Sleep refuses him.A thin wash of lantern-smoke pools above the infirmary rafters, and each time his eyelids droop the smoke folds into shapes: iron-winged vultures swooping over a bamboo bridge, Han's single clouded eye, Won-Il's grin frozen where the knife first kissed throat. Jang rolls onto his uninjured side; straw rustles like distant arrow-flight. Across the aisle someone exhales a whistle-snore that breaks midway, replaced by a wet cough and then by silence. The whole ward seems to breathe in jagged, unsynchronised chords, an orchestra of wounds.
The poultice Ma Gok reapplied still burns cold and hot in alternating pulses. Beneath the gauze, star-grain scar tissue itches where skin began calcifying. He imagines pearl-white roots knitting beneath, impatient to become bone, and wonders if the price of every step now will be the slow petrifaction of parts he can no longer spare. Sixty percent sealed, he reminds himself. Enough to stand, enough to strike. Don't ask for mercy from numbers.
Moonlight angles through the narrow window-slit and lands on the key-peg. Brass glimmers; Jisoo's half-open eye glimmers back. She does not move, but in the blue-grey wash her lashes tremble like measuring scales, calculating weight, distance, consequence. Between them the locked chest squats under its own shadow. Inside, his fused fragment roll lies tucked between rags, its lines of overlapping script probably still faintly warm where blood welded them. He pictures that warmth as heartbeat and feels the answering twitch in his bandaged palm.
The ward door yawns on unoiled hinges and two constables carry in a new stretcher. The man upon it wheezes pink froth; barbed-arrow wound from someone else's border skirmish perhaps. But the smell—fresh river mud and astral rot—snaps Jang alert. Grey-ink servants always lie closest to the door, where beds can be dragged outside if patients turn contagious. Even after surviving a massacre, hierarchy stands like a wall he must scale again tomorrow.
He drifts at last. Dream-memory replays the tribunal corridor: the eight-point lantern burning overhead, the scribe's crimson quill splattering life-ink. Only now the quill writes on his own skin, characters crawling over chest and throat—traitor by omission, lotus thief, brother-killer. He jerks awake with a gasp that rattles the tin water cup beside the cot.
Outside, the fifth-watch gong booms—one long, two short. Pre-dawn. Shadows withdraw from rafters like receding tide. Feathered chill needles the gaps in his bandages, but something warmer swirls beneath: faint mist curling from knuckles to wrist, colourless yet edged in a rim of soft jade. The aura clings for three breaths, vanishes into skin. Not a flare grand enough to alert watchers, only the quiet syllable of potential. He draws it back inside, tucks it where marrow hums.
Soft padding. The young apothecary—barely older than Won-Il had been—moves between beds, leaving shallow spoonfuls of black treacle tonic on each stand. When she reaches Jang her hand pauses. "Tremor-leaf tea," she murmurs, eyes refusing to meet his. "It steadies nerves. Tribunal mornings… everyone shakes."
Jang thanks her with a nod. The tea smells of burnt mint and something metallic. He pretends to sip until she departs, then tips the bowl into the cracked chamber pot. He cannot afford steadied nerves purchased with drowsy muscles; Lotus Bloom Strike demands the full quiver of his pain, not the numbed echo.
A rooster cries beyond the outer barracks. First blush of ash-gold slides under the infirmary door and crawls across floorboards toward the cots like an inexorable verdict. Seo Yun-tae stirs on his stretcher, lids fluttering. When they open he focuses past the rafters straight onto Jang, as though threads of spite tug his gaze true. Bruised lips stretch; no sound comes, but his eyes say tomorrow's promise clearly enough. Jang answers with the smallest inclination of the head—not challenge, not apology, simply acknowledgment that the bridge over the koi pond now waits for them both.
He swings legs over the side of the cot. The floor's chill stabs upward, yet joints obey, newly welded channels holding. He shrugs into the patched cloak an orderly left folded at his feet. It smells of vinegar and cheap smoke—laundry fires that never burn hot enough to cleanse fear. At his belt he knots the hemp ribbon Ma Gok used to bind the last dressing. Three tight loops, a silent mnemonic: breath, root, bloom.
Jisoo pretends to wake, rubbing eyes as though startled by his movement. She sits up, blanket sliding to reveal the faint sketch of a lotus-root motif exactly where her fingers traced earlier. A fleeting smile ghosts her face—too brief to decode—before she turns away to pour her untouched tonic. The cup hovers near her lips, pauses, tips instead into her own chamber pot. Their gazes meet over the parallel spills. An unspoken pact—or warning—hardens in the space between.
Bootfalls in the corridor announce Instructor Lee. "All duel parties to the preparatory hall," he barks, voice flint. "Sunrise waits for no coward." Constables follow, unlocking chest, distributing confiscated gear. Jang's pack returns to his hands. Weight familiar, comforting. He dares not open it here but one gentle squeeze assures him the fragment roll has not been disturbed.
As they file out, the window catches full morning. Beyond the ridge, the bamboo bridge gleams dew-silver, a blade laid horizontal above the koi pond. Wind plucks the banners strung along the arena's perimeter; cloth snaps once, twice—petal-sharp percussion echoing inside his ribs. He closes his fist, feels lotus filaments pulse against bandage, and lets the echo become a metronome for the step he is about to take.
The constable prods them forward. Jang breathes through the ache, through the rising chant of spectators already gathering in the courtyard. Somewhere deeper in the compound, a scribe sharpens a quill for the duel's docket; the rasping stone sounds exactly like bone against blade.
Bloom for him, bleed for none. The mantra steadies his spine as the infirmary door swings shut behind them, cutting off the smell of star-vine and burnt mint. Ahead, sunlight stabs the flagstones, bright enough to hurt—but petals, he reminds himself, cannot fear the sun.