Night had deepened.
The little girl slept soundly, still clutching that shard of celadon in her hand. Her sleeping face was peaceful, her breathing steady, like the only thing in these ruins that had not yet been crushed by something.
The old man did not sleep.
He leaned half against a broken stone, head tilted back as he gazed at the pitch-black canopy of night overhead. It was impossible to tell what he was looking at, or whether he was looking at anything at all. Yet within those cloudy eyes, in the darkness, an exceedingly faint glimmer slowly began to gather.
Something was quietly rising within those clouded eyes.
It was not the gaze of an ordinary aged being, but something buried beneath immeasurably deep and heavy time—something that had slept far, far too long, yet had never truly died. In this silent night, it was breaking through the earth inch by inch.
It was Dao resonance.
Incomplete, shattered, like an ancient mirror smashed into ten thousand fragments. Every shard reflected light, yet none could ever be pieced back into a whole.
Then he spoke.
His voice had changed drastically.
It was no longer the halting, stumbling breath of an old man whose words could barely connect. Something older, deeper, slowly welled up from that ruined shell of a body, like an undercurrent that had slumbered deep beneath the earth for too long, finally seeping quietly through the surface one night.
"Senior..."
He called out once. Those two words were clearer than any he had spoken before.
Chen Xun lifted his eyes and looked at him.
The old man gazed at the night sky for a long while before speaking. "After seeing you, Senior, I seem to have remembered some things. Things from a very long time ago."
"So long