The courtyard of Onus was enormous and empty of anyone who wanted to be near Zhao Wei.
It wasn't the dramatic, deliberate emptiness of a crowd making a statement. It was subtler than that—and in some ways worse. Students moved across the wide stone plaza in every direction, their voices and footsteps filling the air with the ordinary sounds of a place that had been functioning long before he arrived and would continue long after he left. Yet an invisible radius surrounded him, absolute and unbroken. No one crossed it. Conversations shifted direction. Eyes glanced at him and then looked away, carrying the rest of their owners with them as if the movement were unconscious.
What's with him?
Making people feel awkward.
That's one thing, but this atmosphere…
Zhao Wei heard the whispers the way one hears a sound they have stopped expecting—not loudly, but clearly. He kept his eyes forward and his expression neutral, thinking of Zhao Ming's face the way he always did when he needed something to hold onto.
"What's with the mood here?" he asked Xue Lian quietly. "It seems like everyone is avoiding us."
Xue Lian did not slow her pace. "Your presence can only be called unique in the Beyond Realm." She paused, her dark eyes flicking briefly toward the students who had adjusted their paths to avoid coming within arm's reach. "Especially as a human undead."
"Why? Because I'm human, I'm worthless?"
Before she could answer, a voice came from ahead.
"Oh, my."
A woman stood at the entrance to the main building. She wore a long pale coat, her hair pulled back in an elaborate style. Her expression was professionally welcoming yet personally distant. She looked directly at Xue Lian with the focused attention of someone who had been waiting to deliver a message for some time.
"Lady Xue Lian. You have returned." She inclined her head. "The Elder is waiting."
Xue Lian went still for exactly one second. Then: "Lead on."
She turned to the group. "Bai Feng, follow." And then, without softening the words, to Zhao Wei: "It can't be helped. Go find the teacher you were assigned to. By yourself."
The instruction arrived before Zhao Wei could form an argument. He had already opened his mouth—already begun assembling the words take me with you, I don't know where anything is—when the guards stepped neatly between him and the corridor. Not aggressively. Simply and finally.
"Only Lady Xue Lian and Bai Feng are permitted beyond this point."
The blade-like construct hovering near Zhao Wei's head drifted slightly closer. He leaned away from it.
"O… okay," he said.
Xue Lian walked away without looking back. Bai Feng waddled after her, offering a brief apologetic grimace over his shoulder. Then both of them were gone, swallowed by the corridor's interior. The pale-coated woman fell into step beside them, and the guards returned to their positions as though the entire exchange had never happened.
Zhao Wei stood alone in the courtyard.
Deep within the building, past corridors that narrowed and widened and narrowed again, a different conversation was already underway.
The Elder's chamber was vast and dim, furnished with the spare precision of someone who had accumulated enough power to stop caring what anything looked like. The Elder himself was a tall figure robed in grey. His face had the quality of stone that had been worked on for a very long time—not harsh, exactly, but shaped by something patient and relentless. He stood with his back to the window when Xue Lian entered and did not turn around.
"The Semani," he said. "Tell me you have returned with it."
"The Semani was recovered." Xue Lian's voice carried no apology. "A family called the Zrrad has it in their possession. They are low-level by standing, but there is something behind them. The resources they are drawing on do not match what they should be capable of alone."
"Ophidian."
"That is my assessment as well."
"Leave it." He turned from the window. His eyes settled on her with the particular weight of someone who had been saving a question for the right moment. "We can deal with that in time. What I want to discuss is the other matter. The human undead." He paused. "Explain yourself."
Xue Lian held his gaze. "I can manage him. He poses no meaningful threat to—"
"That is not what I asked." The Elder's voice did not rise. It did not need to. "Do you understand what you have done? This family has maintained its standing in the Beyond Realm across generations. We are not a minor house. We do not act carelessly. And you—" He stopped and recalibrated. "Why? Why make a human undead?"
"I was in the middle of a decision," she said. "The method I chose had consequences I was prepared to accept. He will not disrupt anything of significance. I can guarantee that."
"You were prepared to accept." He moved to the table at the center of the room, turning his back to her once more. "I wonder if you considered the history you were accepting along with it." A heavy pause settled over the chamber. "Do you remember Romei?"
The name hung in the room for a moment.
"The undead human king," Xue Lian said.
"Yes." He did not look up. "Do you remember what he cost us? What he cost the whole of the Beyond Realm before the matter was finally resolved? A human undead, with sufficient exposure to this world and sufficient time to grow, can become something that cannot simply be managed." The last word carried a very specific weight. "We cannot afford that again. Not now. Not with the current state of things." He moved toward the inner door. "Kill the undead. Do it quietly, and do it soon."
His robes settled around him as he walked. Then he was gone, and Xue Lian was left alone in the vast, dim chamber with the distinct feeling that a decision had already been made for her without her permission.
She stood there for a moment.
Then she walked back out.
Back in the courtyard, Zhao Wei had concluded that he was extremely lost.
The invisible radius around him remained intact without effort. He looked down at the badge in his hand—the only anchor he had in this place—and then up at the architecture spreading in every direction. Tall buildings. Towers. Passages leading into sections of Onus whose names he did not yet know. Students who adjusted their course the moment they registered his presence.
I answered out of panic, he thought. But how am I supposed to find anything in here?
He walked.
The interior of Onus felt like a place designed by someone with strong opinions about grandeur and weak opinions about practicality. Corridors wide enough to march an army through were lit by sources with no visible origin and lined with unlabelled doors. He tried one. It led to a space that smelled of things he could not identify and produced a sound like stone grinding slowly and patiently against stone. He decided against any further experimental door-opening until he had more information.
He passed students. Some looked at him the way one looks at something they have been warned about. Others looked at him the way one looks at something never encountered before and not yet classified as a threat. He tried making eye contact in the universal language of please, I'm lost, help me. The universal response came back: not my concern.
"Can I ask—"
"G—go away! Don't come close!!"
He stopped walking. He looked at them. He looked at himself. To his knowledge, he had not done anything alarming in the last twenty minutes.
They treat me like a germ.
He put his hands in his pockets and kept walking.
Just find someone who looks normal. Ask them.
The sound reached him before he could identify it.
Faint, drifting from somewhere down a side corridor. Not quite a voice—more the shape of a voice stripped of language and left with only the urgent quality of need. Two syllables, repeated at irregular intervals, each one slightly more desperate than the last.
Help me…
Zhao Wei stopped. He looked left. The side corridor appeared empty. The sound came again from somewhere past the corner.
In situations like this, it is always best to keep walking, he thought, clearly and with complete conviction.
Then he turned left anyway.
The creature that grabbed the hem of his trousers was small, round, and covered in what appeared to be petals—or possibly cloud material; it was genuinely difficult to tell. Its face was a simple arrangement of features: two round eyes currently squeezed shut with effort and a mouth set in an expression of desperate, concentrated need. It had both hands wrapped around his ankle with a grip that was, for something its size, impressively firm.
"What—" Zhao Wei looked down. "What is this?"
It looked up at him. Its grip tightened.
Help me…
The sound was coming from it. He stared. It stared back with those wide, uncomplicated eyes. Then, with great deliberateness, it began to pull him in a direction.
"Go over here?" Zhao Wei said. "Why do I have to go over—"
It pulled harder.
"Don't pull my trousers! Why—"
The creature's face changed. Its small, round features rearranged themselves into something considerably less appealing, and whatever that new expression communicated to some old, instinctive part of his mind, it communicated clearly:
Unless you want to die, follow me.
"Y-yes, sir," Zhao Wei said, and followed.
It dragged him—dragging truly being the right word, even though the creature was a third of his size—because it possessed a quality of unstoppable forward motion that allowed no negotiation. It pulled him through several corridors, past a door taller than it had any right to be, and into a room.
The room was large and full of books. Not organized library books. These books had strong opinions about where they chose to live, and they had decided to live wherever they had landed. Shelves ran up every wall to a ceiling he could not see the top of, and a significant portion of the books had abandoned the shelves entirely to build their own structures on the floor. The whole space smelled of paper and something faintly electrical.
In the center of the room, a figure was caught.
The figure was tall—very tall—built in the way of someone who had grown without rushing and arrived at considerable height almost by accident. Long pale hair fell around a face that currently expressed mild, practiced suffering. His arms were stretched overhead, both wrists locked in a ceiling mechanism, some kind of grip assembly that held him comprehensively, if not cruelly.
"Ah," said the figure, with the resigned composure of someone who had been in this situation long enough to reach genuine acceptance. His eyes moved to Zhao Wei, then to the lever mounted on the wall beside the door. "You. Before anything else—that lever. Pull it down for me."
"Ah—sure, sorry. Like this?"
"Pull it down—"
Zhao Wei pulled up.
The mechanism released all at once with a loud sound that filled the entire room. The figure dropped from his suspended position and crashed to the floor with the full momentum of someone who had been held overhead for a long time and had suddenly been released at entirely the wrong angle.
"W—SORRY! Was that wrong—"
"It's fine." The figure rose and adjusted his coat. His face settled back into its default expression of practiced neutrality. "Thank you. I might have dried up within the hour."
"Are you sure? You look—"
"A new student." He looked Zhao Wei over once, efficiently. "Welcome to Onus."
His name was Zhongy. He stated it the way someone states a fact rather than makes an introduction—the same low, unhurried delivery he used for everything else. "This school operates something like an administrative institution," he added, "but with considerably less organization."
Zhao Wei explained that he was looking for his assigned teacher. Zhongy crossed to the door and indicated a marking engraved in the wall beside it—a symbol Zhao Wei had seen on other walls without understanding its function. "Place your badge in the slot beneath that. It will display your assignment."
Zhao Wei pressed the badge to the slot. A soft chime. A pause.
Zhongy's expression did something brief and complex. "There are no teachers available."
"No teachers?"
"At Onus, teachers select their own students. Students with low levels and no established reputation often wait for extended periods." He spoke in the tone of someone who had said this many times and had reached complete neutrality about it. "The students must find their teachers themselves."
Zhao Wei stared at him. "So I have to find my own teacher."
"Yes."
"How does someone who doesn't even know where the office is supposed to find a teacher on their own?"
Zhongy was quiet for a moment. Something shifted in his expression—not warmth, exactly, but in the direction of warmth, the way a building can face south without being warm itself. "I'm also searching. I'll help you look."
"Really? Thank you," Zhao Wei extended his hand on instinct. "My name is Zhao Wei—"
"No." Zhongy's tone was quiet and precise. "I should be the one thanking you." A brief pause. "Hurry up. This way."
They walked for what Zhao Wei estimated was half the length of the school, and then a little more.
The corridors grew quieter as they went. Then quieter still. The ceilings lowered incrementally. The stones in the walls changed in quality—older, rougher—as though this part of Onus had been built before anyone had settled on an aesthetic. No other students. No sounds from behind any of the doors.
The small petal creature bobbed along behind them at a distance. Zhao Wei had stopped paying it much attention.
"We've come quite far," he said. "I haven't seen anyone else in a while."
"We're almost there."
"Almost where, exactly—"
He did not finish the sentence.
The creature moved. It shot upward in a sudden spiral of light, faster than its size suggested it should, and before Zhao Wei could track the motion, pale vines erupted from its expanding form. They lashed outward with the precision of something that had done this many times before. They struck him across the chest and arms, pulled tight, and slammed him hard into the wall.
"W—what?! VINES?!"
He struggled. They held. Not painful, but absolute—he was bound from shoulder to hip, arms pinned, feet barely touching the floor.
"What are you doing?!" he shouted. "Zhongy—"
Zhongy had stopped walking. His back was to Zhao Wei. The corridor had gone very quiet.
"Sorry," he said. Not in the tone of someone apologizing for a minor inconvenience. It was the tone of someone who had made a decision they were not happy about and had made it anyway.
Before Zhao Wei could respond, the floor moved.
Not a tremor. Not a collapse. A deliberate, horizontal slide—as though a section of the corridor had always been a platform waiting to be activated. The stone beneath their feet carried them sideways, then outward, through a gap in the wall that opened into darkness and then into something else entirely. The air changed. The ceiling disappeared, replaced by sky.
They came out into the open.
It was night in the Beyond Realm. The sky above Onus was a deep, particular shade of dark—not quite black, carrying a luminous quality that had nothing to do with stars. Sparse trees stood at the clearing's edges, their branches pale and still. The building's lights were distant and irrelevant. The moon sat overhead and cast its cold, indifferent light across the open ground.
The vines fell away all at once.
They dropped from Zhao Wei's chest and arms as cleanly as though they had never been there—whatever had powered them had remained behind in the corridor. He pulled in a breath, straightened up, and found himself standing free on open ground.
He looked at the vines on the ground. He looked at the sky. He looked at the sparse trees.
Then he looked at the figure standing in the center of the clearing, arms folded, waiting.