My spirits arrived quickly, but Flee quieted when she saw the tears streaming down Yin’s cheeks.“Why is Yin crying?” Flee approached her with small, careful steps. “Is everything okay, Yin?”Ash stood beside me with Ren on his shoulder. Ash’s eyes narrowed at my master’s expression, the way they did when he was trying to decide whether he should intervene in an unexpected situation.Yin shook her head at Flee, patting her head gently. “Nothing, Flee,” she said, voice even, though the dampness on her face betrayed the fragility of that steadiness.Flee didn’t seem convinced. Her ears twitched, and she looked from Yin to me and then to Granny Lang, who stood further back than usual. Before Flee could ask more, my friends walked in—Zhang first, Liuxiang behind him, and finally Yan Yun. All of them carried a kind of alertness in their posture, the expectation that this meeting was not routine. Qiao Ying came in behind and closed the door, checking the latch twice.I asked Ren to put up a

I held Yan Yun tightly as she cried into my chest. I rubbed gentle circles on her back until she grew too tired to cry and fell asleep in my arms.Her breaths evened by degrees. The first ones shuddered and caught; the next came slow and low. I kept my palm moving in small, steady motions between her shoulder blades. Her weight shifted until she rested against me fully. When her fingers finally loosened their grip on my robe, I slid an arm under her knees and adjusted her so her neck wouldn’t cramp. The floor was hard, but the mat dulled the edge. I adjusted the pillow with a thread of Chi and set it beneath her head. My thumb brushed a damp track at the corner of her eye. She didn’t stir.I looked at Liuxiang. She stood near the doorway with her hands folded inside her sleeves, posture straight, hair pinned with a simple bone stick. Her gaze slid from me to the sleeping form at my side, then to the window, then back. Her face didn’t move much, yet the tiny tightness at the corners of

Flee pulsed her Qi, counting silently in her mind, and matched them to the beat she used when she had been practicing against Leiyu all that time ago. Her lungs burned. She shaped her Chi to follow her desired path. Her fingers spread. Sparks moved over her skin and then pulled back under it. The first pulse cleared a palm’s breadth around her face, a tiny bubble of protected space before it collapsed a moment later. The second let her see three stars that hadn’t been there a moment before. The third hit a pocket of residue that fought back and made her teeth buzz, and she pressed harder into it until it broke apart. Lightning crackled around her, then dispersed as each pulse faded, but each time the miasma was slower to reclaim the space, thinner when it returned. She could do this. She spotted another dark mass heading towards her, but as she readied herself to scream through it, push through, her surroundings changed. A single blink, she stood within the Lunar Court once a

Liuxiang stared at Elder Tian Feng. “There must be some way,” she asked, but her voice sounded blank even to herself. “You see the future. Is there any way to help him?”They stood in a side chamber off the main cavern which Yuan’s master used as his residence, back in the day, before the war had changed everything. The chamber’s walls curved inward and were lined with shallow shelves carved directly into the stone. A low brazier burned with pale pills that released a steady heat without smoke. The smell of medicinal herbs sat heavy in the air, mixed with the sharper scent of blood from bandages that should have been changed an hour ago.Elder Tian Feng had taken the corner under a lantern that never sputtered. The lantern’s glass was clear and showed the steady, condensed glow inside.He looked smaller than usual because he had set aside his outer robe and left only the lined inner layer. His hair, always secured with a dark pin, was fastened without a single stray. The lines around

I became aware of my heartbeat in a steady, annoying way. I made myself breathe slower until it matched the hum I could feel through the wall. My gaze drifted to Zhang, who looked particularly downcast, with an expression I’d only seen him don when he’d been lying in that bed, having given up on life.He stood up, reflexively smoothing the front of his robe before he spoke. “We will have to get things ready. I assume we need all the soldiers ready and all the guns on standby?”I nodded. “Yes, that would be ideal.”“We’ll have to traverse the tunnels to the Divine Tree. I’ll take our most skilled soldiers for this. Once we start this war… There’ll be no turning back. When would you want to do this?”“The sooner, the better. Ideally, within a week. I would like to surround the demon god, and with Yin making as many bombs as she can…” Yin perked up at her name, and I nodded in her direction. “Of course, I’ll bring her as many divine leaves as I can meanwhile, but with the bombs, weapons,