The crimson flower opened like something waking from a very long sleep it had never wanted to end.
Lin Yue did not step back. He noted, with the same distant precision he applied to everything, that stepping back would accomplish nothing—the chamber had already stopped behaving like a room with an inside and an outside. Whatever was about to happen was going to happen to all of them, wherever they stood.
"Lin Yue." Gu Yanchen's voice had lost its careful neutrality entirely now. "Move away from it."
"Moving won't change what it wants."
"It doesn't get to want anything from you."
The petals peeled back further, slow, deliberate, and from the center of them rose smoke the color of old mourning cloth—black at the edges, bleeding into a deep, tired red where it caught what little light remained in the chamber. It did not billow. It gathered, patient and total, the way ink gathers in water, until it had shaped itself into something that filled the space from floor to ceiling.
