The dark seems to tighten its fist around the camp until even the torch-flames huddle low, too cowed to rise. Jang eases one step left, boot rolling heel-to-ball the way Cho Min did—soft, borrowing the night's own weight. Resin-sweet smoke grazes his throat; he resists a cough, lets the taste settle like warning on the tongue. Nothing moves, yet the hairs along his forearms prickle in the exact lattice the Lotus-Root diagram describes, as though the forest has memorised the same lines and is now tracing them back across his skin.
Behind the grain cart a coal mutters, collapses into ash. The tiny sound should be harmless; instead it echoes against the Grey-Pines like a pebble dropped into vaulted stone. Jang's pulse answers—once, twice, a third time matching the Edict bell's rhythm from two dawns past—and then steadies, because fear without control is only fuel for the thing that stalks.
He shifts his grip, top hand near the stave's balance point, lower hand loose to let the shaft breathe. Cho Min called the stance Heron-Loop; in him it feels clumsy but stable, a half-promise of flight. The gate bruising under his palm earlier now warms in a slow, molten circle, neither flare nor failure, merely presence—a lantern turned down and hooded but ready.
A fresh gust rifles the torches. One gutter-flame snuffs with a wet tsk, leaving a wedge of camp in sudden blindness. In the darkness beyond that wedge a shape flits—no more than a deeper absence of colour—crossing from pine to pine without displacing a needle. Jang inhales through his nose: iron again, richer, braided with the animal musk he smelled on the claw-scored bark. Hollow-Maw, he thinks, even as another memory, harsher, whispers bandit steel. Either could wear this scent; both would bleed it.
One cart over, Won-Il stirs under his blanket, perhaps dreaming of breath-cycles turned sour. Jang spares a heartbeat's glance: if alarm is raised badly the servant line will stampede before blades or claws ever land. He stamps the thought flat—there is no room for panic mathematics—and lets attention snap back to the treeline just as a silhouette detaches, descends.
A pine limb bows, unbows. Nothing crashes, nothing howls. Yet where the branch was, a gap now gapes like a missing tooth in a black jaw.
Jang angles the stave across his torso and calls, voice tight but level, "Perimeter shift, east cart." The sentence is servant-plain, loud enough for the next watch to hear, too ordinary to wake the entire camp. If Cho Sun-kyu is truly prowling, he will answer. Only silence replies, the kind so thick it acquires texture, pressing on the eardrums.
Torchlight blooms as someone—likely Jisoo on wheel duty—feeds a new brand to the fire. The glow lifts, crawls across the ground, and freezes upon two parallel furrows gouged into soft loam, each groove as long as Jang's arm, each beaded with sap still weeping under the fresh cut. Claw marks, but wrong direction: these run toward the camp, not away.
His stomach knots. One practice breath, inhale four counts, hold four, exhale seven, the way the fragment drilled into his marrow. The forest exhales with him—or perhaps inhales, drawing their warmth.
A rock-crow screams, uncanny human vowel falling through an octave. Torches shudder; several sleepers flail upright, muttering. From the cart roof Seo Yun-tae's silhouette leans, annoyed, not alarmed. "Rat, did you let the birds steal our horses?" he calls, laughing at his own joke.
Jang ignores him. He pads nearer the claw-furrow, kneels, and touches a bead of sap. Sticky, warm. The cut was moments ago. He glances up: canopy yields nothing but shifting black lace. Instinct insists the attacker crouches still within reach—large enough to scrape bark head-high, stealthy enough to—
Another crack, sharper, right of the first. Jang spins, stave whipping into guard. Torchlight catches only spiralling bark fragments, spinning down like burnt petals. The trunk beyond them bears a fresh diagonal slash, resin glistening.
He backs one pace, places his left foot according to Heron-Loop, letting weight ride the outside edge, ready to pivot. Air buzzes inside his ears; or perhaps it is the pine needles, vibrating with some sub-audible hum. Somewhere close behind, Won-Il's voice rasps: "Brother? You talking to trees again?"
"No sound," Jang hisses. His eyes map the dark for movement, but every shadow seems eager to volunteer. A knot of them bulges forward. He tenses—false alarm, the torch's own smoke drifting.
Yet the breeze that drives that smoke is colder now, laden with iron so thick he tastes it through teeth. It slides past his cheeks, slips under his collar, coils about the bruised Gate, where warmth answers like a dog bristling at intruders. For a dangerous second his meridians twitch, hungry for surge. He clamps down: not here, not without mastery. The forest does not care if he tears himself from inside out.
Hoofbeats thud—small, controlled. Yun Mi-rhe appears between wagons, abacus dangling, eyes narrowed. "Report," she whispers.
"Something cut the pines," Jang says. "Twice, close." He gestures with the stave; she reads the marks in one torch sweep, mouth thinning.
"Not bear," she murmurs. "Angle's wrong. Wind blade or hooked axe." She flicks a glance at distant trees, then over shoulder toward Han's tent. "Hold one more watch-length. If nothing breaches, we rouse the Core."
Jang nods, but the words if nothing breaches fold like paper inside his ears. Mi-rhe retreats, steps silent despite medicine vials clinking.
The pine needles settle again. Rock-crows resume their uncanny gossip, farther away now, as though lured outward by some scent only they perceive. Torches hiss, recovering.
Minutes sag past. Jang forces himself to pace small loops, never showing his back. Resin smoke thickens; it drapes the ground like low fog. He recalls the hallucinogenic warning and keeps breaths shallow. Still, his vision edges blur, torch haloes smearing.
In that blur he catches after-images: branch-step diagrams ghosting across the campsite, Won-Il's dizzy smile, Cho Min's spinning heel. He blinks hard; the ghosts vanish. The marks on bark remain real.
A final circuit, no further sign. The iron scent thins, replaced by normal pine rot. Perhaps the beast—or assassin—tests them only, memorising light reach and watch response before striking later. The thought chills more than attack itself.
He returns to the cook-fire, feeds it a safe knot of willow. Flames rise clean, pushing the pine smoke toward the perimeter. Won-Il settles by the pot again, eyes heavy. "False scare?" he mumbles.
"Not false. Just unfinished," Jang answers, laying a spare log beside the fire in case quick light is needed. He sits cross-legged, stave across knees, and listens.
The camp drifts toward uneasy sleep. Carts creak as timbers contract in cooling air. From Han's pavilion-tent low voices murmur—calculations, perhaps, or prayers. The claw-furrows seep resin, glinting amber when torchlight remembers them.
A sudden hush falls; even the rock-crows choke off mid-echo. Jang's lungs stop of their own accord.
A breath.
Iron on the wind.
Then the forest answers with a splintering crack that does not belong to any tree.