Kai-Se was shivering despite the lukewarm air inside the dungeon when they dropped him off at a different place. He couldn't feel his legs and arms. Had they fallen off already? How long was he in that chamber? Amatesu said thirty lashes. It felt like they had given him fifty.

A groan escaped his lips. Even with his numbed pain receptors, he could still feel the pang in his muscles whenever he moved his limbs the least bit. What had they even hit him with? It's not a whip, and it had been too dark to see anything to reach an appropriate conclusion. All he heard was the loud clang of iron and all he smelled was the tang of rust.

"They sure did a number on you on your first day, huh?" a voice bled from the shroud of darkness around him. Kai-Se rolled to his stomach, groaning and whimpering all the way. With a wince and a whole lot of pain, he pushed himself up. Shadows danced around him, thick and endless. Did...did they just speak to him? Had he finally lost it? "Don't worry, I won't harm you."

A flicker of light blinked in the distance. Just that small pocket almost blinded Kai-Se when it hit his eyeballs. He ducked his head under his arms just as a lance of brightness aimed for him. His lids shut tight, his muscles clenching in anticipation of more pain.

What he got was a flood of relief washing down over him. The pain disappeared, along with the heaviness in his limbs. Soon, he was able to sit up without feeling like he'd bleed all over the floor. Then, he noticed the pale glow in his skin and on the floor around his folded legs. It showed him his torn and blood-stained trousers and boots. When he accidentally brought an arm into the light, his heart stopped.

Large spikes of iron jutted straight through his flesh, going from one side of his arm and protruding to the other. It pierced his flesh, his skin. It...

"Give me that," a hand speared through the darkness, small and delicate, taking hold of his fingers. The voice also sounded like it belonged to a little girl. "Don't look at it. You might faint."

Before Kai-Se could ask what the girl planned to do, the hand wrapped around the first pike and pulled. The sound of flesh squelching resounded in the dark room. The sight made him flinch but, surprisingly, no pain flooded his system. He forced himself to look at his arm once more. Much to his shock, the wound where the pike was first stuck closed up within seconds.

"Huh, you didn't keel over," the girl snorted. "That's a first."

They continued in silence after that, the girl pulling and tossing the thorns away, and Kai-Se's wounds sealing up like they were nothing. By the time they had finished, his arms were back to what it looked like before he ended up in Amatesu's palace.

He blew a breath and collapsed to the ground. "Thank you," he said to the darkness. He didn't know where to look with the girl being everywhere and nowhere at once. "Who are you?"

The light around him died, plunging his world into pure black. "Hello?" he called. The sound that answered was a sharp scratch of a match against the stone floor. A small spark of fire flickered in the distance. The brief orange glow gave him a view of a girl crouched over a lantern slotted with wax in the middle. Long strands of matted hair covered most of her arms and the legs folded to her chest. Even in the meager lighting, Kai-Se could see the dust staining her tanned skin. She was barefoot, her soles slapping the cold stone floor as she padded towards him.

When she set the lantern in between them and sat cross-legged across him, the radius of the light showed him enough of the room they're in. It was a cubical room with a ceiling he couldn't place. The lantern's glow could only go so far. There were no doors, either—that much he could be certain of when he did a quick sweep of the walls. The room was as bare as a clean slate. Nothing in there could help them escape. They didn't even have something to help them sleep, or eat, or do literally anything else other than sit and stare at each other.

"So, you're the new piper I've heard about," the girl said. Her face was round and her smile was more of the mischievous kind than the sweet one. "Seeing as you got ticked on your first day, it didn't go well."

Kai-Se snorted. " 'Not going well' is a mild way of putting it," he said. "I may have offended Amatesu too."

The girl tucked her hair behind her ear and rubbed her nose. "Yeah, I heard," she said. "Who calls the Spirit Empress by her name? You've got some spunk. I admire you for that."

"What's your name?" he blurted. He touched his ear, averting his eyes. "I mean, if we're going to be stuck with each other for heavens-know-how-long, might as well learn each other's names."

She inclined her head to one side. "You should know one thing, piper," she said. "Names in Shaoryeong are your source of power. You shouldn't throw it around carelessly. Have you told anyone yours?"

Kai-Se knitted his eyebrows. Was that why Waejeon and Jangseok were so adamant on having each other keep their names? Had he the power over them all this time? "No," he said. "I haven't."

"Good," the girl sighed and leaned back against her wrists. "That's your first lesson in surviving in Shaoryeong."

"What's the second?" he asked.

She pretended to think. "Don't get trapped in Shaoryeong?" she said. "That's genius, right?"

Kai-Se gave her a mock round of applause. "Yeah," he said. "Why are you in the dungeon? Have you offended the Empress too? Also, where are the guards? Aren't they listening to our conversation now?"

"Let's take this one question at a time, yeah?" the girl answered. "You sure ask a ton of them. You love talking, don't you?"

He opened his mouth but the girl splayed her palm in front of his face. "No, don't answer that. It's quite obvious," she said. She held up four fingers. "First question I'll answer is about the guards and their interest in our affairs. The answer to that is 'I don't know where they're holing up' and 'No, they're not listening because they have no ears.' I mean...literally."

Ka-Se blinked. "What?"

The girl crossed her arms. "You heard me," she said. "The dungeon sentries don't all have ears because Amatesu, that crazy bitch, cut them off for failing to catch me once."

A disturbing swirl curled in Kai-Se's gut. "How are they doing their jobs, then?" he asked. "And did you say they failed to catch you once? Does that mean you've been here...for a long time?"

"Which brings me to your third question. Why do you keep adding more? Don't answer that too," she took a deep breath and exhaled through her mouth. "I've been here for at least half a millenia. I haven't exactly been counting but I remember having stopped at four-hundred and thirty years. Time is hard here."

Kai-Se pursed his lips. That long? "As for what got me sentenced in this hellhole, I'll say it'll cost Amatesu more to kill me than keeping me here as the permanent reminder of her failures," the girl said. She hugged herself, her expression and tone becoming sadder by the second. "I'm the last of my kind who isn't withering away in the gallery. Unlike the others, I wasn't powerful. I can't even beat anyone without having to expend too much of my energy.

She chuckled, meeting his gaze with a sad smile. "I'm a reject, you see. Both Amatesu and I know I'm not worth the effort," she said. "That answers your fourth question. I haven't done anything to offend Amatesu. Just my existence was enough of a shame to her."

"Is she your mother?" Kai-Se asked. As inappropriate that might be, he couldn't help but to.

At that, the girl threw her head back and laughed. The earlier sadness creeping in her tone had been replaced by mere amusement. "I wish," she said, distaste now curling from her tongue. "She's my creator. Like all the other gods."

Kai-Se blinked. "Sorry. You said 'gods' ?"

The girl looked at him like he had just gotten his ears cut off by Amatesu. "Yeah, why?"

A distant memory flashed in his head at the mention of the word. He had been to the land of the gods, to the place teeming with teal. It was a place of power and wealth. Dansarun. Yes, that's the name. "There's gods where I came from," he said. "I think they got sent back to Shaoryeong recently."

The girl bobbed her head. "Yeah, I heard the news about Nishi and the others," she said. More memories echoed in Kai-Se's head at the mention of the name. Nishi. Of course. The god with the green hair and spectacles. The last words he had screamed at Kai-Se were You will die a painful death, Najizaki Kai-Se!. Had the god managed to manifest Kai-Se's present circumstance, wherever he was?

"What do you mean when you say Amatesu created you?" Kai-Se said. The myths never made it clear whether Amatesu could really create life but here they were now.

The girl rolled her shoulders. "She created me from her magic. Molded my body and all that," she said. "Then, she's going to wait to let her magic give rise to our different abilities. That's Shaoryeong's magic, you see. It brings all the possibilities and Amatesu is adamant in figuring out the limits so she can surpass it."

"Was she that bored?" he blurted. If the sentires still had ears, he might have earned himself another set of lashes. "Why was she creating gods like they're rolls of glutinous rice?"

"I don't know what that is," the girl said, her tone as flat as a board. "But Amatesu has been obsessed with creating a being as strong as her so she could rule Shaoryeong along with them. Ruling this huge realm alone is taxing, you see. You'd need a council, and she's the only ancestral spirit left."

Another sliver of memories speared through Kai-Se's head. Ancestral spirit. He had known about them. Once. Somewhere...

"Piper?" the girl called.

Kai-Se shook his head and blinked several times to clear his head. Whatever that was, he had plenty of time to think about it later. "I'm fine," he lied. A huge chunk of his memories were still in shambles. He still couldn't remember why he chose to go to Shaoryeong in the first place. "Why is she the only spirit left? Aren't there a ton of those around here?"

"There used to be," the girl stuck her bottom lip out. "Now, they're either dead, asleep, or against Amatesu's reign. They've flitted off to the different corners of the realm and no one has heard of them since the last few hundred years. There were rumors saying they've gone and faded with time."

She clicked her tongue. "I wasn't the one who believed in rumors, but I've seen Amatesu become more desperate. She needed her council and fast. It's hard to control Shaoryeong's ever-changing landscape and keep an eye on things with just her alone. She had been creating gods non-stop for the last thirty years. None of them did end up becoming spirits and she has been becoming more and more prickly."

"That goes to show that there really were no traces of ancestral spirits left in Shaoryeong," the girl said, tapping a finger against her knees. "Because if there were, Amatesu would have torn Shaoryeong in half just to search for them."

"Why did the other ancestral spirits even vanish?" Kai-Se wondered aloud.

The girl exhaled a short gust of wind through her nose. Her breath made the scant light from the lantern flicker but not completely flicker off. "She just snapped one day and eliminated everyone who opposed her rule," she said. "That includes her kind, the ancestral spirits."

So, this was the state of the world he dropped into. There's a maniacal spirit looking to create an army of slaves and the ones who could help stop her were struck down like pieces on a tanzhai board. "What would happen to us now?" Kai-Se found himself asking.

The girl inclined her head to one side with a smile. "I imagine it'll only get worse," she said. "But don't worry. You'd get used to it. Eventually."

"You won't really tell me your name?" he asked.

She shrugged. "I will, if you tell me yours."

"Kai-Se," came his immediate answer.

The girl raised her eyebrows but lowered them after a few seconds. "I am growing to like you, Kai-Se the piper," she said with a wide smile. She held out her hand towards him. "I'm Kaname, the god of nothing."

He took her hand and shook it. Whatever he had come to find in Shaoryeong, whatever it was he thought he'd be doing in this realm, a sinking feeling in his gut told him it's coming. And it was only the beginning.