The first week of the He Lian Dynasty passed like a dream that refused to end.
Every morning the cracked bells tolled from the palace roof, their broken throats proclaiming peace to a city that still smoked. Every night, the same bells tolled again—lower, slower, as if the metal itself had learned to mourn.
The people obeyed the rhythm because silence was worse. Merchants opened stalls in streets that no longer had names. Children gathered at the riverbanks to throw petals into the current, praying that the Blessed Eye—the pale, hovering sun above the palace—would spare them its gaze. From afar it looked holy. Up close, it hummed like something alive, and its light carried the smell of burned silk.
Beneath that light, the city still bled quietly. The stones wept resin. The wells whispered. Dogs barked at walls that moved when no wind blew. Yet the He Lian court insisted that harmony had returned. "Unity," Wu Jin declared, "has at last been achieved."
Below the marble, unity was taking another form.
No one saw the tunnels anymore. The builders had sealed them generations ago—foundations of an older capital buried beneath the palaces of ten dynasties. There, amid the damp and the dark, something had begun to walk again.
Wu An moved without torch or guide. His eyes had learned the darkness; his body no longer cast a shadow because the shadows followed him. They trailed close, clinging to the edges of his shape like smoke reluctant to drift. Some had faces he knew—men who had died on the march north, captains who had sworn to guard him. Now they served again, silent, tireless.
Every night he stopped beneath a different pillar of the city and pressed his hand to the wall. A faint mark bloomed beneath his palm—a sigil that glowed white, then sank inward until stone turned translucent for the blink of an eye. Above each mark, somewhere in the palace, something failed. Lamps went out mid-banquet. Ministers lost their reflections. The courtiers woke with sand on their tongues and the taste of lotus pollen in their lungs.
The gods wanted unity, he thought. Let them have it—one vein, one breath, one rot.
The voice inside him stirred, smooth and vast as the sea under ice.
Yes, it said. All roots are one when they reach deep enough.
Behind him, Shen Yue followed barefoot through the water-slick corridors. Her chains were gone, but her silence remained. The talisman burned into her throat pulsed each time she tried to speak. Sometimes she thought she heard other voices answer in her place—his soldiers, whispering prayers in a tongue she had never learned.
When she looked at Wu An she saw two outlines: one of flesh, one of shifting light, both moving slightly out of rhythm. The thing inside him had begun to learn his shape.
Above, the Lotus Hall shone again, rebuilt from bone, amber, and brass. Wu Jin sat on the throne of melted bells, signing decrees until the parchment warped from the heat of his hands. "Reform," he told the ministers. "The provinces will be united under one faith, one law."
The courtiers bowed low, sweat glistening on their temples. They pretended not to see the red dust that drifted from the ceiling or the faint smell of incense that accompanied every tremor.
Wu Shuang stood beside the throne, her hair bound with a thread of black silk that never unraveled. Her eyes were distant, fixed on the mosaics beneath the dais. Yesterday they depicted lotus blossoms. Today they depicted eyes—hundreds of them, unblinking.
"Something moves below us," she murmured.
Wu Jin did not look up from his map. "The foundations shift. The architects warned it would take months for the new stone to settle."
She shook her head. "Stone does not settle in rhythm."
Her brother's quill froze mid-stroke. A faint vibration passed through the floor, subtle as breathing. The candles leaned toward it, their flames bending east. Then the tremor was gone.
Wu Jin forced a smile. "See? Nothing."
But the wax that dripped from the nearest candle hardened before it touched the floor—solid white strings hanging in the air like frozen tears. Wu Shuang said nothing more.