Chapter 5: The Withered Heart

Chapter 5: The Withered Heart

The pain was a white-hot scream that echoed through a collapsing cathedral. Then came the silence. The duplicate of Li Wei on the living room floor felt the searing agony in his hand recede, not into relief, but into a cold, terrifying numbness. The sensory static that had plagued his fractured consciousness vanished, replaced by a profound and singular emptiness. He was alone. The others—the musician, the academic—were gone, their signals extinguished in the catastrophic surge.

A new sensation arose, a deep, visceral pull, like a fish on a line being violently reeled in. It was a gravitational tug originating from upstairs, from his bedroom. His consciousness, the last free-floating fragment, was being summoned home.

His goal was singular, instinctual: get back to the room. Get back to the source.

He heard his mother’s panicked cry from the kitchen, his father’s sharp, concerned voice. They had heard the crash, the scream. But their world was a distant, muffled reality. His was the crumbling space between echoes. He pushed himself up, his limbs feeling clumsy and disconnected. The hand that had been burned felt like a block of dead wood attached to his wrist.

Stumbling, he moved toward the staircase. Every step was a monumental effort. The perfect, fluid grace of the duplicate was gone, replaced by a lurching, desperate shamble. The house, once his kingdom, felt alien. The familiar patterns on the wallpaper seemed to writhe, and the polished floorboards felt like the deck of a sinking ship. He was a ghost, and his own body was calling him back to the grave.

He reached the top of the stairs, the pull growing stronger, undeniable. The door to his bedroom was slightly ajar. He pushed it open and staggered inside.

The room was dark, the curtains drawn. It smelled wrong. Not of ink and paper and teenage boy, but of dust and stale air and something else… something dry and faintly sweet, like old leather and decaying leaves.

His eyes adjusted to the gloom, and he saw him.

The original Li Wei. His anchor. His source.

He was sitting in the desk chair, just as he had been left. But he was not merely still. He was a monument to stillness. His head was slumped to one side, his jaw slack. The vibrant, if tired, flesh of a sixteen-year-old was gone. His skin was taut, dry, and translucent, stretched over his bones like yellowed parchment. It had the color and texture of a pressed flower. His dark hair was brittle, lifeless. It was not a boy sitting in the chair. It was a husk. A mummified thing left in the dark for a century.

The last duplicate took a faltering step forward, a silent, horrified gasp caught in his throat. This was the consequence. This was the price of fragmenting his soul, of outsourcing his life. The duplicates had lived, thrived, and felt, while the original body, the silent hub, had been left to… wither.

His gaze fell to the boy’s hands.

And the horror became absolute.

His original self’s hands were resting on the Umbral Plate in his lap. But they weren't just resting. His fingers, long and skeletal, had fused with the black stone. They had elongated and twisted, losing their human shape, becoming dark, gnarled talons. They were no longer flesh and bone but something fibrous, woody, and dead. They had grown into the plate, becoming one with it, like the roots of a dying tree clinging to its last patch of poisoned soil.

The last conscious part of Li Wei stared at those monstrous, root-like fingers, and a memory, sharp and sickening, lanced through him.

He was back in Yueming’s room. The sterile silence. The cold black disk under the bed. The tangled mass of what he had thought were withered tree branches.

He remembered gripping the plate, planting his feet, and ripping it free.

He remembered the sound.

SNAP.

It wasn’t the sound of wood. It was the sound of old, dry bones. The sound of desiccated fingers breaking.

A wave of nausea and cosmic dread so profound it brought him to his knees washed over him. Those weren't branches. They were never branches. They were Yueming. Or what was left of him. The gnarled, thin silhouette he had seen in the window wasn't a trick of the light. It was the truth. It was Yueming’s own mummified body, tethered to the plate, just as his was now.

He hadn't just stolen a secret. He hadn’t just discovered a cheat code.

He had walked into Yueming’s silent house, found his rival’s withered, comatose body hidden under his bed, and he had ripped the life-sustaining artifact from its grip, breaking its fingers in the process. He had murdered him. Not in a fit of rage, but in a moment of pathetic, envious greed. The phantom sounds in the house—the breathing, the turning pages—were the last echoes of Yueming’s own duplicates, winking out of existence the moment he severed the connection.

The realization was a physical blow. He was Yueming. He was walking the exact same path, and he had only just reached the end.

The pulling sensation intensified, becoming an irresistible vortex. His consciousness, this last flickering ember, was being sucked out of the duplicate and into the husk in the chair. He felt his borrowed body begin to dissolve, the edges of his vision turning to smoke. He tried to fight it, to hold onto this last vestige of a living form, but it was like trying to fight the tide.

His awareness snapped into the mummified body.

And he knew true horror.

He was entombed. He could feel the dry, tight pull of his own skin over his own skull. He could feel the immovable fusion of his finger bones to the cold, dead stone in his lap. He could not move. He could not speak. His throat was a hollow tube of dust. His lungs were paper bags that could no longer draw breath. But he was aware. He was trapped inside the corpse, a silent, screaming passenger.

Through the husk’s dry, unblinking eyes, he saw the last duplicate, his final vessel of life, dissolve completely, turning into a plume of black shadow that was immediately drawn into the Umbral Plate.

The plate itself felt… hungry. He could feel it now, a subtle, constant drain. It was sipping away the last dregs of his life force, the final motes of heat and energy left in his shriveling cells. This was how it worked. It gave you the world, but it consumed you to power the illusion. He had thought he was the master of the plate. He was nothing but its battery. A battery that was about to run out.