Verdant Abyss Chronicles

The seed burned like a swallowed coal.

Moyan convulsed as it fused to his spine, roots threading between his vertebrae with wet, cracking sounds. His back arched against the cavern floor, fingers clawing at the pulsing roots beneath him. The pain was beyond anything the hunters' initiation rites had prepared him for—this wasn't the clean hurt of a blade, but something living rearranging him from within.

"The first death is always the hardest," crooned the Rootheart. Its voice no longer came through the air, but vibrated directly in his marrow.

Moyan's scream died in his throat as his eardrums ruptured.

Then—

Sound.

A cacophony of horrors: the squelch of sap moving through the Rootheart's veins, the skittering of blind insects in the chasm's depths, the distant whump-whump-whump of voidship engines far above. Most terrible of all—his own heartbeat, a frantic drumbeat of animal terror.

The Rootheart laughed. "Welcome to the chorus."

---

Jian Luo's boot connected with Moyan's ribs three times before he registered the attack.

"Look who crawled back from the abyss," Jian Luo sneered, his sonic dagger humming at a frequency that now made Moyan's new ears throb. "Did the chasm spit you out or—"

His words cut off as Moyan moved.

Not the predictable strikes of their childhood brawls. This was something else—his body reacting to vibrations Moyan hadn't consciously processed. Jian Luo's dagger hand twitched microseconds before the attack, sending minute tremors through the walkway. Moyan pivoted, letting the blade graze air, and drove his palm into Jian Luo's solar plexus.

The older boy folded like wet parchment.

Around them, the clan froze. Old Man Boran dropped his whetstone. Even the ever-present jungle chatter seemed to hush.

Moyan's mother was the first to react. Lin Haiyu crossed the walkway in six strides, her scarred face bloodless. Her hands trembled as they hovered over his ears—where fresh blood trickled from newly healed eardrums.

"What did you do?" her lips shaped.

The answer came not from Moyan, but from the vines overhead. They shivered, shedding bioluminescent pollen that coalesced into words above the gathering:

"THE LISTENER RETURNS."

---

The trial lasted precisely eleven minutes.

Elder Boran's gravity staff pinned Moyan to the Bone Altar, its crushing weight threatening to snap his freshly reforged spine. The clan's hunters formed a half-circle, their weapons glinting with the eerie green of Surge-charged qi.

"Abyss-touched," Boran declared, spitting onto the altar where Moyan's father's iron earring still rested. "The seed has corrupted him."

Haiyu stepped forward, her own dagger drawn—not toward Moyan, but in his defense. "He's my son."

"And my nephew," Boran countered. "Which is why exile is mercy." He turned to the clan. "Who will speak for him?"

Silence.

Then—

"I will."

Jian Luo limped forward, clutching his ribs. His smile was a gash of broken teeth. "Let the freak prove himself in the Floating Tomb. If the Iron Sky ghosts don't tear him apart, maybe he's human enough to keep."

The pollen-vines hissed approval.

---

They gave him nothing but his father's earring and a waterskin.

As the clan elders sealed the tomb's entrance behind him with gravity seals, Moyan pressed his palm to the cold iron floor. The vibrations told him everything his eyes couldn't—the tomb's vast emptiness, the slow drip of water somewhere below, and... something else. A rhythm out of sync with the Surge's pulse.

Footsteps.

Not from the sealed door. From inside the tomb.

A voice like grinding stones echoed through the chamber:

"You smell like the roots."

Moyan turned to face the Iron Sky's last emperor.