Jang's first steps beyond the briar feel like walking on splintered glass: each vibration inside the torn Gate flares acid-white along his spine, and the frost-numb skin around the poultice can't tell whether it bleeds or merely burns. He forces rhythm into his gait—seven-count breaths like the charcoal-shed mornings; the old cadence offers a skeleton on which to hang the ruin of his body.
Smoke thins as he limps past the gutted cooking cart. Cast-iron pots lie bellied-up in grease-slick mud, still steaming. A ladle rocks in shallow pine-needle broth, tink-tink against the rim—an idiot metronome keeping time for the dead. Jang pockets the ladle's leather thong; every strap may matter. Along the rutted path he scavenges what the living fled: a half-roll of gauze, a corked jar of rice-salt, a cracked waterskin still a quarter full. Supplies for an outlaw road, he thinks, and shoves them beneath the torn sash beside the Medallion's faint hum.
The hum deepens when his palm brushes the coin's face, as though the silver-iron disc recognizes direction the way moss knows north. A truth blooms: the relic is compass as well as key. He lowers his hand; the tug fades but does not vanish, a silent tether to something vast beyond the tree-line.
Wind slides down-slope, lifting torch-smoke into ragged pennants. Carried on that breath comes a voice, thin with distance yet sharpened by command:
"Relic is carried—wings to the vault. Strike camp. Leave carrion to feed the seed."
Black-Vulture captains. Jang drops to a crouch behind a shattered spar and peers through the slats. Figures move beyond the ruined wagons—dozen, maybe more—wrapping torches in wet hide, stamping out pitch patches so darkness can reclaim the clearing. They move with the discipline of men expecting pursuit, yet certain of the night's complicity. One hefts a sack that still drips red; the cultist beside him laughs, wipes a string of blood across his chin like tasting wine.
They melt into the Grey-Pines, boots silent on moss. In minutes only creak-groaning cart bones remain. No Crossed-Lotus banners. No Core silver sashes. Just quiet, and the faint echo of "wings to the vault" clawing at Jang's skull.
He turns back to the corpse-field. There is administrative order even in this carnage: disciples in the inner ring, servants radiating outward like spent embers. Han Jeong-il's body marks the last hinge of that geometry. Nearby, the medical wagon Han abandoned has cracked its axle; herbal tinctures gush from shattered vials, mixing colours that should soothe but now congeal varnish-thick around the wheels. Jang tears a strip from a healer's tarp, knots it round his thigh to stanch seep from thorn gashes. The poultice has crusted glassy white; beneath it the Gate pulse has steadied from thunder to steady hammer—painful, but livable.
"You taught me a lesson after all," he tells Han's staring socket—does not expect reply, receives none. The staff shard fits into his belt like an old tool, its splintered end wrapped in the last of the gauze so the edge won't saw deeper into his side.
Won-Il lies where he fell, knees folded under him in supplicant posture the sect always mocked. Jang crouches, touch gentle on the cooling shoulder. Blood has run into the grooves between pine roots and stopped there, a dark map of something unfinished. He sets the cracked waterskin beside the body, an absurd offering, then presses two fingers against Won-Il's brow where the sweat has dried to salt crescent.
"The world gave you shackles," he murmurs, voice husked raw. "I will give it splinters."
No wind answers, but the Medallion vibrates once—affirmation or mere coincidence he cannot say.
A fresh wave of vertigo folds him at the waist; he braces on the staff shard until vision steadies. Hollow-marrow fever—that healer rumour describing unchecked Gate leakage—snaps through memory. Move or rot. He straightens, adjusts the sling of scavenged supplies, and lets the medallion's hidden tug decide his bearing. Southwest, deeper into Grey-Pine gloom where even dawn-violet will not penetrate for hours.
Each step writes fire across tightened scar tissue; each breath rasps like saw on knot-wood. Yet every yard also peels another layer from the husk of terror that had dictated his life since lash-post mornings. Fear is a narrower chain than iron, but he has broken something thicker tonight.
At the ridge's lip he pauses. First light spiders between distant trunks, turning smoke to mauve gauze. He looks back only once, fixes the line of cart shadows and blood-pools into memory—an ink he vows never to dilute with forgetting. Then he pulls the hood of a dead cultist's cloak over his head, clenches the staff shard, and starts down the slope following the relic's unheard song.