Light came back slowly, the way memory returns to a man who has fainted—not all at once, but in unwilling pieces.
Lin Yue felt grass first. Then warmth, real warmth, sunlight instead of the soulless grey glow the village had worn like a shroud for five days straight. Then he heard birdsong, and it took him a full three seconds to understand why that sound felt so wrong.
He hadn't heard a single bird since they'd walked through the gate.
He opened his eyes.
Above him, branches. Not the skeletal, bone-white trees of the Burial Forest, and not the crooked funeral pines that lined every road in Qingmu Village—this was an enormous old camphor tree, its canopy wide enough to swallow the sky, sunlight breaking through its leaves in scattered gold coins that moved when the wind moved. He was lying beneath it in soft grass, his coat damp with dew, and for one long, disoriented moment he simply lay there and let himself breathe.
"You're awake."
