Volume II chapter 1
The portal left them on a dirt road.
One step was the Abyss and the next was wind carrying salt and something faintly rotten, the smell of a working port at low tide. Ahead of them the city sat against the darkening sky, stone walls and clay rooftops and towers built by people who cared more about seeing far than looking impressive. Beyond it all, the sea.
Lin Feng had not seen the sea before.
He stood there a moment longer than he needed to.
Large, he thought. And completely useless to me right now.
Lira was already walking.
Blink materialized somewhere around their feet and kept pace, his borders softening in the fading light.
They reached the city as the last light went. The outer wall was lower on this side, half-maintained, with a gap where a gate had been. Two guards sat beside it in the posture of men finishing a long shift. Neither looked up as Lin Feng and Lira passed through.
Inside, the streets were narrow and loud and smelled of fish and torch smoke. Lin Feng opened his mouth to say something and a woman cut across his path calling to someone on the other side of the street, a rapid burst of syllables that meant nothing to him at all.
He stopped.
Conversations layering over each other, a cart somewhere, a child, someone hammering metal in the distance. All of it completely illegible. Not just unknown words. No root, no rhythm he could map onto anything he knew.
Lira had stopped beside him, watching his face with the expression of someone who had already arrived at a conclusion and was waiting for him to catch up.
"You didn't understand any of that, did you?" she said.
"Nothing."
"Neither did I." She paused. "Good. That means we start even."
Of course she'd find something positive in that.
They moved deeper into the city and said nothing else about it.
The hunger had been quiet inside the Abyss. Out here it had an edge to it, patient but present, the awareness of something that would not wait past a certain point. He noticed Lira pressing one hand briefly against her collarbone as they walked.
"You're feeling it too," he said.
"Since we left." She didn't stop walking. "It's not unbearable."
"Yet."
"Yet," she agreed.
They waited until the streets thinned.
Late enough that the alleys behind the market district were empty, the torches spaced far enough apart that the shadows between them were deep and real. A man came around a corner alone, walking the specific careful walk of someone drunk enough to need concentration for it. He wore a blade badly, the sheath catching on his hip with every step, and his coat had the kind of stains that didn't come from honest work.
Lira stopped. Tilted her head slightly.
"Not innocent," she said quietly. "Made bad choices long enough that they became habit."
Acceptable, Lin Feng thought.
He nodded once.
Lin Feng's own shadow moved before he decided it would. Not a shadow he had summoned, not an intention he had formed. The shadow that had been attached to his feet since birth, the one that now lived slightly ahead of him, acted on its own. It crossed the alley in a second and the man didn't make a sound. There was a moment of resistance, something pushing back, and then there wasn't, and the alley was empty.
The void in his chest opened.
It was different from before. Inside the Abyss he barely noticed it. Out here it was visible, a space expanding in his chest receiving something arriving from outside, and he felt the soul enter the way you feel a stone dropped into still water. The impact. The spreading. And then the Abyss closing around it.
And then everything arrived at once.
Thirty years. Not as a list, not as ordered images. Like waking up somewhere you already know without knowing how. The streets of this city, their names, their different smells at different hours. The guards who took bribes and the ones who didn't. The rooming house near the east docks where the owner asked no questions. The weight of a knife in a hand. And the language, not learned, simply present, installed as if it had always been there, every word, every inflection, every port slang that would never appear in a book.
Lin Feng stood still for a moment processing the volume of it.
All of that in a single person.
The man's knife was in his hand. He didn't remember reaching for it. It was simply there, practical, worn from use, along with a few coins and a crumpled piece of paper. He turned the knife once and pushed it through his belt. Looked at the paper. Read the name written on it without difficulty.
Then he realized what he had just done.
Lira was watching him.
"What?" she said.
"The language," he said. "I know the language."
She was quiet for a moment. "All of it?"
"Everything he knew." Lin Feng folded the paper and put it away. "Which is quite a lot."
Something passed across Lira's expression. Not envy. Consideration. She looked at the empty alley and then back at him with that quality of attention that meant she was reorganizing something internally.
"When I absorb someone…" she said, more to herself than to him.
"Yes."
She nodded once and said nothing more about it.
Then Lin Feng felt movement in his own shadow.
Something waking slowly, testing its own limits. He stayed still and let it happen. The shadow on the ground thickened and rose, taking height, taking shape. A silhouette that solidified from the ground up, boots first, then legs, torso, shoulders, and finally a face that was recognizable without being exact, like the memory of someone rather than the person themselves. It stood with its head slightly bowed, oriented toward Lin Feng.
Master.
Not a word. An understanding that arrived directly, without passing through language.
You know what happened to you, Lin Feng said the same way.
Yes.Apause. I do not mind.
The connection between them was like a wire pulled taut. Tense and real and entirely new. Lin Feng explored its edges for a moment, felt what the servant knew, what it could do, what it was now. Then he released the connection and the shadow dissolved back into the ground without resistance.
"You were talking to it," Lira said.
"Yes."
"And?"
"It knows a place where we can sleep tonight." Lin Feng started walking. "Follow me."
Lira fell into step beside him. Blink appeared ahead of them, or behind, impossible to say, unbothered as always. They moved through the city without hurry, two people and a cat that was not quite a cat, and the night covered them the way it covers anything that has no interest in being found.