The grey straw didn't just sit on the ground anymore; it breathed. Every time a car passed or a gust of wind blew, the dead stalks rattled like dry bones. The city smelled of copper and wet ash—the scent of a world that had forgotten how to wash itself.

  I sat on a park bench, my hands buried in my coat pockets. My palm—where the 【 門 】 scar sat—wasn't just hot. It was hungry. It pulsed with a heavy, wet thud, like a second heart.

  Across the playground, a small boy was struggling.

  He wasn't running. He was leaning backward at an impossible angle, his heels dug into the grey mud. He was clawing at the air, his face pale, his eyes wide with a silent, suffocating terror.

  I saw why.

  The sun was high in the sky, but the boy’s shadow wasn't under his feet. It was stretched twenty feet away, its long, distorted fingers hooked deep into a rusted drainage grate. The shadow was pulling.

  As it tugged, the boy’s skin began to lose its color, turning the same dull, translucent grey as the straw. He wasn't just dying; he was being thinned out, his weight flowing down into the dark iron of the drain.

  "Wei! Hold on!" his mother screamed. She wasn't calling for help. She was kneeling behind him, trying to grab his waist, but her hands slipped through his torso as if he were made of smoke.

  I stood up. The heat in my palm spiked, a jagged white pain that forced my hand open.

  Floating in the air around the boy were thin, violet threads of script. They weren't letters I could read, but I felt the demand in them. It was a ledger entry written in the air: A body for a shadow. A debt for a soul.

  "Move," I said. My voice sounded like gravel grinding in a jar.

  The mother looked at me, her face smeared with charcoal and tears. She saw my hand—the silver, puckered scar of the Gate—and scrambled backward, her eyes full of the kind of fear people usually reserve for a debt collector.

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  I knelt and slammed my scarred palm onto the asphalt, right where the boy’s heels were losing their grip.

  The world buckled.

  The heat from the scar surged into the ground, meeting the cold, oily pull of the shadow. It felt like sticking my arm into a churning mill. My teeth ached. A sharp, metallic taste filled my mouth, and for a second, I forgot my own mother’s name. That was the price—the Interest. The Gate didn't work for free; it took a piece of me to settle the boy’s tab.

  “Stay,” I gritted out, my fingers clawing into the asphalt.

  I didn't use a spell. I just forced my own "weight" through the scar and into the boy’s heels. I anchored him with my own stolen memories.

  The violet script in the air snapped.

  The boy’s shadow recoiled, flying back toward his feet like a released rubber band. He collapsed into the mud, solid again, gasping for air. But the shadow didn't just lie flat. It huddled under him, twitching, a dark, bruised thing that looked like it wanted to bite.

  I pulled my hand back. The silver scar on my palm had changed. A thin, vertical line had etched itself next to the Gate, like a tally mark carved into bone.

  My head throbbed. I couldn't remember the color of my first bike. It was gone, traded to the earth to keep a stranger’s child from drifting away.

  "You're paying someone else's bill, boy."

  I looked up. A man stood near a dead oak tree. He wore a heavy hemp coat over a pair of stained work trousers. His eyes were flat, the color of slate, and his shadow was tied to his belt with a thick, red cord.

  He wasn't a ghost. He was a man who looked like he’d spent a lifetime counting graves.

  "He's alive," I said, wiping black bile from my lip.

  "For now." The man stepped closer, his boots crunching on the brittle straw. He didn't look at the boy; he looked at the new tally mark on my hand. "But you just told the Earth that you're a co-signer for this city. Every time a shadow slips or a name is forgotten, that scar of yours is going to itch."

  He pointed toward the downtown skyline. The tall buildings were wrapped in the hair of the drowned goddess, and a sickly, violet glow was beginning to pulse from the highest spires.

  "There are people in those towers who aren't trying to pay the debt," the man said, his voice lowering to a whisper. "They're trying to own it. They're collecting the names you're dropping, Jun Liu. And they’re building something with them."

  My palm flared again—not with heat, but with a cold, vibrating warning.

  The boy was safe, but I felt lighter. Less real.

  "Who are you?" I asked.

  The man didn't answer. He just reached into his coat and pulled out a small, wooden tablet. He tossed it into the mud at my feet. It was a Substitute Token, identical to the ones used in the village for the dead, but this one had my name carved into the back.

  "Don't lose your shadow, Master of the Gate," he said, turning back into the grey mist. "The next collector won't accept memories as payment. They’ll want the skin."