Xu Ling reached into the sleeve of her white robe and withdrew something small enough that it disappeared in her palm when she closed her fingers around it. She held it out to Lin Yi.
He looked at it.
A sunflower seed. Or what had once been a sunflower seed. The shell was shriveled, the surface blackened and cracked in the specific way of something that had been exposed to extreme heat from the inside rather than from an external source. It sat in her palm without weight, or rather, with less weight than its size suggested it should have.
"This is part of his inheritance?" Lin Yi said.
"This is the gate," Xu Ling said.
He picked it up. The texture was dry under his fingers, the kind of dry that came from something organic that had been preserved beyond its natural lifespan through means that were not natural preservation. He turned it once and looked at the cracks.
"Your blood," Xu Ling said.
"My blood?" Lin Yi repeated, genuinely surprised.
