Yewon crouched near the low wall, elbows braced on her knees, watching the distant shape of the creature move through drifting smoke. The rooftop had gone quiet around them, the ragged edges of exhaustion finally settling into something closer to stillness now that the immediate danger had passed.
"Tell me how this started," she said. "From the beginning. Not the fight. Before that."
Jin thought back, the memory already feeling like it belonged to a much longer night than the last few hours actually accounted for. He rubbed at the bandage Kwon had wrapped around his ribs earlier, the ache still sharp enough to remind him this wasn't some story he was recounting secondhand.
"Roots first," he said. "Small ones, pushing up through cracks in the pavement, growing fast enough to watch happen in real time. Then pods. Spores. It spread through half the district before it ever had a body at all. The body only showed up once it had already claimed enough ground to build one."
