The world didn't right itself so much as reassemble in pieces.
Moyan's knees hit packed earth just outside the Floating Tomb, his father's knife clutched in a white-knuckled grip. The blade hummed with residual gravitational energy, its edge distorting the air like heat haze. Above him, the sky had turned the sickly green of a fresh bruise—Spirit Surge at its peak.
Jian Luo's shadow fell across him before the voice did.
"Still breathing, abyss-rat?" The older boy's sonic dagger hovered at Moyan's throat, its resonance grooves glowing faintly with stolen Surge energy. Behind him, six clan hunters formed a loose circle, their gravity staffs already forming a containment field.
Moyan's new ears caught the subtle hitch in Jian Luo's breathing—the barely perceptible tremor of muscles pushed past exhaustion. They'd been fighting something out here. Something that left claw marks in the stone and the acid stench of void-tech in the air.
The Rootheart's voice slithered up his spine: "They tried to enter the tomb without you. The ghosts didn't like that."
---
Lin Haiyu broke through the circle first.
Her hands were bloody, her left sleeve torn to reveal fresh burns. The clan's markings had been scorched from her face—excommunication. When she signed, her fingers moved with deliberate slowness so Moyan could read her lips:
"Run. Now."
Jian Luo's dagger pressed deeper. "Elder Boran says he's to be presented at the Bone Altar. Unless you're confessing treason too, Lin Haiyu?"
The vibration came a half-second before the attack—not from Jian Luo, but from the trees. A tendril of glowing root lashed out from the undergrowth, wrapping around the nearest hunter's ankle. The man had barely begun to scream when he was yanked into the canopy, his gravity staff clattering to the ground.
Moyan moved.
His father's knife flashed upward, not at Jian Luo, but at the containment field's weakest point—where two staffs intersected at a three-degree miscalculation. The distorted blade sheared through the gravitational bindings like rotten cloth.
Chaos erupted.
---
The forest had come alive.
Vines thicker than a man's arm burst from the soil, their surfaces studded with tooth-like thorns. The remaining hunters fell into defensive formations, their staffs weaving intricate patterns to deflect the onslaught. Only Jian Luo stood frozen, his dagger dangling uselessly as he stared at Moyan's knife.
"That's impossible," he breathed. "Only Iron Sky blood can wake the—"
A root speared through his thigh.
Moyan caught him before he fell, the knife's gravity field automatically lightening the older boy's weight. The Rootheart shrieked in protest: "Leave him! He's nothing!"
Haiyu's hands closed around Moyan's wrist. Her lips formed two words as the jungle closed in around them:
"Sky's Grave."
Then she was gone, vanishing into the green with Jian Luo slung over her shoulder like a sack of grain.
---
The clearing became a slaughterhouse.
Moyan watched from the treeline as the last hunter fell, his body cocooned in pulsating roots that pumped something thick and dark into his screaming mouth. The vines ignored Moyan completely, curling around his legs like affectionate serpents.
"They'll blame you for this," the Rootheart purred. "But we have what we need."
The ghost emperor's final gift burned in Moyan's mind—a single coordinate etched in gravitational waves. Somewhere in the jungle's heart, past the Sky's Grave and the Celestial Vine Sect's territory, lay the first piece of his father's legacy.
A voice that wasn't the Rootheart's whispered through the knife's resonance:
"The weight of choice is the heaviest burden. Choose anyway."
Moyan turned toward the deepening green, where the trees grew teeth and the shadows moved with purpose. Behind him, the clan's horns began to sound the alarm.
Ahead, the jungle waited with open arms