enough that Lin Tianren thought he'd lost consciousness before the man finished. "It was waiting for us."
His eyes closed, and he went still, breathing shallow but present. Not dead. Not conscious enough to say anything further either.
They carried him back toward the village as the light continued failing, and the deeper wrongness of Moonfall Village revealed itself slowly, layer by layer, the closer they got to its center.
It wasn't the emptiness that unsettled Lin Tianren first. It was how completely undisturbed everything else remained around that emptiness. Doors stood unlocked but closed, as though their owners had simply stepped away for a moment rather than vanished entirely. A meal sat cooling on a table inside the nearest house, bowls still arranged for what looked like a full family. Cooking fires in two other homes still carried faint warmth beneath their ash, banked but never properly extinguished. Drying racks strung between houses held rows of spiritual herbs left exactly where careful hands had hung them, some still fresh enough to carry their original color. A child's wooden toy sat abandoned in the dirt path, mid-tumble, as if dropped in motion rather than set down deliberately. In at least two of the houses they passed, small cultivation formations still pulsed faintly on their own, tending fields or wards that no one remained to actually benefit from.
"They didn't leave voluntarily," Xia Qing said quietly, taking it all in.
"Then where did they go?" Gu Chen asked, though the question had nowhere left to land.
Lin Tianren moved through the silence carefully, cataloguing what wasn't there as much as what was. No blood marked the paths between houses. No structure showed signs of forced entry or fire. No debris suggested any struggle large enough to account for an entire settlement disappearing at once.
Whatever had happened here hadn't happened through violence, at least not the kind that left evidence behind. The whole village had simply stopped, all at once, mid-motion, and never started again.
He found the stone pillar standing at the village's center, weathered enough that it had clearly stood there long before Moonfall itself had been founded around it. A symbol was carved deep into its surface, worn smooth by time but still legible enough to trace with a fingertip.
The moment his eyes settled on it fully, something in his own blood answered — faint, distant, but unmistakable, the same quiet resonance he'd felt once beneath the Beast Queen Sect's compound, in a chamber that had called him something he hadn't yet earned the right to be called.
**[Unknown Ancient Inscription Detected]**
"Can you identify it?" he asked, quiet enough that neither Gu Chen nor Xia Qing noticed him speaking at all.
**[Unable to determine.]**
Then, a beat later, something considerably heavier settled into the notification.
**[Warning: Inscription Contains Sovereign-Level Energy Residue]**
His expression shifted despite his best effort to keep it neutral. The system didn't elaborate further, didn't confirm or deny what the word "sovereign" might actually mean carved into a pillar in a village that had lost forty-some people without a trace of struggle. He filed the reaction away carefully, alongside everything else tonight had already given him no clean answer for.
The fox stopped abruptly in front of one of the abandoned houses on the village's far edge, its disguised form going rigid in a way that had nothing to do with the cold settling over the evening.
"What is it?" Lin Tianren asked, following its gaze toward the doorway.
It didn't answer, only stared, and he stepped inside carefully, the others hanging back a pace behind him.
The room was completely empty — no furniture disturbed, no signs of the same undisturbed domesticity the other houses had carried. Just bare walls and a swept dirt floor, and a single deep scratch mark gouged across the far wall, four parallel grooves cut with a precision that felt less like an accident and more like a signature.
The fox growled low at the sight of it, quiet but unmistakable.
*Something had been here,* Lin Tianren thought, studying the marks carefully. *Recently, and deliberately.*
"System," he said, once they'd regrouped outside. "Scan the entire village. Everything you can reach."
Several seconds of silence followed, longer than any scan he'd requested before.
**[Scanning...]**
**[Spiritual Residue Detected: 47 Individuals]**
He froze completely. "Forty-seven?"
Gu Chen and Xia Qing both turned toward him, catching the shift in his expression even without hearing what had caused it. He kept his own reaction carefully contained, unwilling yet to explain a system neither of them knew he carried.
**[Current Life Signs Detected: 0]**
Forty-seven people had lived in this village. Forty-seven people, and not one of them remained anywhere the system could currently detect — not dead in any visible sense, not hiding, not fled. Simply gone, in numbers considerably larger than the "three groups of herb gatherers" the mission board had bothered to note.
Full night settled over Moonfall Village by the time they finished their circuit of what remained of it, and moving the injured gatherer any further tonight risked undoing whatever fragile stability Lin Tianren had managed to stabilize in him. They agreed, without much debate, to hold position in the village until morning.
He stood alone in the central courtyard afterward, the ancient pillar a dark shape against the rising moonlight, the fox padding quietly to settle beside him.
Then he heard it.
Footsteps. Slow, deliberate, spaced with an evenness that felt considerably more like intention than exhaustion.
*Tap. Tap. Tap.*
Not from the forest. From somewhere inside the village itself.
Gu Chen's sword cleared its sheath instantly, the sound sharp in the settling quiet. Xia Qing's artifact flared fully awake in her grip, casting pale light across the courtyard's edge.
Lin Tianren turned slowly, tracking the sound to its source, and found it waiting in the open doorway of one of the houses they'd already checked, already confirmed empty.
A shadow stood there now, still and shapeless in the dim light, its outline betraying nothing about what actually cast it.
"Who's there?" he called out, voice steady despite everything the last hour had already cost his composure.
The shadow didn't answer. It didn't move at all, standing in that doorway with a patience that felt considerably more deliberate than anything simply lost or frightened would carry.
The system flared violently at the edge of his vision, urgency threading through every line of the response.
**[Warning]**
**[Unknown Presence Detected]**
**[Threat Level: Unable to Calculate]**
The shadow's head began to lift, slow and unhurried, and Lin Tianren felt every instinct he'd built over the last month scream the same warning at once, a half-second before the system confirmed it in language considerably more direct than its usual careful phrasing.
**[Emergency Protocol Activated]**
**[Host Has Been Recognized As a Target]**
**[Recommended Action: Leave Immediately]**
**[Probability of Survival If Remaining: 23.7%]**