Dawn leaks into the ravine as a colour without confidence, a thin pewter wash that barely lifts the indigo left by the storm. Jang moves through it like the last shadow refusing to fade, dragging a cloak heavy with dried blood and rain. Beneath the tallest grey-pine—its trunk warped into a spiral the colour of old iron—he kneels and begins to dig.
The ground is water-logged loam, soft enough that his fingers sink past the nails on every third scoop, but the roots knot close under the surface, tightening around his hands as though the tree has already claimed the body he is trying to give it. He works anyway, silent, breath fogging in pale ribbons. Each heave jolts the bruised lattice of his Gate; pain thrums along his spine like plucked wire, yet the act feels honest in a way nothing since the ambush has. Dirt under fingernails, iron tang on tongue, no clever footwork—only work.
When the pit is shoulder-deep he drags Won-Il's stiffening form into the hollow. The servant robe is crusted black where the throat opened, but the face has settled into an almost childish calm, lips parted as if about to ask another foolish question about Qi. Jang presses the fingers together, opens the palm, and sets the Iron-Lotus Medallion inside. The coin's chill nips his calluses; silver-iron in daylight looks dull, utterly ordinary, which somehow feels right. He winds the fraying grey rope from Won-Il's own pack around the wrist three times, making a binding knot he remembers from laundry duty—practical, inelegant, secure.
"So the key keeps your hand closed," he murmurs, voice rasped raw, "and no one steals your dream."
He lowers the arm, pushes loam until the metal sleeps under earth, then begins covering the rest of the body. Pine needles fall like muted rain. With every handful he whispers a single segment of breath-cycle prayer, the one Won-Il wheezed through in drunken mimicry by the boulder stream: root on inhale, bloom on exhale. Dirt fills the syllables.
When only a mound remains he snaps a dead branch from the grey-pine and blackens the tip over a smouldering knot of last night's lightning-fire. The char runs uneven, bleeding down the grain. He scrapes letters:
WON-IL—HE DREAMED OF QI
The marker trembles as he plants it; a gust rattles the boughs and ash drifts across the name, trying to erase it already.
His knees kiss mud three times. On the third rise something new uncoils from the pads of his fingers: a breath of haze so faint it might be morning mist, except it spins in the air, five translucent petals edged in jade light before the wind steals them. Surprise blurs into acceptance; the gesture feels correct, as though the grave has signed the witnessing contract for their oath.
He stays bowed until pulse settles, then unwraps the two scroll fragments—Root and Bloom—from their oil-silk tube. The edges still shimmer with yesterday's fusion heat, an almost metallic sheen. Memory stitches Elder Choi's caution to Won-Il's laughter, binds them with Ma Gok's cane knock: a vault is a question. He answers the question with blood.
Steel kisses palm; copper warmth pools across the merged silk. He spreads the smear with thumb, drawing the eight-petal spiral sketched in the Bloom verses. The calligraphy under crimson brightens, lines fattening, words inhaling like lungs after drowning. Light blooms—not a flare, more the inward folding of colour until the scroll itself seems to sink beyond sight, leaving only a hovering sigil of smoke.
Pain spears his Gate, but does not tear; instead, the familiar leak at the lumbar knot pinches shut, and coolness trickles upward, threading vertebrae. It is not relief—too raw for that—yet the fever throb ebbs enough for thought to sharpen.
Breath by counted thirds: inhale root, hold, exhale bloom. On the seventh cycle the sigil contracts to a coal-grey shard and re-skins as paper, fused, seamless. Blood has vanished. So has half his strength, but he is still breathing.
A dawn breeze rattles the marker. Jang lifts the new scroll, presses it to brow.
"Lotus will bloom for you, brother," he whispers, and somewhere behind his sternum a pulse answers—neither Heart-Talon's hungry coil nor Iron-Lotus's furnace, but a chimera beat that feels like possibility.
The grave accepts the promise, settling with the faintest sigh of yielding roots.