Chapter 16

Chapter 16: Not Up to the Task

A solid arm caught her instantly, wrapping around her before she could collapse.

Ding He Ran reached out too, but he never even got the chance. By the time his fingers stretched forward, Song Wei Chen was already secured in Mo Ting Feng’s hold. He could only pull his hand back awkwardly, then wipe it on his clothes—twice—as if he could scrub away the embarrassment.

Mo Ting Feng looked down at the face in his arms. Her eyes were shut tight, her complexion paling with each breath.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

His voice was still cold, but beneath it—if you listened—there was a tight thread he didn’t seem aware of himself.

“I just stood up too fast…” Song Wei Chen mumbled weakly. “When you squat too long, you get dizzy. I’m fine…”

She knew that floating weakness. Low blood sugar—an old ghost from childhood, rising up without warning. She kept her eyes closed, willing the spinning to pass.

Just from his voice and the sudden steadiness, she could tell Mo Ting Feng had caught her. After talking bad about him minutes ago, shame crept up on her in spite of herself. She tried to brace on his arm and stand on her own.

“If you’re unwell,” Mo Ting Feng said, “stop struggling.”

He scooped her up as if she weighed nothing.

It looked like hunger fainting, he thought. And it made sense—since meeting her, she hadn’t eaten a single grain. He could ignore food entirely with his cultivation. He’d forgotten ordinary bodies didn’t work that way.

He lifted his gaze. “What are you standing there for? Tell the Dining Hall to make a bowl of sweet soup.”

“Ah? Y-yes!” Ding He Ran answered at once and fled with a spell.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that today’s Dust Warden Official was… wrong. If he stayed one more second, he might see something he shouldn’t—and end up silenced for it.

What kind of ability did this new White Robe have, to make his lord treat him so differently? He looked like he couldn’t do anything at all.

Ding He Ran slapped himself hard. “Hiss… this really isn’t an illusion…”

Mo Ting Feng carried Song Wei Chen through the Waterside Pavilion Garden, heading toward the Dining Hall. He could have blink-stepped with her easily, but he didn’t trust her body to withstand it.

This is just consideration for a subordinate, he told himself.

He also knew how improper it would look for black-and-white twin robes to be seen like this. A concealment restriction rose around them, quiet and seamless. The paths were crowded, yet not a single passerby noticed the two of them.

Song Wei Chen lay quietly in his arms. She hadn’t had an episode this bad in years. Only fragments remained from the time before she turned seven—how “hard to raise” she’d been, how she’d barely eaten, how she’d suffered severe aplastic anemia. Back then, fainting from low blood sugar had been routine. For a while, it had even threatened to worsen into leukemia.

Then, inexplicably, after her seventh birthday, everything had vanished. All symptoms gone. Her lord had finally been able to breathe again.

So why now? Why, after all these years, was it back?

Her heart raced. Her breath came short. Cold sweat dampened her back. Her eyelids were too heavy to lift, yet her mind stayed painfully awake.

If this turned into a callback—if she started fainting every few days in this ghost place—she was done. Her HP bar was already fragile. How was she supposed to grind and level up like this?

She thought of Mo Ting Feng. His words were colder than ice, but his arms were unexpectedly warm—steady enough that her panic loosened, just a little.

A perfectly good man, ruined by his mouth.

And then, without warning, the darkness in her head deepened. It felt eerily like that moment she’d been thrown into the River of Oblivion—dizzy, black, weightless—

Her hand slipped from his arm.

Mo Ting Feng stopped dead.

The small figure in his arms had fully fainted. Something in his gaze softened, a tenderness he hadn’t invited.

A sharp prick flared in his chest.

He understood at once—his he dong had crossed the restriction’s threshold. The backlash had bitten.

Mo Ting Feng steadied his breath and forced his mind into stillness.

“He dong stirs and destroys like rot sweeping through dry wood,” a warning echoed in his memory. “If it triggers dust slumber, it will become a calamity for all things.”

He repeated the old admonition in silence like a mantra until his heartbeat eased.

When he opened his eyes again, she was still safely held in his arms—but the look he gave her had returned to calm emptiness, clear and undisturbed.

Later, Song Wei Chen woke in the same room again.

The first thing she saw was Mo Ting Feng sitting in the chair beside her bed.

Same placement. Same posture. Same dossier never leaving his hand—only now the side table was piled with dossiers, suggesting he’d been here for a long time.

He looked busy beyond measure, yet he’d stayed to keep watch.

A strange warmth rose in her chest. Guilt, too.

“Sorry,” she said hoarsely. “I caused you trouble. I’m probably the most useless White Robe in Dust Warden Manor history.”

Mo Ting Feng’s expression shifted, almost imperceptibly. His fingers tightened around the dossier, then loosened again.

“Good,” he said flatly. “Then improve quickly and stop causing me trouble.”

The impatience in his tone neatly hid everything else: his concern, his self-reproach for forgetting she needed food.

The gratitude that had just sparked in her throat died on the spot, smothered by irritation. She turned that sourness over in her mind—why did she always offer warmth to a cold shoulder?

Then she saw him bring over a bowl of sweet soup, warm enough to steam. He must not have known when she would wake. The heat had been maintained with a spell.

“Drink.”

“No.”

She rolled over with exaggerated defiance and presented him with her back.

For a moment, Mo Ting Feng seemed genuinely at a loss. The person apologizing a heartbeat ago had now declared war. He stared at her thin shoulders, at the way she shivered in the night air, and reached out—instinctively—to pull the blanket over her.

His hand froze halfway.

He yanked it back as if burned and let his voice go colder. “I’m not interested in coaxing you. And I won’t say it twice.”

Song Wei Chen bit back a retort.

Fine. Women could play with fire. But playing with a nuclear power plant? Absolutely not.

“Yes, boss!”

She sprang up so fast it looked like obedience was a martial art. The bowl of sweet soup on the bedside table still steamed, but when she glanced again, the room was suddenly empty.

Mo Ting Feng was gone.

Her stomach sank. Great—he was angry. Unease crept in, and worse, a faint, irrational disappointment curled under her ribs. In the deep night, with candlelight trembling and shadows stretching too long, being alone was genuinely frightening.

It was near the third watch when the Council Hall in the Dust Warden Hall remained brightly lit. Two major cases in a row had the grievance-breakers turning night into day.

Mo Ting Feng entered with a face like thunder. The air in the chamber seemed to drop several degrees.

Everyone who worked with him knew the rule: when he looked like that, you kept your head down and your mouth shut.

“Still no news on the chaos wraith?” he asked.

“R-reporting, my lord… none.” The grievance-breaker swallowed, then forced the words out. “But I dare to guess the new White Robe has seen it. Could we ask him to come discuss? Even a scrap of detail would be better than no lead at all.”

Mo Ting Feng didn’t answer.

He only looked at Ding He Ran.

The stare was cold enough that Ding He Ran nearly forgot how to breathe.

What Ding He Ran couldn’t possibly know was that Mo Ting Feng’s mind had flashed to the garden, to Song Wei Chen praising him—warm sunlight and quilts and all. Mo Ting Feng wasn’t petty by nature, yet the memory left a faint irritant under his skin.

And now Ding He Ran had brought up White Robe again, neatly stepping on that sore spot.

“Song Wei Chen is with me,” Mo Ting Feng said, the words slipping out like a declaration he hadn’t intended to make. “Go bring him here.”

Ding He Ran nodded and moved.

Then Mo Ting Feng saw, in his mind, that pale face in his arms. Those thin shoulders turned away from him in stubborn defiance.

He exhaled once, hard. “Forget it. We’ll discuss the other case first.”

“Yes!” Ding He Ran nearly floated back in relief.

Mo Ting Feng forced his focus into place and began dissecting the case with the room.

Outside, the moon slipped through thin cloud, scattering clear light across the courtyard.

It was nothing like dust slumber.

In Deep Dreamlands, the River of Three Crossings was not this kind of night.

Perhaps to protect the souls passing through on their way to reincarnate—so they wouldn’t be scorched by brightness—the River of Three Crossings lay under fog without end. Even moonlight seemed stingy there, leaving everything dim and starved of color.

At the river’s end yawned a vast limestone cavern. Within it was a place known as the Pool of Past Thoughts. Its geography was special: it could connect heaven and earth. The water gathered from stalactite drips—rootless and ownerless—able to cleanse and purify the soul.

Because of that, it became the Dream Realm’s unique place of rebirth—akin to the Yellow Springs Bureau’s Naihe Bridge.

To preserve the Pool of Past Thoughts in perfect purity, the cavern entrance was sealed by a powerful barrier set by an Upper Realm Heavenly Venerable. The barrier functioned like a self-running mechanism: only souls were summoned and permitted to pass through, completing reincarnation within.

Aside from that, no living being—human, god, or demon—could enter. There were no guards here, because there was no need.

And so, no one knew that the former White Robe Venerable the Dust Warden Manor desperately sought was here.

He was not a soul.

But he could not be called a person, either.

No one knew what wicked art had been used, but it had forcibly torn his soul and body apart—half severed, half still clinging together. It left him in a state neither alive nor dead.

And because the former White Robe’s power was extraordinary, when he was thrown against the Heavenly Venerable’s barrier, it tore open a tiny slit—as if a wedge had been driven into a sealed array, prying a hairline crack that living things could exploit.

A nimble black shadow slipped through that crack, carrying a strange black-purple aura.

The former White Robe’s torment was beyond imagining. His eyes bulged; the veins across his neck and face swelled and throbbed like dark worms. His body shook as if struck by lightning. He couldn’t utter a single word. Human and soul were half-split, half-removed—neither living nor dying—trapped in suffering without end.

In the cavern, the gathered souls howled without awareness.

The Dream Realm… might soon face a great calamity.