The Witness in the Dust

The silence his father left behind wasn't empty. It was a physical presence, a thick, dead air that swallowed sound and made the dust motes hang motionless in the pale shafts of morning light. Wei Yuan stood frozen in the middle of it, the words histories best left buried echoing in the hollows of his skull.

A conspiracy. The thought wasn't a clean realization; it was a cold, greasy certainty coiling in his gut. Not just me. Not just my mind breaking. The walls know. The stones know. And my father… my father helped build them.

The iron box on the floor seemed to watch him, its single, seamless face an unblinking eye. It was the linchpin, the dark heart of this whole disaster. But it was a lock without a key, and his father was a door that had just been barred from the other side. He needed another way in. A loose stone. A crack in the wall.

There was only one. One other soul who had been there. One other person who had breathed that same sharp, ozone-tainted air.

Old Man Ji. The witness.

The thought was a desperate lunge, not a plan. He had to move. Now. He didn't smooth his robes—he felt the phantom wrinkles of his own fear bunching under his skin as he stalked out of the Pavilion.

The path connecting his scholarly prison to the rest of the estate was slick with moss and the smell of damp, decaying leaves. He found him there. Old Man Ji, a question mark carved from old bone and loose robes, sweeping the same small patch of flagstones with a worn-out bamboo broom.

Swish… swish… scrape. The sound was a dry, scratching whisper against the oppressive quiet. The old man seemed locked in a private eternity, his focus absolute and utterly pointless.

"Uncle Ji," Wei Yuan said, his voice a soft intrusion, pitched not to startle.

The sweeping continued. Swish… swish…

"Uncle Ji." He stepped closer, letting his shadow fall over the old man's work.

The broom stilled. Ji lifted his head, a slow, creaking motion, his eyes clouded with the milky film of age. It took a long moment for the world to swim into focus for him. A flicker of something—recognition, maybe, or just reflex.

"Ah, Little Yuan," he rasped, his voice thin and dry as winter leaves. "The dust… always more dust."

A cold fist of despair closed in Wei Yuan's chest. This was it. The senile fog his father had dismissed. The wall of incomprehension he now had to somehow breach. Careful. A direct question would send him scurrying back into the maze of his own mind. This had to be an interrogation disguised as a kindness.

"I was feeling unwell yesterday, Uncle Ji," Wei Yuan began, each word a carefully placed stone across a treacherous river. "Father said you found me. I don't… I don't remember it clearly. My head… it feels full of fog."

He offered a piece of the truth. A baited hook, cast into the murky depths.

Old Man Ji blinked. Once. Twice. "Foggy… yes." He nodded slowly. "The air was foggy. Smelled… sweet." He brought a trembling, skeletal hand to his nose and sniffed the air, as if the memory of the scent still lingered there.

The bruised fruit smell. Wei Yuan's pulse hammered against his throat. A connection. It's there.

"Sweet?" Wei Yuan prompted, his voice barely a whisper. "Like incense? Or flowers?"

"No, no…" Ji shook his head, a fretful, agitated motion. He leaned heavily on his broom, his knuckles shining white. "Not flowers. Like… like old ink. When the water is wrong. When the inkstone weeps." He looked at Wei Yuan, and for a fleeting, terrifying second, the cloudy film over his eyes burned away. His gaze sharpened, becoming terrifyingly lucid, filled with a primal, animal fear.

"The ink was too loud, Little Yuan," he whispered, his voice cracking with the memory of it. "So loud."

The same words. From his memory-storyboard. Not random. A core piece of the trauma.

"What ink, Uncle Ji?" Wei Yuan pressed, leaning in, his own voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Was I practicing? Did you see what I was doing?"

And just like that, the connection shattered. The light in Ji's eyes died, the fog rolling back in. He looked past Wei Yuan, his gaze lost in a landscape a thousand years away. "Sweeping," he mumbled, his hands finding the familiar shape of his broom. "Must sweep the leaves. The First Ancestor dislikes a messy courtyard."

A hot wave of frustration washed over Wei Yuan. The urge to grab the old man's shoulders and shake the answers out of him was a physical thing, a tightening in his fists. So close. So damn close. The truth was in there, a jewel buried under a mountain of rubble.

He couldn't break through the wall. So he would have to find a key to the door.

An idea sparked, cold and terrible. An idea born from the memory of the cold, proficient stranger who lived in his hands. The Artist. Ji wasn't responding to the Waking Self, the frightened boy asking questions. What if he could only be reached by the one who had actually performed the ritual?

It was a terrifying gamble. It was like taking a brush loaded with poisoned ink and pressing it to a priceless scroll, praying it wouldn't bleed through and destroy everything. But the Branch Purge was a guillotine hanging over his neck, and the rope was fraying. What other choice did he have?

Wei Yuan took a breath that did nothing to calm the roaring in his ears. "Uncle Ji," he said, and his own voice was alien to him. The warmth was gone. It was flat. Precise. Cold. "Look at my hand."

He held out his left hand, palm up, displaying the thin, white line of the scar. He focused on it, on the phantom memory of cold steel, on the willing sacrifice of his own blood. He didn't just remember the Artist; he invited him. He felt his posture shift, his spine straightening into a rod of iron. The fear in his gut was scoured away, replaced by an icy, absolute calm.

Ji's rhythmic sweeping faltered. He turned, slowly, hesitantly, and his gaze fell upon Wei Yuan's outstretched hand. His cloudy eyes went wide. He dropped the broom. It clattered on the stone path, the sound obscene in the quiet air.

"The… the brush…" Ji stammered, his entire body seized by a violent tremor. He wasn't looking at Wei Yuan's face. He was staring at his hand as if it were a coiled, venomous snake. "The screaming brush…"

The brush? Not me? Not the box? The Artist's cold logic seized the detail. The source of the soul-flaying sound was the tool.

"What about the brush, Ji?" Wei Yuan asked. The name came out stark, commanding. The affectionate "Uncle" was gone.

The old man flinched as if he'd been struck. He stumbled back a step, his hands rising to ward off a blow that wasn't coming. "Don't break the seal," he whimpered, tears cutting clean tracks through the grime on his wrinkled cheeks. "Don't break the seal… break the scroll…"

He stared at Wei Yuan, his eyes blazing with a lucidity more terrifying than any senility. It was the clarity of pure, unadulterated terror.

"It wasn't your blood," he choked out, his voice a ragged, tearing sob. "It wasn't just your blood in the ink."

And with that, his eyes rolled back into his head. A faint, black wisp of smoke, smelling sharply of burnt paper and something else, something foul, coiled from his nostrils. He collapsed, a frail, broken heap in the pile of dead leaves.

Wei Yuan stood over him. The Artist's cold presence receded like a tide, leaving the Waking Self stranded on a shore of horror, trembling and cold. A phantom pain flared along his meridians, a vicious backlash from the forced summoning.

He stared down at the still form of Old Man Ji, the final, lucid words carving themselves into his mind.

It wasn't just your blood in the ink.

The cryptic note. The ink is not enough. The blood is too thin.

It all made a horrifying kind of sense. His other self hadn't just used his own blood. He had mixed it with something else. Something that made a loyal old man collapse in terror. Something that screamed.

The mystery of what happened in that locked room had just ripped open into a new, terrifying abyss. He wasn't just investigating a ritual.

He was investigating a sacrifice. And he had no idea what—or who—he had offered up on the altar of his own ambition.