The static clung to Moyan's skin like spiderwebs.
He scrubbed at his arms, but the Harvester's afterimage refused to fade entirely. Tiny arcs of blue lightning still jumped between his fingers when he moved too quickly—another unintended gift from the gravity knife's discharge. Across the rebel camp, the others gave him a wide berth. All except Jian Luo, who limped forward with a hunter's stubbornness, his bandaged leg leaving smears of glowing moss juice in his wake.
"So." He jabbed a finger at Moyan's chest. "Your corpse-father turned himself into a message stick. That's new."
Haiyu intercepted the gesture with a blade. Her signs were curt: Test the perimeter. Voices in the vines.
Jian Luo opened his mouth, then froze as the Rootheart's laughter slithered through the clearing.
Clever boy. He hears them now.
Moyan did. The jungle's usual chorus of clicks and rustles had taken on a cadence too deliberate to ignore. Syllables woven through cicada songs. Words hiding in the creak of branches.
Celestial. Vine. Sect.
Yanmei nocked an arrow. "Scouts."
---
The sect's warriors came on silent feet.
They moved like extensions of the jungle itself—skin painted in chlorophyll greens, their wooden armor grown rather than carved. Moyan counted twelve before the vines obscured his view, their positions forming a perfect hexagon around Sky's Grave.
At the center walked a figure robed in living orchids, her face hidden behind a mask of braided roots. The rebels tensed. Even the Rootheart stilled in Moyan's spine.
"Oracle," Haiyu signed, her fingers trembling slightly. Don't meet her eyes.
The woman raised a hand. The vines at her feet parted to reveal a void-tech transponder—the same serpent-marked device Moyan had seen in the Harvester's vision. Its screen flickered with corrupted data streams.
"The abyss whispers truths," the Oracle intoned. Her voice was wrong, syllables stretched like taffy. "But the Sect hears only lies."
Jian Luo's dagger hand twitched. "What the fuck does that mean?"
The Oracle's mask split open vertically.
---
What emerged wasn't a face.
A nest of translucent tendrils writhed where her features should be, each tipped with a blinking sensor node. They pulsed in time with the transponder's static, forming grotesque approximations of expressions—a smile here, a grimace there. When she spoke again, the voice came from the device at her feet.
Subject Lin Moyan. You are the control variable.
The rebels' weapons came up as one. Moyan's gravity knife hummed to life, its distorted edge making the air waver. Only Haiyu remained still, her gaze locked on the Oracle's twitching tendrils.
Mother? she signed, so small Moyan almost missed it.
The Oracle went perfectly still.
Then the screaming began.
---
It started with the outermost scouts.
One moment they stood vigilant; the next, their bodies convulsed as something beneath their skin rippled. Wooden armor splintered as thick roots erupted from mouths and eye sockets, each vine studded with glowing data nodes. The nearest rebel—Little Lian—barely had time to gasp before the same roots burst from her own arms.
Out! the Rootheart shrieked. They're not scouts—they're relays!
Moyan moved on instinct. His knife carved a gravity trough through the chaos, sending warriors and corrupted vines alike tumbling sideways. Haiyu grabbed Jian Luo, dragging him toward the wreckage as Yanmei's arrows found home in the Oracle's chest.
It made no difference.
The tendrils kept speaking even as they dissolved into static.
Observation: Subject retains autonomy. Hypothesis: Rootheart integration incomplete. Recommended action: Immediate retrieval.
Then the transponder exploded.
---
The blast wasn't fire or shrapnel, but information.
Moyan's new ears overloaded instantly, assaulted by a thousand frequencies at once—every leaf's photosynthesis converted to binary, every insect's wingbeat translated into equations. He collapsed, blood streaming from his nose as the data storm raged.
Somewhere in the static, his father's voice:
The vines aren't the prison. The roots are the warden.
Haiyu's hands closed over his ears, her lips moving soundlessly. The last thing Moyan saw before darkness took him was Jian Luo standing over them both, sonic dagger singing a single sustained note that made the very air crystallize.
The last thing he heard was the Rootheart's whisper:
Now you understand why we hate the Serpent.