The salt began before the sea.
It crusted the road in thin scales, then in plates, then in sheets that cracked underfoot like old porcelain. The air tasted of metal and old prayers. My tongue felt too big in my mouth. Shen Yue walked with a scarf over her face, her boots leaving prints that filled in more slowly than they should have.
By noon the last scrub trees had given up pretending to be alive. The world flattened into a white that was not clean, only tired.
"West of the west," Shen Yue muttered. "I thought there would be more… anything."
"There is plenty," I said. "It's just all underneath."
The bridge inside my ribs purred. It liked this place. Too open. Too exposed. No walls, no corridors, no excuses. Just horizon and what waited under it.
We found the first body at dusk.
Not lying down.
Standing.
A soldier by his armor, though whatever heraldry he'd worn had been scoured away by salt. His skin was stiff, his eyes open and dry. A banner pole was still clenched in his hand, the cloth long since rotted to threads. The wind should have moved him. It didn't.
Shen Yue circled him once. "Southern?" she asked.
"No," I said. "The cut of the plates is ours. Northern make. Old."
She pointed at his feet. The salt had piled around his boots as if he'd been standing here while snow fell for a long time.
"He's not buried," she said. "He's… kept."
I stepped closer. The bridge inside me leaned.
The corpse's shadow was wrong.
The light came from our left. The shadow fell straight back. No angle. No hesitation.
"Don't touch him," Shen Yue said.
I didn't have to. The shadow twitched first.
Just a little. Enough.
It turned as if sensing us. The body didn't move. The shadow did. It extended toward me like a second spear.
The bridge in my chest rose to meet it like a dog at the door.
For a heartbeat, we were connected: me, the shadow, and whatever under the salt had decided this man should not lie down.
Then I cut the connection.
Not with a blade. With refusal.
"No," I told it, aloud.
The shadow stopped. It shivered once, like a banner at the edge of hearing, then slid back under its owner's boots and became obedient darkness again.
Shen Yue let out the breath she'd been holding. "What was that?"
"A warning," I said. "Or a greeting."
"From who?"
I looked at the endless white.
"From whatever Father woke when he said the border was 'being settled.'"
We walked on. There were more bodies. All standing. All with shadows that didn't care what the sun said.
None of them moved again.
They didn't have to.
The land had already decided the rules.
In Ling An, the city had begun to learn new rules of its own.
Zhou's engineers raised scaffolds along the broken outer walls, their poles a thin forest of order struggling to grow in tainted soil. Counting-priests hung chimes in courtyards to "measure the wind"—bells that rang without moving, noting changes in pressure that no one could feel.
The people of Ling An learned to ignore them.
They had their own bells to worry about.
Wu Jin sat in a half-repaired Lotus Hall, advisors clustering like flies around a wound.
"Your Majesty, Zhou's commander requests permanent barracks inside the north ward," one minister said.
"Temporary, they said," another muttered.
"Temporary means nothing," a third hissed. "Their tents grow foundations while we argue."
Wu Jin held up a hand. The useless noise dwindled.
"Tell Zhou," he said carefully, "that they may quarter a single regiment inside the northern ward. They will build nothing in stone. No shrines. No towers. If I see one brick with their Emperor's mark, I will treat it as an invasion."
The Zhou envoy's face remained gracious when he heard the terms, but a faint line appeared between his brows.
"A single regiment is hardly sufficient to safeguard such a… fragile city," he said.
"It will have to be enough," Wu Jin replied. "Ling An has survived worse than the courtesy of friends."
The envoy smiled. "We shall see," he said.
After he left, Wu Shuang stepped from behind a pillar where the light did not quite land.
"You're feeding a tiger crumbs," she said. "It will stay until it smells meat."
"It already smells Mandate," Wu Jin said. "We can't hide the scent."
"You could refuse it."
"And give Father a reason to claim I've spurned Heaven's aid?" He gave a short laugh. "He would be halfway to the tower by the time the ink dried on Zhou's declaration of righteous occupation."
She walked closer, light catching the faint thread of the ribbon at her wrist.
"You sound like him more every day," she murmured.
"Then maybe," Wu Jin said, "I'll be able to predict what he does next."
She did not say what they were both thinking:
Or what he's already done.