It began with a pause.
Jia Lin had not meant to stop. But as her foot hovered above a patch of unmarked ground, something in her breath caught — not from fear, not from pain.
Just a memory.
She had walked many miles in silence, yet this silence felt heavier. The sky was not darker, the wind no different. But below, the earth felt weighted — as if waiting for something it had long forgotten.
She bent down and pressed her palm into the soil.
"I buried my brother beneath a tree that didn't bloom," she whispered.
"He wasn't a hero. Just someone I couldn't follow."
There was no flash. No ripple of energy.
Only stillness.
Then — the faintest shift.
A single root coiled upward beneath her fingers. Thin. Trembling. Not reaching to bind her, but to listen.
It did not ask for a name.
It remembered one that had never been said aloud.
Jia Lin stood.
The soil pulsed once — and Ashroot awakened.
Far below the visible roots, the dreamsoil formed its first self-awareness not from cultivation, but from emotion. From a burial unoffered, and a grief unspoken.
In the Sovereign Kernel, the mirror fragment flickered.
"A land spirit formed not from law, but sorrow…"
"This is new."
Jia Lin walked away without noticing.
But behind her, the earth had begun to feel.