Chains chattered like teeth when the guards hauled him onto the courtyard's topmost ring. Light speared across polished slate; every slab flared white enough to sting. Flags of the five study-halls trembled on their poles, their dyes leeched by sun until crimson looked rust-brown and pearl embossing dulled to bone. Somewhere beneath the murmur of three hundred throats a lower sound thrummed—an organ note struck not by music but by the Execution Bell's deep bronze throat, still resonant from the hour chime.
Jang's pulse answered in reluctant harmony. Each beat jarred the blistered skin beneath the manacles, copper scent rising as fresh fluid seeped between iron and flesh. He kept his gaze level, refusing to grant the pain a home in his expression. Ahead, four shallow steps climbed to the dais cut from a single jade slab the size of a barge deck. Grandmaster Baek sat in its centre on a backless stone bench carved to resemble a half-unfurled lotus—pistil throned by age, petals chipped by generations of kneel-marks. His robes were the colour of ash held over flame too long: neither grey nor silver, but something parched and dangerous between.
Instructor Lee stood at Baek's right shoulder with a lacquered gavel in one fist and the crimson ledger in the other. Beside him, two narrow tables bore loop-handled tongs and a brazier already white-hot. Twin forge-adepts pumped the bellows with methodical indifference; sparks winked in the updraft like insects dying.
"Servant Yun-Jang, present." The bailiff's voice rang across rings of stone arranged like rippling water. The first circle, closest to the dais, held inner disciples in tidy double rows. Behind them—outer disciples, then probationaries, then at the rimless edge a pressed mass of grey-kirtled servants. Rule forbade them shoes in this space; the smell of dust and anxious sweat drifted where leather should have been.
Jang scanned those distant faces only long enough to find Kwan's familiar shoulders and Ma Gok's earth-still silhouette. Both men returned his glance without expression. A single blink, slow as sap, slid from Ma Gok; a promise or an apology— unreadable and impossibly gentle in the furnace glare.
Lee rapped the gavel once. "Charges of forbidden cultivation, theft of sect scripture, and conspiracy to endanger Core Han Jeong-il are entered against the accused. Prosecution, present your evidence."
Seo Yun-tae stepped forward in a new tunic the same cruel white as sword-foam, left arm still bound in lacquer splint but raised high enough to display the calligraphy tube clenched in his right hand. He looked bruised, starved of sleep, and incandescent with triumph.
"By grace of the court," he called, turning so every tier could see his profile—one eye still swollen purple from Grey-Pine torch smoke—"I submit the traitor's own words."
The scroll unfurled with a practised flick of wrist and a hiss like silk shearing. Attendants seized its corners, carrying the parchment to two metal hooks that rose from the dais floor. Behind them a rectangle of woven mica-thread curtain caught the sun; as the sheet settled, characters painted in Jang's unmistakeable, slanted clerical hand flared ten-times magnified, black on searing white. Gasps lifted from the outer disciples, a susurrus of indrawn breath and whispered condemnation. Servants, restricted by lash-law to silence, shifted weight instead, sandals grating.
Iron-Lotus Root: branch pivot, marrow coil, bloom vector. The stolen strokes glared back at him—accurate enough to fool any scribe, yet wrong in weight, as if each brush lifted a half-grain sooner than he had ever allowed. Jang's own pulse ticked the defects: flourish there, extra hook there. The counterfeit was perfect to an untrained judge and fatally clumsy to the eye that had written the original.
Seo bowed to the dais. "Grandmaster, this heretical text was seized from the accused's pack by loyal servant Kim Jisoo, who risked reprisal to bring it forth."
A figure approached—ragged hair newly combed, a faint yellow bruise painted across her cheekbone like exotic powder. She held her palms together, scroll ribbon dangling between middle fingers, and when she knelt the crowd leaned in as if gravity followed her tears.
"I tried to stop him," she said, voice quavering just enough to tremble the ribbon. "I feared for the sect. He struck me down and swore no master would chain his bloom. I—" She looked up; wetness balanced on lashes but did not fall. "I was afraid."
The attending scribe dipped vermilion ink and wrote each syllable. Baek's eyelids never twitched. He waited until silence returned, then turned those iron-filings pupils toward Jang.
"You have heard the speaking. Do you answer?"
Jang tasted blood where heat-cracked lips had split, then let the metallic tang anchor his words. "I have heard ink," he replied, letting the phrase fall slowly enough for each rank to receive it. "Yet our creed teaches: iron obeys power. Permit me to prove loyalty by the only weight iron trusts."
A ripple ran through the courtyard—shock, amusement, hunger. Baek's head tilted a single degree, older than stone yet bird-sharp. "You petition for Execution Duel."
"It is the sect's own law," Jang said, throat raw but steady. "Dawn tomorrow. Let power decide whether ink speaks truth."
The gavel struck once. "Granted."
A roar, half exultation half horror, rolled across the rings. Forge-adepts lifted tongs; the brazier spat plumes of white sparks. Jang's muscles tensed but he made no move when they clamped the glowing irons around his wrists. Flesh seethed, sizzling louder than the crowd. Grey-tinged qi fluttered along the manacle rims—Lotus-Mist trying to dull agony, quickly smothered before any elder might notice.
As the locks snapped shut, a line of blistered skin branded a perfect half-moon beneath the cuff; another would mate with it when the other side cooled, carving a lotus corona he would carry until death or victory.
When the crowd noise ebbed he heard a single cane-tap far back—Ma Gok signalling some unreadable codex of regret—and then Seo's breath hot as furnace slag at his shoulder.
"Bring your rat-petals, servant," the outer disciple hissed, voice sugared for the judge's ears yet sharp enough for Jang alone. "I'll press them flat."
Jang offered no word. He merely turned toward the holding corridor, chains singing a low metallic hymn, and let the sun-bleached courtyard fall behind like a book he would open only once more—tomorrow, at dawn, when power would read aloud whatever ending he could carve.