Seven days after the Bronze Gate of the Ruin Abyss secret realm closed, the lights in the Nanming Lamp-Guarding Shop began to flicker for no apparent reason.
At first, they only dimmed and brightened faintly, like an uneven breath. Before long, however, the seven Light Speaker apprentices woke from their dreams one after another, drenched in cold sweat. They had dreamed of the same pitch-black abyss and heard whispers echoing beside their ears: "Give it back to us... give us back our Heart Flame..." The voice did not sound like the howl of an evil spirit. Instead, it carried a profound grief, like a lament forgotten for a thousand years.
After waking from one such dream, A Ya discovered that a layer of dusky ash had coated the wick of her ancient lamp. Its flame had turned from blue to purple, with faint tendrils of black mist coiling around it. Terrified, she cradled the lamp and rushed to Xiaoman. "The lamp... something's going wrong with the lamp! It says it's 'hungry.'"
Xiaoman stared at the flame, his heart jolting. He reached into the lamp with his Heart Flame and, at the boundary between light and darkness, glimpsed a shattered soul silhouette—a human figure clad in a tattered lamp robe. The bronze plate on its chest bore the inscription "Lamp Guarder · Three," of the same lineage as Shouyi's "Lamp Guarder · One."
"Who... are you?" Xiaoman asked softly in Light Language.
The soul silhouette slowly raised its head. Its eyes held no light, only endless emptiness. "We... were once Lamp Guarders. We protected the light until the light became our shackles. They said we had 'fallen,' but we only... wanted so desperately to live."
In an instant, dream visions flooded Xiaoman's consciousness like a rising tide—
He saw the first