Reagan Weston

In the rain-drenched megalopolis of Kulsary, every public surface is lined with luminescent smart glass, fiber-optic facades, and endless automated surveillance feeds. When an ancient entity awakens inside the municipal liquid-crystal displays, she does not smash glass or tear flesh; she listens for the quiet, unbearable grief of hyper-connected citizens and invites them to step across their reflections. Commuters vanish mid-transit, leaving behind damp wool coats and hollow husks that mindlessly repeat their daily routines. Yeldanoglu, a night-shift transit restorer scrubbing psychic artifacts from subway feeds, treats the vanishing faces like low-grade driver corruption until he watches a passenger walk directly into a moving train's window. Across the district, Aydarbek, an optical systems engineer turned rogue temple hacker, repurposes municipal billboard feeds into resonant prayer arrays, convinced that dissolution into the reflective mirror realm offers the only genuine cure for modern urban isolation. With the city's heating and medical grids bound to the same optical trunks that carry the entity's gaze, shattering the glass means freezing the population in midwinter, while keeping the monitors lit surrenders every citizen's reflection.

The jungle of Feng-Lian does not merely grow; it hunts. At the edge of the wetlands, a foreign briar with thorns of red flint has taken root. It creeps into shelters at twilight. It pierces the throats of the sleeping, hollowing out their ribcages to turn their chests into instruments that shriek with the voices of dead kin. Shi Hanying survived the slaughter of his hunting band only to hear his cousin's voice calling from a thicket of thorn-veins. Meng Chunhua’s nets drag up vines wrapped around drowned scouts; Gou Dongxian’s sacred hearth cannot burn the wet wood fast enough; and Tan Ruizhe knows every beast in the forest is fleeing. To survive the bloom, four mortal enemies must carry fire into the howling green.