The instant they hit the sea, it felt as if a stone smashed into their ears.

  Salt flooded their noses. Waves fell like mountains. Sky and water lost all boundary.

  Erica sank first, arms dragged down. The jade pendant burned against her chest like live coal. She a strand of true qi outward, forcing a thin shell of green light to bloom—just enough to drive a sliver of seawater back out of her lungs.

  “Up—!” Jabari’s voice came in broken pieces, sliced apart by water.

  He braced the short blade beneath his arm. The blue flame almost died in the sea, yet clung stubbornly to the spine of the knife, sustaining a faint, warm air膜 around him. He shoved Erica upward with his body. The next wave slammed him back under—then dragged him up again, like a beast that refused to sink.

  Lucas’s pack was heavy with water. He cradled the instruments against his chest and swam one-armed. The runes on his glasses flickered through mist and spray. His first instinct was not panic, but orientation.

  “Shore—north-northeast, two hundred meters—reefs!”

  The waves hurled them high, then smashed them down again. The three were like knots on the same rope, rolled and dragged by the sea. Erica found the rhythm of breathing—between every two waves there was a hairline gap. Each time, she kicked once, shifting half a foot in the direction Lucas had called.

  Her legs burned like lead. But she was clear-headed:

  The first reef bared its teeth. A wave crashed, white foam exploding against stone.

  Jabari surged ahead, clamping an arm around the rocky spine. Blood scraped from his knuckles. He reversed the blade and jammed it into a crack as a hook, then hauled Erica upward with his free hand. Her elbow struck stone hard—but she didn’t cry out. She bit her lip until blood filled her mouth, salty as the sea.

  Lucas climbed last, knees numb from impact. He stripped the pack immediately, checking for water damage. The fold-disk’s golden filaments still glowed, humming faintly—like a small animal just waking from rage.

  He exhaled hard. Ignoring his legs, he turned back to help press them all into the reef’s wind-shadow.

  The wind shredded spray into threads.

  Behind the reef was a narrow fissure, barely wide enough for three to crouch shoulder to shoulder. Jabari planted himself on the exposed side, blade horizontal, taking the wind. A thin line of blue flame crept along the spine, bleeding out warmth. Erica cupped the jade pendant between her palms, drawing the green light out strand by strand—first to warm her hands, then her chest. Lucas pulled a wafer-thin metal plate from his pocket, scraped off seawater, and pressed it to the corner of the scroll.

  The scroll floated out of the pack on its own.

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  It looked stunned by this world—paper creasing and relaxing, brightness surging and fading like breath. When Lucas affixed the metal plate, a soft sounded. A grid slid across the parchment, and a fragmented map emerged.

  Not land—sea.

  Only an outline of waters, with a hair-thin line of light extending northward across the surface, pointing into distance.

  “North,” Lucas said, the word torn by wind. “Keep north.”

  He watched the scroll’s flicker closely and lowered his voice.

  “It’s not fully out of control. It’s being scrambled by rift interference—like using a compass in a magnetic storm. We just came through a merged gate; our three frequencies haven’t settled into one beat yet. So it dumped us into a blind zone—where the noise was strongest.”

  He tapped the twitching light at the edge.

  “Rule to remember: imbalance equals drift. Stable frequency equals navigation. If we can synchronize all three systems for ten seconds, it will lock back onto the correct path.”

  Erica tightened her grip on the pendant. Jabari compressed his flame into a single line. Their breathing began to edge closer together—but the sea’s noise was too loud. First, they had to survive.

  they could stabilize.

  Pain flared again in Erica’s palm.

  She opened her hand. The scorch mark had gone pale from soaking in seawater. She didn’t complain—just pressed and kneaded the Hegu point with her thumb, letting agitation sink back into her core.

  Then Jabari said quietly, “There.”

  In the instant the wave retreated, something dark bobbed in the reef’s shadow—thin, stiff, like driftwood caught by the tide.

  Erica’s chest tightened. She moved instinctively—

  The next wave swallowed it whole.

  “Is anyone there?” she shouted.

  The wind tore her voice apart. No answer.

  The three exchanged looks. No one spoke. The question sank, leaving a hook buried deep.

  The scroll’s thin light kept jumping. The wind sharpened.

  “We move,” Jabari said. “The north wind’s about to turn.”

  They dragged their exhausted bodies over slick stone, heading toward the northern shadows.

  The sea wind slapped salt against their faces like coarse cloth. They staggered up onto a reef beach, soaked to the bone. Shoes scraped against broken stone with shrill friction. Waves thundered behind them. Their breathing tangled in their chests—no one dared slow it.

  Jabari inverted the blade and wedged it into a crevice as leverage, yanking Erica free of the last surge. Her palm still tingled, the scorch bleached white. The jade pendant alternated cold and heat against her chest, tugged by a rhythm she couldn’t see.

  Lucas clutched the pack, checking the fold-disk and scroll before even wiping his face. The disk’s gears still trembled. The scroll fluttered like a fish hauled onto shore—paper rippling, glow unsteady.

  In a wind-sheltered fissure nearby, a patch of sand had been disturbed. The wind wasn’t strong enough to do it. The surface pulsed, as if something beneath were breathing.

  Erica crouched and brushed sand aside. Stone markings emerged—too deliberate to be natural. Rough, urgent, yet ordered. She followed the grooves with her fingers and uncovered a small sigil buried under salt.

  A variant of —.

  Not Central Plains calligraphy, but structurally close to her own convergence glyphs.

  “There’s a site here,” she whispered.

  Lucas had already jammed the projector into the crevice. Golden grids layered downward, stripping sand from stone. Beneath lay a curved wall segment, pitted with small depressions like a star map. A fractured energy line climbed upward—and at its peak, .

  Like a heartbeat.

  “It’s pointing north,” Lucas said hoarsely. “Not direction—frequency. Nordic runic base tone.”

  He shifted the output into audible range.

  Beneath the roar of the sea came a deep hum—like a distant horn. Monotone, structured, descending layer upon layer, as if rising from beneath ice.

  “Not our song,” Jabari said. His people’s chants leapt and surged with fire and wind. This sound sank downward, pressing weight on weight.

  Erica pressed the jade pendant to the stone. Green light seeped out, then recoiled.

  “It recognizes me,” she said softly. “But it won’t let me in.” A thin smile. “Like a locked door—showing us the crack, not the key.”

  “Who’s on the other side?” Lucas murmured.

  The runes in his lenses accelerated, hunting for the pulse hidden inside the light.