33: The Abandoned Shrine

The Abandoned Shrine was a small low building of weather-blackened slate set into the cleft's far end like a tooth set into a jaw, with no door, no windows, no exterior decoration except for the small carved relief of the same three concentric circles I had seen on the launch-week gate stone of Withered Hollow and that I had now seen, in the past hour, on the gate at the corridor's far end and on the small relief of the seventh staircase step, and the recurrence had stopped being a coincidence and had become the small careful thematic motif the launch-week design team had built into the entire chain.

*Memory. Vigil. Return.*

I had spoken *Return* to the gate at the corridor's far end. The gate had dissolved into mist. The corridor had opened into a long flat clearing of fine pale dust at the base of the shrine. I had crossed the clearing. I had stopped six meters from the shrine's wall.

Six meters from the shrine's wall I had read the cleft scout's read.

He had been at the shrine. He had been at the shrine for roughly four in-game hours, by the small density and depth of his boot prints in the fine pale dust. He had circled the shrine three times. He had paused at the southern wall for an in-game half-hour. He had crouched at the eastern wall for some time and had, by the small additional pattern of dust displacement, brushed something out of the eastern wall's lower joint with what appeared to be a small bristled tool — possibly an in-game brush, possibly a launch-week cosmetic comb.

He had not entered the shrine.

The shrine had not let him.

The shrine, the launch-week design's mechanic, would only open to a player carrying the Pioneer of the Path title and the Severing Path chain icon. The cleft scout had neither. He had circled the shrine, brushed at its joints, taken his small careful four hours of measurement, and had withdrawn — at second-bell of yesterday evening, per Lin Mo's read — back up the eastern buttress.

He had left, at the eastern wall's lower joint, a second small token. I crouched and inspected the small joint where the dust displacement was densest. He had left, in the joint between the slate wall and the shrine's foundation stone, a single small pre-rendered chip of black iron the size of a fingernail.

The chip was the same launch-week material as the dust at the staircase's offering plate. The dust had been the polite hostile token. The chip was a different token. The chip was, in the small careful syntax of intra-server signaling, a *marker* — a token that indicated the player had identified a specific tactical feature of the location and was leaving the chip as a small private bookmark to himself for later reference.

He had identified, at the eastern wall's lower joint, a feature.

I looked at the joint. I read it. The joint, on close inspection, was not a true joint of the shrine's masonry; it was, instead, the launch-week artists' small careful render of a thin seam in the slate that the shrine's design had used to suggest age. The seam was, on a Lv 12 perception unlock, capable of being identified as the trigger threshold for a small hidden side-passage that opened from the shrine's eastern wall to a small unmarked chamber that the launch-week wiki would not catalogue for at least two months.

The hidden chamber was, in old timeline, the chamber where Beigong Yan kept his small private cache of Lv-30 promotion accelerator items — a launch-week-only cache of three items that became unavailable after the second-month patch sealed the chamber. The cache contained: a small Lv-30 stat-bonus stone (one-time use, +5 to all base stats permanent), a small Lv-30 Berserker mastery scroll (one-time use, advances any Berserker skill by +20 mastery), and a small unnamed key that the launch-week wiki had, in old timeline year three, identified as the trigger key to Beigong Yan's Lv-80 hidden class quest.

I had not, in old timeline, found the chamber. The launch-week wiki had not catalogued it until year three. By then the chamber had been sealed.

The cleft scout had identified the chamber.

He had marked the seam with a chip and had withdrawn.

He was preparing to come back. He was preparing to come back, almost certainly, with a Tianxia inner-circle excavation team, between now and the second-month patch that would seal the chamber. He was preparing to take the cache.

If Tianxia got the Lv-80 hidden class trigger key, the launch-week trajectory of the entire game tilted in their direction.

I knelt at the eastern wall.

I picked up the small pre-rendered chip of black iron between my forefinger and my thumb. I closed my fist around it.

I did not, this evening, have time to take the cache. The trial was the immediate priority. The trial timer was twenty-one in-game days. The cache was — the cache was the kind of thing that required a small careful side-quest of its own, and it required me to be Lv 30, which I would not be until at least cycle 14 of the Severing Path post-promotion, which was — twelve in-game days from now, optimistic case.

I had twelve in-game days to take the cache before the cleft scout did.

I had twelve in-game days minus the trial's twenty-one. The math did not, on first pass, work.

The math also did not need to work on first pass. The math had to work on second pass. I would, in the trial, be running the Berserker promotion at speed. The Berserker promotion was a fast track if you knew the trial's mechanics, and I knew the trial's mechanics. I had a small practical estimate of the trial's full duration at perhaps eight to ten in-game days, not twenty-one. The twenty-one was the launch-week design's published soft cap; the trial itself, if you took the Berserker route and knew the mirror-gate mechanic and the corridor traps, could close in eight.

If I closed the trial in eight, I had four in-game days of margin. I could get back to the foothills' edge, organize a small lightning excursion to the shrine with the cache key Beigong Yan would, on the trial's completion, give me — because Beigong Yan was not stupid, and Beigong Yan had been built into the launch-week design by a designer who had foreseen exactly this kind of small race condition between the Pioneer and his enemies — and clear the cache before the cleft scout could organize his Tianxia excavation.

The math worked.

The math worked tightly.

I straightened. I tucked the small chip of black iron into a small private inventory slot.

I crossed the six meters of fine pale dust to the shrine's main wall.

The shrine's southern face was the entrance face. There was no door. There was a small carved depression in the slate at chest height, in the shape of a stylized hand. I placed my Iron Longsword's hand against the depression. The depression registered the chain icon in my UI. The slate dissolved.

> *Ding!* [Trial Phase 3 Initiated: The Mirror Gate.]

The shrine's interior opened into a small dark vaulted chamber perhaps six meters across, dimly lit by a single launch-week-rendered candle at the chamber's far end. The candle's light caught — at the chamber's center — a tall slim oval frame that rose from the floor to the ceiling in a single piece of polished black slate. The frame was empty in the middle, and the empty middle was the small dark mirror-surface of a piece of obsidian polished to a depth that the launch-week pass-through carried as the small careful reflective fidelity of a real mirror in a real candle-lit room.

I stopped two meters from the frame.

The mirror caught my reflection.

The reflection was not my reflection.

The reflection was Bladeless at twenty-four, in the cockpit, in the pale grey Tianxia tournament arena's pre-rendered overlay, with the pre-rendered Tianxia sub-guild banner of *Crimson Sky* — Wang Jian's launch-week banner-of-record — half-visible behind the avatar's shoulder and the small sweat at the temples and the small hollow under the cheekbones and the eyes already gone grey-flat with the long fatigue of a man who was, in the next forty minutes of the small final siege, going to lay down his helmet for the last time.

The reflection looked at me.

The reflection's mouth moved.

The reflection said, in the launch-week pass-through engine's faithful render of the voice I had used at twenty-four in the cockpit at the small final siege, in the small flat exhausted cadence of a man who had stopped being able to disguise his exhaustion: *you are early.*

The chamber's candle did not flicker.

The launch-week pass-through carried, very faintly, the small ambient hum of a Tianyu Tech tournament arena — the small distant murmur of a crowd, the small electrical buzz of the broadcast booth, the small subliminal pre-rendered sound of a building full of people watching a man die without knowing they were watching it.

I held the reflection's eyes.

The reflection's lower face moved a fraction. The hollow under the cheekbones deepened. The grey-flat eyes did not blink.

It said: *most candidates take the Knight subspec.*

I said, "I am not most candidates."

The reflection's mouth did the small almost-smile that I remembered, as a physical sensation, from the small final siege's last twenty minutes, when I had been, very briefly, almost amused by the fact that I was about to die. I had not, in old timeline, ever known what the small almost-smile had looked like from the outside. The launch-week pass-through engine was, I noted with the small detached interest of a man being told a thing about himself by his own face, very accurate.

The reflection said: *you are not most candidates because you have been here before.*

The chamber's candle flickered, once.

I held the reflection's eyes.

I said, "I have been here before."

The reflection said: *the Berserker subspec is the path I took. The Berserker subspec is the path that ended in the cockpit. The Berserker subspec has not changed. The cockpit has not changed. Why do you think the second time will end differently.*

The candle flickered, twice.

The launch-week pass-through carried the small ambient hum of the Tianyu Tech tournament arena to me as a thing I had heard, in the small final siege, with the visceral specificity of a sensory memory. The ambient hum was a thing the launch-week design team should not have had access to. The launch-week design team had no record of my small final siege. The launch-week design team had no way of knowing what the small ambient hum of the arena had sounded like at the end of an old life that had not, in this timeline, occurred.

The launch-week design team had built the Mirror Gate to draw, from the candidate's own internal model of his deepest past failure, the small ambient that would most precisely break him.

The launch-week design team was excellent.

I held the reflection's eyes.

I said, "I will give you the answer you want. Then I will draw."

The reflection's mouth did the small almost-smile a second time.

It said: *answer.*

I said, "The second time will end differently because the first time I went into the trial with no one waiting at the cairn for me to come back. The second time I have someone waiting at the cairn. The someone is a small precise eighteen-year-old archer in a silver-blue tunic who has been alive for three weeks against a timeline in which she had been dead for three years. The someone is the small specific gift of who she is this morning. The first time I had no reason to come back. The second time I have a reason. The reason is sufficient. Draw."

The reflection's mouth closed. The candle flickered, three times.

The reflection drew.

The reflection drew the same Black Iron Heavy Blade I carried, with the small precise speed and the small precise economy of motion that I had, in old timeline, refined over five years of solo combat. The reflection used Crescent Moon Slash on the opening swing at mastery 200 — two tiers above my present cap.

I closed the two meters between us at a sprint.

> *Ding!* [Trial Phase 3 Combat Initiated: opponent — Mirror Self (Lv 20). Mirror combat rules: damage taken is real. Death is real. Re-attempt cooldown: 1 in-game day. Maximum attempts: 3.]

The candle in the chamber flickered, a fourth time.

I committed.