The ancestral shrine sat perched atop the low hill overlooking the capital's northern district, its ancient stone walls worn smooth by generations of ceremony, and Yuan felt every instinct in his body scream warning the moment he stepped through its outer gate alongside the gathered court.
Ceremonial pillars ringed the central altar, each one carved with old warding symbols meant, according to tradition, to hold the sacred space separate from the mundane world beyond, and Yuan noted with mounting unease that attendants had spent the morning carefully activating each pillar's inscribed formation, a shimmer of pale light settling faintly across the boundary they formed once the final symbol was properly invoked.
