📜 NEW CHAPTER 3 — EMBERS AND TEETH

Long after the last embers of his father’s coffin sank into cold ash, Jin Ryu stood alone in the courtyard.

The snow had stopped. Only thin trails of smoke rose into the dusk, twisting toward a sky bruised purple with night. The mourners were gone — the parasites fled to warm inns, where they’d whisper about the fool boy trying to wear a dead house like a crown.

Jin rolled the signet ring in his palm. The brass was warm now, heated by the pyre. He clenched it tight until it bit the skin.

"This time, I bury you clean, Father," he murmured to the drifting smoke. "But I don’t bury your house. Not again."

Footsteps crunched on frost. Tae emerged from the shadows by the well, cloak drawn tight, eyes dark under the flickering torchlight.

“You didn’t have to scare Hwan like that,” Tae said, voice low but tinged with something new — respect, or maybe confusion.

Jin turned the ring over once more, then slipped it back onto his finger. It felt heavier than any chain he’d worn before.

“I did,” Jin said. “He’d have slit my purse the second the pyre went cold.”

Tae snorted. “He’ll run to Baek tonight. Or try.”

“Let him,” Jin said, and for the first time his smile was real — small, sharp, no warmth wasted. “Baek doesn’t know I’m awake yet.”

Tae stepped closer, eyeing him. His brother looked like he wanted to laugh again, but didn’t quite trust his mouth to do it.

“You’re different,” Tae said at last. “You speak like…” He hesitated, frowning. “Like you’ve seen this before.”

Jin met his gaze — steady, cold.

“I have.”

They stood there in the hush between bells. The village dogs barked in the distance. Somewhere beyond the gates, the steward’s toad-faced men counted tribute that wouldn’t come.

Tae shifted. “The orchard’s been stripped bare. The salt pans are leased to Baek’s dogs. The barley granary is empty. Even if you scare Hwan off, the house is rotten to the beams.”

“I know,” Jin said.

He knelt by the old stone well. It hadn’t drawn clean water in years — Baek’s men had seen to that, poisoning the lines, bribing the local well-keepers to claim it was cursed. But the well’s stone lip hid a secret older than any ledger.

He brushed away a handful of snow and pried loose a flat rock near the base. Tae watched, eyebrows crawling higher.

Beneath the stone lay a small iron box, rusted shut but still intact. Jin cracked it open with the hilt of Tae’s short knife.

Inside: three small silver coins, blackened with age. A scrap of folded parchment, brittle as old bark. A ring — not a signet, but a plain iron band etched with a dragon curling around a cat.

Tae crouched beside him, squinting. “What is that?”

Jin lifted the ring into the torchlight. The etched dragon was crude, but unmistakable — the original crest of the founder, before the main house forced it to change.

“My real inheritance,” Jin said. He set the ring in his pocket and unfolded the parchment.

On it, a single line scrawled in a hand he knew by heart — his mother’s:

"For when the house is cold and you stand alone."

No map. No hidden gold. Just a memory that he’d once promised her he’d never beg the main family for scraps.

He laughed — soft, bitter, but it felt good. He folded the note carefully and tucked it back.

Tae looked at him like he was half mad.

“That won’t feed us.”

“No,” Jin agreed. “But it reminds me what I’m here to do.”

He pocketed the old coins too. Not enough to buy a loaf — but enough for a message.

When they stepped back inside the house, Soha was waiting. She stood in the narrow hallway near the hearth, arms crossed, hair pinned back so tight it made her scowl look carved in stone.

In the first life, Soha had married out to a petty merchant to pay a tax debt — her dowry stolen by Baek’s stooges before she’d even left the gate. She’d never come home again.

Now she watched Jin with the same sharp eyes that once called him a coward.

“You scared the steward,” she said flatly.

“I did.”

“You tore Baek’s tribute scroll in front of half the village.”

“I did.”

Her eyes flicked to Tae, then back to Jin. A flicker of something — not approval, but curiosity. “Do you have a plan, or are you just going to burn the rest of us with you?”

Jin stepped closer until they were nose to nose. He smelled the stale hearth smoke in her cloak, the faint oil she used to keep her hair neat. Small, stubborn details. Details that had once slipped by him when he’d been too drunk to look.

He spoke so only she could hear: “I’m not your old brother, Soha. If you stand with me, I keep you fed, warm, and free. If you run—”

Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t back away. “Then what?”

Jin smiled. “Then I come find you after I win.”

A beat of silence. Then Soha barked a single laugh — not warm, but real.

“You better win, then.”

They spent the rest of the night in the old hall — just three of them now. A single candle guttered on the warped table. Tae poured cheap barley liquor into cracked cups. Soha dragged out a moth-eaten ledger and dropped it with a thud.

Jin spread the coins beside it — three pathetic coins that wouldn’t buy tomorrow’s grain. But he tapped them anyway.

“These three pieces buy us the first message. Tae — tomorrow you ride to Old Man Gil at the salt pans. Tell him the main house’s lease is done. He gets the new deal: twenty percent more than Baek paid him, but he handles the taxes himself.”

Tae frowned. “Gil’s a drunk and a miser. He’ll gut us.”

“He owes me,” Jin said. “Or he will, when he remembers who cleared his debt the first time Baek tried to hang him by the ankles.”

Soha leaned in, scanning the old accounts. “Even if he agrees, we don’t have the salt rights anymore.”

“We will.” Jin tapped the signet. “Baek’s men only hold paper. I hold the land. I hold the people. If Gil stands with us, the rest will too.”

He looked at his siblings — tired, worn down, hungry. But still here. Still Ryu.

“One piece of silver to light the fire,” Jin said. “The rest buys us grain. A little warmth. A little hope.”

Outside, the wind howled like an old wolf at the door. Inside, the last candle flickered low — but the three of them leaned closer to it, feeding it scraps of wax, refusing to let it die.

Before dawn, Jin stood alone by the shuttered window. He turned the iron dragon ring over and over in his palm. The new signet gleamed on his other hand.

He whispered to the cold glass:

"Baek doesn’t know yet."

He slipped the ring onto his finger beside the signet.

"Let him learn."

To be continued.