By dawn the bounty men's bodies fed Tian's Watch's orchard.
Master Tian said it was the old way — blood for the roots, iron for the crows. The villagers buried them where the apple trees leaned crooked in frozen soil, each trunk marked by a single stone pulled from the river's bend. No prayers, no names.
Li Shen watched from the orchard fence, blade resting across his knees. Yue Lan perched beside him on a low branch, her spirit threads dangling like spider silk through the brittle branches.
The Wolfchain banner still snapped on its spear shaft by the gate ruins. Black silk in the frost, a wolf's head snarling at the dawn.
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Rumor should have been enough.
A symbol. A whisper. A threat. But rumor without spine is wind in dead branches — it rattles, it creaks, it breaks.
Li Shen knew this. Master Tian knew it too.
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By noon, the villagers gathered by the orchard fence. Fathers with saw-scarred hands. Mothers with cracked palms from drawing goat's milk at dawn. Children who peeked behind legs, eyes darting from the banner to the sword across Li Shen's back.
Master Tian leaned on his staff at Li Shen's side, breath clouding the cold.
"You raised the wolf's head," the old man rasped. "Good. But a head bites nothing without a spine."
Li Shen met his eyes — black, sharp, no longer clouded by age when they caught firelight.
"They want a leader?" Li Shen asked, voice flat.
"They want hope," Tian said. "Same thing when iron comes calling."
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A boy stepped forward — twelve winters at most, ribs sharp under a frayed hemp tunic. He held out a branch, stripped of bark, shaped into a crude spear.
Li Shen stared at it, then at the boy's frost-burned fingers.
"Why?" Li Shen asked.
The boy's jaw twitched. He did not look away.
"My brother bled in the charcoal pits. My father broke in the salt mines. You break chains."
Li Shen took the branch-spear. Turned it once in his hand. The wood was soft pine — it would splinter at the first clash.
But the boy's eyes didn't splinter. Not yet.
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Behind him, more stepped forward. A woman with a gut scar from a sect tax whip — her axe still wet from splitting the orchard wood. A young man missing two fingers but balancing a hammer on his shoulder. Old women clutching kitchen knives. A girl barely older than Yue Lan had been when she bound her first ghost-silk thread.
Not soldiers.
Not monks.
But rumor's spine all the same.
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Li Shen turned to Master Tian. The old man's grin cracked frost off his teeth.
"Lead them," Tian rasped. "Or leave them to break."
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Li Shen rose, pine spear in one hand, his blade in the other. Yue Lan dropped from the branch behind him, threads brushing his wrist in a promise older than any crown.
He thrust the spear tip into the frozen mud. The Wolfchain banner snapped in the wind behind him.
"Then stand," he said to the orchard — to the bent backs, scarred hands, wide eyes that still dared to hope. "Stand behind me. Stand behind the chain. When iron comes, we break it. When rumor comes, we feed it our roar."
Yue Lan's threads flickered — a ghostlight halo behind his shoulders.
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The orchard roots drank old blood that day.
Rumor found its spine.
And the Wolfchain's teeth learned to growl.
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⚡ End of Chapter Seventeen — Rumor's Spine
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