Night had fallen.
The little girl slept soundly, still clutching that shard of celadon in her hand. Her sleeping face was peaceful, her breathing steady, as though she were the only thing in these ruins that had not yet been crushed by something.
The old man did not sleep.
He half-reclined against a broken stone, his head tilted back as he gazed into the pitch-black night overhead. It was impossible to tell what he was looking at; perhaps he was looking at nothing at all. Only those clouded eyes, in the darkness, very, very slowly began to well with the faintest trace of light.
Something was quietly rising to the surface within those clouded eyes.
It was not the gaze of an ordinary aged being, but something buried beneath the deepest, thickest layers of time, something that had slumbered far, far too long yet had never truly died. In this silent night, it was breaking through the earth little by little.
It was Dao resonance.
Incomplete, shattered, like an ancient mirror smashed into ten thousand fragments, each reflecting light, yet never again able to be pieced back into a whole.
Then he spoke.
His voice had changed utterly.
It was no longer that halting, stumbling, aged breath of a voice, scarcely able to string words together. Instead, something older and deeper slowly poured from that ruined shell, like an underground current that had slept in the depths too long and finally, one night, quietly seeped to the surface.
"Senior..."
He called out, and that single word was clearer than anything he had said before.
Chen Xun raised his eyes and looked at him.
The old man gazed at the night sky for a long time before speaking. "After seeing you, Senior, I seem to have remembered a few things. Things