Moon-streaked clouds slid across the courtyard as Jang padded past shuttered kitchens and silent training yards. A single watch-tower brazier pulsed on the far parapet, its glow too distant to touch him; he felt almost incorporeal, the echo of his own footfalls swallowed by dew-damped stone.
At the servants' barrack he eased the door aside. Snores drifted like low tide; the rank smell of wet wool and boiled turnip clung to the rafters. Won-Il's mat lay three breaths away, empty—latrine watch, as promised. Jang knelt by his own pallet and exhaled, palms braced on knees while the night's events replayed: elders bickering over relics older than memory, a guard's coin rolling iron rings across marble, silk roasting into lotus-ash, and warm Qi spiralling to his elbow like a tame ghost.
The new copy pressed flat against his ribs, cool through the Fang-Stitched hem. He touched the seam—thread secure, secret heartbeat steady—then reached into the slop bucket beneath his bunk. Beneath onion peels and fish-bone grit, he'd wedged a dry cedar plug hollowed to a scroll tube; the perfect interim grave. The parchment slid inside with a faint hiss, cedar masking any scent of ink or blood.
He wiped hands on trouser cloth, gritty with soot, and glanced toward the shuttered window. Beyond that thin plank, the sect still pulsed—grinding gears he would soon stand inside. Five days. The number loomed like a drawn bow.
Jang rolled onto his mat but did not lie down; instead he settled cross-legged, spine straight, elbows loose. One breath to collect scattered embers, another to bank them. In the hush he could almost hear stars ticking over the roof, gears of the Inheritance Constellation he had yet to see. Somewhere on a pedestal the Iron-Lotus Medallion waited, unaware a servant's hunger had fastened on it like a lock-pick in a rusted keyhole.
"Keys leave the mountain in five days," he whispered, letting the words imprint on the dark the way ink brands silk. "I'll be there to catch them."
A coal popped in the distant watch-fire, a soft acknowledgement. Jang closed his eyes, cradling the warmth coiled at his core. Dawn would come with lash-light chores and the face he must wear, but night had already given him a different name—one he would write on the world in fire or not at all.