“Master Bai?”

At the entrance to Witchwood Forest.

Aerin watched Ye Weibai take a step back, confusion drifting across her eyes like thin mist.

“You go in first, Aerin,” Ye Weibai said, voice steady as a lantern in wind.

She froze and lifted her gaze to the trees ahead, a dark sea with no shore.

For days the sky had been flawless, and the nights too. The moon blazed too bright, a second sun pouring silver across the cold vault of air.

Even after crossing a thousand meters of frost-bitten sky, the light didn’t thin. It washed the continent like a tide of quicksilver.

Yet the forest before them seemed hooded year-round by ink-thick stormclouds. Moonlight fell into that ink, drawn out into threads like silk teased from a cocoon.

It pierced through in wisps. What reached the trees was pale and tired, a ghost of light wavering on bark and leaf.

Aerin looked in. The shadows tangled like black reeds in a river, swaying and clashing. The dark breathed, and her skin crawled like winter water.

It felt like some vast beast lay in there with its jaws unhinged, waiting for her footfall the way a trap waits for a deer.

A familiar taste bloomed in her chest and climbed like ivy. It was the same thing that had filled her a few hours ago—fear.

The black grew in her pupils, swallowing everything like night swallowing a candle. She pressed her lips together. Her face drained, and her blood turned to ice.

She nearly took a step back. Then a warm hand tapped the crown of her head, like a hearth hand to cold glass.

“I’m right behind you.” Ye Weibai’s voice was low, like fire breathing under ash.

Heat rushed through Aerin as if a sun had risen under her ribs.

So few words—yet they poured steel into her bones.

They had known each other only days, and yet Aerin felt her entire life could rest in the shadow of the black-haired boy behind her.

It was that kind of wonder.

In a lifetime, you can trust many. But the one you trust wildly, without reason or proof, without any tidy logic—that’s only one.

On the first day, on that arena stage circled by a thousand eyes, she had stood alone at the sharp point of the gaze. She trembled like a leaf.

She nearly broke, whispering inside—if only the Demon King would come—like a drowning girl praying for thunder.

Ye Weibai stepped out as if answering that prayer. His strength was a bright blade, his recklessness a storm, his confidence a cliff that would not fall.

In that heartbeat, his figure carved itself into her not-yet-shattered heart, stroke by stroke, like a knife cutting a seal into jade.

“Bai—”

When feeling runs deep enough, even the quiet will speak. Not with words, but with the body’s tide.

“Master Bai!”

She turned. Her eyes were autumn water catching gold, ripples bright as coins. She called his title and simply stared, straight as an arrow.

Her red lips parted. Breath trembled. Her young chest rose and fell like a skiff on quick water. Gold hair lifted, a breeze baring a white, smooth throat.

Her soft pupils quivered, and Ye Weibai’s silhouette stood clear within them, like a mountain mirrored in a lake.

No more words were needed. The feeling there was warm as a stove and plain as day.

Smiling, Ye Weibai reached out and tapped her forehead, knuckles light as rain. “What is it?”

“I—” She drew a sharp breath, like a diver before the plunge. But under Master Bai’s gentle gaze, the words snagged like a kite in a tree.

She held that breath until her face flushed apple-red. Then she finally let it go, helpless as a sigh.

Ye Weibai couldn’t help laughing. “What’s that supposed to be? Aerin, are you practicing holding your breath?”

“S-sorry.” Her cheeks burned. Whether from air or something else, she didn’t dare meet his eyes. Her gaze skittered like a sparrow. “I was afraid without one big breath, I wouldn’t dare say it.”

“But in the end you didn’t say it anyway, did you?”

Her mouth opened and closed like a fish at the surface. Then she nodded, deflated, a petal curling in rain.

Ye Weibai shook his head, smiling. “It’s fine. Some words unsaid are still fine.”

“No—it matters!” Aerin blurted, urgency in her voice like a string pulled taut.

His brow ticked up. He looked at her. It was the first time she had pushed back.

She noticed too. Her shoulders shrank, and she cupped her forehead on instinct, as if a tap was coming.

Ye Weibai laughed under his breath. His smile, and the look he set on her, softened like snow on a branch. “Not this time. Then say it next time.”

Aerin blinked, then smiled too. “Mm!”

…

…

It was watching them.

It had always been watching them.

“Watch” wasn’t quite right. For something of its tier, there was no seeing, hearing, or smelling like beasts born of blood.

Was it a living thing? No. Not really.

If you had to name what it did, “to feel” would come closer. Only a little closer.

What was it?

From the outside, it was the sky’s blue lid. It was the drifting cloud. It was the river’s braid of light.

It was the tiny whirlwind at the tip of Aerin’s hair. It was the gravel that buried Augustine. It was the white radiance on Xiuze’s skin.

It was the shadow of a prayer falling to the ground. It was the moonlight that made a fool emperor crawl.

It could present as all things in this World, and yet it was not those things themselves.

Because it could take all forms, it could know all things. That knowing was not sight. It was… feeling.

Wind brushes your body and learns your shape. Is that sight? No. That’s feeling.

So what was it, really?

If one word could hold it, perhaps… Atmosphere.

Augustine and the others called it that.

Atmosphere was its origin, born from humanity’s fear of the unknown. That fear made humans forge their own shackle.

That shackle was the Cycle of the Hero King and his companions clashing with the Demon King again and again. In time, people named it the Cycle.

The Cycle bound the humans of this World. It also sheltered them from the erosions of the unknown, letting their lives run steady as a riverbed.

The Cycle protects humans. Then what protects the Cycle?

“I do,” it said.

When it gained the awareness to say I, it was no longer it. It was she.

Gender meant nothing to her, but a mask must be worn.

In the dark between stars, she preferred to be a woman, so she took that form.

She watched Ye Weibai and Aerin.

She always watched.

Sometimes her gaze slipped aside, because viruses like Augustine moved too loudly. She called them viruses, for they always tried to break the Cycle’s system.

They didn’t frighten her. To her they were no more than insects that a thumb could end, a soft crunch underfoot.

But she permitted no thing that dared threaten the Cycle.

Bug, rat, or dragon, she would lay her nets and crush them one by one with care cold as iron.

Only sometimes, she didn’t understand.

“Why must they do what breaks the Cycle?”

She could read all things, yet she could not look through thin, fragile human flesh and see a human heart.

She couldn’t understand. It didn’t matter. She could analyze the layers of the last tens of thousands of years.

She teased out threads. She laid logic like script across sky and earth. She arrived at an answer.

All paths led to the same stone—they don’t want to die.

The answer made her shake her head. Humans are small and narrow, thoughts forever trapped in a nutshell.

If the death of a few could save the World, what could be more brilliant, sacred, and bright?

A sacrifice like that should be accepted with a steady face and a steady step.

That’s the larger tide.

They cannot resist. They should not resist.

Yet there are always a few who catch the virus and turn to grit in the Cycle’s gears.

These impurities think themselves mighty and try to rebel. Blind to the fact that what they resist is something they themselves created.

Besides, no matter how mighty, an impurity is an ant to her.

“Impurities,” she said, “should be removed.”

So she killed Augustine.

She used Ye Weibai’s hand.