The Witnesses

The stone door closed with a groan.
Dust swirled in the stale air, drifting down like ash. The silence that followed wasn’t empty — it was listening. Even the cracked glyphs in the floor seemed to lean closer, scar tissue waiting to hear the wound named.

Lu Piao broke first.
“You’ve lost your minds.”

His voice rang too loud in the chamber. He stared at the scrolls spread across the table, the knife at Ning’er’s hip, Nie Li’s bare back, the dust still settling from where they had dragged old boxes aside.
“This looks like a cult. Or a suicide pact. Or both.”

“Lu Piao—” Du Ze’s voice was quiet, taut, like a rope ready to snap.
“Let them speak.”

Nie Li pulled his robe back over his shoulders. Not to hide — but to stand before them properly.
“We were about to do something irreversible,” he said.
He met their eyes.
“We still are.”

Ning’er stepped closer, Hei Jin scroll in her hands. The obsidian knife glinted faintly at her side.

Du Ze’s gaze shifted between them.
“Why?”

Nie Li didn’t hesitate.
“Because everything we were taught is a lie.”

A silence stretched, sharp as glass.

“Be specific,” Du Ze pressed.

Nie Li drew a long breath.
“I died.”

The word dropped like a stone into water.

The silence thickened. It wasn’t just his friends staring — it felt as if the very stones of the chamber leaned forward, listening to a secret not spoken here for centuries.

Lu Piao snorted, too quick, too nervous.
“Yeah, we’re all gonna die someday—”

“No,” Nie Li cut in. His voice sharpened, trembling at the edges.
“I already did.”

The chamber froze. Even Ning’er’s hand stilled on the scroll.

“I died under the Sage Emperor,” Nie Li said, slower now, the words pulled like thorns. “I was the strongest I had ever been — and still crushed. Glory City burned. Ziyun died. Everyone I loved was swallowed in fire. And then, in the silence after death, a Voice called me back.”

His hand pressed flat to the parchment of the Seal.
“It gave me breath again. Not for power. Not for revenge. For this. To remember the First Covenant, and to renew it with the Second.”

Du Ze’s face tightened.
“You’re saying… this is your second life.”

“Yes.”

Lu Piao’s laugh cracked like a broken reed.
“That’s—That’s impossible. You expect us to swallow that because you say so?”

“You don’t have to,” Nie Li said, his voice steady. “But ask Ning’er: how could I read Hei Jin script that only a handful of scholars still grasp, when most of it was burned as heresy with Kong Ming’s fall? How did she come to hold the knife prepared for the Seal? And how did I find her before she even knew what it meant?”

He spread his hands, they were scarless but shaking “Do you think I could invent this? I’m standing here because mercy dragged me out of the grave. And I have one chance to make it count.”

Ning’er’s voice cut the silence.
“They called my pain a disease. But when he spoke of the First Seal, it fit. For the first time in my life, it made sense.”

Her fingers brushed the knife at her side.
“My grandmother told me this blade was older than the Winged Dragon clan. That it belonged to our family before power seduced us. I thought it was just a story. Now I see it was a memory.”

Her eyes flickered, grief smothered beneath the steel of resolve.
“If I take this path, everything my family ever demanded of me dies here. Every hope they pinned on my cultivation, every ambition written into my bones — gone.” Her fingers tightened around the knife, not trembling now but deliberate, steady. “But maybe it should die. Maybe that hope was never life at all, only a chain.”

Lu Piao blinked, confusion wrinkling his brow. “What do you mean?”

“Cultivation,” Nie Li said, his voice low, sharp as broken glass, “is rebellion — and mutilation of the soul.”

Silence fell, heavy as a sealed tomb.

Du Ze looked between them, then down at the Seal. He studied it like a battlefield, slow and methodical, as though testing every line. His lips pressed tight. His gaze lingered on the Seal, then flicked to Ning’er’s pale face, then back to Nie Li. The weight of mockery, of years of endurance, of being told he was fragile — all of it wavered in him. He looked like a man standing at the edge of a cliff, terrified, but more terrified of wasting the chance to leap.

“I always thought the soul was fragile,” He said finally. “That it had to be hardened, trained. That was why I came here — why I endured the mockery, and why my two sisters were married off to a nearby village so I could afford to study.”

He lifted his eyes to Nie Li.
“And you’re telling me the very techniques I bled for — that my sisters sacrificed their futures for — were the wound all along? That it was all for nothing?”

“Yes,” Nie Li said softly. He reached out and set a steady hand on Du Ze’s shoulder. His voice held no scorn, only grief. “But don’t think their sacrifice was meaningless. They gave so you could seek truth — and now you’ve found it. The soul was never meant to be opened and yoked. It was meant to remain whole, sealed, at peace.”

Du Ze’s lips trembled. His eyes glistened as the weight of it sank deep into his bones — not just loss, but a strange kind of release. For the first time, he felt the cost had led him to something that endured.

Lu Piao shook his head violently.
“This is insane. We need cultivation to fight. Without it, the beasts will eat us alive.”

“No,” Nie Li said. “With it, we become like them. I watched children come into rooms like this with nothing. Parents scraped coin together, desperate. And when their soul-gates were forced open, they staggered out blazing with power.”

He gritted his teeth.
“But now I see the truth: their Seals were undone. They weren’t strengthened. They were hollowed.”

“That’s a lie,” Lu Piao snapped. “That’s a—”

“It’s the truth,” Nie Li said, cutting across him. “I watched them burn brighter and brighter until nothing was left. And I followed the same path. That’s why I died.”

Silence pressed.

Du Ze exhaled slowly.
“And the right path… is refusal.”

“Yes.”

“You won’t rise,” Nie Li said. “Not in the world’s eyes. But when the flood comes — and it will — you’ll still be standing.”

Lu Piao groaned, throwing up his hands.
“So we just give it all up? Everything we’ve worked for? To live as—what? Spiritual beggars?”

“You’ll live,” Ning’er said softly.

“And the rest?” Lu Piao demanded. “The nobles? The City Lord’s Hall? The whole tower of cultivation?”

“They’ll fall,” Nie Li said. His voice carried no triumph. Only certainty.
“And they’ll call us traitors while they burn.”

Du Ze’s jaw tightened. His eyes lingered on the Seal one last time.
“You already know who’s going to follow you, don’t you?”

Nie Li didn’t flinch.
“I know who was sealed already.”

The chamber seemed to hold its breath.

Du Ze stood frozen, torn between the weight of memory and the pull of truth. His sisters’ faces rose unbidden — the ones who had bartered their futures so he could sit in these halls. For a moment, his throat closed. To abandon cultivation felt like betraying them all over again.

But then he looked at Nie Li. At the scroll. At the lines. And he knew.

Slowly, with tears burning unshed at the corners of his eyes, he stepped forward and extended his hand.
“My sisters gave so I could chase strength. If I keep chasing it, I’ll only dishonor them. But if I choose truth… maybe their sacrifice can still mean something. Mark me when the time comes. I don’t want power if it costs me my soul.”

Nie Li clasped his hand firmly.

Ning’er allowed herself the faintest smile, relief softening her eyes.

Lu Piao stared at them all like they were speaking another language. His mouth opened, closed, then opened again.
“Insane,” he muttered.

But then he jabbed a finger at Nie Li.
“If you’re really going to do this, then you’re not doing it without me.”

Nie Li blinked.
“You’re saying—”

“I’m saying,” Lu Piao groaned, “if the sky really is about to fall, I’d rather be standing beside my stupid best friend than sitting on a tower about to collapse.”

His voice cracked, not with fear but with fierce affection. “If you walk into fire, Nie Li, I’m walking with you. Don’t think you’re leaving me behind to play prophet while I sit safe. I’d rather die mocked with you than live praised without you.”

He jabbed again at the Seal.
“But I swear, if this turns out to be some elaborate prank…”

Nie Li laughed — not bitter this time, but alive.
“It’s not.”

“Good,” Lu Piao muttered. “Because I hate needles. And this feels worse.”

The dust stirred faintly in the chamber, though no breeze had moved. The broken glyphs on the floor seemed to drink the moment, as though memory itself had just taken note. For a breath, the particles of dust swirled together into faint, geometric lines — the suggestion of a star, six points with one waiting center — before drifting back into grey stillness.

The witnesses had been marked — not in flesh yet, but in resolve. And the Covenant had begun.