The warning gong's vibrations crawled up Lin Moyan's bare feet like ants marching toward his knees. He didn't hear the bronze disc's strike—had never heard anything in his sixteen years—but the tremors through the cliffside village's wooden walkways spoke clearly enough.
Spirit Surge coming.
Across the suspended walkways, hunters scrambled to secure bone charms against their chests. Old Man Boran's lips moved in familiar shapes as he dragged a whetstone along his serrated blade: "Abyss take the unprepared."
Moyan's fingers dug into the vine-woven railing. Below, the jungle canopy rippled like a green ocean struck by something massive moving beneath its surface. The trees themselves seemed to recoil, their kilometer-high trunks creaking as bioluminescent pollen erupted in panicked clouds.
Then the earth spoke.
Not in sound. In pressure.
A single word traveled up through the walkway, into his ribs:
"Come."
---
"Move, deaf rat!"
Jian Luo's elbow collided with Moyan's temple as the older boy shoved past, his prized sonic dagger already unsheathed. The blade's subsonic whine made Moyan's molars ache—a frequency even his deadened ears could perceive.
"Surge's here," Jian Luo sneered, his fingers dancing along the dagger's resonance grooves. "Think your corpse-father felt it before the chasm ate him?"
Moyan's knuckles whitened on the railing. Five years had passed since his father descended into the Bloodmaw and never returned. Five years of Jian Luo's taunts growing sharper than his dagger.
The walkway shuddered again.
"Hurry."
Moyan turned toward the cliffside path just as Jian Luo's foot lashed out.
---
The dagger's edge missed Moyan's carotid by a finger's width, its sonic blast scattering a cluster of glow-moths into frantic spirals. Moyan felt the attack coming—the minute compression of air, the telltale vibration in the wood beneath them.
His palm struck Jian Luo's wrist with precisely measured force.
Crack.
The sonic dagger clattered against the walkway, its deadly resonance harmlessly absorbed by the ancient wood. Jian Luo gasped, clutching his wrist.
"You—"
Moyan stepped over the fallen weapon. Behind them, the village elders were already herding children into root cellars, their shouts silent but their fear palpable in the tremors beneath Moyan's feet.
The path to the Bloodmaw waited, its entrance bristling with warning totems—skulls of the last hunters who'd ventured down during a Surge.
One of them wore his father's iron earring.
---
Descending required no ropes—the chasm's walls were a lattice of fossilized roots thicker than temple pillars. Their surfaces bore carvings no Lin hunter could decipher: spirals that hurt the eyes, angular glyphs that seemed to writhe when viewed out of the corner of vision.
Halfway down, the air turned syrupy with the scent of overripe mangosteens and something metallic. Primordial Qi, the elders called it. The planet's blood.
Moyan's pulse-sense screamed.
Something moved in the gloom below—not beast, not root. A vein, glowing corpse-green, slithering upward to meet him.
When it pierced his sternum, there was no pain. Only a voice settling into his marrow:
"At last."
---
The cavern's walls pulsed like a living throat.
Before Moyan floated the Rootheart—a grotesque amalgam of wood and muscle, its surface studded with half-formed faces. One resembled Uncle Feng. Another looked disturbingly like his father mid-scream.
"Lin Kainan's son," the Rootheart crooned through his bones. "He heard me too... before he fled."
Moyan's breath hitched. "Where is he?"
Laughter vibrated through the roots. "Alive. Fighting. Losing." A tendril unspooled, offering a seed that glowed with violet light. "Carry me. I'll return what the world stole from you."
The promise hung in the putrid air: Hearing. Knowledge. Power.
Above them, the cavern ceiling trembled. Not from the Surge—from engines. Voidship engines.
The Rootheart's voice turned urgent: "They've come to harvest us again. Choose."
Moyan reached for the seed.