Flaming Fist

The look in Lin Yun's eyes changed. The pale blue within them was no longer merely a spiritual glow, but a calm so profound it bordered on detachment. She was no longer the girl who had panicked in the Red Cloud Suite. Even her entire bearing had changed.

"I said," she spoke quietly, yet with extraordinary clarity, "Lin Yun was only a name I once used."

Jiu Jia Yi's Adam's apple bobbed, and his fingers tightened imperceptibly around his blade.

"So you... aren't Lin Yun at all?" He refused to believe that the woman who had fought her way through blood and fire alongside him could suddenly become someone else.

"Lin Yun did exist." She looked at him, a trace of tenderness surfacing in her eyes, but that emotion seemed buried at the bottom of a deep well, impossibly far away. "But she was my shell outside the 'door,' the identity I had before I chose to forget. My true self was awakened by the Eye of the Center a very, very long time ago."

Bai Mo stood to one side, his hands hanging at his sides, his expression conflicted.

"She finally remembered," he murmured, as though mourning something, or welcoming the return of fate.

"You knew all along that she wasn't Lin Yun." Jiu Jia Yi rounded on him, his gaze sharp as a blade. "Who the hell are you?"

Bai Mo slowly exhaled, as though breathing out an illness that had festered for years. "I was originally just a waiter aboard the ship. An utterly ordinary waiter. Until three years ago, when I stumbled into the Mirror Realm."

His voice was low, as though he were recounting a past that no one would ever believe.

"The Mirror Realm... isn't a space, but a structure of consciousness, a realm of self-replication and projection. When I entered it, I saw thousands upon thousands of faces of 'me'... each one was a different me, doing different things, saying different words. Only then did I realize that I was nothing more than a repeating symbol."

"But she—" He looked toward Lin Yun. "She is the only being who cannot be replicated."

"So you approached her from the very beginning just to lure her here?" Jiu Jia Yi sneered, anger showing in his eyes. "You had her drawn in, awakened, and... used?"

Bai Mo shook his head. "I brought her here only to close that rift. Without her, the Eye of the Center can never close again. Do you think I wanted to endure three years of torment, struggling endlessly between one dream and another? If she didn't come, I would die too. We were all chosen."

Lin Yun neither interrupted Bai Mo nor defended herself. She merely lifted her head and gazed at the eye, her expression growing ever more serene.

"It hasn't fully awakened yet," she said softly. "I can feel it. It's... still waiting."

"Waiting for what?" Jiu Jia Yi asked in a low voice.

"For me to speak my true name." She turned around, a faint smile on her face, yet it held an indescribable desolation.

"Can you stop it?" he finally asked, his voice barely audible.

Lin Yun fell silent for a moment. "Maybe I can, maybe I can't. But this is something I have to face."

"You're not alone." Jiu Jia Yi stepped forward and said quietly, "Even if you're no longer 'Lin Yun,' I won't let you walk into that eyeball alone to die."

Lin Yun faltered slightly, a flicker of conflicting emotions passing through the depths of her eyes.

"You really..." She gave a soft laugh. "You really aren't afraid to die."

"I am," Jiu Jia Yi replied bluntly. "But I'm more afraid of something happening to you."