The disciples crashed into the chamber, blades drawn.
The first—a broad-shouldered youth with vermilion sigils painted across his face—froze mid-step. His eyes locked onto Lin Khei... then widened in revolted denial.
"You're not—" He gagged, sword clattering to the stones. "Not the Hollow Sage!"
Behind him, a girl in tattered robes retched violently. Her vomit wasn't bile, but ink-black threads that writhed like worms before dissolving into the stone.
Lin tilted his head.
What do they see?
The Scripture answered.
It seized his right arm. Tendons popped. His hand jerked upward, held aloft like a marionette. His fingers closed around the bone quill resting in the ash-ring—its tip still slick with wet ink.
Not his.
He didn't resist. Not because he agreed—but because resistance was useless.
The quill moved.
It traced the air, painting with slow, graceful horror. The ink floated—beads suspended midair like punctuation waiting for judgment.
Then the glyphs ignited.
—"見""真""形"
Witness. Truth. Form.
The broad-shouldered disciple screamed.
His vermilion sigils boiled off his skin. Where they peeled away, new characters blistered up—not the disciple's writing, but Lin's. His body becoming a palimpsest of stolen scripture.
The girl's pupils dilated. The glyphs reflected in her eyes—and for a heartbeat, they burned backwards across her retinas.
"It's writing inside my—!"
Her scream curdled into a sobbing gurgle. She clawed at her face as blood streamed down her cheeks. Her mouth opened wider than it should've—like paper tearing too far. Her tongue unfurled like a scroll, inked characters spilling down its length—a last confession she'd never spoken.
Lin Khei did not look away.
He watched.
He studied.
Each movement. Each deformation. Every unspeakable twist of soul and skin was recorded in the growing silence that followed.
The Scripture flipped another page.
A third disciple—a thin boy with fear-stiff limbs—collapsed to his knees and scraped a glyph into the stone with his fingernails: "否" — Deny.
The ink in Lin's veins surged.
His arm moved again.
This time, the ink wasn't borrowed. It came from him. His palm split open along an old scar he didn't remember earning. Ink oozed from the wound like blood.
He wrote one more glyph:
—"忘"
Forget.
The last disciple's eyes rolled back. He fell like a puppet with cut strings.
The chamber was quiet.
The Scripture was not.
Its page shimmered, and a final command etched itself—not on parchment, but into Lin's skin.
—"吞 鏡"
Swallow the Mirror.
Lin turned slowly.
There, half-buried under fallen stone and shattered scroll shelves, was a shard of polished glass.
It hadn't been there before.
He walked to it.
Kneeled.
Looked.
The reflection didn't match his face.
It was younger. Eyes like ink wells overflowing with script. Skin glowing like burnt parchment. And a smile—not cruel, but knowing—curled across lips he didn't remember owning.
The reflection moved.
Lin Khei did not.
It raised its hand.
So did he.
It mouthed a word.
So did he.
And then he picked up the shard.
And swallowed it.
The glass cut—but what dripped down his esophagus wasn't blood. It was ink. Black and glistening, it pooled in his stomach like a fresh pot of writer's ink.
The Scripture purred inside his chest.
He could feel it shifting.
Pages rustled not in the air—but in his bones. New glyphs inked themselves onto the inside of his ribs. His breath came shallow. He bent forward as though choking, but no blood came—only symbols, crawling across his tongue.
He knelt until the tremors passed. Then rose.
The disciples' bodies were already beginning to fade—paper-thin outlines scattering like ash. The quill in his hand twitched once, then stilled.
A name whispered at the edge of his mind.
It tasted like the glass shard—sharp and reflective. A name that could cut him if he bit down too hard.
He wondered if it had ever been his to lose.
The Scripture flipped one last page.
—"章 四"
Chapter Four.
Lin exhaled. The ink in his stomach stirred.
It was hungry.