Chapter fourteen: A Rotten Empire.

  Grig, Elara and Han looked at Jian Yue. They sensed the change in the air; it had grown with tension. Mo Fei, unaware of the truth, said.

  “You do realize that I can't hear you…” He said his voice was muffled and distant.

  Jian Yue’s hand rose at his forehead as a gesture of acknowledgement and frustration, and he facepalmed at this situation. Then sat heavily beside Mo Fei, his movements speaking of exhaustion.

  “How do I address you, Ascender?” Jian began with the introduction.

  “Mo Fei”

  “Mo Fei…” Jian Yue repeated the name on his tongue. “It means ‘To fly,’ and it could also mean ‘There is Nothing that is Not’ Which one will you end up with?” His face had a small grin. Mo Fei didn't understand what he meant.

  “What do you mean?” Mo Fei raised his head at Jian Yue in confusion.

  “You have to find that out, as for me, I'm the Seventh ‘Descent’ of the ‘Warden of Silent Pages’, Jian Yue.” He introduced himself, and Mo Fei nodded.

  “Warden of Silent ‘Pages’… That's why you can throw papers,” Mo Fei said flatly.

  “There is no time for jokes. Now you have to listen to it, this is really important.” Jian Yue’s expression was grim.

  He leaned close; his voice was louder and deliberately clearer. “Be happy that you are out this right now,” Jian Yue began, and his eyes locked on Mo Fei’s, his fingers intertwined. “There are several things that you must know now.” He let the words hang. The candle’s unmoving flame now flicked as if creating suspense. Mo Fei’s ears perked up, his mind now focused on words.

  “You ascend through sleep in the world one, or through self-inflicted death in other worlds, but if you are killed by the entities, then… That wasn't an ascension but a clear, tragic and brutal death.” This cold realization hit Mo Fei deeper, not because it was terrifying, but how stupid he was when he was escaping them; it was the retroactive horror of understanding all his past moments of bravery as utter, suicidal folly.

  The fight with Kholkis and the Suture Worm, he had thought that it didn't matter if he had died, it'd ascend him. But now he knew if he actually had thrown himself, the thought of a dream of home could have become just a history of a young man that no one would remember.

  Mo Fei’s mouth was dry; he gulped slowly, bravery faltered, he was a cautious guy, and the thought of not dying made him reckless for a while. But now he realized the fear of death was a necessary fear; if you throw it away, then that would make you foolishly reckless. He had stood before those entities, thinking death was an escape route. He had been a step away from becoming just a weightless body.

  “Why?” The word scraped out of Mo Fei’s throat. “Why is this world absurd? And who built it?”

  Jian Yue’s gaze grew distant. “The ‘Architect’ built it, and he changed the laws. You are from his ‘Authority’, so you must be careful.” Jian Yue raised his hand, and a long scroll appeared, the laces made of swishy silk, and it opened.

  “World 0… Our home… It was the world where the oldest Ascendants called ‘The Sundering’ lived. As for today, there are twelve ‘Authorities’.”

  He gestured vaguely around them, at the very air. “What you are seeing right now, the time we are in is the epoch of ‘Ascended’. Each year, seven chosen ones reach these worlds with no sole purpose, but one thing is certain: we can't survive whether we choose an ‘Authority’ or not.”

  The revelation was a physical blow in their heads especially on Mo Fei whose will was shattering further and further the more he was learning about these Worlds. Han let out a soft, shattered breath. Elara wrapped her arms around herself. Grig’s fists were clenched.

  “The ‘Authorities’ you can choose,” Jian Yue continued, his voice low and relentless, “are the shackles placed upon the corpse. The ‘Dream-Weaver’, the ‘Curator of Flesh’, the ‘Warden of Silent Pages’, the ‘Cartographer’... And the ‘chosen ones’ like us are the sacrificial offerings if we survive and ascend to complete the next ‘Descent’. Then… the higher ‘Ordinal’ will catch the attention of the higher ‘Ordinal’ ‘Ascenders’.” Jian Yue popped his knuckles before speaking further. “And they go after them to advance and complete the next ‘Descent’ earlier,” He finished his words. Looking at them.

  Mo Fei asked. “What's ‘Ordinal’ and ‘Descent’ are they different?”

  “No, they are not different. 'Ordinal' refers to the number of their gap between ‘Godhood’, while 'Descent' indicates how many rituals they have completed. 'Descent' is used for ritual counting. Do you get it?”

  Mo Fei nodded and stared at the sigil on his wrist ‘壹睹’ (The Apprentice's eyes). The Architect’s path. The path of the creator of the prison. The path of empty authority.

  “Then the ‘Architect’ is…?”

  “The corpse,” Jian Yue dropped the shocking truth, his voice hollow. “ ‘His Authority’ is shattered, dormant. Only the tools remain, like the Glaive and the Ji Yu feathers. To walk ‘His’ path is to pick up the most dangerous path of all. The current ‘Architect’ is not ‘Him’. It's a very long story. We don't have that much time to explain everything.”

  He leaned forward, his final words falling into the utter silence.

  “You wanted to go home, Mo fei. Everyone does, but we are trying…trying to go back to world 0. But it is getting more hopeless.”

  The flame of the candle finally went out, as if strangled. Suddenly, in complete darkness, the only sound was the rough draw of breath from five living souls, hidden in a small pocket of silence inside the bowels of a dead, dreaming god.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Someone is here!” Jian shouted. The candle was not just there for flame; it was a timer, and now they had been found.

  “Escape from the backyard gate!”

  Sensing the urgency, Grig, Elara, and Han quickly stood up, but Mo Fei had trouble standing up from his wounds. Grig knew it, and he did what was necessary. He quickly carried Mo Fei on his back as they moved toward the backyard, Jian Yue chanted.

  “The Honorable Warden. The Creator of Silence. The Lord of Unwritten Ends. The Reader above Cosmos. The Keeper of the Epilogue. I held the glimpse of your authority. I request your help. I pray you to change my story, silencing the air.” Just in that moment, he finished chanting the main door dissolved, and someone passed through it. A man wearing the light blue and white robes, the light outlining his features. His lips moved as he spoke

  “... No one is here, how… weird.” The man's eyes passed through every object there and landed on the extinguished candle. His eyes held disappointment when he saw nobody there.

  The flame had died. In the perfect darkness that followed, the pursuers' scent cut through the stale air: it wasn't sweet but more like a touch of gold.

  Jian Yue was nowhere to be seen as he had disappeared.

  Then, with a sound like tearing parchment, the front door simply... unwove itself, and he entered. Just in that moment, the pain suddenly fell with a thud to the ground, his body feeling no air around him, the silence got heavier, and the pressure in the air started crushing his bones, an unknown force catching him off guard.

  “What!? What is this!” His senses were dull now as he forced himself to get out of the house, crouching. His face was tinted with annoyance and humiliation.

  “A-A ‘Warden’ was here! You son of a-” He cursed under his breath, his voice muffled and venomous. The moment he got out of the house, the crushing force instantly stopped as he gasped, breathing hard.

  “I'm gonna kill him, I'M GONNA KILL THAT PIECE OF SHIT!” He swore this as he stood up, trying to maintain his body.

  Meanwhile, they were escaping, running as fast as they could and as far as they could. Jian Yue appeared beside them, running.

  “Jian Yue! What were you doing there?” Grig asked, his voice hitching from sprinting.

  “Making an escape, whoever was there can't move freely for the next eight minutes and six seconds.” Jian Yue stated that they got an instant relief; it was perfect for their escape and a good choice not to fight directly for now.

  “I still wonder why you are helping us. I can't think of any reasons.” Han was running as he examined Jian Yue, demanding an answer.

  Jian Yue breathed softly before answering.

  “Because I'm an ascender, if I don't help ascenders they will eventually die. This year, four had already died, and now three remain, including Mo Fei.” He looked forward and continued. “It is the only option to find… Companions, in case we fail.”

  This answer slightly calmed the scepticism of Han. Finally, after fifteen minutes of running, they reached the end of ‘Trasia.’

  “So Mo Fei… Tell me, what is your next step? Do you want to ascend to the next world? Or perhaps you will stay here.” This question of Jian Yue left Mo Fei thinking for a while before answering.

  “I'll live in this world for a while. I won't ascend unprepared.”

  “Then… Why don't you join us?” Jian Yue gave a proposal to Mo Fei.

  “... I will join at least that'd let me survive.” Mo Fei said bluntly and then continued. “I won't find any other better option… but the wounds are the real deal. Without ascension they can't be healed.”

  “Yes, we aren't high, ‘Ordinal’ ascenders. We have only that option to heal. Though there are medicines too, even if it's the past of our world.” As he spoke, Mo Fei’s face held an exhausted look, but worse was his hearing.

  Mo Fei, who was clinging to Grig’s back, a world that was a lurching silent film. He saw Jian Yue’s lips moving in response, but heard only the bumping of his own heartbeat.

  “It's getting worse.” Mo Fei muttered, which was heard by Grig.

  “We will reach somewhere,” Grig assured him, and they kept walking. “Somewhere… but where?” Mo Fei thought but didn't say anything.

  Jian Yue’s eyes were sharp, staring at Mo Fei. “Well then, you'll be with one of us, welcome to the epilogue.”

  “Epilogue?”

  When Mo Fei questioned, Jian Yue chuckled slightly, lighting up the tension as he answered the question. “Our little resistance. Just a bad name for a worse plan for our little group of ascenders.”

  The journey was a blur of agony for Mo Fei. crunching snow, and the ragged sounds of their breathing were quieter. He drifted in and out of a feverish consciousness, his mind replaying Jian Yue’s words. “Sacrificial offerings… Ordinal, ‘Descent’… The corpse…”

  After what felt like hours, the terrain began to change. The imperial stonework gave way, then to the skeletal remains of a forest, trees petrified into grotesque frozen statues. Then, beyond a ridge, they saw it.

  It wasn't just a town. It was a graveyard of a village that had been abandoned a while ago.

  “Vraalk,” Grig whispered, the word a puff of frost in the air. His footsteps got slower and then stopped.

  Below them in a shallow valley lay a collection of perhaps two dozen stone huts, their roofs caved in by snow and time. A low wall, meant for keeping wolves away, was broken, scattered in different places. No smoke rose from any chimney. No light glowed in any window. Only the relentless wind howled through the ruins.

  Elara’s hand went to her mouth. Han’s stoic face cracked, revealing a deep, weary sorrow. This was the fate of a small village powered by an unruly dictator

  “This is empty,” Grig said, his voice thick. “I thought… I thought maybe they were taken as slaves. Like me.” He took a shuddering step forward, then another, descending into the slope towards the stone-huts of his past.

  Jian Yue didn’t stop him. He watched, his expression unreadable. “A village that had tried to resist a dictator now had met an end,” he said quietly, more to Mo Fei than anyone. “In the end, there was nothing left.”

  Grig moved through the ruins like a sleepwalker. He stopped before a hut slightly larger than the others, its door hanging off one hinge. He pushed it aside, opened it. The mouldy wood made a groaning noise, and he stepped into the darkness.

  Mo Fei, from Grig’s back, saw a shattered table. A child’s broken toy was scattered around, and a toy horse, half-buried in debris near the wall. And at last in the ground, A hearth full of ash, and it was not of furniture but… of humans… Perhaps someone was burned alive, the bones proving it. Grig stood in the center of the room, his shoulders trembling once, twice. No sound came out.

  “Put me down,” Mo Fei rasped.

  Grig gently lowered him to lean against the doorframe. Mo Fei’s vision was low, but he kept his eyes on the big man. Grig walked to the hearth, knelt, and brushed the ash with his fingers. He might know whose ash it was. He picked up the toy horse, cradling it in his palm, his thumb stroking the rough wood.

  “My son… Kael,” Grig said, the words torn from somewhere deep and broken. He was trying his hardest to maintain his voice from cracking. “He was carving this. For his mother’s name-day.” He looked around the dead space, his eyes finally landing on Han, Elara, and Jian Yue at the doorway. “She was… She was the village healer. She argued and fought back. The overseer’s men… they called her a void-spawn sympathizer, she was just like you, Mo Fei, who had spawned… but-”

  He didn’t need to finish. The story was written in the frozen silence of the stones.

  “I was outside to get something to eat. It was already the season where we got almost nothing to eat,” Grig continued, his voice flattening into a monotone of pure grief. “By the time I returned… it was already over. The silence was already here.”

  Han stepped into the hut, placing a weathered hand on Grig’s shoulder. “She was an ‘ascended’. And the overseer does not care for healers or carvings or sons.”

  “I know, but he had no reason to do this with the villagers and me,” Grig said. He closed his fist around the wooden horse, then carefully placed it in a pouch at his belt.

  “A cruelty doesn't carve meaning” Han said.

  “It doesn't matter when it happened a long time ago,” Grig said as he stood up, his movements suddenly decisive, the grief hardening into something else. He turned to Mo Fei. “You asked me why I trusted you. In the snow, with the Kholkis.”

  Mo Fei nodded weakly.

  “Because you didn’t run,” Grig said. “When you could have. You turned and fought the beast. For us. You gave me a reason to stop being a weight and start being a weapon human instead of a lone swan… She gave me the reason why a terrible world could look like heaven. She didn't run and cried out for help in desperation. I'm now ashamed of how easily I gave up, but you reminded me.” He looked at the ruins of his home, then back at the group.

  “This is my freedom. Not a place. It’s knowing what I’m fighting for. It’s knowing the face of the thing that did this…It's a rotten empire that is self-centered.”

  He walked out of the hut, his back straight. “Where will you stay, Jian Yue. Is it far?”

  “A day’s travel. Through the Glacial Vein’s upper passes and the forest of dreams... It will be… unpleasant.”

  “Anywhere is better than here,” Grig said.

  “So will you come with us?” Mo Fei asked, his voice surprisingly gentler than usual.

  Grig shook his head, and with a final thought, he had made his decision.

  “I wish that I could accompany you for a while… But I want to stay here, this is our departure time.” Grig’s voice was quieter, and Han explained this to Mo Fei. Elara, however, was emphasising his loss; she was speechless by this, though she had faced it before, the grief that caused her heart to be sensitive.

  “... You were a great help, thank you, Grig. I hope we meet again.” Mo Fei said this, without his will he didn't want to say this out loud. He had believed that they'd be just dead weights in his survival. He didn't know how he thought that it was like he had been losing ‘Mo Fei’ more and more with each world.

  Grig nodded. “I have to thank you, too. I never imagined I'd walk in an open field again.”

  “You aren't the only one thankful for him for that, but Grig, you were the strength of us now, I guess we have to leave you behind,” Han said in his solemn voice.

  “Don't worry about me, I won't be lonely here, but it'll be comfortable to me… Farewell.”

  With these final words of Grig. They left ‘Vraalk’ behind, a monument to silence that was more profound than any shallow heart.