Chen Wei gathered the twelve in the main hall.
No ceremony. No setup. Xin stood at the front of the room and told them everything.
The Hollow. The cage. Longwei's choice. The split core. Why they existed. What was coming. What he was asking.
It took twenty minutes.
When he finished the room was quiet for a long time.
The older man who had asked the direct question earlier spoke first. His name was Doran, from the northern mountain clans. Cultivation background, third gate, had known something was different about his qi his entire life and built a working framework around it without knowing what it actually was.
"You are asking us to use something we have had for days," he said. "Against something that has existed since before the ley network."
"Yes," Xin said.
"And the people who b
