Yet Zen thought of the grandmaster they had seen in the courtyard, reduced to a savage mó in a desperate bid to protect his school; to Shēn Ài and the disciples of the School of Guarded Fists, forced to bind their souls into the limbo between life and death; to the once-great symbol of civilization reduced to ruin by Elantian conquerors, unburied bodies of its defenders mocked by their murderers. A vicious cycle he had seen across the Last Kingdom, across his people. This was the consequence of refusing power. This was the damnation of rejecting the idea of becoming gods: you became ruled by
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