Radeon watched their faces, ghosts and wraiths alike, knot with confusion, suspicion, pride that had outlived their lungs.

A few grunted complaints, yet they still left him room. A measure of faith, waiting on his next words.

"Did your brains rot with the rest of you?"

Radeon stepped closer and jabbed a finger at the paper.

"Look at the array. Get your faces in it."

The wraiths and ghosts who carried titles like array master, grandmaster, even the so called premier experts, did not rush to contradict him.

The expert ghosts leaned in instead. Claws tapped and scraped at the ground as they copied strokes.

A couple of them tugged at their own balding hair in frustration, like time itself had worn grooves into their memory.

For a moment, Radeon expected their confusion to turn into ignorance. A simple gap. A missing method.

It did not. What they sketched back were runes that made his throat tighten. The lines were clean. Advanced.

Complete in ways that did not belong to his world. The last thin hope that he had simply regressed into a familiar past cracked inside him.

This place had its own rules. Its own history. He breathed out slow, as if he could exhale the old life with the air. Then he tapped the second sheet.

"Listen. I will explain. This is a ghost humanizing array. Three teams. Shifts. I split it to match your exact numbers."

Radeon spoke without flourish. Seven hundred nodes would be set across the peak, worked into rock, wood, and soil.

Twenty ghosts would remain on standby for emergencies, replacements, and reinforcement.

The array could take eight hundred nodes if he needed to overfeed it. Three teams would rotate through the core every twenty four hours, keeping the formation alive.

The name still left blank looks on their faces. Humanizing meant nothing to them. Not yet. Radeon let that hang for a heartbeat, then lifted his chin.

"Alright. I won't hide it." His voice went flat and hard. "You see this body. I can eat. I can drink. I can feel again. Taste. Pleasure," he said, face straight, mixing truth and lies.

For a moment, the wind was the only sound, cold and thin as a knife on the skin.

Wasn't this similar to reincarnation? A new life? Being reborn?

Then their expressions shifted. Mouths lifted. Eyes widened.

A roar rolled across the peak like thunder hitting a bowl of stone. Longing. Millennia wasted, with no tongue left to taste anything but dust.

Radeon let them howl until the noise started to turn sloppy. Then he coughed once, soft, and the sound cut through them sharper than a shout.

"That said. There are rules." He held up a finger. "First. You're in charge of mountain security."

"Second. If you want to eat, drink, or play. You pay."

"Third. You learn the arts I give you. Then you teach them when I say."

"Fourth. You burn incense to my image."

"Fifth. You can't eat people unless I tell you to."

Only Calyx did not lose himself in it. He stepped forward, head bowed, but his question had an edge that proved he was not merely grateful.

"Supreme Lord, if I may inquire... The Samsara. Are we to act, or hold our hand a while longer?"

Radeon had expected it. A long lived ghost did not survive by forgetting the great wheels that crushed worlds.

But when he reached inward for certainty, he found a hollow place.

He had quietly torn through Calyx's soul. He had searched his memories with an anatomist's cruelty.

Still nothing solid. Only a mission shaped into bone and instinct, as if he had been built to obey a command he could not fully remember.

"I'd rather you call me Radeon. For now, we take it slow," he said.

He looked from Calyx to the others, and let a thin, humorless curve touch his mouth.

"Think of yourselves as a wave. We start as a ripple. We spread. Then one day you look up, and you're the tide that breaks peaks."

Radeon's words landed, and the peak answered with motion.

He and the wraiths went to work. Structures rose one after another, wood sliding into place.

Radeon did not swing a hammer. He watched. He paced. He pointed and demanded what was needed. A foreman with a whip he never had to show.

When he was not directing construction, he knelt by the living bodies laid out on the ground and tilted water to their lips, one careful sip at a time.

He did not do it out of softness. He did it because dead laborers give him any benefit.

Outside the ghost fog, the waiting crowd heard it. Hammering. Soil being torn and tilled like trenches cut for war.

A sudden, relentless rhythm of building where there had been only mist and dread.

Then the heavens began to stare. Divine threads descended. Scry talismans fluttered in and out like curious moths, trying to drink information from the fog.

Radeon shot them down before they could learn anything worth carrying. One by one they fell, ash and scraps spinning away on the wind.

By the second day, the scrying slowed. The diviners understood the lesson.

If you could divine, you could also be counter divined, and no one wanted their sect's secrets peeled open in return.

By the third day, even the bold had gone quiet. Visitors waited at the edge of the mist. Masters. Sect envoys sent to meet whoever claimed the peak.

They stood with their hands tucked in their sleeves, faces calm, feet ready.

When the ghastly haze finally thinned, every head lifted.

The shapes that emerged were not broken caves or crude huts. Great structures stood in ordered lines, their angles clean.

Walls ran true. Thirty two gates stood marked. The entire peak, five thousand meters of stone, looked owned. Above each main gate hung a huge plaque. Cairnlight Barterhold, the name Radeon had chosen.

Then the white robed men appeared, moving along the perimeter with the ease of those who did not fear being watched.

Their faces were handsome in that unsettling way, too smooth, too calm, like masks that had learned how to smile.

A man in the crowd tried to slip past them. He dashed toward one of the buildings.

He hit the barrier and folded like straw under a boot. Sickness washed over him so fast, his knees found the ground before he knew it.

Murmurs started. The first sparks of gossip. Radeon did not let them catch.

His voice rolled out from within the new walls, steady and heavy enough to pin thoughts in place.

"Respect is for those who can hold it. Three copper coins in the bowl buys safe passage. That's all we ask."

For a heartbeat, the crowd simply stared, then the uproar came. Cultivators were not blind.

The grass inside those fences was pristine, thick and well grown, the kind of green that did not happen by accident.

Even standing on it would feel like taking a breath through silk.

If someone could sleep within that walled city, even in the open air, it would be a victory.

On the flank of the crowd, a talisman expert lifted his hands and worked.

One deriving talisman, then another, then a third, each one probing for illusion and deceit.

When he finished, he shook his head. No illusion. The crowd surged, ready to rush the gates.

Radeon's voice boomed again, louder, and the air itself seemed to tighten around it.

"I'll say it again. Respect. Fall in line. This city can house a hundred thousand. Plenty of ground under your feet. Read the rules before you move."

The people followed them through the gates. A few too many laws had been set out.

Most found them easy enough to follow. Some frowned. Some thought there were not many at all.

Others could not read them, and asked the person next to them what the rules said.

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