Gojo no longer had the Six Eyes.

  He felt the absence like a dull ache in the middle of his forehead—a missing limb of perception. Before, he could have seen it all. The veins of cursed energy under the snow. The paths people took before they died. The way the weirwood trees breathed. Now, everything felt muted. Blurred.

  He missed the clarity. He missed the truth.

  “Would’ve been real damn useful now,” Gojo muttered bitterly.

  He sat in the snow, legs crossed, hands resting on his knees, as if meditating. But his cursed energy was frayed, running thin from everything. From the fight. From the killing. From the knowing.

  A thousand corpses laid behind him—Free Folk and Crows alike. Their screams still echoed in the snowdrifts, like ghost wind. He had tried to spare them. Tried to reason. Warn them.

  They hadn’t listened.

  The puppeteer had pulled the strings before Gojo had even noticed.

  A chill ran through him—not from the cold, but from the memory of it. That thing... that mind... had buried its claws deep in their minds, and the weirwoods helped it. Eyes in the trees. Blood in the roots.

  Gojo exhaled and looked up to the grey sky.

  No answers.

  He’d searched for more glass candles—none. Shattered, spent, or hidden so well that even he couldn’t find them anymore. And yet, the cursed shikigami—the White Walkers—were still appearing. Still being pulled through the world like paper soldiers, summoned by someone.

  The slaves bonded to the weirwoods still fed the summoning.

  The roots... they were everywhere. Buried under rock, under snow, under castles and godswoods. They weren't just trees. They were a network. A prison.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  And the souls inside couldn’t scream anymore.

  He had tried burning them. Cutting them. Shattering the ground around them. But the roots were always deeper. Always older. Like they had been waiting since the beginning.

  And whoever was controlling the crows—those cursed black-winged things that watched him even now—was still out there. Still hiding. Still watching.

  The same one controlling the puppets, probably. The cursed spirits in flesh.

  Who? What?

  Gojo had no answers.

  Even the dragon—the one that attacked him before, flying like a corpse stitched back together—had vanished without a trace. Its cursed presence had just... faded.

  “All dead ends,” Gojo muttered, dragging a hand down his face.

  He stood and dusted off the snow from his cloak.

  There was nothing left here for now. He needed to return to Winterfell. Rest. Regroup. Rethink the shape of the world. If he couldn't find the enemy, maybe he could draw it out.

  But something tugged at him as he passed the base of the Wall.

  A pulse.

  He stopped mid-step.

  Cursed energy.

  Leaking—barely—from the Wall itself. A crack.

  Gojo tilted his head and squinted, pressing his hand to the frozen stone. Even without the Six Eyes, he could feel it. Thin strands of cursed energy trickling like blood through fractured bone.

  Curiosity bit at him. He crouched and traced the crack with his fingers, until he found an opening—small, but wide enough to peer through.

  He leaned in.

  And saw it.

  An eye.

  Red-veined. Staring.

  Human, and yet... not. It twitched. Alive. Just barely.

  Bark wrapped around it like flesh fossilized into wood. The pupil dilated and locked onto Gojo as if it recognized him.

  It was inside the Wall.

  Gojo pulled back slowly, breath fogging in the air.

  “No...”

  He looked again, deeper.

  Not just an eye.

  Roots. Thick veins of cursed wood spiraling through the ice. Faces frozen in terror, some half-melded into bark, some locked behind sheets of ice, mouths open in endless screams. He couldn’t count them all. Hundreds.

  Thousands.

  Maybe more.

  All nailed in place by jagged glass candles, driven into their hearts like pins.

  The Wall was not made of ice.

  It was a living thing.

  A massive weirwood tree, grown sideways and stretched over centuries. Fed by blood. Fed by souls. Fed by people.

  “Damn,” Gojo whispered, stunned.

  He stepped back, gaze trailing the length of the wall as far as he could see.

  “This whole thing... it’s a weirwood. One giant, cursed root system.”

  He thought of all the stories—of the Wall protecting the realms of men. Of the sacrifice. Of the Night’s Watch oath.

  It was never just about defense.

  It was containment.

  Or worse—sustenance.

  A cursed battery, lit by the souls of a million dead.

  He looked back at the eye in the crack. It blinked once. Slowly.

  He turned away.