Chapter 29: The Left Path

Yang chose the left tunnel—the one echoing with cries. Something in him, primal and unexplainable, told him that was the way forward. Or backward. He no longer knew the difference.

Each step echoed like thunder in the silence. The cries grew louder, then clearer—not cries of fear, but of calling. A chorus of childlike voices, singing something like a lullaby but wrong in melody.

Old Li stayed behind, whispering prayers outside the fork.

The air grew hotter. The copper seal now felt like a furnace strapped to Yang's back. His flashlight began to fail, flickering like a dying heartbeat.

He passed alcoves carved into the walls—each housing a seated, mummified child, mouths open as if mid-song. Some still had remnants of robes, others had decayed into bone and wire.

Then he saw it.

A vast chamber opened before him. At its center, a colossal sphere, made of bone and clay, hovered inches above a pit. Veins of black crystal pulsed through it, like arteries.

The whispers stopped.

One voice rose above them all.

"Come closer… vessel."

Yang dropped to his knees, unable to breathe.

Visions exploded in his mind—of ancient rituals, of being carried as an infant into this place by masked elders. A dagger raised. The copper seal pressed to his chest. His blood smeared into stone.

He was the first. The Womb's first survivor.

A shadow moved behind the sphere—something tall, jointed wrong, faceless.

"Return the seal," it said.

He staggered to his feet. "And if I don't?"

The shadow smiled without a mouth.

"Then the Core will rise… without permission."