Chương 590: Chapter 585: Where Is He?

I stayed standing in the stone corridor and I kept my eyes on the mirror entrance, waiting. Everybody else had already spread out across the hall by then, sitting down or meditating or just doing whatever they needed to do to recover from their own trials. Pan Jun had put himself against the far wall and he was still twitching every now and then. Xie Ling had picked a spot close to the entrance and she stood there with that cold face of hers that never changed no matter what was happening.

Xu Feng was sitting cross legged and running through breathing exercises, in and out, over and over. But Tian was still not out. I had figured he would finish somewhere around the same time I did, maybe a little after me but not by much. The trial was harsh, but Tian was smart. He thought fast.

He was the type of person who could change his approach halfway through something and still come out the other side fine, and even back when we were traveling together, even when he was making a mess of his sword forms and getting frustrated about it, he always found some way to keep going forward. The problem was that this trial didn't care about any of that. This trial cared about whether you knew who you were. And Tian thought he was Ke Yin.

He wasn't pretending or running some long con on all of us, he actually believed it down to the bone. The memories were there, the little habits were there, the way he thought about right and wrong was there, and all of it was real to him because as far as his mind was concerned, those things had happened to him. Except they hadn't happened to him.

He was a piece of Wu Kangming's consciousness that the Dream World had picked up and built a whole person around, and now that person was standing inside a trial that existed for no other reason than to ask you what you were. The Dream World would keep our bodies safe. I already knew that much. Moon had caught me when I fell. But the mind was a different thing. Your body could come back perfectly fine and your mind could come back in pieces.

I had read enough cultivation novels back in my old life to know exactly what happens to a person who loses their sense of self, and none of those stories ended in a good way.

"How long has it been?" Xu Feng asked. He had stopped his breathing exercises and he was looking at the mirror with an expression that he wasn't bothering to hide.

"Forty-nine minutes since Hou came out," Xie Ling answered, and she didn't even turn her head to say it. Of course she had been counting.

"Sixty-three minutes since we entered."

"That's, that's longer than anyone else took, isn't it?" Pan Jun shifted around against the wall and he was starting to sound more like himself again, which was a relief.

"Is that supposed to happen?"

"Nobody knows what's supposed to happen in this place," Song Wei said from where he was sitting. His voice came out calm and level but I noticed his fingers were tapping against his knee in a steady little rhythm, and that told me more than his voice did. He was getting impatient.

"Every trial is different for every single person. Some people are in and out in minutes. Some people take hours."

"But he should be out," Pan Jun said, and his voice climbed up higher than before.

"He's strong. If someone that strong is taking this long, then—""Then it means the trial is pushing him in a direction it didn't push the rest of us," Shen Bolin said. He was over by the far wall with his arms crossed over his chest.

"Tian will come out. He has the will to come out." I looked over at him when he said that. There wasn't any doubt in him at all, not in his voice, not in his face, not anywhere, and it made me wonder what exactly the two of them were to each other. They had come into the palace together which meant they had been traveling as a group for a while, so did Shen Bolin actually know what Tian was? Did he understand that the person he was defending so confidently wasn't really the person he thought he was standing up for?

"And if he doesn't come out?" Song Wei asked.

"We should be discussing our options now, not later."

"Our options." Li Na spoke up for the first time in a long while.

"You mean leaving him."

"I mean," Song Wei said, and he took his time with the words, "that we need to decide in advance what we're going to do if he doesn't come out within a reasonable amount of time. This palace does not wait for anybody. The further in we go the worse it gets, and if we sit here bleeding hours—""He will come out," Shen Bolin cut in. His spiritual pressure moved a little, just enough that every person in the corridor was reminded he was a Lucid Lawbearer and the rest of us weren't.

"Tian has walked through worse than a mirror. He will come out."

"You don't know that." Song Wei didn't shrink back even a little under that pressure.

"None of us know that. I have led expeditions before this one. I have watched people walk into trials and never walk back out, I have seen their minds get stuck inside whatever nightmare the palace decided to build for them. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for someone in that situation is admit they're already gone and keep moving."

"How very merciful of you," Xu Feng said, and his voice was dry.

"Deciding for the rest of us when a person stops being worth waiting for." Song Wei's jaw went tight.

"I'm being practical. We came into this place for the Celestial Dream Lotus. Every minute we spend standing still is a minute where something can go wrong. The palace is alive, or did everyone forget that part. It adapts. It learns from us. The longer we stay in one spot, the more time it has to—""Tian would wait for any one of us," Li Na said. She said it softly but the whole corridor heard it.

"He wouldn't leave someone behind just because it was inconvenient for him."

"This has nothing to do with convenience," Song Wei snapped back at her.

"This is about surviving. About finishing what we came here to finish. About not throwing away every chance we have because—""Because what?" Shen Bolin's voice had gone cold now, colder than Xie Ling's face.

"Because one man is taking longer than you find acceptable? Because whatever schedule you've built in your head matters more than his life does?"

"My schedule," Song Wei said, and he pronounced every word very carefully, "is the reason my people are still breathing. My caution. My willingness to make the decisions nobody else wants to make. If you want to stand in this corridor until the stars burn out, then that is your choice and I won't stop you. But my team is not going to gamble this entire expedition on—""Your team can walk out that door any time it wants to," Shen Bolin said.

"We're waiting." The air in the corridor had gotten thick and heavy and nobody wanted to be the next person to talk. Pan Jun looked like he was trying to press himself backwards into the stone, although whether that was because he was scared of the argument or because some part of him still believed he was a piece of the palace, I honestly couldn't tell. Xu Feng had one hand closed into a fist on his knee. Xie Ling just watched all of it with those pale eyes of hers. And I was standing right in the middle of it.

Song Wei wanted our group to leave, that much was obvious to everyone including him. We had signed on for an expedition and not for a rescue operation, and every hour we stayed here was another hour for the palace to shift itself around and get ready for us. I understood the reasoning. Purely in cultivation terms, cutting loose someone who was probably already lost was the correct move and everyone in the corridor knew it. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

But Shen Bolin's group was not going to leave without Tian, and that was just as obvious. Whatever had grown between them on the road was strong enough that they would throw away the lotus and their lives and everything else before they walked away from that mirror. Which meant it was on me.

"We wait," I said. Everyone's head turned toward me at once. Song Wei looked frustrated but he didn't look surprised, so he had probably already guessed. Shen Bolin gave me a small nod and there was approval in his eyes when he did it. Everyone else mostly just looked relieved that somebody had finally said something that ended the argument.

"For how long?" Song Wei asked me.

"One hour? Two? Where exactly is the line where you're willing to admit he isn't coming back?" I actually thought about it before I answered. I thought about Tian standing somewhere inside that trial with different versions of himself all around him, except his versions wouldn't be about roads not taken or choices he regretted, his versions would be about whether the name he called himself belonged to him at all, whether he was Ke Yin or Wu Kangming or some third thing in between the two.

"Two hours," I said.

"If he isn't out in two hours then we talk about it again." Song Wei clearly wasn't happy with that but he nodded anyway.

"Two hours. Then we revisit this." The corridor went quiet again after that. Pan Jun sat down and he looked worn out from all his failed attempts at merging himself into the wall. Xu Feng went back to his meditation. Xie Ling stayed standing exactly where she was, still staring at that entrance, as if she could drag Tian out of it by looking hard enough. I found myself a spot along the wall and slid down it until I was sitting.

The others probably assumed I wanted to wait because Tian was my sworn brother and that was what you did for your sworn brother. That wasn't it though. I needed to see what came out of that mirror. Because it wasn't Tian in there, not really.

The Dream World had taken a fragment of Wu Kangming's consciousness and dressed it up in memories and a personality and a set of goals until it could walk around and talk and believe in itself, but underneath all of that construction there was still my tournament opponent sitting inside. After I got the Celestial Dream Lotus for Lu Chenyang, I was going to have to find Wu Kangming and end our match one way or the other. That was the whole reason I was standing in this palace in the first place.

The tournament wasn't going to close until one of us put the other one down. So I needed to know whether this trial was going to break Tian into pieces, or sharpen him into something I would have a much harder time beating. So I waited. Li Na sat down close to Shen Bolin and took out a portable formation plate. She started tracing lines across the surface of it with one finger, spiritual energy coming off her in thin careful threads. Practice maybe.

Or maybe she just needed her hands to be doing something instead of nothing. Shen Bolin didn't move at all. Arms crossed, eyes locked on the mirror, completely still. He had the patience of a man who had lived long enough to learn that hurrying almost never fixed anything. Song Wei had less of that patience. He kept looking up at the entrance, then down at a jade compass he had in his palm, then back up again. Tracking the time probably, or watching the spiritual pressure of the palace, or both at once.

The rest of our team had scattered around the corridor but every one of them kept glancing over at him, waiting to be told what to do next. The minutes went by very slowly. I ended up thinking about my own trial while I sat there. About the other version of me that had come walking out of those mirrors, the one who had survived everything by being crueler and more violent than anyone around him, the one who had turned into the exact thing I had spent my life fighting against.

It had been awful to look at because I could see the road that led there and I knew that road ran straight through me. But I had known who I was the entire time. That part never wobbled. I wasn't Hou Hongyun, street orphan turned gang boss. I was Ke Yin, dropped into a cultivation world from somewhere else, trying to stay alive and keep the handful of people I cared about alive too. Tian didn't have anything that solid to stand on.

He thought he was Ke Yin but his heart demon would know better, heart demons always know better, that's the entire point of them. It might even show up wearing Wu Kangming's face. It might drag out every memory of the Wu clan, the marriage that fell apart before it started, the old ring with the ancient sword master's spirit sleeping inside it, every single experience that actually belonged to him and that he had either lost or never been given in the first place.

"Tell me about him," I said to Shen Bolin. The words were out of my mouth before I had really decided to say them, but the second they were out I realized I did want to know.

"About Tian, I mean. How did the two of you meet?" Shen Bolin looked over at me, surprised that I was asking. Then his face softened by a small amount.

"He came up to us in Lightwater City. Said he had heard we were headed toward the Dream Well territories and asked if he could travel with us."

"That's all?" I asked.

"That's all," he said.

"He was polite about it. Respectful. But there was something in his eyes when he asked. Determination, I suppose that's the word for it. He knew where he was going, and there wasn't going to be anything in this world that talked him out of it." Li Na looked up from her formation plate.

"He was different from the other cultivators we met on the road. Most of them are arrogant, full of themselves. They think climbing a few realms means they've become something special."

"And Tian wasn't like that," I said.

"No," she said, very simply.

"He asked questions. He listened to the answers. When we talked about cultivation theory, he wanted to actually understand it, not stand there waiting for his turn to show off what he already knew. It was refreshing." I turned that over in my head. I thought about Wu Kangming in the tournament, the way every single movement he made was exactly correct, the way he treated winning as something that had already happened and was just waiting to catch up. There had never been any gloating in it.

Underneath all that terrifying skill there had been something close to humility. So maybe that part came across. Maybe whatever fragment ended up becoming Tian brought some of the better pieces of Wu Kangming along with it.

"He told us about his father," Shen Bolin went on.

"About the Genesis Dream technique, about the damage it did to his father's cultivation to make him. He said he had to find a way to stabilize it, to repair what got broken. That's why he came here. For the lotus." The same flower I came for, which would be funny if it wasn't so inconvenient. Except I was carrying it back to Lu Chenyang and Tian wanted it for Yue Tianming, the man who had burned away his own cultivation base to build a son out of dream essence. Only that wasn't the whole truth of it either, was it.

Tianming built a vessel. The thing that woke up inside that vessel wasn't new at all, it was Wu Kangming's consciousness pushed through whatever machinery the Dream World runs on, one fragment shaped and padded out until it could pass for a whole man. I wondered if Tianming ever suspected. If he ever looked at his son and felt something in the back of his head telling him that this person wasn't entirely his own work.

"He practices every single morning," Li Na added.

"I've watched him. He goes through his sword forms even though he tells everyone he's terrible at them. He just keeps going, again and again, as though doing it a thousand more times will finally make it make sense to him." That sounded like Wu Kangming too. The stubbornness. The refusal to accept that anything was beyond him. The tournament had shown me that side of him very clearly, he didn't have natural talent for most of what he did, he just outworked every person who did. More time went by.

Song Wei checked his compass again and his expression got darker each time he did it. We were coming up on the one hour mark and the mirror hadn't so much as flickered. I let my head fall back against the stone. The corridor was cool and slightly damp and somewhere far away I could hear water dripping onto something. This palace was enormous and full of noises and sensations that never quite finished becoming anything. I had the constant feeling that it was sitting in more than one place at the same time.

My thoughts wandered back to the tournament, to the real Wu Kangming with his body meditating across from mine. His consciousness was in here somewhere too, split off into this Tian-shaped piece that walked around thinking it was me. I wondered whether he had any way of reaching across to Tian at all. Whether he could use this heart demon trial to hand his own fragment some clarity.

"That's one hour," Song Wei announced.

"We agreed on two. I'll honor that, but I want it said out loud that this is already far longer than any trial should run. If nothing changes in the next sixty minutes, then—" The mirror rippled. Every voice in the corridor stopped at once. Every head turned toward that shifting liquid surface. For a few seconds nothing happened at all, and I felt my chest tighten. Then a shape started to push through and Tian stepped out. Physically there was nothing wrong with him. There was no blood anywhere, no cuts, no burns.

The robes were still whole, back still straight, but his face was wrong. His eyes weren't focusing on anything in the corridor, they went past us and landed on something that wasn't in the room with us.

"Tian!" Li Na was already up and moving toward him. Shen Bolin followed after her at a slower pace with relief all over his face. Tian didn't react to either of them. He just stood there and stared at nothing. I pushed myself up off the wall and walked over. Everyone was crowding around him now, asking him questions, checking him over for wounds that weren't there. He stood in the center of all of it with that empty expression, not answering, not moving, not looking at any of them. My eyes narrowed.

Did he take the shortcut? Was the dreamgod's madness sitting behind those eyes right now, looking out at me? And if so, what did that mean for our battle?