Jang stands inside a hush so deep it seems to cancel the memory of wind-blades behind him. The chamber is round—an eye scooped from the mountain's heart—its walls beveled inward like petals of stone pressed around a single colossal lotus. No torch burns, yet a cool jade luminescence wells from the floor itself, seeping through hair-thin fissures in the slate and pooling in gentle rings that pulse at the pace of a measured breath. Far overhead a corbelled ceiling vanishes into darkness; when he tilts his head he swears he can hear drafts spiral in slow orbit, as though the whole vault inhales.
At the centre rises a dais no taller than his knee. Its face is carved into fifty-six concentric petals, each line so fine the edges glimmer like frost. Jang lowers himself, palms braced on marble that vibrates faintly against bone. Three triangular hollows interrupt the petals, arranged in a perfect equilateral about a round socket the size of a small coin. Within the socket, ridges depict a lotus yet to bloom; the workmanship strikes him—every fold carries microscopic striations that make the carved bud look alive, waiting.
The Medallion stirs in his sleeve, tugging with the subtle certainty of a lodestone finding true north. He draws it out: silver-iron alloy darkened by travel grime, two petals etched on the rim, hairline groove spiralling toward a tiny star-shaped keyway at the centre. He hesitates only long enough to wonder if the keyway seeks the missing Jin-Seals—then presses the Medallion into the lotus socket.
Metal kisses stone.
A bass note hums up his arms, through cracked ribs into spine; teeth chatter. The concentric petals ignite one after another, jade lines racing outward until the whole dais glows like a captured aurora. Tiny grains of dust lift from the floor, hovering, aligning to unseen currents. But the triangles remain dark—empty sockets refusing the circuit—so the light falters, stutters, and settles into a sullen heartbeat rhythm. The vault stays shut.
Jang exhales through clenched teeth. A vault is not a box but a question, Elder Choi once droned. The Medallion alone is only half an answer.
He retrieves it; the glow gutters out, leaving faint green after-images swimming before his eyes. As vision clears he begins a slow circuit along the chamber's edge, one hand skimming the wall to feel for cracks or inscriptions. Panels of fresco stretch between supporting ribs—lively painted scenes of disciples sparring amid swirling ribbons of wind, but the pigment is blistered, flaking. When he brushes a fingertip across a ruined panel, the plaster gives way like stale bread. A section the size of his palm crumbles, exposing lead-grey mortar beneath— and in that mortar, something glints.
He kneels, working with dagger tip and patience until the foreign object loosens: a strip of silk, stiffened by age and metal dust, folded tight as a scroll dog-eared by centuries. It slides free with a sigh of powder. Heart hammering, he unrolls the fragment on his thigh.
Charcoal characters unfurl in a scholar's confident hand:
Iron-Lotus Root Canon • Bloom Chant (Lines 1–37)
Ink strokes swirl tighter, denser than those on the first fragment—every glyph spiralling inward, mirroring the petal geometry of the dais. He skims the opening stanza, words swimming but potent:
Petal turns upon spiral; spiral drinks marrow;Marrow sings to heaven; heaven descends in bloom.
He cannot read farther; the Gate behind his sternum thrums warningly, as though raw text alone could trigger another rupture. Yet awareness of raw potential pours through him—this is the next step after root and branch, the moment where a flower drinks sky. The thrill is bright enough to sting, and it takes effort to tuck the silk safely into the Fang-Stitched pocket without shaking.
When he lifts his gaze, fresh plaster dust drifts like pale pollen. The void left by the removed stone reveals a deeper layer of mural—one crazed with age but intact. A kneeling figure rendered in muted gold reaches toward a lotus of living flame. Chains loop his wrists, but the links nearest the bloom melt mid-air, dripping away like wax near a taper. His face is obscured, perhaps never painted; instead, a mirrored scrap of bronze is inset where features would be. Jang leans close—and the metal shows only his own grime-streaked reflection, eyes hollowed by loss and resolve.
He bows his head, not consciously, just enough that tears collect on lashes but refuse to fall. If roots can snap stone, a bloom can shatter sky. The thought is his, yet older than him, older than the stele outside. He presses a reverent palm to the cold wall.
The Gate chooses that moment to remind him of debt. A hot spike lances along spine-stem nodes, driving vision into grainy monochrome. Breath hitches; no time for cultivation cycles here. He forces air out between clenched teeth, slides the Medallion back into sash, and staggers from the wall before dizziness can drop him.
Dust swirls thicker now—the vault's slow heartbeat falter-humming toward silence—and as he limps across the petal floor that pulsing light dims further, as if recognising its unfulfilled design and choosing sleep over incompletion. By the time he gains the corridor mouth, jade lines have faded to faint moon-scars on stone.
Back through the rune hall: his earlier acrobatics spared only one solid beam. He crawls the reverse route with arms trembling, spear fragments littering the floor like broken teeth. Past the illusion stretch, he edges around phantom echoes; every pulse-sense ping duller, but still enough. At the wind-blade gauntlet he cannot waste time counting—muscles burn too fiercely—so he gambles on memory and pain-taut intuition, sliding through gaps that close fractions after passage, each gust slicing the air with death's whistle an inch from skin.
He emerges into rust-fog dusk, knees buckling. The sky has soured from pearl to bruised indigo, clouds roiling like smelted slag. Lightning spiders in violet forks across distant peaks, thunder rolling a heartbeat later—low, massive, not unlike stone doors grinding beneath the world. From somewhere beyond the gorge mouth, a beast howls: long, mournful, answered by a shorter horn blast, three descending notes. Black-Vulture pursuit.
Rain begins—hard, cold, spearing through iron dust and turning it to bloody mud. Jang clutches the new fragment beneath soaked tunic, feeling its promise radiate heat that may only be fever. Gate pain flares, but within that pain pulses something else: the dauntless hum of the Medallion, a promise that the dais hum will one day answer. He squares shoulders, turns face to storm, and steps into its question.