Chapter 13 · free to read
Four hundred and sixty freed cuffs at the bottom. Nine sluices. And at the top of the whole apparatus, one small circle the charts refused to give a name to.
A hundred paces. Shen Ke's chart called it the Long Answer, and noted in a careful hand that the disciples who walk it come out unable to say what they walked through.
It did not hurt. That was the horror of it. Things simply stopped having been true, politely, one at a time, like a shop being closed up for the night.
He won. He stood in the wreckage of the Long Answer with the elder dead at his feet, and he could not have told anyone his own name, his trade, or why his apron had somebody else's blood on it.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.