The compound was still burning when Kai left it.
Not the clean orange fire of wood and oil, but something uglier. Black flames licked the beams, fed by the ruptured cores of the dead. Cultivator fire. The kind that didn't care about rain. The kind that only went out when it ran out of qi to devour.
Kai walked through it untouched. Every step left a footprint of solid shadow that lingered a heartbeat longer than it should have, as if the ground itself were reluctant to let him go. The heat didn't reach him. Smoke parted like it was afraid.
Calamity hung at his side—not a sword now, but a wound in reality. When it moved, the air screamed like something dying far away.
He was looking for the vault. Not for spirit stones. Not for weapons. For the ledger that listed every child ever sold through this branch. He would burn the guild a second time if that was what it took.
The vault door was three tons of star-iron, sealed with nine formation locks. A week ago, it would have laughed at him. Tonight it opened with a polite sigh when he rested two fingers against the runes.
The locks recognized the eclipse aura clinging to his skin and decided dying quietly was preferable to defiance.
Inside, shelves of jade slips, weapons, pills. And on the central pedestal, exactly where Gorran's pride demanded it be displayed: a thick, leather-bound book with a brass clasp shaped like a snarling wolf.
Kai opened it.
Names. Hundreds of them. Some crossed out in red ink. Some annotated with buyer names he recognized:
Imperial Eunuch Division.
Heavenly Joy Pavilion.
The Alchemists of Crimson Cauldron Mountain.
His finger stopped on a line dated eleven years ago:
Lot 7 – Male infant, black hair, gray eyes, no crying – 5 low-grade stones.
Purchaser: Black Fang Guild (internal use).
He stared until the letters crawled. So that was the price of his life. Five stones.
Calamity stirred against his mind, tasting the spike of rage.
Shall we go collect interest?
Kai closed the book. Tucked it inside his blood-stiff robes. Then he walked out and let the vault collapse behind him.
Outside, dawn was still three hours away, but the eclipse sun had already begun to pale, edges turning sickly pink. Time was bleeding out. He needed to vanish before the nearest garrison noticed the pillar of black flame punching into the sky.
He was halfway to the broken gate when the crying started. Soft. Wet. Terrified. A storage shed he hadn't checked. Door barred from the outside.
Kai hesitated. The smart thing was to leave. Every heartbeat spent here was another heartbeat closer to Core Formation hunters arriving.
Calamity whispered sweet poison.
Children slow you down. Mercy is a leash. Cut it.
He kicked the door off its hinges anyway.
Inside, twelve kids huddled in the dark. Ages five to ten. Shackled together with slave collars. Eyes wide and reflecting the fire. They flinched at him. Covered in blood. White streak in hair. Sword-shaped hole in the world at his side.
One little boy started screaming.
Kai crouched so he wasn't looming. The motion felt strange, like his body had forgotten how to be gentle.
"I'm not here to hurt you," he said, voice rough. "Collars. Can you wait while I break them?"
None of them moved.
He reached for the nearest collar—thin iron, basic suppression array—and let Calamity's edge kiss the metal. The collar fell apart like wet paper. The girl wearing it gasped and scrambled backward. One by one, he freed them.
When the last collar hit the ground, the oldest girl—maybe ten, missing two front teeth—found her voice.
"Are… are you a demon?"
Kai considered seriously.
"Something worse," he said. "I'm the one the demons are going to be afraid of."
He stood.
"East gate is open. Follow the ash road until the river. There's a smuggler village called Mud-Fish Hollow. Ask for Auntie Mei. Tell her the Black Fang debt is paid in fire. She'll hide you."
The girl swallowed.
"What about you?"
"I have fifty-three names left to cross off."
He turned to leave.
The little boy who had screamed earlier tugged his sleeve. Kai looked down. The boy held out a broken wooden sword—the same one Rin had carried earlier. Charred, but still whole.
"For you," the boy whispered. "So you don't forget us."
Kai stared at the toy for a long time. Then he took it, tucking it through his belt opposite Calamity.
"I won't," he lied.
He walked them to the gate, pointed them toward the road, watched until the last small silhouette vanished into the smoke. Only then did he let the mask crack.
His knees hit the mud. For the first time since the eclipse, something hot ran down his face that wasn't blood.
Calamity coiled tighter around his thoughts, displeased.
Weakness. Sentiment. It will kill you.
"Maybe," Kai rasped. "But tonight it kept me human a little longer."
He stood. The wooden sword felt heavier than the shadow blade. Somewhere in the distance, signal flares were already rising—green and gold, the colors of the provincial garrison. Hunters were coming.
Kai wiped his face with a sleeve that would never be clean again. He looked at the fading eclipse one last time.
"Fifty-three names," he told the sky. "Then the ones who paid for them. Then the ones who allowed it."
Calamity laughed—a sound like breaking mirrors.
And after that?
Kai started walking north, toward the Crimson Wastes where no law reached.
"After that," he said, "we'll see how many emperors it takes to balance twenty-four childhoods."
Behind him, the Black Fang Guild burned until there was nothing left but a black scar on the earth and a legend whispered in terror for a thousand years.
The Shadow Blade had taken its first steps.
And the world had already begun to bleed.
[SFX: "WHOOM—CRACKLE—SCREEE—FADE"]