Ash covered the courtyards like snow. The dead were honored in quiet ceremonies beneath crimson flags, while the wounded slept beneath silk screens drawn with prayers. Monks whispered tales of the Scourge Marshal's fall, of Li Shen's eightfold strikes, and the phoenix fire that devoured the sky.
But Li Shen did not rest.
At the highest balcony of the eastern spire, he stood alone, the five blades at his back and the Crimson Feather Codex gripped in one hand. Master Ren approached, his steps quiet against the stone.
"You won the siege," Ren said.
"No," Li Shen replied. "We survived it."
Ren paused. "You wish to strike back."
"I have to." His gaze was distant, fixed on the far horizon. "We cannot fight them defensively forever. They'll return with another Scourge Marshal. Another tide of darkness."
Ren sighed. "Where?"
Li Shen turned. "The Forge of Gloom. Deep in the Black Vale. It's where they craft their cursed blades, where they bind the souls they take. If I destroy it, we break the source of their army's power."
"Then you go alone?"
Li Shen gave a faint smile. "I never said that."
By dusk, he departed with three companions:
• Jun, his sworn brother, wounded but determined.
• Sister Rain, a blade-dancer from the eastern wind temples, quick as lightning and twice as silent.
• Brother Wei, a scrollbearer and chi-seer, carrying maps inked in ghost-blood that only shimmered beneath starlight.
Their path led down the Serpent's Maw, a winding canyon where the sky vanished above, and the rocks whispered of things buried.
The Black Vale was no ordinary valley.
It was a wound in the world.
Choked in ash-mist and lit only by cursed lanterns, it pulsed with memory-eating winds and blind spirits bound to shattered statues. They moved in silence, wrapping themselves in sealing charms and walking single file across bridges that groaned like living bone.
At the fourth nightfall, they reached it.
The Forge of Gloom.
It sat inside a crater surrounded by petrified trees, rising like a heart carved from obsidian. Chains floated in the air around it, suspending prisons of glowing soul-metal. Blacksmiths in crimson masks worked at anvils that bled heatless flame. Overseers chanted hollow rites. And in the center of it all stood a figure carved from shadow and steel—
A Hollow General known as the Chainsire.
Li Shen whispered, "We destroy that forge. Then we destroy him."
The infiltration began at midnight.
Sister Rain moved like a ghost, slipping between curses and light. She felled sentries with pinpoint strikes to the throat, her twin blades humming like wind chimes. Wei scrawled sigils onto stone, unraveling wards layer by layer. Jun kept watch with bow drawn.
Li Shen entered last.
He walked toward the core of the forge, guided by the pull of the Crimson Feather Codex. It burned hot in his hand. The soul-iron within the crucibles shimmered in response—drawn to him, as if remembering.
One of the anvil-smiths turned.
"No flame burns without shadow," it rasped.
Li Shen answered not with words, but with a blade.
He struck.
Sērahn's Echo screamed in reply—an explosion of fire-song that shattered anvils and sent sparks cascading through the air. Jun fired arrows tipped with dragonglass, detonating ghouls mid-leap. Sister Rain spun through enemy lines, weaving death like thread.
And from the shadows, the Chainsire rose.
The Chainsire was more specter than man—his body encased in soul-forged armor, his limbs extended with hooks and flensing knives. Dozens of bound chains snaked around him, each holding a stolen soul that cried in anguish. His voice echoed through the forge like a thunderstorm.
"You come to break the chain?"
"I come to end it," Li Shen answered.
Their duel lit the entire valley.
Chains tore through the air, striking like serpents. Li Shen moved with eightfold precision, deflecting strikes with the Mirror Vale Blade while using the Eidolon Blade to sever spirit links. When the chains wrapped around his limbs, he drew on the Ocean Soul Blade and sent a tide surging around him, breaking the links in a roar of liquid chi.
But the Chainsire was a master of entrapment.
With one hand, he summoned a memory prison, trapping Li Shen in a cage of his worst fears—visions of fallen comrades, his own failure, and the burning Monastery.
He trembled.
Until a voice reached him.
Jun, shouting from afar: "You're not alone!"
That cry snapped the illusion.
Li Shen roared and shattered the prison, flames erupting from the Crimson Feather Codex. He channeled the full power of the phoenix script, inscribing Runes of Severance in mid-air.
"Yǎn Huǒ – Eye of Fire."
He slashed upward.
A column of white fire engulfed the Chainsire, burning not flesh, but spirit.
Chains snapped. Souls screamed free. The Hollow General screamed in silence—his body unraveling like cloth in the wind.
The forge buckled.
As the soul-furnaces overloaded, explosions rocked the valley. Obsidian cracked. Blacksmiths fled, their curses unraveling in glowing threads. The petrified trees caught fire—green and violet flame consuming the landscape.
Li Shen and the others ran through collapsing bridges, leapt across cursed fire, and dodged spectral blades falling from the air like hail. Wei flung open a scroll and summoned a flight glyph, lifting them over a ravine just as it collapsed.
Behind them, the Forge of Gloom fell into itself.
A beacon of light—pure and golden—burst from the ashes as the bound souls were freed. For the first time in centuries, the Black Vale saw the stars.
They stood on the edge, panting, soot-streaked, and bloodied.
Jun laughed through a cough. "Well. That was unpleasant."
Sister Rain gave a rare smile. "We should burn more forges."
Li Shen looked to the east.
"One down," he said.
Far away, within a tower of silence beyond time, the Hollow Council felt it.
A circle of nine shadowed forms stirred in fury.
"The Chainsire is broken," one whispered.
"And the forge?" asked another.
"Gone."
The Hollow Architect rose, his cloak stitched from stolen fate.
"We underestimated him."
"Not again," said a woman with a voice like silver bells shattered. "Send the Black Envoy."
They nodded.
The storm would return.
But Li Shen had drawn first blood.
And the war was far from over.