The throne room collapsed around us in a long scream of stone giving up.
Pillars cracked. Tiles fell like dying birds. The sky above Ling An split into two colors — red and something that had no name.
Our father stood untouched in the ruin.
Wu Jin lay coughing blood, his crown cracked in half beside him.
I forced myself upright. My ribs hated me. The bridge inside me wanted to kneel. I did not.
I spat blood at his feet.
"You built the He Lian Dynasty," I said. "You crowned him. You armed me. You set Zhou marching. You fed the South to the river. You—"
He raised one hand.
The rubble froze mid-fall.
"You speak," he said, "as if the South is still a threat."
Wu Jin staggered to his knees, clutching his throat where sound had only just returned.
"The Southern border—" he rasped. "Fort Hei—Father, what have you done? What does 'not yet' mean? What—"
"It means," the Lord Protector said calmly, "that matters in the south are being settled."
"How?" I demanded. "By whose hand?"
He looked at me as if that were a useful question, but not the right one.
"The South," he said, "will not trouble you."
That was all.
No explanation.
No assurance.
No comfort.
Only the same tone he used when I was a child asking why his hands smelled of steel after midnight.
Wu Jin rose shakily. "Father… if you've arranged everything—then what of the Regent? The marshes? The withdrawal? The twenty thousand dead?"
"All according to its rhythm," he said.
"What rhythm?" I snarled.
He looked at me.
"The world's."
Then the ground split where his shadow fell.
A pulse of air threw me backward across shattered marble. Wu Jin was hurled against a column with a sound like bone deciding it no longer wished to remain whole. Shen Yue screamed my name before the wind tore the sound away.
Light burst from the fault line — too bright, too wrong.
A hand reached out of it.
Not human.
Not divine.
Not something I had ever seen.
But something that recognized the bridge inside my ribs.
A threat.
My father did not recoil.
He watched with clinical interest.
"You will deal with it," he said to me.
I fought to my knees. "Deal with what?"
He looked down at the hand clawing up from the chasm in the tiles.
"With what I freed."
The hand withdrew, dragging something enormous beneath it, as if embarrassed to be seen too early.
I grabbed Shen Yue, pulled her behind a toppled brazier before the floor swallowed itself again.
"You're unleashing monsters under our feet?" I shouted.
"No," he corrected.
"I am merely removing the boundary that kept them still."
Wu Jin coughed wetly. "FATHER—why? What is this for?"
"For unification," he said. "For what comes after the He Lian Dynasty. For the empire that neither of you are yet prepared to rule."
"And you expect us to thank you?" Wu Jin spat.
"I expect you to survive," the Lord Protector said. "Or fail. Both outcomes serve the rhythm."
I lunged.
Shen Yue grabbed my arm too late.
I drove my blade toward his throat—
And stopped.
Not because he blocked it.
Because the air around his neck became solid, like trying to stab a river made of iron.
He did not look at the sword.
He looked at me.
"You will need new allies," he said softly. "From the West. From those who remember what the world was before kings."
"You won't tell me anything."
"I already have."
He stepped backward into the splitting floor.
Stone reformed around him like a wound closing.
"Father!" Wu Shuang's voice cut in from the corridor.
She sprinted into the hall as everything trembled, hair loose, face white as frost. She saw us, saw the ruin, saw the last heartbeat of the crack sealing shut.
"Let me through!" she cried, trying to dive toward the vanishing gap.
I grabbed her arm.
"Let me go!" she screamed. "He's—he's not finished—he told me to follow—"
"That," I said, "is exactly why you're not going."
She swung at me; I took the blow.
Her fists shook. "You don't understand, An. He left something for me. He showed me—"
"What did he show you?" I asked.
Her lips trembled.
"A tower with no stairs."
That froze every drop of blood in my body.
Wu Jin's voice rasped behind us. "Sister… what did he tell you to do?"
She looked at him, then at me.
"He told me," she whispered, "to wait for the bell."
And the whole palace shook again.
Hours later, the city burned with quiet torches, not flames. People whispered as if afraid the night would overhear them.
Shen Yue bound my arm. I barely felt the needle.
"You're leaving," she said, not asking.
"I have to," I said. "The West holds answers. Old sects. Old archives. Old names."
"And new allies?"
"If they'll have me."
"And Shuang?" she asked. "She's unraveling. Torn between you and him."
"She'll choose when the bell rings," I said. "And I don't think she'll choose us."
Wu Jin stood on the balcony of the ruined Hall, staring south.
"He said the border was 'settled,'" he murmured. "As if twenty thousand dead were just ink drying."
I joined him.
"You're not safe here," I told him.
He laughed bitterly. "No one is safe anywhere."
"I'm going west," I said. "If I find answers, I'll send word."
"And if you don't?"
"Then you'll hear the bell."
He nodded once.
A fragile alliance.
A wounded one.
A necessary one.
Wu Shuang watched us from the threshold, unreadable.
Her fingers stroked the ribbon tied to the bell-clapper she carried in her sleeve.
Not ringing it.
Not yet.
Only remembering it.
The wind stirred.
Somewhere deep under Ling An, something breathed.
The West waited.
And whatever my father "settled" in the South was coming here sooner or later.
I tightened my cloak, picked up my blade, and began walking toward the western gate.
Behind me, the city trembled like a heart learning a new rhythm.
Ahead of me, the road whispered a warning I pretended not to hear.
The bell had not rung.
But it would.
And when it did, the world would learn which son the old world had chosen to devour first.