"What did he give it?" I asked.
The monk answered as if reciting a sutra. "His blood. His vow. His children."
My jaw clenched.
"He gave you to it," the monk said, finally meeting my eye. "Long before you were born. Promised that one day, you would carry it more perfectly than he ever could."
Shen Yue's hand went white on her sword hilt.
"Can it be cut out?" she asked.
The monk smiled sadly. "It is not a tumor. It is an understanding."
"Then what threat am I meant to deal with?" I said. "He told me a new danger was coming. That he had 'removed the boundary that kept them still.' What did he mean?"
The monk tapped one of the basin lines.
"The old sects knew there are things under rivers and behind sky that never cared about men. They were content to sleep while mandates shifted. Your father wished to wake them and teach them the language of order. To harness them to his unification."
"That's insane," Shen Yue said.
"That," the monk replied, "is empire."
I swallowed. "West of here. Are there people who've seen what he's trying to use?"
"There are sects who survived his purges by cutting their tongues out," he said. "Some in the canyons, some beyond the salt flats. There is a city that appears on no map, where people remember the world before dynasties. They will not welcome you. But they might answer you."
"Why me?" I asked. "Why help the weapon he forged?"
"Because weapons can cut their makers," he said. "And because you are not only his design."
He looked at Shen Yue.
"You anchored him once before," he said. "When the bridge first woke. You can again. As long as you remember he is not a god. Merely a path that learned to walk."
The basin flickered.
For an instant, the stone filled with black water.
Something moved beneath it.
Not reaching.
Not attacking.
Just… aware.
Of me.
The bridge inside my chest leaned toward it like a lover.
I stepped back.
"If I travel further west," I said, "can I learn how to sever him from this thing? Or it from him?"
The monk's eyes softened. "You may learn," he said, "how to make a choice neither he nor it accounted for."
"Good enough," I said.
Shen Yue exhaled, a sound halfway between a laugh and a curse. "So. West of the west."
"Past the salt," the monk said. "Follow the wind that carries no dust. When you begin to forget why you came, you will be close."
"That's not helpful," she muttered.
"It is precise," he replied, and stepped back, as if we no longer belonged to this part of the mountain.
In Ling An, the night finally swallowed the last scrap of false daylight. Real stars attempted to reassert themselves, but many were missing.
Wu Jin stood with Wu Shuang on the sundered balcony.
"An has gone west," she said.
"I know."
"Zhou presses from the north. The South is… quiet. Too quiet. Father is somewhere between, building things that do not yet have names. You can't fight all of that with decrees."
"What do you suggest?" he asked.
"Stop asking what he wants," she said, fingers tightening around the bell-clapper. "Start asking what happens if neither of you does it."
He looked at the broken city. At the tents of aid. At the empty courtyards where people whispered my name and his in the same breath, with different kinds of fear.
"And you?" he asked. "Which way do you lean?"
She turned the clapper in her hand, feeling its weight.
"I stand," she said, "at the rope."
The wind blew from the west that night.
Carrying, just faintly, the smell of salt and something older than kings.
I felt it on the mountain and knew: whatever Father had "settled" in the south was not an ending.
It was the first stone in the road he had laid for us.
Westward, the land waited.
Behind me, a broken dynasty.
Ahead of me, a choice someone else thought he had already counted.
I tightened my grip on my sword and walked deeper into a world that had begun to remember it did not need gods or fathers to break.
Only bridges.
And those who dared to burn them.