He Used My Blood Then Chose Me novel · Chapter 10 of 32

Chapter 10: The Rising

We turned back north that same evening.

The ferryman took us across for free after that. He said he didn't want anything from people the temple was calling.

We walked all night and slept in the day.

My mother kept up. She'd been lying on a cot for twenty-one years and now she was walking twenty miles a day, and she didn't complain once.

On the second night Ren stopped in the middle of the road.

"Riders," he said.

We got off the road and into the brush.

Six of them came by. Shinigami, in dark coats, moving fast north.

They didn't see us.

"They're heading for the temple too," Ren said.

"Everybody's heading for the temple," I said.

On the third day we came up over the ridge and saw the Amber Forest.

We saw the temple.

It stood in the middle of the forest where there had never been anything but trees.

Tall. Stone. A roof that caught the light.

Smoke coming off it in a thin line, like a chimney in winter.

I stood on the ridge and looked at it for a long time.

"That's my home," I said. "That's where I grew up. There wasn't anything there."

"There is now," Min-jun said.

We went down into the trees.

The forest had changed. The paths I knew were still there, but the temple had come up through the middle of everything, and it had pushed trees aside to do it.

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