The path angles down into a ravine where the wind cannot reach, and smoke from distant fires drifts instead in listless skeins that snag on branches and refuse to rise. Jang's stolen cloak drinks the fumes until he smells like pitch and pine-rot; good, he thinks—let any hunter's nose read him as carrion and move on.
Roots writhe across the descent like pale serpents. Twice he stumbles and feels the Gate tear stretch, hot silk ripping behind the poultice. The third time he goes to one knee the world judders sideways and a cold wave rolls up from his feet, hollowing bone. Hollow-marrow fever—the phrase rings like an edict stamp. He tears the cracked waterskin free, swallows a single mouthful, and forces himself upright while the pulse inside the Medallion thrums a bass note against his ribs.
At the ravine floor a brook threads between moss-slick stones. Moon shards lie in every ripple, thin enough to snap. He kneels, rinses blood from his palm, then presses that wet skin to the Medallion. A spark leaps—no light, only sensation, a pop of static that snaps every hair on his arm erect. The tug sharpens, and the coin angles a fraction south-west, aligning like a compass needle unwilling to grant doubt.
He sets off again, staff shard tapping stone in counter-beat to his limp. Each breath now is numbered: seven-in, hold for seven, nine-out—the charcoal-shed cadence polished into instinct. With it comes fragments of Won-Il's questions, asked between coughs of ash: How many breaths does it take to feel anything? Jang seals the memory behind the new wall forming in his chest; grief will pour through later, but not yet, not while the blood is still warm on his sleeve.
A fallen cart blocks the way ahead, its axle sundered, its canvas hood collapsed like a crushed throat. Something glitters in the guttering torchlight: a disciple's sabre, edge notched by claw strikes, hilt silk half-melted. He pries it free, but the weight drags on the torn meridians and he lets it drop—steel is useless if it turns the wielder into iron ballast. Staff shard and Medallion; that is the weight he can bear.
Beyond the cart the pines open into a clearing scoured by hoof prints and claw furrows. The ground stinks of bile and burnt resin. Here, a discarded Black-Vulture mask stares up, lacquered grin split by heel impact. There, an Inner-disciple's banner pole, snapped, silk soaked dark. A single living sound persists: the wet rasp of someone breathing through ruined lungs.
He finds the source pinned beneath a wagon tongue—Cho Min, torso crushed, footwork prodigy turned to broken marionette. Wide eyes flick toward Jang, then away, refusing plea or comfort. Jang crouches anyway, lifts the other's head onto his knee. Cho's lips move; no sound emerges until Jang leans near enough to smell blood on each word.
"Pelvis… chain… cut it… free."
He means the belt hook that houses the disciple's travel kit. Jang saws it loose with a shard of wheel iron, places it in Cho's remaining hand. There is nothing else to offer. Cho's fingers tighten, then slacken. The belt pouch dangles, heavy with what feels like coins and dried medicinal root; Jang slips it into his cloak. One more corpse to remember, one more name to carve into resolve.
North-east, a pulse of orange flares behind the trunks as a cache of discarded torches takes, then gutters again. The cult has truly gone. The clearing belongs now to cinders and ghosts. He wonders whether Seo fled with the survivors or lies among the dead—decides the answer matters only if the man returns to block his path. The ruins beyond the Grey-Pine border will judge all debts.
He climbs the opposite bank on elbows and one functional knee. Halfway up, dizziness turns the slope into a wheeling wall. The calcifying skin around the poultice tightens, and for a moment he tastes iron snow at the back of his throat. He gropes for the belt pouch, finds a bone-stoppered vial labelled in Yun Mi-rhe's clipped calligraphy: marrow-fire dose: quarter only. Kwan's words—knives or healing—echo as he bites the stopper free. The scent is winter-mint over rotting leaves; the liquid sears like solder on his tongue.
Heat races spine-ward, meeting the damaged Gate with a hiss he feels rather than hears. The tunnel vision retracts enough to reveal a usable strip of path again. He caps the vial and staggers uphill. Ten paces, pause; ten paces, breathe. By the crest his pulse has steadied and the fire in his core has settled into a steady brand: painful, but forging rather than consuming.
The climb delivers him to a narrow deer track veering southwest—exactly the line the Medallion kept insisting upon. Far down its dark throat a single star winks between branches, as though some hand has taken a chisel to the night. That gap must face the ruins; the coin's tug surges when he angles toward it.
He looks back one final time. From this height the massacre clearing is a smudged circle of ember glow, a dying eye that still remembers everything it witnessed. Pines sway above it like mourners without faces. Jang lifts two fingers in the Lotus salute—root to leaf—then turns away.
"Splinters," he reminds himself, voice in the hush the cult left behind. "Splinters can fell a door the chains could only rattle."
The path bends, hides the clearing, and with it the last warmth of the torches. Night accepts him, cloak, staff, coin and all, as though he were smoke escaping a kiln. Each step is a vow hammered into earth: onward, until the mountain yields the name of the thing that murdered his friend, and until the Medallion finds the lock it was born to break.