The mountain mists curled across the peaks like pale serpents, veiling the early dawn in a fragile stillness. The air was sharp, touched by the lingering violence of the night before, as if the earth itself remembered the clash of two spears and the death of a general.
Yet the Feilun Sect did not rest.
The disciples roused themselves with tired but determined faces, the echoes of their celebration gone, replaced with the weight of what lay ahead. The halls, the training grounds, even the courtyards—everywhere rang with the scrape of weapons, the murmur of mantras, the thunder of footsteps.
At the center of it all stood Tian Shen.
He was not in the training fields this morning, nor among the disciples drilling themselves in rigid formation. Instead, he was on the cliff edge beyond the main hall, where the sky stretched unbroken. His spear was planted in the ground beside him, its shaft black and scarred, its tip faintly aglow with suppressed lightning.
He was still.
