Chapter 7 · free to read
Three days out of Fenyang the road stopped pretending to be a road. There was only up, and the green thing at the top of it, watching them come.
He had left a town, a block, a grandfather's stall and eleven years of ordinary mornings. He carried the apron anyway. He could not have said why.
Every legend she had sewn into him made the blade faster. None of them had made him a swordsman. The gap between those two things kept putting him on his back.
The god had lost his head a long time ago. The cut that took it was still there in his shoulder, and it was exactly the width of the thing on Gu Tie's back.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.