The orchard slept by night but whispered by dawn. Frost clung to bent trunks, branches naked but strong enough to carry stories older than Tian's Watch itself.
Rumor has a spine, Li Shen thought. Now it needs iron in its marrow.
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He stood where the fresh graves fed the apple trees — the bounty men's last tribute to soil that refused to starve. Yue Lan knelt beside one trunk, her spirit threads brushing the roots, drifting through frozen earth like ghost fingers searching for secrets.
Master Tian hobbled up behind them, staff tapping frost-hard ground. His eyes were sharp, clear for once, as if the roots lent him back a younger man's sight.
"Dig here," he rasped, pointing to the shallowest grave. "Beneath these bones, the old chain sleeps."
---
Li Shen frowned. "A hoard?"
Master Tian spat into the soil. "Not silver. Not gold. Iron. Tools. Blades. Enough for rumor to wear real teeth again."
Yue Lan's threads flickered — frost crackling as they traced the orchard's hidden veins.
"Why hide them here?" she asked.
Tian's laugh was dry bark snapping. "A king searches temples. A tax lord checks storehouses. No one checks dirt watered with blood."
---
They dug with hands first — the villagers came at dawn with spades, broken shovels, old pickaxes stolen from mine camps long abandoned to rot. The soil was hard, frozen deep where the roots curled like knotted veins around rusted iron.
By midday, the first blade surfaced — a short sword, edge chipped but spine solid. Then another. Then an old forge hammer, head pitted but handle still wrapped in oiled hemp.
When the sun cracked through the orchard branches, they'd unearthed a shallow pit lined with rust and iron dust — the Wolfchain's buried hoard.
A promise left under roots when rumor first broke a crown's leash.
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Li Shen held up the sword — not his, but weighty enough to feel like an oath. The villagers watched him, breath steaming the orchard air.
One old man stepped forward — a woodcutter by the look of his splintered boots. He took the sword from Li Shen's hands, tested the edge with a thumb, then spat in the frost.
"It'll break easy," he said. "But so will they."
A rumble of laughter — low, tired, real. A root cracking frost.
---
Yue Lan turned to Li Shen, threads brushing the half-dug pit behind them.
"We have iron," she said. "Now teach them to wield it."
Li Shen looked at the orchard — at children peeking from behind trunks, mothers with sleeves rolled high, fathers with axes resting on shoulders like old friends.
He planted the rusted sword in the soil beside the fresh grave marker — a single stone still wet with dawn frost.
"Tomorrow we sharpen," he said. His grin was all teeth in the cold. "Tomorrow we teach the crown how deep these roots grow."
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When dusk fell, the orchard hummed with quiet voices, soft clangs of blades being scrubbed clean, hammer heads re-wrapped with fresh cord. Under frozen branches, Tian's Watch remembered how to bleed iron into rumor's spine.
Above the orchard, the Wolfchain banner flicked once in the dusk breeze — a black snarl stitched into silk, biting at crowns that thought frost could choke old roots dead.
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⚡ End of Chapter Eighteen — Roots of Iron
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