He heard it before he saw it.
A low, wet sound—like something thick moving very quickly through the undergrowth—and then the Guard of Onus, which had been silently following them for the last thirty steps, let out a sharp, alarmed cry.
Then the Poison Worm was simply there.
It had the shape of something that had never needed to worry about being seen. Wide and low to the ground, its body was segmented and dense, covered in a surface that shifted color in the filtered light from dull grey to dark iridescent black. Its face—if the blunt front end could be called that—was all mouth, ringed with small, hard teeth that moved independently. It completely blocked the path ahead.
"HUK—?!" Zhao Wei stumbled backward.
"It's a parasite called a Poison Worm," Bai Feng said, in the tone of someone narrating a nature documentary while quietly sweating through his jacket. "Highly toxic. Very stubborn. They don't attack anyone who has been permitted to enter Onus, so just—"
The Poison Worm lunged at Zhao Wei.
"—don't worry—"
It struck him in the shoulder. What he felt was not the impact—he had taken worse—but the searing heat that came with it. A burning sensation started at the point of contact and spread outward through his skin, as though something with no right to touch a living body had been pressed against him. He clutched his arm.
"AGGH—HOT—!"
"What?!" Bai Feng stared. "Why is the Poison Worm—?!"
"My skin is burning!" Zhao Wei shouted.
He threw himself sideways, trying to gain distance and understand what was happening. The worm had already turned, slow and certain, orienting toward him the way a predator focuses on prey it has decided to claim. The heat in his shoulder showed no sign of fading.
Though people with permits don't get attacked, he thought, slightly hysterical.
"Move away!!"
Xue Lian's voice cut through the chaos. She was already moving, one arm raised. Something dark gathered between her fingers—neither pure shadow nor light, but a force that built the way a storm gathers, all at once and then again.
"Bai Feng!!"
Her strike lashed out.
The Poison Worm moved faster than anything its size should have been able to. With one fluid twist, the strike slammed into its outer surface and stopped dead.
Xue Lian stared.
The worm was unharmed. The air around it crackled faintly where her power had struck and then dissolved, like water thrown against stone.
Blocked. The thought was quiet in her mind. I controlled my power. But a worm shouldn't be able to block it. How?
The worm turned back toward Zhao Wei.
"UGH, LET ME GO!!"
It had him by the leg—or rather, its bulk was pressing down on his leg with the devastating certainty of something that never needed to hurry. Zhao Wei heard the crack before he felt it. His knee. Something had shifted that was never meant to shift.
He felt it now. Loudly.
"I swore," he growled through clenched teeth. His hands scrabbled across the path and closed around a fistful of solid earth. "I swore an oath. Spirit Fire. Go back. Back to Zhao Ming." His vision swam at the edges. "But before I can even get past this damn insect—"
The Poison Worm opened its mouth wider.
Something in him—something that had nothing to do with magic, power, or the Beyond Realm—made a decision. It was older, simpler: the same stubborn part of him that had spent his whole life getting up off cold floors because Zhao Ming needed feeding.
"UUUAAAAH!!"
He swung his head forward and headbutted the creature directly between its front segments with everything he had.
The Poison Worm reared back—only an inch, but that inch carried surprise. In that surprise lay an opening, and Xue Lian had been waiting for exactly that moment.
"Now!!"
The darkness that erupted from her this time did not gather. It simply arrived—absolute, directionless, a force without shape—and slammed into the Poison Worm like the announcement of something final.
The creature's shriek tore across the canopy, scattering a flock of creatures that were not quite birds from the upper branches. Then the worm was hurled backward, smashed into the roots of the nearest giant tree, and dissolved into smoke and silence.
The forest fell deathly quiet.
Zhao Wei sat in the dirt with both hands flat on the ground, breathing hard through his nose.
"Are you okay, kid?" Bai Feng asked, reaching him with surprising speed.
"S… somewhat."
He looked down at his leg. His knee throbbed. But even as he watched, the pain receded—not gradually, but steadily, the way water pulls back before a wave. The Zhao Wei body was doing what it always did.
"Wait," he said. "My leg—"
"It's already healed," Bai Feng confirmed, inspecting the joint with professional focus. "You were bitten pretty badly, but the wound has closed."
Zhao Wei flexed his knee. The burn in his shoulder had vanished, too. His entire body felt reset to the state it had been in before the worm decided he was breakfast.
Xue Lian crouched beside him. Not with open concern, but with the focused attention of someone assessing damage to something that belonged to her.
"Mistress," Bai Feng said quietly, his voice dropping, "could it be that the one who controlled the worm is…"
"It's fine. I can guess who did it." She straightened. Her gaze swept through the trees, searching for something invisible. "There are people in Onus who do not view you kindly." She spoke directly to Zhao Wei, without softening the words. "Get stronger quickly if you wish to live. I cannot step in every time something like this happens."
Zhao Wei looked up at her.
"Such an elaborate greeting," he said.
Something unreadable flickered across her expression.
"Get up," she said. "Hurry."
He stood.
Onus was—there was no other word for it—grand.
Not grand in the way Beijing was grand, with the grandeur of age and human intention. This was grand in the way something is when it was never built for human eyes and does not particularly care that they are trying to comprehend it. The structure that rose before them as the forest thinned was black, vast, and complex in a way that made the eyes slide off it before they could fully register what they were seeing—towers that receded into a cloud layer that might have been decorative, walls that extended in directions requiring a different geometry, and suspended above the main entrance, the Onus symbol burned with a slow, patient white light.
"Hwuah~" Zhao Wei said, craning his neck. "So grand. I can't imagine something this big. It's awesome."
"This is Onus," Xue Lian said simply.
"How do we cross? There's no road!"
She reached into the folds of her jacket and produced something small—the badge. "This is the license to enter Onus. Proof that you may attend the school. Do not lose it." She nodded toward a wide circle of carved stone set into the path, filled with slowly moving light. "Step into the circle. Do you have the badge Luqi gave you?"
Zhao Wei held it up. "Here."
They stepped into the circle together.
The world compressed, rearranged, and then expanded again—and they were inside.
The corridors of Onus were tall enough to make Zhao Wei feel very small.
Students moved through them—most of them not human, or human only in the way Xue Lian was human, which felt more like a direction than a destination. They traveled in clusters or alone, and nearly all of them, in their various ways, looked at Zhao Wei.
"What will you do if you get lost here?" Xue Lian said without looking at him. "Stick close."
"Okay."
From somewhere behind him, two students—both close enough to human to pass at a glance—watched him with open interest.
"Is that the rumored undead?"
"He looks no different from a human. I heard a demon apprentice made him."
"And then, almost admiringly: "To see an earthly undead with my own eyes…"
Zhao Wei kept walking. He kept his face forward and let the whispers wash over him. He had spent enough of his life in rooms full of people talking about him to have developed a strong immunity to it.
He was so focused on keeping his expression neutral that he didn't notice the other student until he had already collided with him.
The impact was light—a mere brush of shoulders in a crowded corridor. Yet Zhao Wei staggered, and a bruise was already forming where they had touched. The other student stopped.
He was tall, dressed in dark, fitted clothes chosen for function rather than style. His hair was dark and neatly cut. His face looked like it had finished emoting long ago and decided it was done.
He turned and regarded Zhao Wei with quiet, calculating eyes.
"Sorry," he said. "I wasn't watching."
"No," Zhao Wei replied, rubbing his shoulder. "I was the one not watching."
Behind the student, two girls burst into barely contained excitement: "Super~ Is that Ophidian's B-type?! Where, where?!"
The student—Ophidian—ignored them. He shifted his gaze past Zhao Wei to Xue Lian, and his posture changed by the smallest degree.
"Hello, Lady Xue Lian. It's been a while." His voice was even, untouched by the surrounding noise. "I wasn't careful, and I bumped into your servant."
"Ophidian," Xue Lian said. Nothing more.
Ophidian looked back at Zhao Wei with those calm, calculating eyes. "Hmm… strange. You barely got bumped, yet you look fairly messed up. Let's stop the tricks."
Xue Lian's voice was flat. "It's because someone gave us an undesired welcome."
Ophidian tilted his head slightly. "Really? I had no idea." The calm in his voice was absolute. Then his eyes locked onto Zhao Wei with the directness of a door opening into a cold room. "I won't forgive anyone a second time."
The silence that followed carried weight.
Ophidian stepped back, his posture subtly rearranging as though filing the conversation away. "I have things to do, so if you'll excuse me." He turned to leave, then added over his shoulder, without urgency, like a casual note: "Till we meet again, undead."
He walked away down the corridor, his two companions following. The crowd of whispering students parted smoothly for him, the way crowds always part for those they have learned to respect—or fear.
Zhao Wei watched him go.
"…What was that about?" he asked quietly.
"Hmph," Bai Feng muttered. "I still can't understand what he was talking about."
Neither could Zhao Wei. But he filed the encounter away in the same mental place he kept everything useful—not forgotten, not yet acted upon, simply held for later.
He had made an oath to obtain the Spirit Fire and return. He was in the right school. He had a badge in his pocket and a bruise already fading from his shoulder. Somewhere in this enormous, impossible building was a teacher he had not yet met.
First things first.