The salt-man collapsed into powder that blew away in a wind that never touched my skin.
Shen Yue crouched beside the heap, blade drawn but useless against something that had never lived at all.
"He wasn't alive," she said softly. "And he wasn't dead."
"He was a message," I said. "Nothing more."
A message from the wrong sender.
The bridge inside me — usually a quiet hum — pulsed hard enough to nauseate me.
It didn't like that thing.
Or it recognized it.
Neither was comforting.
Shen Yue rose. "Do you believe what he said? That your father went east?"
"I believe he can be everywhere," I said. "And nowhere. And orchestrate both."
"And the warning?" she said. "What does it mean that nothing answers when the bell rings?"
I didn't answer.
Because the bridge inside me was answering too much.
We walked on.
The salt thinned.
Then thickened again, as if we had crossed an unseen border.
And then the landscape changed.
Tents — dozens of them — stood half-formed in the white.
Not real tents.
Salt replicas of tents.
A frozen army.
All facing east.
"No tracks," Shen Yue whispered. "No footprints in or out."
"They weren't camped here," I said. "They were erased here."
The wind shifted.
One of the tents shuddered. Not from breeze.
From something inside pushing outward.
I stepped closer before Shen Yue could stop me.
The salt canvas bulged. Cracked. A hand pushed through — grainy, brittle, but unmistakably shaped like a soldier's hand trying to crawl out of its own grave.
Then the figure inside tore free.
Not human.
Not monster.
An impression — a life trapped in salt, forced into a shape that barely remembered how to move.
Its head tilted toward me.
And every salt tent around us began to shiver.
"Run," Shen Yue whispered.
"No," I said. "They're not attacking."
She stared at me. "How do you know?"
Because the bridge leaned forward like a predator smelling a wounded animal.
"They're afraid," I said. "Of what's following us."
Not what lay ahead.
What walked behind us.
A second wind hit — colder than night, a wind that carried no sound, only pressure.
Shen Yue's hand closed on my arm. "An…"
"I know," I said.
Turning was a mistake.
But I turned.
And saw it.
Not a creature.
Not a man.
A shadow, upright, tall as a spearman — but with no body attached to it.
Its feet didn't touch the salt.
It cast a shadow of its own — a darker shade beneath the darkness.
It was following me.
Because something inside me was calling to it.
The bridge pulsed again, pulling my spine forward like a hook.
Shen Yue shoved me aside, placing herself between us.
"Enough," she hissed. "You want him? You go through me."
It tilted its head.
Not dismissive.
Curious.
It took a single step.
The salt under its feet turned black.
"An," Shen Yue whispered, "if you have anything in that cursed thing inside you that can stop this—"
I didn't.
But something else did.
A sound split the air.
A bell.
Not loud.
Not clear.
One note, thin as a fingernail scraping the inside of a skull.
The shadow froze.
Every salt soldier froze.
The wind died.
And somewhere, impossibly far yet impossibly close, I heard a voice I had hoped not to hear again so soon.
"Not yet."
My father.
The sound was not shouted.
Not spoken through air.
It arrived directly in the marrow.
The shadow bowed its head — to him, not me — and dissolved into the salt.
The tents fell back into heaps.
The wind returned.
But nothing felt natural anymore.
Shen Yue's face was pale. "He's controlling them."
"No," I said.
"He's commanding them."
"That's worse!"
"Yes."
I stared where the shadow had stood.
The bridge inside me whispered, almost gently:
He calls them. Because they answer him.
And you?
You will answer when he asks.
I shut it out.
It laughed.
Quietly.
Hungry.
In Ling An, the bells still refused to ring.
Wu Jin's hands trembled on the railing of his ruined balcony.
Below him, Zhou's engineers replaced stones in the wall as if they were restoring a shrine to themselves. Counting-priests walked the palace gardens, humming under their breath. Soldiers murmured that even the trees bowed toward the tower rising at Hei Fort.
Then Wu Shuang approached.
"The southern army has vanished," she said. "Like ink washed from sand."
"No bodies?"
"No bodies," she repeated. "No smoke. No fires. No sign of retreat."
Wu Jin clenched his jaw. "So they're dead."
"Or changed," she said softly. "Like the ones he kept in the salt."
He stiffened. "You know something."
"I know many things," she said. "None that help you sleep."
She held up the bell-clapper.
"I dream of the tower," she said. "Every night. The stairs that are not stairs. The rope that is not rope. Father calls it the 'Mandate's Tongue.' When it rings, it will choose."
"Choose what?" Wu Jin demanded.
"Who speaks for the world," she said. "And who becomes silent."
He stared at her. "And which path will you take?"
She half-smiled. "I will follow whichever brother survives the first ringing."
"You make it sound like a hunt."
"It is," she said simply.
We left the salt flats before dawn.
The air shifted as we crossed into broken foothills lined with abandoned terraces. Old farmhouses leaned against each other like drunks trying not to fall. Trees had grown in strange shapes — bent toward the west as if pushed by an unseen hand.
"Do you feel it?" Shen Yue asked.
I nodded.
"The pull?"
"The warning."
She frowned. "From your father?"
"No," I said.
"From something that hates him."
The path narrowed.
Light dimmed.
And for the first time since leaving Ling An, the bridge inside me retreated — not in pain, not in hunger, but in fear.
We had reached somewhere even it did not want to tread.
A stone marker rose at the path's fork.
A single character carved deep, old enough to predate every dynasty:
禁
Forbidden.
"Do we go around?" Shen Yue asked.
"No," I said. "We go through."
She sighed. "Of course we do."
We stepped past the marker.
The sky flickered.
The air thinned.
The mountains ahead folded in a way mountains shouldn't — as if space had been bent wrong, like a scroll crumpled by a careless hand.
Something moved inside the fold.
A shape.
A figure.
Not salt.
Not shadow.
Something else.
Something that knew my father.
Something that feared him.
Something that hated him.
And it waited for me.
I finally understood the salt-man's warning:
When the bell rings, and nothing answers—
That thing will.