Chapter 7: The Weight of a Root

The mist closed over the valley like a curtain drawn against an audience that had already left. So Cheong stood in the center of the ring, chest heaving, the furnace in their core pulsing with a rhythm that felt both alien and intimately familiar. The packed earth around them bore the scars of the exchange—furrows, cracks, a splintered stone that had split clean in two. Yeom Hwa's footsteps made a...