The forest trail west of Stone Lantern was quiet—too quiet.
Birds should have been singing. Leaves should have rustled under deer hooves or fox feet. But the only sound was the whisper of wind through the branches—and Shi Yan's footsteps.
He walked alone. He always did.
But he wasn't supposed to.
A faint rustle to his left stopped him cold.
He listened—not just with ears, but with the discipline honed by years in the Temple. There it was again: a soft, stifled cry.
He stepped off the path, silent as drifting snow, and found her.
A girl, no more than nine, curled beneath a thornbush. Her arms were scraped, her dress ragged, and her eyes—wide and dark—looked up at him in terror.
She tried to scurry back, but a snare vine tangled around her ankle. She made no sound—not a scream, not a word.
Shi Yan knelt down slowly, palm open.
"I won't harm you," he said softly. "Let me help."
Still no voice. Only her chest rising and falling in shallow, panicked breaths.
He gently loosened the vine and lifted her out. She didn't fight him—but she didn't thank him either.
They sat beside a small stream as the sun passed overhead. The girl refused food, but drank water in desperate sips. Her eyes never left him.
She hadn't spoken a word.
Not once.
Shi Yan didn't press. Silence, he knew, was sometimes safer than speech.
But then, as he performed his evening forms—simple Shaolin breath-and-motion routines meant to calm the spirit—her body went rigid.
He noticed it mid-form. She'd frozen.
Her hands clenched. Her eyes stared—unblinking, filled with terror.
He stopped moving.
"What did you see?" he asked quietly.
The girl pointed at his stance.
Then, trembling, she traced something in the dirt with her finger: a crude, childlike drawing of three men in monk robes. All in the same stance he had just used.
Shi Yan's breath caught.
That stance—Tiger Descends the Mountain—was one of Shaolin's foundational poses. But it had been restricted years ago, after the massacre. Forbidden, even. Because they said he used it to kill them.
He knelt beside her.
"You saw them? That night?" he whispered.
The girl nodded slowly.
"You were there."
Her fingers scrawled again—this time, a fourth figure. Smaller. Hiding behind a tree.
Herself.
And then she drew something else. A detail that turned his blood cold.
A symbol—etched into the robe of one of the monks. A black lotus, blooming on a circle of thorns.
She wasn't just a refugee. She was a witness.
And more than that—she had survived the night of the massacre.
Shi Yan felt the ground shift beneath him, though he hadn't moved.
He had spent years believing he was the killer.
But this child—mute, frightened, and forgotten—had just cracked open the lie.
Not just that he wasn't alone that night.
But that the killers had worn Shaolin robes too.