The shards did not fall.
They hung there, suspended in the dead air of the mirror chamber, a hundred broken constellations catching light that had no source, each fragment turning with agonizing slowness as though the room itself had forgotten how gravity worked the moment Gu Yanchen crossed the threshold. Lin Yue watched one piece drift past his shoulder, no bigger than a coin, and in its curved surface he caught a sliver of his own reflection—calm, unblinking, entirely unremarkable given what had just happened.
The pressure in the room had not lessened. It had simply changed shape.
Where the mirrors' voices had pressed down cold and clinical, this was different—heavier, older, and strangely reluctant, like a held breath. Lin Yue noted the way the crimson light bleeding faintly through the suspended glass seemed to bend away from the black of Gu Yanchen's robes, curling around him the way water curled around a stone it could not move.
