Time flew, and night dropped like a velvet curtain. After an afternoon of rest and the food Lingxiao and Lingsaki brought, I’ve relit most of my embers.
As for the ninth floor, I chose tomorrow, a gate waiting at dawn. I need deep sleep, seeds of calm before the trial’s wind. And after years apart, we only reunited yesterday; our words are a river, and I owe them tea-warm time.
I spent years sealed in the Daynight Sanctuary, inheriting the Dual Daynight Tomes, a walled garden lovely yet stifling. Days like those grind like millstones, slow and dull. For me, years in one place feel like a cage of still air; in a short life, how many “good years” can you lock behind one door?
Humans aren’t like the God-folk, Demon clans, or the Elven Kind, whose years grow like old pines. Our span is a mayfly skimming a stream; even if you climb to the Divine Realm, even to the Overdeity Level, the hourglass barely slows.
“Dear big brother, what are you thinking?” Lingxiao asked, her voice a soft bell under eaves.
We lay on plush, tender grass, three leaves under the stars. Above, lanterns of fire dusted the dark. In the Nine Cold Labyrinth, the night shines brighter than outside; the Milky Way stitched slender silver between a hundred worlds. No painter alive could net this shimmer, and even the Central Continent can’t quite rival this ink-wash of light.
“Mm, nothing much,” I said, eyes on the star ocean, while my heart rippled like a pond. “Thinking about the ninth floor tomorrow, and I can’t settle.”
“It’s fine! Dear big brother, with us here, we’ll clear the ninth floor!” Lingxiao beamed, sunrise on frost.
Lingsaki sighed, a sleeve brushing dew. “Don’t talk like it’s in the bag, Lingxiao. On the eighth floor, the three of us barely slapped a bell from their hand to meet the condition, and luck carried us. If the ninth demands we defeat its guardian outright, what then?”
Silence fell, soft as snow on a path. The worry had sat in me since afternoon, a stone in the gut. The ninth step will be steeper than the eighth; can we climb it with these legs? We met her condition by a fluke and a flash of luck, not by our own blade.
“Well, one step at a time,” I said, letting breath ebb like a tide. “There’ll be a way.”
Thinking more now only stacks stones on my chest; better to go in light, like a bow unwarped before the shot.
“He’s right. Holding steady against a thousand shifts is our best bet,” Lingsaki said, an anchor in a swirling bay.
“Mm-hmm! I’ll give my all to help dear big brother!” Lingxiao chirped, an arrow eager for the string.
“As expected of my little sisters—reliable,” I murmured, and I drew them close, a warm quilt under the night. My palm smoothed their hair, wind over young rice.
“Hehe, praise received!” Lingxiao giggled, a silver bell.
“Mmm, that feels so good,” Lingsaki breathed, like a cat in sun.
With tomorrow’s ninth-floor journey beating closer like a drum, time is thin as paper. All we can do now is string the bow, hone the edge, and meet it at full strength.
