The Tower breathed.
It did not breathe with lungs, but with the silent expansion of presence — a ripple that extended outward from its base across the mountain ridges below the White Palace. The stones of its Foundation Floor shimmered faintly with residual trials, still echoing the footsteps of those who had endured within.
Aeon stood at its peak, alone.
The wind was thin here — not due to altitude, but significance. This place was not high, but deep. The Tower did not rise toward the sky like a monument. It folded inward, compressing thought, intention, and the weight of being.
He folded his hands behind his back and watched the fading image in the glyph-mirror suspended before him — the aftermath of Ji Fen's trial.
The favored son, arrogant and brilliant, had entered with confidence and exited with silence. The Tower had not rejected him. It had simply refused to lie to him.
"He was trained in logic, but not in grief."
Aeon's lips barely moved as he whispered the thought aloud. It was not judgment. It was observation. Grief had structure. Grief had shape. But Ji Fen had never mapped it — had only redirected it.
Another image appeared — Mei Lin. Her form delicate, her breath steady. She had emerged not triumphant, but whole. The crystal lotus left in her wake was still flickering in the lower spire — a symbol of silent strength.
Aeon felt something stir in the tower.
Not gratitude. Not pride. Something stranger — like the curl of a page being turned before it was read.
He closed his eyes.
When Aeon dreamed, he did not see stars.
He saw schematics. Not of tools or weapons, but of meaning. In his inner sea, where others floated on clouds of elemental Qi or divine flame, he walked through silent halls made of angled glyphs and echoing ideas. Blueprints of stories. Skeletons of truth.
"Existence is not flow. It is not chaos. It is not whim. It is a structure — built from within, reinforced by will."
That was what he had told the Ancients in the Round Circle.
But here, above the Foundation Floor, he confronted a problem: Structure does not move.
Structure needed something else to animate it. Something irrational. Something symbolic.
He whispered:
"Emotion."
And then corrected himself:
"No. Narrative."
Aeon opened his eyes. The mirror glyph shifted, drawing lines across the sky, interlacing patterns only he could fully read.
A glimpse — not of the future, but of a seed.
It was not made of wood or flame, but of possibility.
He saw it:
A Second Floor. Suspended above the Foundation. Woven not of stone or discipline, but of projection. A place where illusion did not obscure truth but amplified it.
A place where cultivators met themselves — or rather, the many selves they could have been.
He did not smile.
He simply turned, and spoke to the wind.
"Lady Huayin."
The air behind him shimmered.
There was no flash, no thunderclap. Just a soft folding of space — as though the world bent forward to speak.
Out of that fold stepped a woman in silver and ink-black robes, her fox mask etched with glyphs that changed subtly as she moved. Her presence was light — almost ignorable. But the Tower noticed her. The glyph-lines around its edges shimmered in approval.
Huayin, Matriarch of the Mirrored Vale.
"You've seen it, haven't you?" she said. Her voice was a hush — reverent, intimate, like a library whisper during an eclipse.
Aeon nodded.
"The Tower needs a second breath. The Foundation Floor has taught them to endure. Now they must choose. We must show them... themselves."
Huayin's head tilted.
"Which self?"
"All of them. But one at a time."
The Tower pulsed beneath their feet.
The illusion-crafting chamber was not a room. It existed in a folded fragment of the Tower's spine — a place that hovered both inside and outside, like a whisper on the edge of sleep.
Inside, illusionists from the Mirrored Vale floated in lotus formation, surrounding a lattice of threads that hung from the ceiling like marionette strings made of dream-ink.
Aeon entered, and the light bent toward him.
He raised one hand, conjuring a shape from condensed thought — a silhouette of a young man, lean and hollow-eyed, a blade in each hand, rage simmering in his chest.
"His name is Lu Fei," Aeon said. "He lives for vengeance. Craft for me a trial where he meets the person he could have been... if he chose peace."
The weavers said nothing.
Instead, Huayin stepped forward and gestured with one fingertip.
The threads shifted.
They wove the shadow of Lu Fei's scar. They breathed color into his regret. They mirrored the broken rhythm of his walk. And then... they split him.
Two Lu Feis appeared — one sharp and blooded, the other robed and quiet, surrounded by children he never fathered but chose to raise.
Aeon felt the ache of it.
"He must walk beside them. Argue. Touch. Choose."
"And then?" asked Huayin.
"Then he must kill one."
A hush.
Even among illusionists, such finality was rare.
But the Tower pulsed again — not in protest, but in confirmation.
It understood.
This was the Projective Strata.
That night, Aeon sat alone, sketching the glyphs that would bind the Second Floor to the Tower's spine.
He did not look up as a silver fox flickered in the distance — Huayin watching from a ridge.
He thought instead of the hundreds who would enter this place. Of those who would emerge limping, laughing, broken, or unrecognizable. He thought of their future selves — the versions of themselves they would discard or embrace.
He whispered to the empty air:
"Meaning is a choice. Choose deeply."