Chapter 12: Incense, Blood, and an Empty Seat

  The Temple of Ten Thousand Fmes did not burn with fire.

  It burned with memory.

  And today, the incense was bitter.

  Acolyte Mi Zhen knelt in silence as the ash collected in yers on her robe. Her lips were cracked. Her eyes did not blink. She had been kneeling for nineteen hours.

  When the bell finally rang — low and iron-heavy — she rose.

  The high priest was dead.

  *****

  There was no mourning. Only ritual.

  They bathed his body in river salts. Removed his eyes. Sealed his hands in lotus mud.

  And then, before dawn, Mi Zhen carried the body alone up the Bck Stair — 333 steps carved into a mountainside that had never been mapped.

  At the summit was the Seat of Calling.

  A stone throne, older than the empire, said to be carved from the mor of a dead god.

  No one had sat in it for three hundred years.

  She pced the body in front of it.

  Then she waited.

  When the wind came, it was not cold.

  When the stars flickered, they did not twinkle — they shifted.

  Then something happened.

  The corpse inhaled.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Then stopped.

  The air filled with the scent of cinnamon and burnt copper.

  And in Mi Zhen’s mind, a voice that was not hers, not male, not female — but many:

  “He is not chosen.

  But he may be remembered.”

  The body burst into red-gold light.

  Mi Zhen shielded her eyes.

  When it cleared, the throne was still empty.

  But carved into its back now — fresh and wet — was a single symbol:

  To wait(等待).

  *****

  beneath the temple, Mi Zhen opened a scroll no one was supposed to know existed.

  Its ink was faded. Its nguage older than script.

  But one phrase had been circled by trembling hands a hundred years ago:

  “When memory begins to awaken, the earth will offer its teeth again.”

  She did not sleep.

  She did not weep.

  She only whispered a name she hadn’t heard in a lifetime:

  “Zhaotun.”

  Then she packed her robes. Took no horse.

  And walked into the dark.

  (End of chapter)