The jungle parted for him now.
Vines uncoiled from his path, their barbed tips dipping in something resembling reverence. Bioluminescent moths clustered around Moyan's gravity-distorted knife, their wings beating in perfect sync with the blade's resonant hum. Even the ever-present drone of Surge-maddened insects fell silent as he passed.
"They remember your father's scent," the Rootheart murmured. "How quaint."
Moyan's new ears caught what the vines tried to hide—the wet, tearing sounds from the canopy above, where the clan hunters' remains were being methodically dismantled. Something in that rhythm made the seed in his spine ache.
Then the trees ended.
---
Sky's Grave wasn't a place. It was a wound.
A circular clearing five kilometers wide, its edges marked by petrified sentinels—hundreds of Iron Sky warriors frozen mid-scream, their gravity armor fused with the very trees they'd tried to flee into. At the center lay the wreckage of an imperial flagship, its serpentine hull snapped in three places like a dropped whip.
The air smelled of ozone and old blood.
Moyan's boot dislodged a bone fragment as he stepped forward. Not human—something longer, with too many joints. The Rootheart hissed in recognition:
"Harvesters. Your father's work."
A vibration through the soil warned him a half-second before the attack.
---
The first arrow missed his throat by a finger's width. The second would have taken his eye if he hadn't twisted, letting the gravity knife's field deflect it mid-flight.
"Stop."
The voice came from everywhere at once—echoing through the wreckage, vibrating up through the bones underfoot. Moyan knew that tone. Clan hunters used it when cornering void-beasts.
His mother stepped from the flagship's ruptured hull, her burned arm cradling Jian Luo's unconscious form. Six figures emerged behind her, their faces hidden beneath woven root-masks. The tallest held a bow carved from what looked like spinal columns.
Haiyu's hands moved in sharp signs: "Knife down. Or die."
The Rootheart laughed. "Oh, she's good. Kainan taught her well."
---
The rebels' camp smelled of fermented sap and desperation.
Moyan counted twenty-three survivors clustered around a gravity well that shouldn't exist—a miniature black hole suspended in a cage of singing bones. It illuminated faces he recognized: Old Wen the weaponsmith, his left eye now a pulsating crystal. Little Lian, who'd gone missing during the last Surge, her arms now threaded with glowing roots like his own.
Jian Luo groaned on a bed of moss, his leg wound packed with something that moved. The archer—revealed as Elder Boran's missing wife, Yanmei—kept her bow trained on Moyan's heart.
"Prove you're not the abyss' puppet," she demanded. "Tell us what the ghost showed you."
The Rootheart whispered, "Lie."
Moyan raised his father's knife and slashed downward.
The gravity well's cage shattered.
---
For three breaths, nothing happened.
Then the wreckage began to rise.
Chunks of metal tore free from the flagship, orbiting the exposed singularity in perfect spirals. The rebels scrambled back as the bone fragments underfoot lifted into a swirling constellation. Even the petrified warriors trembled in their arboreal prisons.
Haiyu's hands flew: "Kainan's move. But unfinished."
Moyan felt it too—the technique was incomplete. The ghost emperor's knowledge had given him the key, but not the strength to turn it fully. Blood dripped from his nose as he fought to maintain control.
Jian Luo chose that moment to wake up screaming.
"Serpent's shadow!" He thrashed against his moss restraints. "In the trees! In the—"
The Surge winds died abruptly.
Every insect in the jungle fell silent.
From the eastern treeline came a sound that made even the Rootheart recoil: the crisp snick of a void-tech safety disengaging.
---
The Harvester stood three meters tall at the shoulder.
Its six-jointed legs moved with eerie precision, avoiding every bone and vine as it entered the clearing. The armored carapace bore the familiar serpent-galaxy sigil—but cracked, as if something had tried to chew its way out from within.
When it spoke, the voice was Jian Luo's.
"Subject Lin Moyan. You are designated for reclamation."
The rebels moved as one. Yanmei's spine-bow sang. Haiyu's daggers flashed. Their attacks passed through the Harvester like smoke.
It continued advancing, its true form flickering between realities.
"Not real," the Rootheart gasped. "Memory given flesh. Your father's last—"
Moyan's knife hit the ground.
The released gravity wave sheared the Harvester in half vertically. For an instant, the two halves remained connected by glowing filaments—then burst into a shower of static that resolved into a single, trembling image:
Lin Kainan, his body half-consumed by roots, slamming a gravity seal onto the Harvester's back. His lips moved in familiar shapes:
"Find my son."
Then the vision collapsed, leaving only the smell of burning ozone and the rebels' panicked breaths.
Jian Luo was the first to speak.
"Well," he croaked, "that's properly fucked."