The first thing to go missing was the light.
Rat eased sideways through a slit between roots, shoulder scraping bark slick with cold sap. The air had weight. It held his breath and counted it. A thread of vine curled around his ankle, warm as a small animal. It pulsed once, slow.
"If this is what roots feel like, no wonder trees never move."
His whisper came back damp and smaller. The staff in his hands tapped stone, then wood, then something that gave like meat. He stopped tapping.
Above, the Green Bell had rung once, not sound so much as a pressure that reset the heart. Down here, the ring lived in the wood. Every root strand carried a memory of tone. The place hummed like a hive that prayed.
He shut his eyes. Useless anyway. He lifted his free hand and began Rhythm Tap against his chest. Three beats light, one heavy. Pause. Repeat. The sound walked the hollow. It came back in different clothes where the walls bent or the floor dropped. He mapped the shape with echoes like a bat.
The vine at his ankle tightened a fraction. He flicked the staff, gentle. The vine withdrew without protest. It was not alone. He could feel them now, a braid of living lines braided again through soil. The Codex lifted a page inside his skull.
[Warning: Shrine defense protocol in motion.]
[Environmental Qi density: high. Entanglement fields present.]
"Right. Your soothing bedside manner is why Heaven is single."
He moved. Elbow, knee, plant the staff, slide. The air tasted green and a little metallic, like copper coins left in rain. The tunnel opened to a bowl where roots hung in a curtain. Sap drops fell slow as thinking.
A heat like a small hearth pulsed ahead. The Bell's presence. Not sound. The idea of sound. Everything leaned toward it.
Something else leaned first.
The cold touch at his ankle returned. Another loop joined it. Then another. Not vine now. Filaments, fine as hair, but there were a thousand. They slid over skin that wanted to crawl away from itself. The filaments did not pull. They tasted. The warmth of the Bell traveled along them the way a rumor traveled through a street.
Rat stilled. He did not kick. Kicking announced manners he could not afford. He counted one breath. Two. Three. On four, he exhaled slow through teeth and let his weight settle into his feet like he was a stone that had chosen its place.
He spoke low.
"I am carrying heat you like. I do not like how you grab. Let us bargain."
No answer. Roots rustled. The filaments flowed higher, curious. They had no concept of bargains. They had appetite.
Something answered from deeper in the bowl.
It stepped without stepping. A shape made of pale scaffolding slid through the root curtain. Antlers. Not bone. Not plant. Something between. It had a stag's crown but wrong, too many prongs, angles that a forest would not choose. Its body was a suggestion. Fungus organized by hunger.
The Hollow Antler Wraith. A shed echo of the Verdant Stag's power that had learned to feed.
It did not look at him. It looked at the warmth under his ribs and the piece of Bell tone riding the coin at his sash. Filaments brushed his knee and drank.
His teeth panged. Not pain. The sudden knowledge of emptiness. A thieving cold nibbling at the edge of the warmth he carried.
Rat bent his knees and rolled his shoulders. His breath found the mountain's familiar ladder. Three-Breath cadence. In on one. Hold and compress on two. Out on three but keep a piece. He gathered Qi at the belly and let it creep down the arms into the staff. He did not challenge the drain yet. He redirected it.
"Eat this instead."
He tapped the staff twice lightly against a root to his left, then slid the butt end to another root on the right and pressed. On the third breath, he exhaled into the wood. The staff carried the thread of warmth into those two lines. Decoys. The filaments felt the feed and split to chase it.
The Wraith's antlers tilted, slow and elegant. It did not hurry. It had grown here in the Bell's rain. It had all the time that rot had.
Rat did not.
He measured the bowl with Rhythm Tap, felt the slack place where roots sagged, and edged for it. The filaments hissed on stone. He lifted his foot a hair too late. A dozen threads kissed skin and drank. Frost crawled under the skin of his calf, drawing a thin flower in the shape of hunger.
"Ah. Cold stew. My favorite."
The Codex made a note that sounded like a clerk licking a thumb.
[Parasitic construct identified: Hollow Antler Wraith.]
[Defense vector: siphon warmth. Counter by rerouting flow into non-sentient pathways.]
"Already on it," he said. "Try contributing an umbrella next time."
He stepped into the slack place and let his weight sink a fraction. The roots accepted him the way mud allowed a footprint when it liked the shoe. He kept his breaths small. He did not run. The thing with the antlers swayed. No eyes. It did not need them. It listened to heat the way he listened to echoes.
A truer warmth pulsed from the chamber beyond. The Bell. If he could drag the Wraith's attention onto a bigger meal, he might slip the leash. If he pulled wrong, it would feed through him like a straw.
He cupped one hand around the coin at his sash. The copper felt hot enough to blister. He did not remove it. He angled it away from the filaments. He raised the staff and tapped the ceiling root once, then again, setting a rhythm. Slow. Patient. He matched it to his heart until the beat outside and the beat inside forgot which was which.
The root curtain trembled. The Bell's warmth found his pattern and licked along it like water finding an old channel. A hum rose that was not quite sound. The filaments along his leg eased, minute by minute, choosing the richer line.
The Wraith shifted. Its antlers unwound into the air and sifted for the larger pulse. It moved without weight. The roots around it darkened, drained. Sap beads turned to tiny pearls of frost that cracked and fell in perfect silence.
Rat slid sideways and tallied debt. Every trick left a tax. He would pay for the warmth he borrowed. The mountain always collected.
The tunnel narrowed to a throat. He went chest first, staff held along his forearm. The wood bruised his ribs where it pressed. He pushed through, breath shallow, teeth bared without meaning to bare them.
Behind, the Wraith dipped its antlers into the root he had fed and drank. The Bell's echo ran up its crown and scattered into spores that glittered, then died. The thing did not care about dying. It had made a career of it. It cared about the feel of being full, even if full meant empty in the next moment.
Rat found floor again. He let his toes grip wet stone. The walls came away a handbreadth, then two. He could move his shoulders without peeling skin. He risked a longer breath. The cold on his calf bit deeper on the inhale, then retreated a finger-width on the exhale. A curse that breathed with him. Neat.
He kept tapping. He let the rhythm fold his thoughts smaller until the world was the size of a staff-tip kiss on wood. He remembered Instructor Zhen slapping him for thinking while moving.
"Breathe. Listen. Move. Think when you sit."
The route bent. The hum grew. A pressure flowed across his teeth and settled in his ears like soft sand. The Bell lay ahead in a chamber of roots woven to a cup. He did not see it. He felt it. Sound waiting to happen.
Another feeling moved with it. The Verdant Stag. Not present. Its absence was a shape in the hum, proof of a door. The Stag's shed pieces had learned hunger. The Stag had learned restraint. Rat prayed the Stag liked students.
He eased into the cup.
The Bell was not large. It hung from a web of vine braided into a cradle, a bowl of green bronze that looked poured from dusk. Its lip was etched with lines that were not letters and not knots, a running pattern like wind in grass. It breathed. Very faint. Enough to raise hairs along his arms.
Filaments threaded the cradle like thieves in a market. They had not reached the lip. Something in the pattern kept them a finger away, as if politeness mattered.
Rat bowed his head without planning to bow it. The motion arrived one heartbeat before his mind.
"Help me help you," he said under his breath to the Bell. "I am new at shrines. I am better with gutters."
The coin at his sash answered. Not word. Heat. The rhythm of his taps slid into the Bell's skin and came back truer. He let the staff tip touch the stone beside the cradle, not the Bell, and gave it one breath's worth of push. The chamber sighed.
The Wraith arrived like a memory you tried not to think about and then did. Antlers hung in the doorway, then unfolded through. The filaments along the floor gathered like frost meeting sunlight. They glowed. Not kind. Not cruel. A child's interest before it learned what knives did.
"Not for you," Rat said, and stepped between antlers and cradle.
He did not plan a fight. He planned a redirect.
He found the Three-Breath cadence again. On the first, he chose the shape of the warmth in his belly as a bowl, not a torch. On the second, he set the bowl at a tilt. On the third, he gave the Wraith a path around him that felt better than through.
Reversal Instinct clicked. An old door opening. The Wraith's drain tug took hold of the warmth he carried. He did not push it away. He turned it. The hunger skipped his chest and poured into the two root lines he had already primed like gutters waiting for rain.
The Wraith flowed for them the way water flowed for a hole.
The filaments that ran up his calf felt the change and shrank back a hair. The cold there settled into a neat white scar like a fern leaf frozen into skin. The mark would stay. Hunger remembered its meals.
He set another rhythm with the staff. He did not hit the Bell. He did not need to. The cradle took the beat and passed it to the bowl. The bowl held it as a thought.
The Codex stamped a form.
[Skill interaction: Reversal Instinct + Breath cadence recognized.]
[Temporary sub-technique instantiated: Redirected Siphon.]
Rat grinned at the roots. "File that under finally useful bureaucracy."
The Wraith fed. A dozen roots withered along their edges. Others fattened. A balance he did not trust but could use. He moved with the feed, staying just a step off its lean, herding it like a drunk bull toward a low channel he had felt on entry.
Another tap. Another breath. The antlers swept inches from his face. Cold wind moved with them though there was no wind here. He did not shiver. The Bell's not-sound sat behind his teeth now. A hum made of patience and wet earth.
The Wraith found the low channel and tried to pour itself deeper. The channel was shallow. It starved there. It pulled back, angry only in the way a tide was angry when it met rock. It turned its crown toward the richer pulse. The cradle. The Bell.
Rat stepped in closer and lifted the staff horizontal, not as weapon, as line. He set the length of the wood between antler and lip. The staff began to shake. He let it. His shoulders took the vibration and fed it into his feet. The stone liked it. The cradle liked it.
"Gentle," he said. "We are not breaking anything that pays rent."
He breathed with the Bell now. He did not know when he had started. The Wraith extended one antler prong and touched the air an inch from the lip. The prong smoked and retracted, not burned, not hurt, simply refused. It did not think in words. It thought like rot. It thought in time.
He made his offer again, out loud for himself.
"Eat there, not here."
He flattened his palm against a fat root to his right and pushed a palmful of his warmth down it. The filaments rippled. Luck would have been them flowing away from the Bell. Instinct would have been them flowing toward him. They did neither. They divided. Half for the root. Half reaching slower for the lip, curious about the thing that refused them.
Curiosity. A problem he understood.
He took a short step and tapped the staff twice on stone. The beat bounced off the bowl and came back with a roundness that made his eyes water. The Bell did not ring. It breathed harder. He felt the moment a line slipped between living and not-living. The cradle's vines tightened. The Wraith had never learned fear. It learned limits.
A breath later, the filaments around his ankle contracted and sank, leaving the frost-mark tingling. He flexed his foot. Feeling returned in prickles. The bowl of warmth in his belly stuttered, then refilled at a dribble.
He let out a laugh that sounded like someone who had not died yet.
"Thank you," he told the Bell. "I will pay for this later. I am very behind on dues."
The Codex took that personally.
[Note: Debt acknowledged.]
[Timer Initiated: 2 nights, 23 hours for relocation before pattern collapse.]
"The mountain is a landlord," he muttered. "Got it."
He took his hand from the root. The Wraith gathered itself in the doorway, antlers knitting and unknitting in confusion. The hunger faded down to a pale ache that sat in the ankle wound and licked.
He had survived the first conversation. The second arrived on wooden feet.
The roots in the wall ahead opened one slow lid. Bark had grown a grain around an old knot. Now it became an eye. No white. No iris. Rings of age as pupil. It turned, and the turn sounded like a branch deciding to fall.
A voice came from everywhere the sap ran. It was the sound of water in pipes and wood swelling in rain. It made him want to kneel because kneeling was easier than arguing with forests.
"Kneel, thief," the earth whispered. "Feed what you took."
He did not kneel.
He smiled into the dark and counted his breaths.
"Let us bargain."
[Codex of Strands of Fate - Status Update]
Vitality: 5
Qi Sense: 5
Comprehension: 3
Fate Entanglement: 18
Realm: Foundation Establishment
New Sense: Root Listening (Minor)
Effect: Perceive living Qi pathways within 15 paces. Improves route choice and redirection.
Temporary Technique: Redirected Siphon
Effect: With Three-Breath cadence and Reversal Instinct, divert parasitic drains into selected roots.
Timer: 2 nights, 23 hours to relocate Green Bell before shrine pattern collapse.