The salt flats widened into something that wasn't land so much as an unfinished sentence.
The sky grew low. The earth grew hard. My breath grew short.
"You feel it?" I asked.
"Yes," Shen Yue said. "Like standing too close to a boiling pot you can't see."
The monk on Qiyun had said: Past the salt. Follow the wind that carries no dust. When you begin to forget why you came, you will be close.
I had thought that last part a metaphor.
It was not.
By mid-afternoon I had to keep repeating it in my head like a mantra:
West. Answers. Father. Bridge. New threat.
West.
Answers.
Father.
Bridge—
I lost the next word and had to drag it back like a man pulling himself out of mud.
Shen Yue touched my arm. "You're drifting," she said.
"So are you," I answered.
Her jaw set. "Then talk to me. Keep counting. Keep naming."
"Fine," I said. "We're walking."
"Where?"
"Toward people who knew him before we did."
"And after that?"
"Toward something he didn't count on."
The bridge didn't like that. It bristled, as if insulted.
"You are not just his plan," Shen Yue said. "Remember that."
"I'm also the plan of the thing inside me," I said. "That's not better."
"No," she agreed. "But it means there are at least two voices in there. Use them against each other."
I snorted. "You make treason sound domestic."
"Family always was the first war," she said, and we kept walking.
By sunset we saw it: not a city, not a fort, but a line of stones half-swallowed by salt, marking nothing visible.
Beyond them the wind changed.
It stopped carrying dust.
It stopped carrying anything at all.
I stepped over.
It felt like falling, though the ground did not move.
Behind me, Shen Yue cursed softly. "What did he do to this place?" she whispered.
"He didn't," I said.
She looked at me.
The bridge answered for me, not in words, but with a sense:
He didn't make this.
He found it.
He used it.
We walked into somewhere the world had tried to forget.
In Ling An, the South remembered itself all at once.
The first rider came at dusk, horse lathered, eyes wild. He dismounted badly, nearly falling, and pushed through the ranks of city guards as if they were reeds.
"I must—see—the King—Nan He Wang—" he gasped.
He was dragged before Wu Jin still half-choking on road dust.
"Speak," Wu Jin said.
"The marsh," the rider coughed. "Hei Fort. The tower. The Regent. The dead—"
He swallowed, forced the words through a throat that didn't want them.
"The border is… empty."
Silence dropped in the hall. Even the damaged pillars seemed to lean closer.
"Empty?" Wu Jin repeated.
"No banners," the rider said. "No southern camp. No fortress lights. No—no bodies. The river runs, but…" He broke off, shuddering.
"But what?" Wu Jin demanded.
"It runs uphill," the rider whispered. "And it won't take reflections. We looked. We saw nothing. As if the water had forgotten how to show men."
The memory of his father's voice slipped into the back of Wu Jin's mind:
It is being settled.
He forced his face not to change.
"Send more scouts," he said. "Carefully. No large detachments. Tell them to watch the tower."
A different minister licked his lips. "And if the Lord Protector is there?"
"Then they do not approach," Wu Jin said. "They watch. We are past the age of filial trust."
He dismissed the court.
Wu Shuang remained.
"You know what this means," she said quietly.
"It means we have no southern buffer anymore," he replied. "If something comes north, it will come straight here."
"It also means," she said, "that Father has finished something."
"Finished, or fed?" he muttered.
She did not answer.
Her thumb stroked the bell-clapper through the fabric of her sleeve.
"If he hangs it in that tower," she said, "and rings it—"
"I know," Wu Jin snapped.
He did not, not fully.
But he knew enough:
Whatever his father had "settled" at Hei Fort was not peace.