The city did not panic.
That was the most frightening part.
It adjusted.
By the third dawn after Wu An's second use, the northern districts looked less like a battlefield and more like a patient being prepared for surgery. Zhou's camps still ringed the outskirts—close enough that the sentries on Ling An's walls could count their cookfires, far enough that no one could accuse them of violating the veil. The artillery remained silent, muzzles angled with meticulous restraint, as if even cannons had learned reverence.
But inside the city, Zhou had already begun to move as if they owned the future.
They did not march in columns. They walked in lines.
Monks—some in gray, some in saffron, some in unmarked robes whose hems were weighted with lead—paced the edges of distortion, chanting patterns that had no melody and no mercy. Their voices did not rise; they pressed forward, steady as water filling a low place. Where they walked, the air thickened slightly. Shadows returned to their owners. The subtle warping of angles—walls leaning, streets bending back into themselves—resisted, then obeyed.
Zhou did not "suppress" the Presence.
They interfered with it.
And interference was a different kind of violence.
Where Wu An's road had carved a clean line into the land, Zhou erected spires—talisman towers shaped like narrow pagodas stripped of ornament, their stone faces engraved with sutras and Daoist seals layered over each other like stitched skin. Copper bells hung from their corners, but they did not ring. They trembled without sound, responding to pressure the ear could not hear.
Men who approached the spires too closely complained of nausea, of their teeth aching, of old dreams returning in daylight. Dogs refused to pass between them. Children cried without knowing why.
It worked anyway.
The road's shimmer dulled at the edges. Its certainty frayed. The line still existed, still cut through reality like a scar, but it no longer felt absolute. It felt contested—like a boundary in dispute, like an argument sustained long enough to become law.
Wu An stood beneath the tower and understood something had been taken from him.
Not power.
Freedom.
The Presence remained, seated and wordless, haloed by absence. It did not turn its head. It did not grant audience. It did not reject anyone. Yet the city behaved as if it were constantly being watched by something too patient to blink. People spoke more softly. Fights ended at the first insult. Even the desperate found themselves pausing, as if the act of escalating required permission they could not obtain.
Wu An could stand closer to it than anyone. That fact had become known without proclamation. Soldiers stepped aside instinctively when he passed. Civilians lowered their eyes. Some knelt—then looked ashamed afterward, as if their bodies had betrayed their minds.
He should have felt reverence.
He felt distance.
Liao Yun approached him in the courtyard where the stone still remembered heat.
"Zhou has created a perimeter of dampening," Liao Yun said. His voice was calm, but the calm was that of a man counting how many ways a city could die. "The Presence still holds. But its reach is being measured. They're building a ring of interference—stone spires, prayer lines, controlled routes. They've stopped the worst distortions from spreading."
Wu An stared toward the northern district, where a tenement had folded inward the day before and left a blank space in the street as if a page had been torn from a book.
"They're containing it," Wu An said.
"Yes," Liao Yun replied. "Not destroying it. Not provoking it. Studying it. Learning where it fails."
Wu An's mouth twitched—almost a smile, almost a grimace.
"They think it's a weapon," he said.
"And you?" Liao Yun asked carefully.
Wu An did not answer at first.
The being inside him did not speak, did not warn, did not advise. It only tightened and loosened around his thoughts like a strap that did not care whether it was choking you or holding you upright. It aligned with the simplest vectors: threat, advantage, inevitability.
Wu An finally said, "I think it's a law."
Liao Yun's eyes narrowed. "A law can be rewritten."
Wu An looked at him. "A law can also be enforced."
Shen Yue stood at the edge of the courtyard, close enough to hear, far enough that she could still pretend she hadn't come to listen. The smoke made her eyes red, or perhaps it was something else. When Wu An turned toward her, she did not flinch—but she did not step closer either.