Chen Xun took a few steps closer.
The little girl did not retreat. She merely shifted instinctively toward the pile of rubble behind her, like a small beast guarding its nest, quietly shielding those things a little more securely.
Chen Xun lowered his eyes and glanced at the pile of rubble.
It was an unremarkable heap of fragments, large and small, in all sorts of shapes. She had stacked them neatly together, clearly putting thought into their arrangement. The gaps between each piece were almost identical, their precision surprising.
Yet on closer inspection, a few pieces among the rubble were unusual.
There was a broken porcelain shard, its glaze mostly worn away. Only one corner still bore the faint pattern of a cluster of dark green grass blades, rendered in delicate strokes. It was a glaze unique to the Azure Mysterious Immortal Domain, used exclusively on vessels meant to hold precious spirit herbs.
There was half a broken bronze plaque. The inscription on its back had already blurred away, while an incomplete character for "mysterious" could still be made out on the front.
There was also a short piece of charred wood, black and light, probably all but weightless in the hand. Nothing revealed what it had once been, yet she had placed it at the very center of the rubble, in a position of honor, as though it were the most precious piece of all.
Chen Xun stared at that piece of wood for a while.
He recognized it.
That was the grain of moon pear wood.
The staircase railings in the Azure Mysterious Immortal Domain's Scripture Pavilion had been made of moon pear wood.
"These." Chen Xun raised his eyes to the little girl. "What did you pick them up for?"
The little girl froze for a moment,