Lin Yu didn't sleep. He pretended to, which was almost the same thing.
He kept his eyes mostly shut and his tremor sense wide open. The black-aura figure in the corner didn't move for three hours. Just sat there, knees up, hood covering their face. Breathing slow and regular like someone asleep. But Lin Yu's soul sight said otherwise. The black aura pulsed occasionally, little flickers of activity. Whoever this was, they were awake and watching.
Around four in the morning, the figure stood up.
Lin Yu tracked them through tremor sense without opening his eyes. Light footsteps. Careful. Moving through the rows of sleeping civilians toward the back of the prayer hall. There was a side door there that led to the temple's storage rooms. The figure paused at the door, and Lin Yu felt a strange vibration. Not physical. More like a ripple in the karma field, a brief distortion in his soul sight that made the nearby auras flicker.
Then the figure slipped through the door and was gone.
Lin Yu counted to sixty. Then he got up.
He followed the vibration trail through the side door into a corridor he hadn't mapped yet. Stone walls, old wood, the smell of dust and forgotten offerings. His tremor sense picked up the figure about fifteen meters ahead, moving deeper into the temple's back rooms.
They stopped in what felt like a storage cellar. Below ground level. The vibrations were clearer down here, less interference from the people above.
Lin Yu pressed himself against the corridor wall and activated soul sight fully. Through the stone, he could see the black aura. And now that he was closer, he could make out details he'd missed before. The blackness wasn't uniform. It had texture. Swirls of deep purple and dark red moving through it like oil in water. And at the center, a seal signature.
Faint, corrupted, but readable.
A fragment of Seal #38. Meng Po. The Goddess of Forgetfulness. In the mythology, Meng Po brewed the tea of oblivion that souls drank before reincarnation. She erased memories. Made you forget your past life so you could start clean.
The corrupted version of that power, filtered through pitch-black karma, would be something different entirely. Not erasure of past-life memories. Erasure of short-term ones. You could walk up to someone, do whatever you wanted, and make them forget it happened.
That's how this person had gotten into the shelter undetected. Anyone who noticed something off about them simply forgot they'd noticed.
Lin Yu's tremor sense picked up something else. A second presence in the cellar. No, not a presence. An absence. A civilian, sitting on the floor, aura flickering erratically. Confused. Disoriented. Like someone who'd just woken up and couldn't remember where they were or how they got there.
The black-aura figure was standing over them.
Lin Yu weighed his options.
Go back. Tell Weilin. Tell Chen. Bring numbers. Smart play. Safe play.
Except the Meng Po Bearer could erase their memories of the conversation. They'd forget the warning the moment it was delivered. And the civilian in that cellar might not have time for Lin Yu to figure out a workaround.
Could he take this person alone? Unknown. He had tremor sense and soul sight, neither of which was a combat ability. His tremor pulse could disrupt incorporeal entities, but he'd never tested it on a human Bearer.
He also didn't know the full extent of a corrupted Meng Po's powers. Memory erasure was the obvious one. But seals gave multiple abilities depending on karma alignment. A black-karma Meng Po might have other tricks.
This was stupid. He should go back.
He stepped into the cellar.
The space was small. Stone walls, wooden shelves lined with dusty ceramic jars. Temple storage, probably hadn't been opened in years. The civilian, a middle-aged man Lin Yu recognized from the evening meal line, sat on the floor with glazed eyes. The black-aura figure stood with their back to the entrance.
"That's one of ours," Lin Yu said. Kept his voice level. "From the shelter."
The figure turned. Pulled the hood back.
A woman. Young, maybe his age. Thin face, sharp cheekbones, dark circles under eyes that were almost entirely black. Not naturally. Her irises had been stained by her seal, the way extreme resonance sometimes changed physical features. Meng Po's mark.
She looked at him. Didn't seem surprised.
"Grey," she said. Studying his aura the way he'd studied hers. "Perfectly grey. I didn't think that was possible."
"What are you doing with him?"
She glanced at the civilian. "Feeding. Not the way you're thinking. I don't kill. I take memories. Small ones. What he had for dinner. The name of the street he grew up on. Little pieces. They taste like..." She paused, searching for the word. "Like color. Each memory has a different flavor."
Lin Yu's stomach turned. "You're eating his memories."
"Small ones. He won't miss them." She said it like it was reasonable. Like she was explaining a dietary preference.
"Put them back."
"Can't. Once consumed, they're gone. That's how the seal works." She tilted her head. "Are you going to fight me? Because I should tell you, if you try, I'll just make you forget this conversation happened. You'll walk back to your blanket and wonder why your head hurts."
"Will that work on me?"
The question surprised her. She studied his aura again. The perfect grey. The Seal #0 error signature that she probably couldn't read any better than anyone else.
"I honestly don't know," she said. "Your seal is... wrong. I can't get a lock on it. Most people, I can feel the edges of their karma. The shape of their memories. With you it's like trying to grab smoke."
Good. That meant his anomaly status gave him at least partial resistance to her ability. Maybe.
"Here's what's going to happen," he said, making it up as he went and hoping she couldn't tell. His voice came out steadier than he felt. Tremor sense was feeding him her physical state, heartbeat elevated but controlled, weight balanced on both feet, ready to move if she needed to. She was scared of him, at least a little. That was something. "You're going to stop feeding on the people in this shelter. In exchange, I won't tell the combat Bearers what you are."
"And why would I agree to that?"
"Because the combat Bearers include a Guanyin user with plus-eighty Mercy karma. Her Karma Mirror reflects your own karma back at you as pain. With your alignment?" He let the implication hang.
The woman's black eyes flickered. Fear. Brief, quickly hidden, but real.
"I didn't come here to fight," she said. "I came to hide. Same as everyone else."
"Then hide without eating people."
Long silence. The civilian on the floor blinked, looked around, seemed to come back to himself. He stood up shakily, mumbled something about needing the bathroom, and shuffled out of the cellar without looking at either of them.
The woman watched him go. Then looked back at Lin Yu.
"You're interesting," she said. "Grey karma, broken seal, and you negotiate instead of attack. The people I work with would find you very interesting."
"The people you work with."
"Reapers. I'm not one of them. But I've worked with them. Done jobs." She pulled her hood back up. "My name is Fang Qiu. Remember it. Or don't. Most people don't get the choice."
She walked past him and out the cellar door. Her footsteps faded up the corridor.
Lin Yu stood in the empty storage room for a while. His hands were shaking. He clenched them until they stopped.
[Karma Shift: Order +1, Truth +1]
Confronting a threat. Extracting an agreement. Apparently the system filed that under Order and Truth.
He went back to his blanket. Lay down. Stared at the ceiling.
The meditating old man by the gate was still glowing faintly. Weilin's green sun pulsed with the slow rhythm of deep sleep. Fang Qiu's black aura settled back into the far corner, still and quiet.
[Correction Tribulation: 51:03:18]
Fifty-one hours. Reapers in the shelter. A system that wanted him dead. A healer walking toward a cliff. And now a memory-eating spy who thought he was interesting.
He closed his eyes. Didn't sleep.