Chapter 4: A Prophecy Older Than the Prototype
Long Xingchen didn't sit. She stood over me the way you'd stand over a puzzle you'd been assembling for longer than the person watching could imagine, and for a long moment the only sound in the chamber was the two elders behind her shifting their weight, uncomfortable in the silence their own superior wasn't bothering to fill.
.
"You have questions," she said finally. Not a question of her own — a statement, delivered the way you'd note the weather.
"I have several," I said. "I'll start with the one
that's going to bother me most if I don't ask it now. That Spine doesn't fail on its own. So who made it fail, and why did it need to be me standing on it when it did?"
Something in her expression shifted — not surprise, I didn't think this woman had room left in her for surprise, but something closer to approval, the particular kind reserved for someone who's finally asked the right question instead of the obvious one.
"There is a prophecy," she said, "older than the prototype you climbed today. Older, in fact, than most of the people who still believe in it." She moved to the room's single window, hands folded behind her back, and looked out at nothing in particular. "It concerns the Primordial Tyrant bloodline. That when it truly stirs — not flickers, not simmers, but *stirs* — it does so under duress. Never in comfort. Never by choice. The bloodline has to believe, however briefly, that death is the only alternative to waking."
I felt something cold settle under the heat still simmering in my arms. "You're telling me someone engineered a near-death situation for me and three of my cousins, on the strength of a prophecy, to see if I'd wake up correctly."
"I'm telling you," she said, turning back to face me, "that the prototype has stood far longer than anything built by mortal hands should reasonably last, and that its collapse today was neither an accident nor, strictly speaking, a secret to everyone who arranged it." She let that sit for a moment. "I did not arrange it, if that's the question underneath your question. But I was told it would happen, and I let it."
*She let it happen,* I thought, and the calm in my own head surprised me more than the information did. *She let three of my cousins nearly die to confirm a story.*
*For what it's worth,* the System said quietly, *she's not lying. I'd know.*
"You let it happen," I repeated aloud, keeping my voice level in a way that cost me more than I let show. "Knowing it could have killed them."
"Knowing," she said, without flinching from it, "that the alternative — a bloodline this old, this dangerous, waking up untested, unwitnessed, in a moment no one had prepared for — was worse. You are not the only cost this clan has ever weighed against a prophecy, Zaitian. You are simply the first one in four generations who was worth the weighing."
The two elders behind her hadn't said a word this entire time, and I understood, finally, exactly what kind of woman was standing in front of me. Not cruel. Worse than cruel — patient, on a timescale that made individual lives look like the rounding errors they apparently were.
"And the rest of the prophecy," I said. "The part you haven't told me yet."
She almost smiled. "That part," she said, "you'll have to survive long enough to earn."
*Why is it always survival with these people,* I thought, keeping my face still. *Doesn't a fantasy story usually start with a harem and some monsters to punch? Why does mine open with a conspiracy and homework.*
Out loud, I said, "Elder, I want real answers, not riddles. I don't think I'm ready for a prophecy right now — I spent sixteen years in a coma before any of this started, and everything I know about my own life, I learned secondhand from maids and attendants who happened to be kind enough to talk to me. I've been awake two years and isolated for most of it. Can you at least tell me what's actually going on? And before I forget where is my Mom?"
The elder studied me the way you'd study someone claiming an illness they clearly didn't have, though whatever suspicion she felt, she kept it off her face. "That is not something you need to know today," she said. "As for your mother's disappearance — that is a question for your father, not for an elder of this clan. I believe I've answered what I came to answer."
She turned to leave, the two silent elders falling into step behind her.
"Understood, Elder. I'll ask my father." I stood and gave the bow the moment demanded, watching the three of them go.
*System,* I thought, once the door had shut.
*Yes, Host.*
*I don't think I'm ready for whatever comes next. I want to go into the city my clan governs and lose my virginity first, so I can actually be free of whatever cosmic nonsense is coming for me. I read a novel once where a prodigy nearly got turned into a human pill by his own uncle — desperate for power, wanted the bloodline for himself — and the kid survived specifically because he wasn't a virgin yet. Feels relevant.*
*That is not how any of this works, you absolute dumbass,* the System said. *And I would like to know what fourth-rate author wrote that, because I refuse to believe it exists.*
*Is it a crime to dream now?*
*It's a crime to let that dream anywhere near your actual priorities,* the System said. *Get up. Go see your father. You have considerably more urgent things to survive than your own inexperience — unless you'd genuinely rather end up like your fictional human-pill prodigy, virgin or otherwise.*
I let out a breath that felt heavier than it should have. Fine. This life was going to be a pain regardless of what I did or didn't do in the city tonight — but dying unknown once had already been enough for one lifetime. I wasn't in a hurry to make it a matching set.