In the Immortal Tomb's sublayer of sealed speculation, the echo spun again. Not in analysis, but in reaction.
It pulled a thread. Not fate. Not starlight. Belief.
"One walks threadless," it thought.
"One rewrites myth before the myth is named."
And yet, the vault did not collapse.
It shifted.
Fang Yuan stood beneath a logic-array that had never been tested. It was not fate-path. Not void-path. It was absence-path — a killer move meant for enemies who did not yet exist.
He had once called it Starlight Hook. Never used it. Never perfected it.
But now, something outside him was trying to finish the move.
"The coral bleeds before the hook lands," he murmured.
The girl's shadow brushed no walls, yet scrolls within his aperture began to blur.
One clone fell silent — not in defiance, but in anticipation.
Far across the Gu World, in a sealed jade formation tied to Sea of Blood's memory, a ripple surfaced.
The bone from earlier had begun to hum. Not a song — a statement.
"The story you buried has risen."
— Spectral Soul's fragment tried to scry through void-dreams, but the mirror returned only an ocean. And a fisherman who spoke nothing.
— The Starlight Echo recoiled from the girl. Not in fear. In etiquette.
"This name is older than my format."
In a ruin long erased from maps, the girl stood beneath a stone.
"Where do Gu come from?" she asked aloud.
The Gu did not answer.
But a voice, deep within the coral script of the world, whispered:
"From the first belief that the world should answer back."