The Nine Lanterns

Sakai was the best investigator the Imperial Bureau ever produced. For eleven years he walked into the places no one else would go — sect compounds, spirit territories, the dark spaces where the powerful preyed on the powerless and called it order. He believed the system would protect the innocent.It didn’t.Now he runs an inn on the western frontier. The Twilight Fox Inn sits on a road between two towns, serves anyone who walks through the door, and operates under one rule: everyone is equal under this roof. Human, spirit, cultivator — it doesn’t matter. You follow the inn’s law or you leave. Those are the only options.His partner is Jasmin — a nine-tailed kitsune spirit sovereign who is vain about her fur, particular about her tea, and capable of erasing a sect compound from existence if the mood strikes her. Together they’ve built something the empire says is impossible: a place where spirit-kin and humans sit at the same table.But the empire Sakai left behind is rotting from the inside. Spirit-kin are being hunted. Children are disappearing. Crops are failing on land that’s been fertile for generations. Communities that lived in harmony for decades are tearing each other apart. And at the center of it all sits a new Imperial Chancellor — a man Sakai investigated years ago. A monster whose case was buried because the right people were paid.The monster got promoted. And now he’s running the empire.Sakai didn’t want this fight. He wanted to build rooms, serve tea, and resolve disputes between kappa over river pools. But the fight came to his door — literally, with a dagger and a smile — and the inn he built as a sanctuary is about to become the one place in the empire where the truth can’t be buried.The Nine Lanterns haven’t been lit yet. When they are, everyone will see what’s been hiding in the dark.