I do not go up.
I go down.
That is the mistake they never stop making about me.
The corridors beneath the prison descend past memory, past old holding cells and forgotten storage vaults, into spaces that were sealed not to keep things in—but to keep things quiet. The stone here is older than Ling An's name. It knows how to listen without speaking.
They are waiting.
Not a rumor.
Not a contingency.
A battalion.
The Black Tigers kneel in ranks beneath the prison, armor dulled, blades wrapped, breath controlled. Fewer than before—far fewer—but intact. Not routed. Not broken. Not captured.
Hidden.
They rise as one when I step into the chamber.
No cheers.
No oaths.
Just readiness.
Liao Yun stands at the front, bandaged, pale, eyes burning with something steadier than hope.
"They thought we were finished," he says quietly.
"They needed to think that," I reply.
I look at them—my soldiers, my responsibility, my sin—and feel something cold and precise settle into place inside me.
This is not rebellion.
This is continuation.
"Signal the outer cells," I say. "Quietly. We move when the city screams loud enough to cover us."
They do not ask how.
They do not ask why.
They vanish into shadow like a thought the world is about to regret having.
Above us, the scream comes sooner than expected.
Zhou takes the Eastern Tower at midday.
Not through assault—through geometry.
Their engineers collapse the foundation supports with surgical precision, severing the tower's ritual alignment from the rest of the city. The structure does not fall.
It goes dead.
The banners rise on its parapet—clean, disciplined, inevitable.
Ling An sees it.
The city fractures.
Markets overturn. Temples fill and then empty again as prayers lose coherence. People run without direction, panic spreading faster than fire because it has no shape to resist.
Wu Jin stands on the palace steps, watching the smoke climb in uneven spirals.
"This wasn't supposed to happen," he whispers.
Orders fly. Messengers stumble. Commands overlap and cancel each other mid-sentence. His authority no longer flows—it pools, stagnant and overwhelmed.
He turns toward the tower instinctively.
Toward his father.
Toward Wu Shuang.
Too late.
The Lord Protector does not move to retake the tower.
He does not send soldiers.
He does not negotiate.
He releases restraint.
The Presence does not surge upward.
It folds outward.
Wu Shuang steps forward onto the balcony, her body no longer fully obeying its outline. Her shadow detaches, stretching across the courtyard like spilled ink, splitting into layered silhouettes that disagree with one another about where she stands.
The air drops.
Not in temperature.
In permission.
Zhou's forward units hesitate—only for a breath—but that breath is enough.
The city answers.
Not with walls.
Not with weapons.
With absence.
The space around the Eastern Tower collapses inward, swallowing sound, then light, then men. Zhou's disciplined lines shatter as formation stops meaning anything. Soldiers fall not screaming, but abruptly gone, erased between steps, leaving armor crumpled like shed skin.
Wu Shuang raises one hand.
The dead do not rise.
They are repurposed.
The ground buckles as sutras burn through stone and flesh alike, rewriting function into remains. The Presence tightens into coherence for the first time since Zhou's binding—not answering me, not answering Wu Jin—
answering control.
Thousands die in moments.
Then tens of thousands.
Zhou's commanders try to withdraw.
There is nowhere to withdraw to.
Their rear lines dissolve as the city's geometry twists, streets overlapping, alleys turning into throats that do not lead out. Siege engines sink halfway into stone and are crushed by their own weight.
Hundreds of thousands do not die.
They are ended.
Ling An stops being a city.
It becomes a graveyard with walls.
Wu Jin watches from the palace as the slaughter unfolds and understands, finally, what his father has been building toward all along.
This was never about holding the throne.
It was about making the throne irrelevant.
He sinks to his knees.
"I can't stop this," he whispers.
No one answers him.
Below, I feel it all—not through the Presence, but through the city's reaction to it. The ground hums like a struck bell. The air tastes of iron and incense and something older that has learned patience from centuries of being denied.
This is the scream I was waiting for.
I step forward from shadow.
"Now," I say.
The Black Tigers move.
We pour into the lower arteries of Ling An as the world above drowns in horror. Zhou's survivors are blind with terror, command structures annihilated in seconds by something they cannot classify or fight. No one sees us coming.
We strike surgically.
Armories.
Signal towers.
Gate mechanisms.
Not killing unless necessary.
Not because we are merciful—
—but because there is no time.
This is not the end.
It is the next phase.
As Ling An drowns in blood and absence, as Wu Shuang stands haloed in nightmare and my father watches his masterpiece unfold, I understand the shape of what comes next with terrifying clarity.
Zhou has learned fear.
The South will learn opportunity.
Wu Jin has learned helplessness.
And I—
I have learned that if the world insists on becoming a graveyard,
then I will decide
who gets buried last.