The ink-pool didn't just swallow the Ancestor; it inhaled him.

  I felt his fingers—thin as dry twigs—snap against my wrist as the suction pulled us down. The obsidian knife slipped from my grip and vanished into the black. There was no "spiritual realization," only the burning of salt in my eyes and the taste of rot in my throat. I kicked, my boots hitting the soft, pale flesh of the Root-Terror, and shoved the old man deeper into the Maw.

  The ink-pool let out a long, bubbling hiss. The white-stone path beneath me gave way.

  I reached blindly into the dark, my fingers catching on a piece of rough, splintered timber. I hauled myself up, gasping, my lungs screaming as I vomited a mixture of black bile and grey ash onto the floor.

  I wasn't in a void anymore. I was back on the rooftop.

  The violet light was gone. The sky was a flat, dead grey, the color of a gutter. The "Tall Grass" had turned into brittle, ash-colored straw. It covered everything—the vents, the ledge, the broken elevator housing—in a thick, suffocating carpet.

  My uncle sat a few feet away, leaning against a rusted water tank. He was shaking, his hands buried in the grey straw. He didn't look up. He was staring at his own feet, where he had used a sharp stone to carve a jagged circle in the concrete around him.

  "Don't step outside the line, Jun," he whispered. His voice was a dry rattle. "The sun is coming up, but the shadows haven't left. They’re just hiding under the straw."

  I stood up, my legs trembling. The 【 門 】 mark on my palm had stopped bleeding. It was now a thick, puckered scar, the skin around it dead and white.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  I walked to the edge of the roof.

  The city below was silent. No sirens. No hum of electricity. The streetlights stood like dead trees. Down in the intersections, I saw movement.

  A group of survivors—people who had been office workers and couriers yesterday—were kneeling in the middle of the road. They weren't praying to a god. They were busy. They were using mud and spit to paint giant, lidless eyes on the sides of stalled buses.

  A woman stood near a fire hydrant, methodically tearing her silk scarf into thin red strips and tying them to every car door handle she passed. She didn't look at the sky. She kept her head down, her lips moving in a silent, repetitive count.

  They weren't "communing" with the dark. They were terrified. They were trying to survive the only way the Village knew how: by building a wall of superstitions before the night came back.

  "They're making the rules, Jun," my uncle said, crawling toward me, careful never to let his knees touch the concrete outside his carved circle. "They saw what was in the grass. Now they’ll never look at a shadow the same way again."

  I reached into my pocket. My hand brushed against the phone. The glass was cracked, the casing bent. It was a useless piece of plastic and metal.

  I looked at the black screen.

  In the reflection of the dead glass, I didn't see the grey sky or the ruined rooftop.

  I saw a small, thatched hut sitting in a clearing of black trees. The door of the hut was slightly ajar. Hanging from the lintel was a single red rag, sodden with rain.

  A figure stood in the doorway of the hut. It was wearing my jacket. Its hand was raised, pressed against the wood of the doorframe.

  Slowly, the figure moved its finger. It began to carve something into the wood.

  【 門 】

  The wood in the reflection splintered under the figure's touch.

  On the rooftop, in the real world, a sharp crack echoed. I looked down at my feet. A deep, jagged fissure had just appeared in the concrete, splitting the roof in two.

  From the crack, a single blade of fresh, vibrant green grass poked through.

  It wasn't dead. It was waiting.