Chương 287: 60. Karma 1

Before the sky had even fully lightened, Fort Louis had already clawed its way back into motion. No—"come back to life" wasn't quite the right way to put it. It was more accurate to say the fortress had never really slept at all. It had merely squeezed its eyes shut for a few hours in the dark, only to be seized by the throat and hauled upright again by the war outside. The watch was still rotating along the walls. Men were still hauling timber below.

The lamps around the infirmary hadn't gone out once the entire night. Every so often, the wind dragged in the scent of distant char, tangling it together with horse dung, hot iron, blood, and wet earth into one distinctly front-line, thoroughly unappetizing morning aroma. The kind of smell that told you, in one single breath: Ah. Today is definitely not going to be a day for enjoying breakfast in peace.

By the time I threw my cloak on and stepped out of my temporary quarters, Lei Lian and her squad of Yinglong Guard were already waiting outside. Of course they were. There are two kinds of people in this world who are genuinely terrifying. The first kind is someone stronger than you. The second kind is someone stronger than you who also wakes up earlier. Lei Lian, unfortunately, was both. She hadn't brought many riders today—roughly twenty, all drawn from the sharpest edge of the Yinglong Guard.

Their kit wasn't the standard long-range formation loadout either. Everything had been visibly trimmed down for rapid reconnaissance, short-range insertion, and sudden engagement: shorter spears, lighter crossbows, securing cables and spare gear pared to the bare minimum. This wasn't a show of force. This was a surgical team heading in to inspect a wound—fully prepared to dig out whatever had gone rotten inside it.

And I had the distinct honor of being the piece of meat standing next to the scalpel, forced to learn human anatomy on the job.

"Your color is terrible," Lei Lian said the moment she saw me.

"Thank you. That's a remarkably heartwarming thing to hear first thing in the morning."

"I'm not concerned about you," she said flatly.

"I'm concerned you'll pass out halfway there and drag down the entire squad's pace."

"Relax. I was at least alive when I fell asleep last night."

"Good." She nodded once.

"Then you'd better be more useful today than you were yesterday." I was just about to say, I've always considered myself a professional who only clocks out once he's broken, when a familiar wave of heat rolled in from the side. Ignicia walked over. She hadn't shifted into dragon form yet—still in human shape, though her armor was even more streamlined than last night, stripped down for maximum mobility.

Her crimson hair was tied back, the buckles at her shoulders and waist adjusted to the exact tension needed for a mid-flight transformation and immediate re-engagement. There was something bizarre about the sight. When anyone else dressed like this, it meant they were preparing to go to war. When Ignicia dressed like this, it meant she was preparing to become the war itself. She glanced at me.

"Did you sleep?"

"Theoretically, yes."

"Theoretically?"

"My body lay down. My eyes closed. My brain, meanwhile, spent the whole night taking turns wrestling two hundred unresolved disasters," I said honestly.

"So if you're asking whether my soul got any rest, I genuinely cannot confirm." Ignicia listened, then replied with her usual flatness:"Perfect. We don't need your soul today. We only need your brain to still function." Brutal. Completely irrefutable. After all, this trip to Thornhold was never going to be a poetry recital. Lei Lian raised a hand, and the Yinglong Guard snapped into motion instantly.

Several wyverns were led forward, their wings unfurling one by one into the morning mist like a row of silent war banners. Further along the wall-walk, a handful of people were watching us—some garrison soldiers, some of the non-combatants who'd witnessed Ignicia's dive-and-breath the afternoon before. Their expressions were complicated: relief, mixed with the hollow, exhausted prayer of please don't let it be our turn to die first today. I turned back for one last look at Fort Louis. The city was still there.

The walls were still there. But that kind of "still there" felt like a man whose face had been beaten to a pulp, stubbornly insisting he was fine. This place wasn't short on courage. It wasn't short on tragedy. What it was short on was time, order, and someone who wouldn't turn and run at the worst possible moment. And the people we were flying to find right now were exactly the ones who had turned and run. The thought sent something that had been sitting at the bottom of my chest slowly floating back up.

Not anger. Anger is too clean. It was more like a dull, festering pressure—the feeling of an unsheathed blade tucked against your ribs, jabbing bone with every step, reminding you exactly how filthy the task ahead was going to be. Ignicia seemed to read exactly what I was thinking.

"Regretting it?" Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

"Is there still time for regret?"

"No."

"Then why ask?" The corner of her mouth twitched slightly.

"Confirming you haven't decided to bolt at the last second."

"Oh, I have," I said with complete honesty.

"But my life has always had this terrible habit—every time I want to run, there just happen to be more people watching from the front."

"Then you're salvageable."

"That sounded like a compliment, and I find that deeply unsettling." She didn't answer. She simply turned and walked toward the open ground ahead. The next instant, scorching heat rolled outward in total silence. Even now, watching Ignicia shift into her dragon form still made me lose focus for a heartbeat. Not because it was unfamiliar. Precisely because it was familiar—and that familiarity was exactly what made it clear this wasn't a simple change in size.

It was a rewriting of the rules governing the entire space. In human form, she already had enough presence to suffocate a room. But the moment those scales fanned open along her spine and her wing bones tore the morning mist apart, the physical laws of the world around her seemed to redefine themselves according to her terms. Her colossal crimson wings spread wide, and even the morning light seemed to hesitate before daring to land on them.

Several Fort Louis soldiers, despite having witnessed this exact sight yesterday afternoon, still instinctively stepped back half a pace. Perfectly understandable. Perfectly normal. If you could watch a dragon capable of burning your ancestral trauma into something of pure archaeological interest and not step back, you weren't brave. Your legs had simply gone too weak to move. As I stepped onto her lowered wing joint and vaulted up onto her back, a nearby Yinglong Guard rider naturally passed me a securing cable.

"My lord, if you feel the urge to vomit today, please give us some warning." I looked at her.

"Has your collective set of expectations regarding me become somewhat fixed?" She replied with total professionalism.

"It isn't an expectation, my lord. It's risk management." Right. The longer I spent around these people, the more clearly I understood one thing: being "elite" didn't just mean you knew how to fight. It also meant you could deliver the most merciless remark imaginable in the calmest tone possible. Lei Lian took off first. The rest of the Yinglong Guard followed in tight formation. Ignicia beat her wings last, hauling us clear of Fort Louis in a single, decisive surge.

The ground shrank rapidly—wall-walk, towers, outer camp, supply roads all spreading out beneath us. Further east, the front that had been bleeding smoke all of yesterday looked even clearer in the crisp morning light—like a massive wound slashed across the border, its edges still seeping. And we flew north along that wound, the whole way. On a map, the journey from Fort Louis to Thornhold looked like nothing more than a straight line tracing the Eastern Wall northward.

Only when you actually flew it did you understand how agonizingly long that "line" really was. The wall wasn't a thin white mark drawn on parchment. It was a genuine, man-made monolith hammered into the earth. Roughly eight meters in average height, taller still wherever towers and reinforced sections rose. From the ground, it was a barrier. From altitude, it looked like a scar someone had carved to forcibly divide one nation from another. Except now, that scar was festering.

The further north we flew, the clearer the rot became. Some towers still stood intact—banners flying, men moving below. Others had been scorched entirely black, the stonework looking like smoked bone, rubble piled at their bases still uncleared. Certain sections had been patched in a hurry, timber palisades and mismatched stone fitted together crookedly—one glance told you this wasn't engineering. It was a desperate gasp for breath, bought with lives. The land behind the wall told an even worse story.

Supply carts lay overturned in the ditches, their burned-out wheel rims half-buried in mud. Some junctions were so choked with shattered timber and stone that they'd simply been abandoned and rerouted around. In several places, freshly dug mass graves stood out, the turned soil glaringly new, marked only by short wooden stakes—many left blank, with no time to finish writing the names. I stared down at all of it and, for once, found myself with nothing to say.

What I'd seen at Fort Louis yesterday was a single point on the verge of collapse in the present. What I was seeing now, flying north along the line, was an entire defensive front's past and present rotting together. This hadn't happened overnight. It hadn't happened from a single lost battle. This was what it looked like when someone retreated, step by step, leaving every gap they created for the people behind them to fill with their own bodies.

"Do you understand it now?" Ignicia's voice traveled up through her spine.

"I do," I said quietly.

"And I'm significantly angrier than I was."

"Anger is good," she said.

"It means you haven't gotten used to it yet." I didn't answer right away. She was right, actually. The truly terrifying thing was never how bad the front got. It was the moment you'd stared at it long enough that the horror started to feel normal—the moment you began thinking, well, everything's burning anyway, one more body doesn't change the math. That kind of numbness was what would truly kill an entire defensive line, far more efficiently than any enemy army. The fact that I still felt sick.

That I was still furious. That I still wanted to drag the people responsible out and pin them to a wall and demand answers—that, at least, was still a good sign. After half an hour of flight, Lei Lian signaled a turn, and the squad dropped altitude slightly. Outside the wall line ahead, signs of enemy activity grew denser. Half-ruined encampments from the night before. Siege equipment burned to skeletal remains. Freshly dug approach trenches and cover positions.

The Yanxia Empire wasn't throwing bodies at the wall blindly. They had a system, a rhythm—someone coordinating the biting, the burning, the probing, and the rotation across multiple points at once. Which meant the people on our side who'd fled or died hadn't simply failed on their own. They'd failed at the exact moment the enemy was perfectly positioned to sink its teeth in.

I looked further east, faintly making out the silhouette of the Blazing Scale Wall on the far horizon—distant enough to seem like a legend, close enough to feel like a nightmare. The land between these two great walls should have been a contested zone, buffers and bridgeheads and forward outposts tangled together. Now it looked like nothing so much as a millstone built specifically to grind human beings into paste. And Thornhold sat at the northern edge of that very millstone.

The closer we drew, the more a familiar sensation began rising inside me. First the rivers. Then the shape of the forest belts. Then several old road forks, slopes, and ruined tower foundations I could still recognize from above. I stared at one particular fork in an old dirt road and spoke without quite deciding to.

"I used to walk that road." Ignicia said nothing, as if waiting for me to continue on my own.

"It didn't look like this back then." I stared at the half-destroyed tree line bordering it, my voice scattered thin by the wind.

"A little further north, there used to be a small village. Freezing in winter, crawling with bugs in summer, and the bread was hard enough to hold a personal grudge against your teeth. But the stewed apples they sold by the road weren't bad at all." I laughed once.

"Probably gone now."

"Do you want to go down and look?"

"No." My answer came fast.

"The thing I'm most afraid of right now is going back and finding my memory more intact than the place itself." As long as something stayed only in memory, at least it could be called clean. But the moment you actually turned and looked at the real thing—saw it burned, smashed, trampled, saw the road still there, the name still there, but the people gone, the houses gone, not a trace of anything resembling a life left behind—that feeling was worse than simply never knowing how it ended.

Ignicia was quiet for a moment.

"So—are you going home right now?" The question was asked very lightly. But hearing it still made something tighten in my chest. Home. What a beautiful pair of words. And what a magnificent piece of cruelty. I watched the northern wall line growing closer ahead and, after a long pause, answered:"If we're just talking maps and place names, then sure."

"But if going home means returning somewhere with people waiting for you, people who remember you, somewhere you can still sit down and catch your breath and feel like you belong there…" I smiled, faintly.

"Then I probably haven't had a home in a very long time." The wind slipped past my ears. Ignicia didn't offer comfort. That was one of the things I liked about her. She was never the type to smear pretty words over a situation you both already knew was genuinely rotten. She simply adjusted her wings a fraction, stabilizing our altitude, making sure that in the middle of this silence, at least my body wasn't jostled around on top of everything else.

Sometimes that kind of silence felt more like company than any comfort could.