Mist thick as hammered iron drifts between the gorge walls, every breath Jang draws scraping metallic against the back of his throat. Dawn, such as it is, arrives in bruised bands—rust-red light caught in the particulate dust of an age-collapsed forge. He keeps to the left-hand cliff where knuckled roots jut like rungs. Each step sends pulses of ache from the poultice-sealed tear along his ribs, but the mountainside answers with its own dull throb: a subterranean heartbeat, faint yet certain, calling the Medallion in his sleeve to quiver.
At the gorge throat an ancient stele leans, half swallowed by silt. Lichen veils the upper strokes, but when Jang rubs away the grey crust the words emerge in crumbling seal-script:
Iron-Gale Sect · Lotus Flight Vault.
Below, gouged by some desperate tool—perhaps fingernail, perhaps dagger—runs a fragmentary warning: … astral backlash devoured the crown …
Wind snakes through the inscription's hollows, raising a whisper that could be rain or teeth. He bows, not out of devotion—he has none left for dead masters—but in acknowledgement of what buried them: the same hungering power that now stirs under his own skin. When he straightens, the stele's shadow bisects his body from skull to heel, and he decides that is omen enough: one half of him still rooted in night, the other clawing at a morning coloured like dried blood.
The passage narrows to a throat barely two shoulders wide. Mottled stone bears chisel grooves, some neat, some frantic. Forty paces in, the vapor thins, revealing horizontal vents carved like flutes into either wall, dozens of them, offset so left answers right in staggered rows. A hush hangs for the space of three breaths, then air shrieks through the slits—clean, invisible, lethal. A fallen pine cone caught in the blast is shredded to brown dust before it can bounce.
He closes his eyes, lets the whistle map the corridor: each gust lasts the span of a racing heartbeat and cycles row by row from floor to ceiling, a vertical scale played by a blind musician. Memory-Won-Il flashes—"Teach me the next breath." Jang inhales to that remembered curiosity, holds, and begins to count the pattern.
Three beats… silence… next register.
The Branch-Step wants a rhythm of its own: anchor, draw, release. His torn Gate snarls at the idea of Qi surge, so he offers mere muscle—just enough. On the count of silence he slides forward a pace and a half, body folded so vent-edge flash passes above the crouch. The wind-blade screams behind, clipping a tuft of hair he cannot spare to fear.
Anchor. Draw. Release.
Another silence pocket. He whips the Medallion wrist close to his sternum; the coin answers with a faint harmonic hum, resonating through clavicle into teeth. The vibration sharpens perception: with eyes narrowed he sees pollen-fine motes in the corridor eddy the instant before each gust, a pre-shock shiver.
Anchor—draw—release—
Mid-corridor a moss cushion inflates then detonates into jade confetti as a mis-timed blast grazes the opposite wall. He flinches back, breath snagging; the Gate tugs like fishhook in marrow. Not now. Focus returns to footwork, Cho Min's Heron-Loop echoing: weight rolls along the blade of the foot, knee hinge soft, torso a reed that bends but refuses to break.
Halfway markers appear—rusted rings bolted waist-high. He gambles on their purpose: maintenance brackets once held test ropes for disciples. If so, three more vent rows remain. Sweat scalds his ear wound; he tastes iron again, cannot know if nosebleed or air.
Silence.Step, heel barely kissing stone.Shriek behind, ahead stillness.
Two rows left.
Medallion hum climbs a tone, as though answering deeper turbines; the air itself feels charged. Torso twist, right shoulder leads; passage narrows further so sleeve fabric sings against raw rock. Final vent chorus wails overhead, cutting away a dangling vine to prove mercy is finished here.
The hush that follows is absolute—no drip, no bird cry, only the burn in his lungs and the Medallion's fading tremor. He allows one heartbeat of stillness, then another, just long enough to register that his hands shake. Not fear; depletion.
A small alcove opens to the left, quarried into the cliff; it shelters a lacquered drum rotted open, the interior streaked soot-black. Within lie three palm-sized wooden plaques, shapes warped but legible: stylised wind glyphs in triplicate. Trial tokens for acolytes who cleared the vent gauntlet. He takes none. Tokens are for those who celebrate a path already mapped; his map ends several steps ahead where fresh ruin begins.
Beyond the alcove the corridor widens into a chamber whose walls shimmer like heat haze though the air is knife-cold. Mica flecks embedded in the plaster refract what little light filters from the gorge mouth, stretching murals into lenses that bend space into impossible convergence: each step forward seems to lengthen the hall, distant archways retreating like mirages on mirror-water.
Jang stills, lets heartbeats slow until their echo outlines the room in invisible pulses. The scroll's margin note—"pulse tells truth, eye may lie."—guides him now. He casts a shallow surge along the battered lateral meridian, enough to send a tremor through fingertips. Three heartbeats answer: his own, plus two hollow rebounds. Mirrored phantoms. He pivots seven paces left, ignoring sight, trusting the absence of echo there. Foot meets cool stone; vision snaps true. A narrow doorway, unpainted, stands where the false hall suggested only wall.
He exhales, grit-smoke rasp along throat, and feels the Gate ease by a hair's breadth—as though recognising the rightness of pulse over vision.
Inside, dust glitters atop chevron tiles cut from veined slate. Someone—years ago or minutes—has scattered handfuls of ground quartz across the floor; the particles settle heavier on depressions, painting faint constellations of safe pressure. In the nearest quadrant the pattern sketches a crescent of un-dusted rectangles: the lethal path. The safe route, narrow, arcs snake-thin toward a spear discarded near the far lintel.
He edges weight onto a clean tile; nothing. Next, a cautious toe tests quartz and triggers a soft chime beneath, rune lines brightening ember-orange. A warning, not a strike—mercy on first fault. He memorises layout: honour the weight of humility. The answer forms before conscious thought: legs on ceiling beams, belly to dustless sky.
He wedges the spear at beam joints, hauls himself into a crawl, ribs sobbing under bandage. Enough. The word returns, this time as flint rather than surrender. Arms tremble but hold. Below, chevrons glow and fade with pendulum regularity—sensing pressure even from drifting ash. When his fingers drop to the exit ledge the spear slips free, clanging onto a lethal square. Runes erupt in coruscating light; stone teeth spear upward, shredding the shaft into splinters that leap for his heels but die two breaths too late.
A roar of vacuum as the tiles reset. Silence reclaims the hall.
He lands on knees too numb to feel pain and rises into the dark beyond.