It was past midnight.
Wei Liang sat at his desk with a statistics problem in front of him.
A can of coffee had gone warm beside his notes. His roommate Jiaming was asleep. The campus outside was dead quiet.
He had an exam in six hours.
He wasn't worried about it. He had one problem that kept giving him a wrong-feeling answer. He couldn't find the error anywhere. That kind of problem was worse than a hard one.
He leaned back and closed his eyes for one second.
Something grabbed him.
Not from outside. From inside his chest.
A hook behind his ribs, and a pull so sudden he couldn't breathe around it. He tried to open his eyes. His body didn't answer. The room vanished. All at once, not slowly.
Wei Liang was falling inward, the edges of himself coming apart like wet paper in water.
The last thing he thought was that he still hadn't solved that problem.
Then everything was gone.
Far away, in a place with no name, an old man was dying.
He had been dying for a while now, and it didn't hurt. That surprised him. He had expected more from ten thousand years of accumulated power. But the body ended the same way all bodies ended, quietly, without ceremony.
He sat alone in the ruins of his palace.
No disciples, no servants, no one remained. The great formations carved into the floor had gone dark. The walls were cracked. Outside, the city that had once surrounded him was nothing but dust and silence.
He was the last living thing left in it.
He had spent ten thousand years doing what needed to be done. Sealing things that couldn't be destroyed. Hiding things that couldn't be left in the open. Waiting for someone who could finish what he had started.
But time had run out before he found that person.
So he looked further.
He pushed what was left of his perception outward. Past the dead palace, past the ruins, past the edge of his world entirely. He was searching for something specific. Not power, he had no use for that now. Not talent. Something simpler. A soul that could hold what he carried without breaking under the weight.
He searched for a long time. The lamp burned lower.
Then he found it.
Not in this world. Somewhere else, on the other side of a thin crack between one reality and the next. A soul that was, by every normal measure, completely ordinary. Not strong, not gifted, not chosen by any heavenly fate.
Just the right shape.
He had no time left to look for better.
He gathered what remained of himself and pushed.
Wei Liang woke up on his back.
Above him was a grey sky with no sun in it. The light came from everywhere at once and had no warmth. He lay still for a moment, confirmed he was breathing, then sat up slowly.
Ruins stretched in every direction.
Massive stone columns lying cracked across the ground. Walls still standing in some places, collapsed in others. Pale dust covered everything, shifting in a cold wind that never stopped. No plants, no insects, not even weeds growing in the cracks between the paving stones.
Wei Liang stared at that last part.
Weeds grew in everything. Concrete, old stone, abandoned lots. They didn't wait for permission. Nothing growing at all meant something was deeply wrong with this ground.
He stood and checked himself quickly. Both hands, both feet, same clothes he'd been wearing at his desk. He patted his pockets. Phone with no signal and sixty percent battery. Student ID, forty yuan in coins, one pen. And at the very bottom, the canned coffee, still cold somehow.
He stared at the coffee for a moment.
Later.
He turned his attention inward.
There was something behind his ribs. Locked, dense, pressing outward from a place he had never felt before. When he tried to look at it directly it scattered away from him. He caught pieces instead.
A throne room larger than any stadium he had seen.
The sound of an army so vast it became like weather.
And a name, rising on its own without him reaching for it.
The Ashen Emperor.
Dead for ten thousand years. The last ruler of this world. The old man who had been dying in that palace.
The one who had decided Wei Liang was close enough.
One thing had been left near the surface on purpose, right where he would find it first.
They know you are here. They are coming.
Wei Liang sat with that for exactly three seconds.
Then he thought: water. He had been unconscious for an unknown amount of time in a dead wasteland. That was the actual urgent problem. Ancient grudges could wait their turn.
He picked the direction the wind was blowing from and started walking.
The ruins went further than he expected. Broken archways, toppled statues worn smooth by time, empty courtyards with nothing in them. Whatever this place had been, it was enormous once. Whatever ended it had been thorough. Not a scrap of wood or metal anywhere. Just stone and ten thousand years of dust on top of it.
He had been walking for about five minutes when he heard a sound.
A footstep, to his left. Deliberate weight on loose stone. Then the clink of something in a bag.
He stepped behind a fallen column and looked through the gap.
Two people in rough, patched clothing moved through the rubble. The older one had a long knife at his belt and a heavy collection bag over one shoulder. The younger followed two steps behind, eyes scanning the ground for anything worth taking. They moved with the easy confidence of people who had done this hundreds of times.
Scavengers.
Not what the warning was about.
Wei Liang watched them pass, gave it another full minute, then stepped out. His pulse had gone up without him noticing. He brought it back down.
He picked up his pace and kept walking west, toward where the wind was coming from. He thought about water.
He also thought about how the warning had said they.
Plural.
That meant more than one.
And somewhere behind him, in the rubble he had just passed through, something stepped out from behind a wall.
It was not one of the two scavengers.
It began to follow him.
He hadn't heard it yet.