Chapter 7: The Weight of a Key

Kai Cheng walked the familiar route back to the tea shop, but his mind was a storm of calculations. The Heart of the River was a key—that was a fact now, not a legend. But a key to what, exactly? Old Huo had spoken of a vault, of doors between worlds, of something that had been imprisoned. His training screamed at him to gather more intel, to verify the source, to build a threat assessment. But he...