Redeeming the Broken Stars.

CHAPTER 12: PREPARATION FOR THE TOURNAMENT:

The silence that followed Kaelen Ashwright's words hung in the alley like smoke after a fire, heavy, suffocating, refusing to dissipate.

All traitors must pay dearly.

He'd said it with the voice of a boy barely seventeen, rasping and rough from days of disuse, from a throat that had dried out while its original owner lay dying. 

But the coldness behind those words belonged to someone else entirely. 

Someone nineteen years old with the weight of cosmic betrayal etched into his very soul.

Old Moth studied him for a long moment without speaking.

The rats in the refuse pile had gone quiet.

Even the distant sounds of the Mortal Coil, the shouting of merchants, the clatter of cultivation tools, the grinding poverty that constituted daily life in the lowest of the Nine Heavens, seemed to hold its breath.

Then she laughed.

Not a short, polite laugh. Not a gentle, grandmotherly chuckle.

A real laugh, dry and rattling and ancient, rising from somewhere deep in that skeletal chest, as if she hadn't laughed properly in years and was making up for lost time.

"Pay dearly," she repeated, tasting the words.

"Yes. Yes, I suppose they will."

She leaned forward on her walking stick, white eyes fixed on him with that unsettling precision. 

"But first, child, before any traitor pays anything at all, you need to be able to stand up without trembling." The old blind Moth slowly said.

As if on cue, Kaelen's arms shook beneath him. 

The effort of sitting upright was already costing him. Zain's body, malnourished and battered and only technically alive, was not cooperating with the absolute fury of the soul it now housed.

He ground his teeth against the weakness. Against the humiliation of it.

"I'm aware of my limitations," he said tightly.

"Are you?" Old Moth tilted her head.

"You speak of paying debts and punishing traitors. You have the memories of a Grandmaster candidate, nineteen years of elite cultivation training sitting in your soul like a library no one can access. And you cannot currently stand without assistance."

She immediately paused. 

"Awareness of limitations and acceptance of them are different things. Which do you have?"

Kaelen looked at her steadily. "Awareness. I will never accept them."

Something shifted in Old Moth's expression. Not quite approval, but something adjacent to it, a recalibration, as if a hypothesis had been confirmed.

"Good," she said simply. "Then we have work to do. A great deal of it." 

She straightened, her walking stick tapping against the stone. "Can you walk?"

"I can try."

"Try harder than that. The alley is not safe for either of us after dark, and you've been in it for four days already.”

“Another night and someone will come along who's less curious and more hungry."

She reached down and offered him a hand, a knot of gnarled fingers extended toward him. 

The hand of a beggar, a woman who'd spent years sleeping on streets and eating whatever fortune brought her. 

Yet Kaelen Ashwright had already noticed things about Old Moth that didn't fit the image she presented.

The precision of her gaze despite her blindness.

The economy of her movements, nothing wasted, nothing accidental.

The way she'd known his name without hesitation.

Kaelen Ashwright immediately took her hand.

Getting upright was an exercise in humility that Kaelen Ashwright, former heir to the Ashwright Sect, had never experienced in his previous life.

His legs shook. His ribs screamed where they were still knitting together. 

His head swam with the effort, Zain's body had been running on nothing for days, no food, no water, nothing but the bare minimum his unconscious soul had managed to keep circulating.

But he got upright. Wavering, grey-faced, one hand braced against the wall, but upright.

"Impressive," Old Moth said, without a trace of mockery.

"Most people in that condition would have stayed down."

"Most people in that condition haven't had their essence consumed by Devourers and survived," Kaelen managed through gritted teeth.

"Fair point." Blind old Moth turned toward the alley's mouth, her walking stick resuming its rhythmic tapping. 

"Walk. I'll talk. You'll listen. We have approximately twenty minutes before your legs give out entirely, so I'll cover the essentials first."

Kaelen Ashwright immediately pushed off from the wall and followed her. 

Each step was a negotiation with a body that had not yet decided whether it was committed to being alive. 

The street beyond the alley opened up into the Mortal Coil properly, and Kaelen got his first real look at the lowest of the Nine Heavens.

It was exactly as awful as Zain's memories had suggested.

The City of Dust, which was apparently what the locals called this particular settlement within the Mortal Coil, was built along the banks of a sluggish river that had long since given up any pretense of being clean. 

Buildings stacked on top of each other in haphazard towers, each floor added when the previous one ran out of space, until the whole thing resembled a drunk man's attempt at architecture.

Narrow streets threaded between them, barely wide enough for two people to pass, and filled at this hour with the evening traffic of a thousand desperate lives.

Street vendors with carts of questionable food. 

Children running errands that no child should be running. 

Cultivators of marginal ability wearing the marks of minor sects nobody important had ever heard of, lording their meager power over people with none.

The smell was something Kaelen was going to have to come to terms with. 

Eventually. When he had the mental bandwidth for it.

"The Mortal Coil," Old Moth said, gesturing broadly as she navigated the street with the ease of long familiarity.

"The first of the Nine Heavens. The floor of existence. 

Where the cultivation hierarchy begins, and where its refuse is deposited." 

Her tone was not unkind, merely factual. 

"You're familiar with it only from above, aren't you? From the perspective of someone who never had reason to look down this far."

"The Ashwright Sect operates from the Fourth Heaven," Kaelen confirmed, falling into step beside her. 

Walking was getting marginally easier now that his blood was moving.

"The Mortal Coil was... a theoretical concept. Somewhere cultivation began."

"Some place where cultivation survived," Old Moth corrected. 

"There's a difference. In the upper heavens, you learn to cultivate. Down here, you learn whether you have enough will to live to begin. Most don't." 

She stepped around a collapsed section of paving without looking at it. 

"The Devourers created the Nine Heavens as a layered ascension, each realm a test to determine whether a soul had the quality to rise higher.”

“The Mortal Coil was never meant to be permanent. It was a starting point."

"But the Elders have made it a permanent underclass," Kaelen said.

"The Elders make excellent use of it. People who never leave the Mortal Coil never ask inconvenient questions about what happens in the Celestial Realm." She glanced at him sideways. 

"People like Zain." She immediately added.

Kaelen was quiet for a moment. Zain's memories stirred at the sound of the name, fragments of a short, hard life surfacing without warning. 

The smell of bread from a bakery three streets over that he'd never been able to afford.

A woman's voice, kind but tired, that he'd called mother until she stopped answering. 

The particular geometry of a punch from a larger boy that he'd learned to anticipate.

"He deserved better," Kaelen said quie

tly, surprising himself.

“Yeah, he did…but he is dead and here you are…with the privilege to inhabit his lifeless body.” Old Moth said, almost laughing.