The city breathed in slow, tidal pulls, and with each breath Wu An felt a little less bone, a little more echo.
He walked the tunnels without footsteps. Stone accepted him as water accepts a sinking lantern—first with reluctance, then with hunger. The marks he had sown in Chapter and Vault, under column and cistern, had grown roots. They threaded the foundations in pale lines that pulsed to his heart and, sometimes, to something deeper than his heart.
Shen Yue followed at a distance, careful not to cross his shadow. It no longer kept to the floor. It rose and fell like a fishing net in black water, snagging old prayers and the names of men it had once been. When she whispered his name, the echo returned from three directions, each syllable entering late, as if memory itself had to catch up.
"Wu An."
He didn't turn. The sigils under his skin stirred like fish beneath ice. "There are more doors than halls," he said, voice low, "and more halls than rooms."
"What are you opening?"
"Not what." His head tilted, listening to a distant bell that hadn't rung yet. "Who."
Above them, Ling An shivered. Dust sifted from the fissures like gray rain. Somewhere a choir began—no words, only breath. The First Bloom's shadow swung wide across the streets, touching rooftops, closing the eyes of statues that had no lids, making the dogs turn in their sleep and face the same corner of the room.
Wu An stepped into a cavern whose ceiling had never decided to stop growing. Old scaffolds clung to the walls. The air smelled of lotus resin and cold iron. A basin lay at the center—empty, but wet—and the stone around it had been scorched long ago in shapes that once were talismans and were now merely scars.
He knelt. His hand hovered over the basin. His pupils dilated until the light fled.
"Here," he said.
"What happened here?" Shen Yue's voice was thinner than the air.
"A promise," he said. He touched the stone.
The cavern bloomed with a vision that was not a vision; the past walked in, tracking mud. Torches hissed. Armor flickered. Men in the Lord Protector's livery stood in a circle, faces set in the stillness of duty that never learned to pray. At their center, the Lord Protector himself—younger, broader, his beard black, his eyes the same iron—placed incense into a brazier carved like a closed lotus. An officiant in travel-stained robes—no court priest, some mountain adept with wind-burned hands—chanted from a sutra that refused to keep its own lines.
"Unity for winter," the officiant said. "Bread from bone. Banners that do not break."
The Lord Protector didn't kneel. His shadow did. He cut his palm and let the blood fall into the empty basin. It hissed but did not smoke.
"For the North," he said, and—there—the smallest flinch, the brief turn of the head toward a darkness beyond the torches, as if answering a voice that had not been invited but had arrived first.
The vision folded without fading. It became part of the walls again, like a stain you can no longer scrub. Shen Yue swallowed, the sound loud in the quiet.
"He knew?" she asked.
Wu An stood. The light returned to his eyes by degrees, as if borrowed and reluctantly given back. "He thought he was paying in copper for a bridge," he said. "He did not ask where the bridge led."
Above them, a horn sounded in the distant streets, the note bending halfway as if the air disapproved. The court had begun to gather.
"We should go," Shen Yue said.
"No." He turned away from the basin. "Let them come to us. They have for years."
In the Lotus Hall, the banners of the He Lian Dynasty hung motionless in a current that moved everything else. The throne of melted bells gave off no sound. A dozen ministers had appeared again since dawn, smiling and speaking with their usual voices; their shadows did not match their hands.
Wu Jin sat very straight. If his right hand trembled on the arm of the throne, he held it until the tremor became the pose. Around him the hall seemed clean. The mosaics no longer shifted openly. The air tasted of pearled incense, courtly and civilized, as if smell itself could be reminded of manners.
An usher entered and went to his knees hard enough to bruise. "Your Majesty, a messenger from the River Hei."
Wu Jin's jaw tensed. "Admit him."
The messenger came in mud to the shin and dust to the eyebrow, a day's riding packed into each muscle. He bowed. The paper in his hands had been sealed three times; two seals were broken and the third had been repressed over the fracture. He offered it without looking up.
Wu Jin did not take it. "Speak."
"My lord," the messenger said, voice hoarse, "the line holds, but the river's gone strange. The men—" He stopped. His tongue knew the words and his throat refused them. "Dispatches will follow."
"From whom?" Wu Jin asked.
"From… from command." The messenger's shoulders shook once. Then, carefully, he added, "The Lord Protector sends his vow."
Wu Jin waved him backward. "Rest. Eat. Use your own hands."
The messenger went, leaving prints that filled with a thin sheen of light before drying.