The road west had forgotten it was a road.
Old milestones lay half-buried, their carved characters worn down to anonymous grooves. Trees leaned over the track like old men blocking a doorway to see who still came and why. Shen Yue walked at my side, hand never far from her sword, eyes measuring distance in threats rather than li.
Behind us, Ling An shrank into a smear of false light and broken bells.
Ahead, the hills rose like sleeping beasts.
We traveled without banners, without retainers, without the arrogance of men who think the land belongs to their surname. I had worn that pride once. It cut deeper than any spear when it failed.
"How far?" Shen Yue asked.
"Until the city forgets us."
"Ling An has a long memory."
"Then until we reach a place that remembers something older."
She grunted. "The western sects."
"The ones Father called 'useful until they asked the wrong questions.'"
"You plan to ask the same questions."
"And worse."
She didn't try to talk me out of it. That alone made her trustworthy.
By the third day, the roads stopped pretending to be maintained. Wagon ruts filled with standing water that reflected nothing at all. Birds flew in short, panicked bursts, as if forgetting where the sky ended. Once, we passed a village that had taken its own name off the gate. The timber where it had been nailed was scrubbed clean as bone.
A boy watched us from the ditch. His eyes were too steady for someone so thin.
"Which way to Mount Qiyun?" I asked.
He didn't answer. He just pointed west without looking.
"Thank you," Shen Yue said.
He tugged at my sleeve as we started to move. "Mister," he said, "if you're going there… don't drink the water."
"Why?"
"It remembers you wrong," he said, and ran, as if naming the place aloud might make it notice him.
Mount Qiyun was not tall. It didn't need height. It had history.
Once, before Liang, before the Lord Protector's campaigns, before any map agreed on borders, there had been sects up here. Mountain orders that studied the old scripts and the older silences between them. Father had sent men up once. Few had come down, and those few changed their oaths or their tongues.
We climbed in silence. The path narrowed to thoughts more than steps. Fog hung low, thick as wool, smelling faintly of ink and wet stone. Somewhere water dripped in a rhythm too slow to be purely natural.
Shen Yue broke the quiet. "You're thinking of him."
"I'm trying not to."
"You're walking like him."
I stopped. My hand was clenched at my back the way his always had been. I forced it open.
"It doesn't matter if this path was his first," I said. "I'm taking it for my reasons."
The bridge under my ribs pulsed once, amused.
It did not say whose reasons those were.
We found the first of the western monks at a bend where the path shouldn't have turned, but did.
He sat on a rock, bare feet red with cold, robe patched but clean. His head was shaved. His face old without being fragile. He looked at us as if we'd been due three days ago.
"You're late," he said.
Shen Yue's hand tightened on her hilt. "We weren't expected."
"You were," he said. "Just not by name."
I studied him. His eyes did not slide away from mine. They recognized something, and did not flinch.
"You know what I carry," I said.
"I know what he gave you," the monk replied. "And what he took away."
"Who?"
"The man you call Father," he said. "We called him something else when he came here. Long ago."
The fog thickened around us, listening.
"Then you knew he'd do this," I said. "Arrange kings and bridges and bells. You knew what he planned for the South."
The old man's gaze shifted past my shoulder, down the mountain, as if he could see all the way to Hei Fort and the tower with no stairs.
"The South is a question that has already been answered," he said. "You came to ask about the next one."
"Which is?"
He smiled faintly. "Whether you will remain a question… or become an answer."
The bridge inside me shivered, hungry.
Shen Yue stepped forward. "We didn't come for riddles, old man. We came because something under the city woke. Because the Lord Protector walked through a breaking palace untouched. Because he spoke of unifying a world that is already breaking. Tell us what he did here."
The monk rose with the slowness of water freezing. "Come," he said. "If the mountain chooses you, it will not let you leave unchanged. If it does not choose you, you will not leave at all."
"That's not comforting," Shen Yue muttered.
"It is precise," he said.
Precision was its own kind of compassion in this age.
We followed.