I did not sleep.
Sleep requires the belief that the world will still exist when you wake.
By dawn, Zhou had changed their shape.
I watched it from the broken edge of the road — the thing that used to be a road, the thing I had carved and then failed to control. Their camps no longer formed a ring around Ling An. Rings are meant to contain. Zhou had learned that containment was inefficient.
They formed angles instead.
Wedges pressed into the outskirts of the city, artillery dragged into new alignments, supply lines shortened and doubled. Their banners were fewer now, their fires lower. Everything about them said the same thing:
We are not afraid. We are adjusting.
They did not cry for their dead delegation.
They cataloged it.
I felt the Presence lean toward me as I stepped forward. Not encouragement. Not command. Recognition — the way gravity recognizes mass. The talisman towers Zhou had erected along the perimeter reacted at once. Sutras cracked. Stone chimed like struck glass. Bells trembled without sound.
The monks faltered.
I did not look at their faces.
I did not need to.
I pushed.
Not wildly. Not blindly.
Deliberately.
The Presence answered by clarifying the world where Zhou had made it vague. Supply depots vanished into folds of air that sealed behind them. Roads forgot which direction they were meant to run. An artillery battery fired once and discovered that elevation was now a suggestion rather than a law.
Zhou lost men.
Not many.
Enough.
What mattered was not the loss.
It was the pause that followed — the hesitation in their formations, the recalculation that rippled through their ranks like a held breath.
They withdrew instead of advancing.
That unsettled me more than panic would have.
"They're learning," Liao Yun said from behind me.
"Yes," I replied. "And they're learning me."
Behind the walls, Ling An did not cheer.
People watched from doorways and windows, faces pale, expressions caught between relief and dread. They did not call my name. They did not kneel. They stepped aside when I passed, as if proximity itself carried risk.
I felt it then — the thing I had been avoiding.
Isolation.
Not imposed.
Chosen by everyone else.
Inside the palace, Wu Jin sat on a throne that no longer belonged to the future. Ministers bowed to him and spoke to Zhou officers in the same breath. Decrees were issued and quietly amended before the ink dried. He understood exactly what was happening.
Understanding did not grant leverage.
He was intelligent enough to see the trap.
Impractical enough to be inside it.
Shen Yue did not come to me.
She stayed among the displaced, organizing shelters, moving people away from unstable districts, giving orders that were obeyed because she spoke softly and did not pretend to be certain. I watched her from a distance once, saw the way her hands shook when she thought no one was looking.
She did not look at me.
That hurt more than the screams had.
She had altered the failsafe.
I knew it now with the same certainty I felt the Presence align beneath my skin. She had touched the lattice, bent it just enough to redirect my will. The massacre that had erased a neighborhood instead of Zhou's monks —
That was her doing.
I told myself it did not matter.
The being inside me did not care.
But something else did.
In the tower, Wu Shuang moved like a blade that had learned to walk.
Zhou's remaining envoys did not enter Ling An again. Southern messengers vanished between checkpoints. Clerks carrying two sets of ledgers failed to arrive. Wu Shuang did not hunt them.
She corrected them.
Even the Lord Protector felt it now — the way her actions no longer required his approval. He watched the city from the tower's upper chamber, hands folded inside his sleeves, posture immaculate, breath controlled.
This was not how it was meant to unfold.
The Presence had been designed as an inevitability.
I had turned it into a choice.
Wu Shuang had turned it into a process.
The Lord Protector tightened his grip on the design without revealing the strain. Orders were sent. Ritual anchors reinforced. Southern envoys reassured. Zhou monitored carefully.
No one moved too quickly.
Everyone waited for me.
That was the final truth, and it sickened me.
I stood again at the edge of the vanished district, staring into the place where sound no longer behaved correctly. Names echoed strangely there, as if the air itself had learned them too late.
Thousands were gone.
I had done that.
Shen Yue came to me at dusk.
She stopped three steps away.
Not out of fear.
Out of decision.
"They're adapting," she said quietly. "Zhou. The South. Even your father."
"I know."
"You can't keep escalating."
"I can," I replied. "And I will."
Her jaw tightened.
"This ends with nothing left," she said.
"No," I answered. "This ends with everything reordered."
She looked at me then — truly looked — and I saw the thing she was trying not to let me see.
She was afraid of who I was becoming.
Not because I was cruel.
Because I was right.
"If you use it again," she said, "I won't be able to protect people from you anymore."
I stepped closer.
"Is that what you think you're doing?" I asked softly.
She did not answer.
That was answer enough.
Beyond the walls, Zhou's camps burned lower, tighter, more disciplined than ever. Their generals no longer asked how to defeat me.
They asked how to survive me.
The Southern Kingdom accelerated its procession — silk canopies raised, incense prepared, restoration hymns rehearsed. The Emperor of Liang waited patiently, knowing time favored legitimacy more than force.
And beneath the tower, the Presence remained seated, wordless and absolute, as if waiting to see whether I would use it again.
I understood something then — something that should have terrified me more than it did.
The horror was no longer the god.
The horror was that I was beginning to think like it.