Four years passed like falling ash.
Without fire.
Without sound.
Just the slow, steady burial of everything that once burned.
Kael turned fourteen in silence.
No celebration. No acknowledgment. Elric had been gone that week, searching for ghost orchid in the outer woods.
Bren had left two years prior, his departure marked only by a folded letter and a half-smile that said nothing.
The other disciples no longer greeted Kael.
They avoided him.
He didn't mind.
He preferred it that way.
More and more, people chose silence around him—not because they'd seen anything, but because Kael never made mistakes.
His diagnoses were too quick. His warnings, too precise.
His instincts were right even when the elders hesitated.
That kind of perfection wasn't comforting.
It was unsettling.
In hushed corners, some whispered that Kael carried something he shouldn't.
Something not meant for mortals.
And people feared what they couldn't understand.
Elric's visits grew shorter. His cough deeper.
But he never stayed away.
When he returned, he still checked the ledgers. He still handed Kael assignments.
Sometimes they spoke. Sometimes not.
But his gaze always lingered—just long enough to remind Kael that he was being watched.
Kael rarely asked questions now.
He had long learned that answers came at a cost.
The Nameless Verse had been pushed to its third layer.
Kael could now extend his awareness through his bones—feel the tension of his blood as it moved, slow his pulse with a breath.
But it wasn't cultivation.
Not truly.
No lightning strikes. No inner sea awakening.
Just... more control.
More silence.
That night, after a day of failed meditation and sour-tasting tonic, Kael collapsed onto his bedding without bothering to undress.
Sleep took him without asking.
And in that sleep—
He fell.
Not physically.
Not with weight.
But with thought.
He drifted through a colorless fog, thick as honey, silent as breath.
No wind. No ground.
Just a space that wasn't space.
A void.
But not empty.
Something pulsed there.
Soft.
Distant.
Familiar.
He moved toward it.
Or it moved toward him.
A light flared—green, but deeper than any plant's hue.
A shape emerged. Not solid. Not imagined.
A spine. Twisted. Floating.
And around it, words.
Not in any tongue he knew.
They spun in slow arcs. Spiraling down toward him.
He reached out.
Felt the cold of meaning without understanding.
Felt watched.
Then—
A voice.
Not sound. Not tone.
A pressure behind thought.
A breath behind memory.
"承…印…"
Kael jolted upright.
Sweating. Breathing hard.
The room was dark.
Still.
The bottle sat on the shelf.
Unmoving.
But for a moment, it had glowed—just once, then gone.
Kael didn't sleep again.
He sat with the bottle near him.
Not touching.
Not opening.
Just listening.
To the silence.
To the thing behind it.