Chapter 13
The Sovereign's Memory
Chen Yunfei · 4.8K words · ~20 min read
Chapter 13: The Sovereign's Memory
The door closed without sound, and Chen Yunfei understood at once that sound had been a privilege of the upper ruin.
Below the threshold, the deeper chamber breathed—slow, vast, patient—and the air it exhaled was not cold in any way his skin had learned to name. It was older than cold, a temperature that belonged to time before seasons, before the river had cut the gorge, before Cloudmist's founders had knelt on stone and called their submission virtue. It pressed against his cracked ribs and did not worsen them; it pressed against the jade at his sternum and the fragment spirit inside the jade went quiet in a manner Chen Yunfei had never heard, not asleep, not wounded—*reverent*, the way a servant goes quiet when the sect master enters a hall.