That July, a thick fog rolled into Lung Vale. Though it was the middle of summer, the ground felt as cold as a tombstone. Each morning, the rooftops were dusted in ash, like someone had cremated a corpse at midnight and scattered the remains across the trees.
No one remembered hearing ritual drums.
Yet every night, they woke with chilled stomachs and eyes that stung, as if dust from the underworld had fallen into them.
And Anna, the 9-year-old girl—the last survivor of the bloodline—
was no longer just a child.
After the rest of her family perished, the authorities moved Anna to a government-run orphanage on Coralstone Hill, about three miles from Lung Vale. The social workers described her as calm, quiet, and unreactive.
But at night, they could hear her talking to someone for hours.
"No… this belly's too small… not warm enough…"
"I'll find another one… a bigger one… soft and full…"
They assumed it was trauma. But then, strange things began happening.
A girl named Lily woke one morning with her belly swollen as if pregnant.
The next night, she died from asphyxiation, and when they examined her body, they found a pulpy clay doll lodged in her throat—its face drawn in ash, its hair made from Anna's strands.
Three days later, a boy died in his sleep.
During the autopsy, the doctor extracted a set of undeveloped teeth from his stomach, embedded like tiny roots in his gut lining.
Anna never said a word.
But each time a child died, staff would find a small ash effigy placed outside the dorm, and Anna would be seen smiling softly in the dark.
A trainee teacher named Miss Harlow decided to observe Anna during the night. She installed a hidden camera in the shared sleeping quarters.
On the first night, the footage showed Anna sitting up at 2:13 AM, drawing a fetal symbol in the dust beneath her bed. She whispered in a language no one recognized—not Latin, not ancient Vietnamese, not any known dialect.
At 2:41, the video glitched.
The camera went dark for 13 seconds.
When the feed returned, Miss Harlow was lying unconscious in the center of the room, her eyes wide open, and her abdomen slit cleanly open—but bloodless.
She survived.
But from that day on, she could no longer speak.
She simply repeated the same sentence, over and over:
"The thirteenth womb… is ready…"
The incident was covered up.
The orphanage was shut down and relocated.
Anna was moved elsewhere—no one knew where.
Locals living near Coralstone Hill claimed to hear scratching at their doors at night, and the sound of infants crying backwards, as if the screams came from inside a womb, clawing to escape.
Meanwhile, back in Ngoc Trach, where Ong Mon had once been sealed, hair began sprouting from the earth.
Not grass.
Not roots.
Hair.
Long, wet, black strands, reaching to the waist—growing like weeds, like stillborns clawing upward from the mud.
Beneath the soil, villagers said they felt a pulse.
Like a giant heart, slowly waking—
With each beat, syncing to the rhythm of a new life.
A life not yet born.
The thirteenth womb.
No one knew where Anna had gone.
But in the bones of their ancestors, in the marrow of old bloodlines—
They could feel her.
And they knew.
She was ready.