Wuchen looked as though someone had ripped the bones out of him.
“The token returns to the Old Court...”
His throat tightened, and his whole body trembled.
Lin Qingzhu startled and instinctively looked toward Zhou Xuan.
Zhou Xuan did not immediately reach for the Command Token.
He stared in the direction the Supreme One Token pointed.
The tip of the Command Token tilted slightly, bypassing the entrance marked on the map fragment and pointing deeper within.
That was not the place Wuchen had just indicated.
In other words, the entrance on the map might only have been the entrance outsiders had found.
The place the Supreme One Token wanted to reach lay elsewhere.
The Return-to-Void Map on the table trembled faintly. As the Command Token's light swept over several incomplete lines, they briefly lit up.
Wuchen jerked his head up, his breathing falling into disarray.
"Wrong... the ancestor's notes weren't wrong. We read them wrong."
Zhou Xuan tapped a finger against the table.
"Explain."
Wuchen opened his mouth, as though trying to untangle the jumble in his head, but the more anxious he became, the less coherently he spoke.
Lin Qingzhu frowned, poured him a cup of tea, and pushed it toward him.
“Senior Wuchen, take your time. You've already knelt before him. Surely you can give us more than half a sentence.”
Wuchen paused, then accepted the tea without drinking it.
He gazed at the hovering Supreme One Token, his voice hoarse.
“There is an ancestral admonition in the Token-Keeper Lineage's notes.”
“If the Supreme One Token does not awaken, the token-keepers shall not act.”
“If the Supreme One Token awakens, it must not be stopped, seized, or hidden.”
“If one day the Command Token rises of its own accord and points toward the Old Court, then that is...