Roots drink salt.
Iron feeds rumor.
The orchard's hush cracked, and a new banner rose with the frost.
---
Li Shen stood at Tian's Watch gate again — frost mud crusted on his boots, salt sweat dried to white streaks across his sleeves. Over his shoulder, the Wolfchain banner fluttered ragged but whole. The Fang's dagger stitched at its hem glinted under dawn's pale hush.
Behind him, orchard fathers bent under sacks stuffed with crown salt and rusted iron. Mothers braced spears carved from old fence rails now tipped with steel stripped from the crown's vault door. Children gathered in the orchard pit, pressing frost herbs to raw palms blistered from dragging rumor's hoard up the ridge trail.
---
Master Tian sat on his old stump near the gate. His cough came softer now — frost in his lungs traded for the hush of a man who knows roots drink deep.
He eyed the line of burdened orchard hands, the flicker of the Fang's blade in the banner cloth, the salt bricks stacked at Li Shen's feet.
He spat once into the frost. A grin cracked his cracked lips.
"You brought rumor home in iron," he rasped. "You plan to bury it or feed it?"
Li Shen dropped one salt brick at Tian's feet. It struck the mud with a hush that echoed iron's promise.
---
"We melt iron," Li Shen said. "Forge spears. Build stoves for the children. Trade salt for coal and hammer rumor into steel the crown's hush can't choke."
Yue Lan drifted from the orchard fence, her spirit threads brushing the hoard — frost weaving runes into the salt bricks, binding hush to coin so no spy's breath could carry rumor back to the crown before it roared too loud to silence.
She perched beside Li Shen, pale eyes bright as frost bitten by dawn.
"Roots fed," she murmured. "Now roots bite."
---
Tian's Watch hummed with rumor's hush turned thunder. Fathers hauled iron to the old forge shack by the orchard's edge — rust hammered bright on frost-slick anvils. Mothers melted salt to trade with pine miners for pitch and coal. Children too small for axes learned to weave frost sigils into fresh fence rails, building a wall that rumor alone could slip through.
---
At dusk, Li Shen stood at the orchard's highest slope. He pressed the Wolfchain banner into the churned soil — roots drinking frost where rumor's spine first broke the crown's hush.
He stitched a new scrap of silk into the torn hem — pale blue dyed with frost herbs, bearing a single ghost rune drawn by Yue Lan's threads.
---
An orchard father set an iron spearhead at the banner's base — old crown iron reshaped under rumor's hammer. A mother lashed the last chain link stripped from the salt cellar around the pole, its rust biting silk, a vow never to bend again.
---
Li Shen lifted his blade. The orchard hush gathered — every breath drawn by every root that refused the crown's fire, stone, or poison.
He spoke, voice raw, low, a hush turned storm:
> "Roots fed.
Frost risen.
The chain breaks all hush."
---
The orchard roared. Buckets clanged against split fence posts. Spears thudded frost-mud. Children howled rumor's oath to the pines.
Yue Lan's threads flicked wide — frost runes searing the banner's edges bright under dusk's hush. For a heartbeat, the orchard's breath shone blue where rumor's teeth met crown iron.
---
Above Tian's Watch, the new frost banner snapped.
Roots fed.
Iron forged.
The chain roared.
---
⚡ End of Chapter Thirty-One — Frost Banner
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