Date: TC1853.08.18
Location: Ring 5 City - Medicine Hall Branch
The Fifth Ring smelled different from Seven Peaks.
Lin Yue stepped off the transport platform—a modified formation array that'd carried her forty kilometers in twenty minutes—and breathed in city air. Smoke from cooking fires, merchant spices, unwashed bodies crammed into too-small housing, the underlying metallic tang of depleted spiritual energy that pervaded the outer rings.
Home. Or what passed for it before she'd found cultivation.
The Medicine Hall branch sat three blocks from the transport station, marked by a simple sign carved from living wood that'd been coaxed into growing the sect's symbol. Nothing fancy. Nothing that screamed wealth or power. Just a building that looked like it belonged in the Fifth Ring—solid construction, clean lines, doors open to anyone who needed help.
