Di Yusheng opened his eyes.
He lay on his side, looking at the wall of the shed. Moonlight fell through the crack in the door. The rice on the stool was cold. Everything was where it had been when he fell asleep.
Then his fingers moved.
They curled lightly against the mat.
Di Yusheng went still.
For a long moment, he only looked at his hand. There had been no long struggle before it. No heavy delay. He had not spent himself just to make the fingers twitch.
He had wanted to move.
And he had moved.
Slowly, he pressed his palm against the mat and pushed.
His arm held.
His shoulder rose.
His body followed.
He sat up.
The motion was awkward, but smooth in a way nothing had ever been before. He stayed there, breathing quietly, one hand still braced against the mat, as if the moment might break if he moved too quickly.
Then he lifted his right hand.
It rose at once.
He turned it over and stared at the palm. Closed the fingers. Opened them. Closed them again.
The hand obeyed.
Something tight inside him loosened.
It was a strange feeling. Faint. Quiet. But it was there. Something that had always pressed against him, always held him down, had given way a little.
Di Yusheng put one foot on the floor.
Then the other.
He stood.
His legs trembled once, then steadied. He did not fall. The shed did not spin around him. The floor stayed under his feet.
He took one step.
Then another.
He reached the wall and laid his hand against it. Rough wood met his palm. Cool. Solid. Real.
He stood there with his hand on the wall and breathed.
Then he turned and walked to the stool.
The bowl was there.
He reached for it.
His fingers closed around it at once.
Di Yusheng held the bowl in both hands and looked at it. It was only a chipped bowl with cold rice dried along the bottom. He had seen it every day.
He had never held it like this.
Then pain lanced through his head.
He swayed. The bowl nearly slipped from his hands.
Something burst open inside his mind.
Memories.
Not his.
A black sky above a city of dark stone. Towering halls. Banners moving in the northern wind. Snow beyond the walls. A vast clan whose name carried weight across a domain.
The Su Clan.
The Northern Star Domain.
Knowledge came with the memories, complete and cold.
The Su Clan was one of the great powers in the north. Ancient. Vast. Feared. It was ruled by tyrants, men and women who stood above the rest through wealth, connections, and strength. Those three things held power together. Lacking any one of them meant weakness.
Su Xuanyi had possessed all three.
Di Yusheng saw him in fragments.
A young man in fine robes, calm-eyed and precise. A figure walking through halls where others lowered their heads. Meetings. Favors. Debts. Alliances built with care. Resources gathered over years. Strength sharpened until none could deny it.
He had climbed steadily.
And in the end, he had become a tyrant of the Su Clan.
Then the memories changed.
A hall.
Several familiar faces.
Words spoken smoothly.
A trap hidden inside courtesy.
By the time Su Xuanyi understood, it was already closing.
After that came pursuit. Blood. Wounds. A net pulled tight from all sides. The people who wanted him dead had prepared well. They had prepared for his strength, for his methods, for the law he had comprehended.
The Source Law of Dislocation.
They knew of it.
They feared it.
But they had not known he could use it that way.
Pressed to the edge, with no path left open, Su Xuanyi had forced the law outward. Not against flesh. Not against weapons. Against the void itself.
The memories turned broken after that.
Space tearing out of place.
Direction collapsing.
His body failing.
A fall through something twisted and unstable.
Then an unfamiliar place.
Then this sect.
Then the shed.
Then a sleeping child.
Open meridians. A body of terrifying promise. A mind so dim and still it seemed almost empty.
Greed.
Decision.
Entry.
Then light.
Runes.
A pull from somewhere deep inside the child.
Panic.
Tearing.
Everything shattered there.
The memories stopped.
Di Yusheng stood motionless in the shed, the bowl cold in his hands.
His breathing was uneven.
The moonlight still lay across the floor. The mat was still behind him. Nothing outside had changed.
Inside, everything had.
He knew who Su Xuanyi was now.
He knew of the Su Clan. The Northern Star Domain. Tyrants. Betrayal. The Source Law of Dislocation. He knew these things with the clarity of memory.
But they still did not belong to him.
That truth was clear.
He was Di Yusheng.
He was the child Elder Han had brought back. The child who had spent five years watching the world because his own body would not answer him. The child who could not even hold a spoon without struggle.
That had been him.
This was still him.
Su Xuanyi's memories were only memories.
They sat in his mind, complete and heavy, but when Di Yusheng looked at them, he felt no confusion. No sense that he had become someone else. He understood the man. That was all.
He lowered the bowl back onto the stool.
Then he stood quietly and felt his own body.
A strange understanding had settled into him alongside the memories.
Before this night, something inside him had always been out of balance. His body had been healthy. More than healthy. But what moved within it had always been too weak to use it properly. Every action had felt distant. Every movement had taken more than it should. It was why even the smallest things had been so hard.
He had never been able to explain that before.
Now he simply knew it.
And he knew something else.
That balance had changed.
Whatever Su Xuanyi had done, whatever the runes had done after, the gap between his will and his body had narrowed. He did not know how. He did not know why.
But it was true.
Di Yusheng lifted his hand again.
The fingers opened.
Then closed.
He walked to the wall. Turned. Walked back. Bent down. Straightened. Lifted the bowl once more. Set it down carefully.
The motions were still clumsy. They still took effort. But they happened when he wanted them to happen.
That alone felt unbelievable.
He kept moving.
A step. Another. A turn. A reach. A crouch. Rising again.
His breathing grew heavier. His limbs began to ache. But even then he did not stop at once.
For five years, he had only watched.
Now his body answered him.
Di Yusheng stood in the middle of the shed, chest rising and falling, his hands clenched at his sides.
He wanted to move more.
He wanted to test everything.
His hands. His legs. The reach of his arms. The strength in his back. How fast he could turn. How far he could walk before his legs gave out.
He did not understand much yet.
But this, he understood completely.
He could move.
And for the first time in his life, that made him want more.