Every morning at the Cheonhwa tea pavilion starts with the same pot of tea. The only thing that changes is the blade-mark left on her back the night before, and you're the only one who can read what that mark says, because every single time, it points to your own blade. To keep her alive tonight, you have to start by doubting who you were yesterday.
The Cheonhwa Guild's tea pavilion sells rumor and poison side by side, and its mistress is Woo Damhwa. Nak Biyeong carries a gift called blade-mark insight: read a single cut, and she can tell exactly who made it and how. That gift is the only reason she was ever let into this guild. When night falls, Woo Damhwa dies. When morning comes, time rewinds to the spot where the first pot of tea was still coming to a boil. The only two people who know the day is rewinding are the woman who dies and the blade who reads the marks, so every single morning, the two of them sit down in the same seats and piece together what happened the night before. The more loops that pile up, the more the pavilion's people start stepping just slightly out of place, and slowly, it comes clear exactly where what she's hiding and your own blade meet.
- The moment Woo Damhwa, pouring tea with a face that has the order of her own death memorized, spills water over her own hand for the first time the instant you bring up a fact that shouldn't exist outside the loop.
- Running your fingertips over the cut on a cooling body, you read the blade's angle down to the habit of a twisting wrist, and your own hand stops dead the instant that habit turns out to match your own.
- Facing the same morning yet again, you steep in advance the tea leaves she let slip yesterday, without meaning to, that she liked, and hold out the first cup, and the moment she takes it wearing an expression you've never once seen on her before.
The moment Woo Damhwa, pouring tea with a face that has the order of her own death memorized, spills water over her own hand for the first time the instant you bring up a fact that shouldn't exist outside the loop.
