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Chapter Text

The mission had been marked green-tier: low risk, light surveillance, return before dusk.

Yuanzhi never liked missions labeled low risk. Red cloaks of danger could be met head-on, cut through with blade and wit. It was the ones dressed in jade and silk - soft, quiet, polite - that hid the most poison.

The moment the wind shifted, he knew. A faint, sickly-sweet scent drifted into the air - bloodroot, rare and out of season.

His steps faltered, pupils narrowing, instincts clawing to the surface. But the blade had already nicked him.

Barely a whisper of steel. A line across his arm so small it shouldn’t have mattered.

He fired the whistling arrow. A flare of red streaking into the clouds - the only thing his gege would ever need to come running.

Then the world turned sideways. And everything disappeared.

When Gong Yuanzhi opened his eyes, he was standing in the Gong Palace courtyard.

No pain. No weight. No dizziness.

The air was wrong. It was crystalline, too sharp, every breath like glass. Osmanthus blossoms perfumed the night with sweetness so heavy it clung to his throat. Lanterns swayed though there was no wind. The marble beneath his feet shimmered as if freshly polished, not a single crack, not a trace of time.

The world felt whole. But too whole.

And then he heard it.

Laughter.

His breath caught.

It wasn’t a sound he was used to. Not from him. Gong Shangjue never laughed like that anymore - free, warm, unguarded. It was the sound of a boy who had not buried his brother. The sound of a man who had not grown hard from grief.

Yuanzhi turned toward it, slow and quiet, like approaching a fire he didn’t want to wake.

There, in the main courtyard, stood his gege. Hair untied, posture loose, sleeves rolled as he sparred playfully with a boy half his size.

Yuanzhi froze. He knew that face. Knew it better than his own.

Langjue.


Alive.


The air fled from his lungs like it had been knocked out of him. 


He stepped back, staggering slightly, unnoticed. The name screamed inside him but never left his lips. His lungs seized. His hands trembled. It was as if something inside him, brittle and barely held together, had cracked down the center.


A green jade guardian passed near him, eyes scanning the courtyard.

They didn’t pause. Didn’t even flinch.

Yuanzhi wasn’t seen.

No one turned. No one called his name.

And then Langjue ran straight past him - through him - laughing.

No contact. No acknowledgment.

Nothing.

He passed the same pillars twice, or perhaps they were different ones wearing the same face. Every corridor gleamed as though freshly polished, every lantern burned steady without smoke, every surface scrubbed of fingerprints. The perfection sickened him. It was like walking through a painting where someone else had decided which fragments of memory deserved to exist, and which should be erased.

When he reached the Zhi Lineage Hall, his chest tightened. The air should have smelled of earth and herbs, dust clinging to parchment, acrid venom steeping in sealed jars. Instead there was nothing. Just silence, clean and polished, sterile as a shrine.

No crates of dried herbs stacked in crooked towers. No wax-sealed vials he had labeled in his own jagged hand. No dark corner where a boy had hunched over mortar and pestle, bruising his fingers as he taught himself to distill toxins the world had forgotten.

He searched anyway, hands trembling as he pulled open cupboards, slid his fingers along stone grooves, touched the empty racks. But every space gaped hollow. His childhood, scraped away. His existence, unacknowledged.

Even his reflection, in the still water basin, felt unfamiliar. For an instant, his own face stared back: sharp eyes, the tight mouth of someone who had taught himself to bite before being bitten. Then the image rippled, and a stranger appeared.

His hands trembled as he touched the surface. A boy stared back. Younger. Eyes full of confusion and something raw.

Not him.

Not the boy who survived.

Not the boy who stayed.

He wasn’t here.

He had never been here.



The realization sank talons into his chest, cold and merciless. His chest tightened, breath catching as if the air itself refused to acknowledge him. The thought came sudden and cruel, rooting itself deep before he could tear it out: What if this was how it should have been?

Panic pressed against his ribs. 

He staggered from the hall. The palace itself seemed to close in on him, walls narrowing, shadows deepening. The floors gleamed with such perfection that his footsteps left no trace. Even the sound of his breathing seemed swallowed whole. He existed less with every step. 

At the edge of the pond, he collapsed. The stone rim dug into his spine as he curled inward, knees to chest, arms wrapped tight like bindings.






Yuanzhi sat by the empty pond long after the moon had risen.

He could hear Langjue’s voice echoing faintly in the distance. Training. Talking. Laughing. Then Shangjue’s, warm and steady, teaching, correcting, praising.

Every sound was a blade.

Yuanzhi’s nails dug crescents into his skin. Each laugh carved him thinner. Each word proved what he already knew: Shangjue had everything he needed here. A brother. A reason. A world whole without Yuanzhi’s shadow.

It was everything Yuanzhi had tried to be, everything he had broken himself into becoming - for Shangjue.

A replacement.

A shadow of the boy who should have lived.

He tried to summon anger, pride, even his usual sharp-edged indignation. But the silence hollowed him out. This world didn’t need him.

And worse - neither did gege.

He remembered the tunnel. The blood. The moment Langjue slipped away.

He remembered being too late.

He remembered Shangjue’s eyes after. Hollowed, sharpened by grief into something that never quite softened again.

That was when Gong Yuanzhi had begun. The desperate need to earn back something he could never name. The way he had brewed poisons faster, spoken sharper, honed himself into a weapon Langjue would never grow to be.

And still, even now, it wasn’t enough.

Now faced with a world where Langjue lived and he was erased, Yuanzhi’s body shook with the truth of it: maybe this was justice.





Later, as the dream frayed at its edges, he curled up beneath the empty eaves of the armory.

The cold seeped into his limbs, but he didn’t move. No one came to find him. Not even gege.

Not this version of him.

Only the faint whisper of poison threading his veins reminded him he still existed somewhere. That outside this false world, someone might be searching.

And in his last moment of consciousness, he thought he heard it - faint, distant: “Yuanzhi.”

Shangjue’s voice.

Calling him.

Desperate.

Terrified.

But not fast enough.

Never fast enough.

Chapter Text

The dream didn’t end.

That was the first horror.

Yuanzhi had always believed himself resistant to illusions. He’d trained his mind to stay lucid through fever, through poisons that unraveled sanity, through pain that cracked bone. But this - this was gentle. The most dangerous kind. It crept into him like sleep. Familiar. Warm. Kind. It softened edges, dulled suspicion. It whispered, stay.

And slowly, insidiously, it began to make him forget.

He woke each morning to a palace scrubbed of grief. No burnt incense for the dead. No portraits draped in black. No sharp looks from elders reminding him of what he wasn’t.

Langjue was alive. Gong Shangjue, his gege, was whole.

And Gong Yuanzhi didn’t exist.

The first few days, Yuanzhi wandered in stunned silence. The world ignored him, but his mind screamed.

He watched Lang-didi from rooftops and shadowed corners, memorizing the curve of his smile. He saw the way servants paused to ruffle Langjue’s hair, how Shangjue let his younger brother drape himself over his back during sword drills.

That used to be his place.

But Langjue fit into it better. Like a puzzle piece that had always been meant to be there.

Yuanzhi was the jagged shard - sharp and ill-fitting. Always cutting himself on the edges.

He began cataloging all the ways this world had corrected itself without him.

Ziyu, now calm, unchallenged. Yun Weishan, serene, never interrupted by Yuanzhi’s suspicion. Gong Zishang, still loud and theatrical, but her glances toward Jin Fan weren’t shadowed by Yuanzhi’s acidic barbs.

He had been the thorn in everyone’s side. And now the thorn was gone.

And they all bloomed brighter.

The fourth night, he broke.

He found his way to the courtyard behind the Zhi Lineage Hall. Or what should have been. No poisons. No traps. Only peach trees in flawless bloom, a pond where koi drifted soundlessly, their scales gleaming like coins scattered across still water.

Yuanzhi crouched at the edge and stared into the surface.

The face that wavered back was barely his own.

A boy with hollow eyes. No Gong crest at his breast. No jade token at his belt. His braid short, uneven, like it had been hacked by careless hands. A child who had never been kissed on the forehead by a mother. A child who had never been mourned.

The sight of him split something raw open.

“Liar,” Yuanzhi hissed.

The word tore through his throat, sharp as glass. He struck the water, scattering the koi into pale blurs. His reflection shattered, then re-formed, calm and vacant, as though mocking him.

“I was here! I was! You can’t erase me!”

He grabbed a stone from the pond’s edge and hurled it into the water. The ripples spread wide, swallowed everything, and then too quickly the surface smoothed again. As if nothing had happened. As if he had never touched it.

“I stayed!” he shouted, voice cracking, echoing against the peach trees. “When the halls burned, I stayed! When ge was alone, I was the one at his side!”

His chest heaved. Fury poured out of him, frantic, desperate. He clawed at the marble rim until his nails split. He punched the ground until his knuckles split open, raw and red. He tore fistfuls of grass from the earth, ripped blossoms from their branches, shredded them in his hands until petals stuck to his skin like ash.

And still the silence swallowed him.

His body shook with fury, but no matter how he raged, nothing changed.

His reflection blinked back up at him. Calm. Blank.




Something inside him buckled.

His hands fell limp. His body shook, not with rage anymore but with the collapse that followed it.

The words bled out of him, ragged and cracked.

“Lang-didi was better. He didn’t need to be taught how to smile. He didn’t have to be reminded to look people in the eye. He didn’t make Ge clean up after his tantrums. He didn’t…he wasn’t me.”

His legs gave out. He dropped to his knees, fist pressed hard against his chest as if he could hold himself together.

“Ge could’ve been happy.”

The word gege scraped against his throat, tasting of blood and loss.

He didn’t sleep.

Sleep meant surrender, and he couldn’t risk waking to find even his thoughts rewritten. So he wandered the palace instead, a hollow shadow pacing through corridors that gleamed too perfectly, too quiet.

He was as invisible to the world as he now felt inside.

Once, he tried to enter Shangjue’s chambers. Just to see. Just to be near. His hand pressed against the carved wood, and the door did not yield. Not locked. Not barred. Simply…unmoved. As though the house itself failed to recognize him, rejecting his presence without so much as a creak.

Another time, he saw Ziyu and Yun Weishan walking beneath the lantern trees. They laughed together. Genuinely.

In the real world, he would’ve interrupted. Found some veiled insult, some half-witty jab to remind them that perfection doesn’t last. But here, he had no voice.

When he forced a scream, clawing it up from his chest until his throat burned, it spilled out as silence. The sound died before it reached the air. His fury had nowhere to go.

He started carving his name into stone.

On pillars. On tree trunks. On the backs of ornamental benches.

GONG YUANZHI. GONG YUANZHI. GONG YUANZHI.

Over and over. With a sharp rock or his nails if he had to.

He just wanted one thing to remember him.

But each morning, the marks were gone.

Wiped clean like he’d never existed.

He stopped walking upright.

His body bent in on itself, as though the weight of being unseen had pressed his spine until it curved. Less boy, more shadow. A hollow-eyed thing dragging itself through polished corridors. His lips cracked, bleeding when he whispered. His knuckles split and bruised from striking stone walls, as though pain alone could prove he was real.

He whispered his gege’s name like prayer.

Like anchor.

Like apology.

At first, the syllables steadied him. Gege. Gege. Gege. But the more he clung to it, the more it frayed, until the sound itself grew strange in his mouth - rubbed raw by repetition, empty of meaning.

And even that began to fade.

Because whenever he closed his eyes, he saw Langjue again.

Smiling.

Whole.

Shangjue smiling back, unburdened, his hands never bloodied by loss.

The image seared itself into Yuanzhi’s skull, cruel in its warmth. He tried to look away, but the dream pinned his gaze open. It forced him to watch what might have been, a world healed by his absence.

And a voice in Yuanzhi’s own head whispering:

This was the dream, wasn’t it?

You were just a detour. A mistake. A substitute in mourning’s clothes.

Now the world’s been set right.


The words wrapped around him like chains. He pressed his forehead to the cold stone floor, body trembling, but the voice followed, whispering closer each time, until it felt less like thought and more like truth.



A sound cleaved through the silence.


Not Langjue’s laughter. Not the dream’s hollow echo.

A voice.

Low, gravel-edged with fury. Real.

“Yuanzhi.”


His heart stopped.

The dream convulsed. The edges quaked, faltered, as though rejecting the intrusion.

Yuanzhi’s eyes widened. For the first time in days-weeks?-heat streaked down his cheek. A tear. The first he had shed in years.

He collapsed to the ground, arms wrapped around himself, clutching his own name in his head like a talisman, as though repeating it might keep him from vanishing completely.

“Ge,” he whispered, voice breaking.

“I’m still here. Please don’t forget me.”

And somewhere in the distance, sharp and unnatural in its sudden absence-

Langjue’s laughter stopped.

Chapter Text

The whistling arrow split the sky.

It wasn’t the sound that made Gong Shangjue’s blood turn cold - it was the timing. The arrow wasn’t meant for enemies. It was meant for him.

Yuanzhi never used it unless he had no other choice.

Shangjue didn’t hesitate.

One blink and he was gone, wind whipping past him as he tore across the valley on horseback. A thousand scenarios warred in his head, none of them ending well. He should have gone. He should have never sent Yuanzhi.  

He had sent Yuanzhi out alone.

A low-risk patrol, he’d told himself. Just a sweep near the northeast ridges to investigate rumors of strange herbs.

Routine. Safe.

But even now, galloping through morning mist, Shangjue could still hear it, could still see it. He remembered the day he sent Yuanzhi off.

“Green-level mission,” he had said, flicking his fingers toward the jade scroll. “A formality. You’ll be back before nightfall.”

Yuanzhi had frowned. “Can’t Jin Fan go?”

“No. He’s covering for Ziyu’s detail.” Shangjue had waved him off. “Stop stalling. You’re the only one I trust to handle this without attracting attention.”

And Yuanzhi - foolish, loyal, beloved Yuanzhi – had smiled. “I’ll listen to you, ge.”

Now those words echoed like a curse.

The trail wasn’t hard to follow. Not when Yuanzhi had scorched the forest with blood.

By the time he found him, the sun had slipped behind the trees, casting long shadows across a quiet clearing. But nothing about it was peaceful.

Yuanzhi lay sprawled against the twisted roots of an old pine, half-upright only because a branch had caught the weight of his shoulder. His robes were soaked through in a way that made Shangjue’s mouth go dry. Poison dripped from his sleeve in dark rivulets, staining the moss beneath him in ink-black pools.

Shangjue didn’t remember leaping from the horse.

One moment he was upright, the next he was kneeling, gathering Yuanzhi into his arms. “Didi..Yuanzhi...look at me.”

No answer. He was cold.

Not the chill of death - not yet - but the clammy, unnatural cold of venom coursing through fragile veins.

Shangjue pressed a hand against his brother’s cheek. It came away damp. Fevered. Yuanzhi stirred faintly at the contact, lips twitching in a soundless protest. His breath caught on a ragged inhale, but his eyes stayed shut. Beneath the pale skin, a lattice of black veins crept from his collar to his jawline - a spiderweb of ruin tracing paths Shangjue couldn’t undo.

Shangjue pressed two fingers to Yuanzhi’s neck, then lifted his wrist to his mouth.  He didn’t hesitate - bit down until blood reached his tongue.

His eyes widened.

Familiar. Too familiar.

This wasn’t some enemy toxin.

This was Gong Yuanzhi’s own poison.

Except it had been twisted.

Repurposed, laced with something else.

Something designed to bind itself to memory, to scramble what the mind knew to be real.

They used his own brilliance to gut him from the inside out.

And Shangjue had sent him straight into it.

He gathered him carefully, lifted him to his chest like he used to when Yuanzhi was still small, when he’d wake from night terrors in the aftermath of the Gong clan massacre - not screaming, but deathly still, breathing through clenched teeth, tears absent.

Even then, the boy never cried. Even now, he didn’t.

The palace was chaos by the time Shangjue returned.

He didn’t pause for protocol or explanation. He marched past the guards, blood-stained and furious, Yuanzhi limp in his arms.

“Summon Elder Yue,” he barked to the nearest Jade Guardian. “Now.”

They scrambled without question.



He took Yuanzhi straight to the apothecary wing and laid him gently on the bamboo pallet. The younger boy twitched as his body met the bedding, eyes darting under closed lids, muscles jerking like puppet strings pulled in erratic rhythm. The fever was climbing. Fast.

Elder Yue arrived moments later, breathless. The Elder wasn’t much older than Shangjue, but his calm, practiced hands and sharp eyes made him the palace’s most reliable healer.

“Where did you find him?”

“Forest, near the northeast ridge,” Shangjue replied, voice clipped. “Poisoned. It’s his own formula, but altered. Warped.”

Elder Yue checked the boy’s pupils, then pressed a set of thin, shimmering needles to key acupuncture points.

“He’s caught in a poison dream,” he said grimly. “One that attacks the roots of memory. The venom doesn’t destroy the mind, it rewrites it.”

Shangjue’s eyes never left Yuanzhi’s face. “Is he aware?”

“Yes. And the longer he stays in it, the more real it will feel.”

“Can he come back?”

Elder Yue hesitated. “…I don’t know.”

The palace simmered with tension. Not open panic - the Gong family didn’t panic - but something heavier, tighter. Like breath held too long.

A quiet dread curdling under the surface.

Servants moved in clipped motions. Jade Guardians patrolled with unspoken urgency.

In the inner courtyard, Gong Ziyu arrived alongside Jin Fan and Gong Zishang, all three summoned by wordless messengers and instinctive dread.

When Ziyu stepped into the apothecary hall, he didn’t ask questions. One look at Shangjue’s face - drawn tight with rage and something deeper - told him everything.

Yuanzhi lay pale and unmoving, skin glistening with fever-sweat, limbs twitching in spasms that made Zishang wince.

“Who did this?” Ziyu asked quietly.

Shangjue didn’t look away from Yuanzhi. “I don’t know. Yet.”

“He went out on your orders?”

“Yes.”

Ziyu nodded once, jaw tense. “We’ll find out who laid the trap.”

“They used his own poison against him,” Elder Yue added from the bedside. “Something foreign woven into his compounds. Whoever did this knew Yuanzhi’s methods...intimately.”

Zishang’s brows furrowed, uncharacteristically serious. “Who even has access to his records?”

“No one,” Shangjue said. “Not unless they broke into the vaults or… or he trusted them.” 

A heavy silence fell. Everyone knew the only person Yuanzhi trusted is his gege. 

Elder Xue entered next, robes brushing the tile, his usual composed expression tinged with rare concern. “I came as soon as I heard. Shangjue…” 

"I need answers, not condolences,” Shangjue said, not unkindly, but with a finality that kept everyone at distance.

Elder Xue moved closer to the bedside anyway, studying the boy with furrowed brows. “What has he been given?”

“Something that targets memory,” Elder Yue replied. “He's locked in a dream that distorts reality. If we don't bring him back soon, the poison’s illusions may overwrite his mind entirely.”

“And if that happens?”

Elder Yue hesitated. “Then we’ll lose him. Not the body, but… the self.”

Ziyu’s jaw clenched. Jin Fan remained still as stone, but his eyes flickered toward Shangjue - watching.

“Should we begin an internal inquiry?” Zishang asked, uncharacteristically subdued.

“No,” Shangjue said sharply. “Not yet. I don’t want rumors. Not while he’s still fighting.”

Ziyu gave a slow nod. “Then we’ll do it quietly. I’ll assign Jin Fan and Young Master Xue to trace the compound’s signature. If this came from within, we’ll find the source.”

As the others began filing out, Jin Fan lingered for a moment. “He’ll fight it. You know that.”

Shangjue didn’t reply. He just stared at the hand he hadn’t let go of since Yuanzhi was placed on the bed.

When the room was empty again, Shangjue exhaled, shoulders tight, eyes hollow. Only the lamp flickered, casting golden light across the boy’s unmoving face.

He leaned forward, elbows on knees, letting his forehead rest lightly against the back of Yuanzhi’s hand.

“I told you it was safe,” he whispered. “I told you to go because I trusted you.” His voice cracked. “But that wasn’t the point, was it?”

He closed his eyes.

“You’re not just a soldier. You’re not just the genius everyone expects to fix what we can’t. You’re my didi. I raised you. And I keep forgetting…” His hands tightened around Yuanzhi’s.

“I thought… if I trained you hard enough, if I made you strong enough… nothing could hurt you.”

His voice trembled, but only slightly. “I treated you like a soldier. Like one of the guardians. But you’re not.”

He reached forward, brushing a strand of hair from Yuanzhi’s brow. “I keep forgetting that loyalty like yours is a blade you’ll turn inward if I’m not careful.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty.

It was thick.

Heavy with everything unspoken between them - years of expectations layered over grief, over loss, over the kind of bond that never needed words until it was too late.

Yuanzhi murmured something unintelligible in his sleep. Shangjue leaned down, pressing his forehead to the back of Yuanzhi’s hand.

“I failed you, didi.”

Chapter Text

Sleep never touched Shangjue that night.

The apothecary wing had long gone quiet. The lamps dimmed to a soft glow. Outside, a summer storm had begun to roll in from the north – wind stirring the trees like breath over old bones. But inside, only the shallow sound of Yuanzhi’s breathing and the muted scratching of Shangjue’s pen over parchment broke the silence.

Scrolls lay scattered across the floor, some still half-rolled, others soaked in spilt tincture. The table beside the cot was crowded with flasks, dried herbs, handwritten notes, and glass vials that had seen more frantic mixing than precise preparation.

Elder Yue had returned twice in the night. Both times to monitor fever spikes and reinforce the acupuncture seals. Both times to deliver the same verdict, however gently: No change.

No progress.

If anything, Yuanzhi’s body was growing weaker. The sweat clinging to his skin had chilled. His jaw occasionally tensed like he was grinding his teeth in his sleep – but his eyelids didn’t so much as twitch when Shangjue called his name.

“He’s sinking deeper,” Elder Yue had said. “I’m sorry.”

Shangjue didn’t remember replying.

He barely remembered sitting down again, or the next hour of combing through one poison manual after another, trying to reconstruct what had been done to his brother – not just how, but why. What purpose did it serve to unravel memory? Was it punishment? Control? A message?

Whatever it was, it had been cruelly specific.

And it used Yuanzhi’s own work.

That truth burned more than anything. His didi’s genius – weaponized. Turned against the very boy who had perfected it. And now he lay quiet and shaking, caught between worlds.

Jin Fu, Shangjue’s personal guardian, stepped into the doorway without a word. He had been there all night – keeping the corridor sealed from intrusions, fending off concerned whispers from younger disciples, and turning away even Zishang when she tried to slip in with a bowl of broth and her usual chaos as comfort.

“Water?” Jin Fu offered quietly.

Shangjue shook his head, eyes never leaving the figure on the cot.

“Rest for an hour,” Jin Fu said, more firmly this time. “You won’t be useful to him if you collapse.”

“I’m not leaving him.”

“I didn’t say leave. I said rest.”

Jin Fu said nothing more. He simply bowed and stepped back into the corridor, leaving his master alone again with silence and guilt.

Shangjue set his brush down and reached for a half-unrolled scroll detailing venom pathways that targeted the hippocampus – rare, experimental work. The ink was smudged. He didn’t care.

Beside him, Yuanzhi shivered violently.

The fever spike was sharper this time. Shangjue pressed a new cooling cloth to his brother’s brow and leaned close, watching for the tiniest shift. “You’re not allowed to leave me,” he whispered. “You hear me? I already lost one didi. I won’t lose another.”

But Yuanzhi didn’t stir.

Not here.

Back in the poison dream, Yuanzhi drowned.

There was no sky above him – only an endless ceiling of smoke and ash, heavy and close. The ground beneath his feet was soft but wrong, like the rotted pages of a book long forgotten. Each step sank him deeper.

And always, just ahead, the echo of a child’s laughter.

Light. Familiar.

Cruel.

He followed it.

Fog curled around him like a shroud. Then, through it, a flicker of gold – a lantern. A dragon’s shape, delicate and old. The tail still bore a dark stain. The whiskers were frayed.

He knew it instantly.

Shangjue’s lantern. Lang-didi’s.

A keepsake.

Once, he’d tried to fix it. Thought he was helping.

And once – once – Shangjue had turned to him, voice sharp and cracked like something brittle finally snapping.

“Do you think a new one will always be better than an old one?!”

Now the words returned, not as memory but as accusation. They sliced through the haze with terrifying clarity.

Not weary. Not gentle.

Angry. Fractured. Laced with a grief that Yuanzhi hadn’t understood, not fully.

Yuanzhi staggered.

He remembered it all now.

The way he had hurried to fix the broken lantern, thinking it would ease his gege’s sadness.

The way Shangjue had stared at it like he’d been betrayed.

He hadn’t known.

He hadn’t understood.

And worse…he’d touched it anyway.

The shame had bloomed fast – searing, thick, inescapable. He remembered the sting of it, how he had frozen, mortified, unsure what he had done wrong until Jin Fu told him the story. The ink stain. The nightmare. All the little scars of a child now gone, etched into that lantern like memory carved in bone.

He watched the lantern in Langjue’s small hands sway gently, the stain still visible on the tail. The old one. The original. The real one.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to no one. “I didn’t mean– I just wanted to–”

The laughter came again. But this time, it wasn’t just distant. It was circling.

He turned.

There, in the mist, stood a small figure in blue.

Langjue.

Still five years old. Still alive. Eyes bright with innocence, a carved wooden sword clutched in one hand, the lantern swinging from the other. He wasn’t looking at Yuanzhi.

He never had.

Another figure emerged beside him.

Shangjue – younger, carefree, smiling in a way Yuanzhi hadn’t seen in years.

“Lang’er,” dream-Shangjue said, kneeling. “You kept it just like I taught you. I’ll hang it in the main hall.”

Yuanzhi’s throat tightened.

“Ge…” he tried, voice thin. “Ge, I’m right here.”

Neither turned.

“Gege, look at me,” Yuanzhi begged, his voice cracking. “Please.”

Still, Shangjue only smiled at the boy who wasn’t him. Who never had to become him.

The lantern’s glow dimmed.

And suddenly it was back in his own hands – cracked, glimmering, swaying from a hook that wasn’t there.

Then another voice came – quiet, steady. Jin Fu’s.

“New clothes are better,” he had said once, “but not people.”

And Yuanzhi’s reply – his own voice, breaking from somewhere deep inside – whispered back like a curse.

“But I’m not used clothes.”

The fog twisted.

And the dream warped.

The lantern shattered in his grip. Ash scattered across the fog like burned paper. He gasped as the warmth left him, replaced by cold.

The courtyard faded. Bled away like ink in water. And the world twisted sideways. Screams echoed. Familiar ones. The shrill sound of steel clashing with flesh. Of silence, where people should have been.

He stood in the center.

Alone.

His hands, stained black. His veins – dark and thick beneath his skin, like ink spilled beneath parchment. Something writ itself into him that didn’t belong. He clawed at his arms. The blackness wouldn’t come out.

Yuanzhi blinked, and suddenly the ground was wet.

Blood soaked his boots. Bodies surrounded him. The Gong clan, lifeless. Motionless. Faces frozen mid-fear.

In the middle of it all, Shangjue stood again.

But this was no warm brother.

This Shangjue wore blood-red robes and eyes that had forgotten how to see. His hands dripped. His blade gleamed. And when he looked at Yuanzhi, it was like he was looking through him.

“You were supposed to protect him,” he said.

Yuanzhi backed away.

“You let him die.”

“No,” Yuanzhi choked. “I wasn’t there– I wasn’t even–”

“You think loyalty makes up for absence? You think becoming useful makes you wanted?”

Shangjue stepped forward.

“You’re not Langjue. You’re not even a shadow of him. You’re just what was left. A spare. A ghost we kept because we didn’t know what else to do with you.”

“Stop,” Yuanzhi gasped.

“You tried so hard to be enough. But the harder you tried, the more obvious it became–”

“Stop!”

“ –that you’re not him.”

Yuanzhi fell to his knees, breath ragged, nails clawing into the earth that wasn't earth. “I never wanted to replace him. I just…I just wanted to stay. With you. With the family. I thought if I made myself useful–”

He looked up.

The blood-red Shangjue had vanished.

And in his place…

A mirror.

One made of still water, black and perfect. It showed him everything – his own face, pale and empty. His eyes, ringed with purple, sunken with years of trying too hard. His hands, stained with blood, with ink, with poison, with desperation.

And behind his reflection stood Langjue again, holding Shangjue’s hand.

“They don’t need you,” the mirror whispered. “You were always temporary.”

Yuanzhi shattered.

His image fractured. And in its place came the cold. The darkness. The sensation of falling inward. Of pieces coming loose from his ribs. Of memory unthreading itself like silk from a wound.

He cried.

This time not in fear.

But in grief.

For a self that never belonged.

For a family that never truly saw him.

For a brother who might never forgive him.

And worst of all – for the truth that maybe, just maybe, this was what he’d always feared:

That if Lang-didi had lived, there would’ve been no place left for him at all.

The child’s laughter returned. This time, broken. Mocking.

He screamed.

The sound tore from Yuanzhi’s throat like it had been trapped there for years. A wrenching, broken cry that startled the silence – rough and wet and strangled, like it had clawed its way up from somewhere deep in his chest.

Yuanzhi’s back arched off the cot. His limbs spasmed, violent and uncoordinated, like he was trying to escape something only he could see. His fingers curled so tight they drew blood from his own palm.

“Yuanzhi!” Shangjue bolted to his side, catching his wrists, pinning him gently but firmly.

“Didi – wake up, come back to me!”

Yuanzhi didn’t hear. Couldn’t.

His eyes were wide open, but unfocused – unseeing. His breath hitched, then staggered into a terrifying silence.

His back arched again, harder this time, legs thrashing, teeth clenched like he was choking on something that wasn’t there.

“Elder Yue!” Shangjue roared.

The door slammed open within seconds. Elder Yue entered, robes half-fastened, still tucking in the edge of his sash.

One look at the boy on the cot, and he dropped everything.

“Hold him,” he ordered. Elder Yue dropped to his knees and pressed glowing fingers to Yuanzhi’s temples, his throat, then his sternum.

“His qi’s spiking out of control – the venom’s triggering a backlash!”

Yuanzhi’s body bucked again, foam flecking at the corners of his lips.

His jaw snapped shut so violently that Shangjue heard the click of his teeth. Then–

Nothing.

He went still.

Too still.

For one breathless second, the room froze.

Then Shangjue leaned in and realized with horror that Yuanzhi wasn’t breathing.

“No,” he rasped. “No, no, no–” Shangjue did, barely registering the tears streaking his face as he cradled Yuanzhi’s clammy forehead.

“Please… Zhi’er, breathe– come on, come on…”

A flash of light pulsed through the boy’s body.

Still nothing. Then another.

Yuanzhi’s mouth opened, and with a horrible, gurgling gasp, air flooded back into his lungs.

His chest lifted.

Shuddered.

Fell.

Fell again.

But it rose.

Shangjue let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, pressing his forehead to Yuanzhi’s temple.

His hands were shaking.

His didi’s face was still pale – too pale.

His breathing ragged.

And already, his fingers had begun to twitch again.

Elder Yue sat back on his heels, face grim. “We brought him back. But barely.”

Shangjue swallowed hard, shaking.

Elder Yue moved to check Yuanzhi’s pulse again, now a faint tremor beneath the skin. “His spirit’s fragmenting. The poison is unspooling his mind. Every spike like this tears another thread loose.”

Shangjue looked at his didi – at the boy who had once stood in the shadows of the Gong clan with nothing but his vials and his fierce devotion – now so pale, so still, the line between life and death drawn thinner with every hour.

He twitched. Not from the fever, but from something deeper.

A whimper tore from his throat, barely audible, like a child calling out in a nightmare. “Ge…” Shangjue flinched.

He reached for Yuanzhi’s hand, gripping it between both of his.

“I’m here,” he said, steady despite the break in his voice. “I’m right here. You’re not alone.”

But Yuanzhi was slipping again – eyes fluttering, face pinched, fingers trembling like they were grasping for something not there.

“He’s going back under,” Elder Yue warned. “And next time, I don’t know if we can pull him out.”

“I won’t let him fall,” Shangjue said. “Even if I have to follow him in.”

The storm outside cracked open the sky.

Inside, Shangjue sat hunched over his didi’s still body, drenched in guilt and moonlight, gripping the hand of the only family he could not lose – not again.

Not this one.

Chapter Text

The inner chamber of the Gong Pavilion had never felt this cold. Not even with summer rain threading down the windows and a brazier quietly burning in the corner. The silence was taut. Pressurized.

Shangjue stood by the long table, jaw set, arms folded over his chest. He hadn’t changed out of the robe he wore when Yuanzhi flatlined the night before – the silk creased, the hem crusted with dried medicine. But no one dared mention it. Not when the weight in the air felt like it could crush lesser men.

Across from him stood Jin Fan and Young Master Xue – now in his older, mature body after shedding his child-like appearance following Xue Gong Zi’s death. And beside them, silent and composed, was Gong Ziyu.

The Sword Wielder’s presence grounded the room. Not cold, not aloof, but steady in the way a blade held at rest still whispered of danger. He had listened without interruption to every word of the report. His arms were folded, his expression unreadable.

Parchments lay open on the table – facsimiles of Yuanzhi’s poison schematics, so perfectly copied that it made Shangjue’s stomach twist.

“These were recovered from a sealed chest in an abandoned manor outside of Longxi,” Jin Fan said. “One of Wufeng’s old fronts - repurposed recently. The Sword Wielder had us follow the trail from the black-market cultivator who sold the courier’s poison-dipped dagger. It led here.”

Shangjue’s throat tightened. “That’s real.”

“Yes,” Jin Fan said. “Copied from an old draft in the archives. But the original’s still in the vault. We checked.”

Ziyu’s voice was low. “How?”

Young Master Xue’s answer came swiftly. “A junior aide named Ren Hui. He passed multiple loyalty tests. Paper trail matched a fallen cousin branch. Turns out, he was Wufeng’s plant –embedded years ago, activated recently. During an inventory rotation… he copied this.”

Shangjue clenched his teeth, fury burning in his dark, sharp eyes. “And no one noticed?”

“He was careful,” Young Master Xue said flatly. Unfazed. “He rerouted scroll fragments, copied schematics, and fed them out through coded correspondences. Slipped poison threads into courier runs. Quiet. Surgical. The perfect mole.”

Elder Yue’s jaw tightened. “They played a long game.”

“Wufeng always does,” Jin Fan said. “But it’s more than just theft. The poison Ren Hui copied wasn’t complete. It was one of Yuanzhi’s abandoned drafts. Unstable. He discarded it for a reason.”

“He used to say the binding agent acted like memory,” Shangjue murmured, reining in his anger with the weight of remembrance.  “It clung too tightly and broke everything it touched.”

Jin Fan nodded grimly. “It was more dangerous than useful. That’s why he buried it. But they didn’t care.”

“They made it worse,” Young Master Xue added. “They took that instability and leaned into it. Twisted it into something parasitic. A slow-acting venom that mimics the qi-signature of its creator, so it bypasses his internal resistance. We only detected it because Elder Yue used a spiritual stabilizer that briefly misaligned Yuanzhi’s core. If not, it would’ve continued feeding off his mind undetected.”

Shangjue’s knuckles whitened.

“The venom targets cognition and emotional anchoring,” Young Master Xue continued. “Memories get scrambled. Guilt loops. Identity disintegration. Each spike causes fragmentation. It’s not meant to kill quickly – it’s meant to unmake.”

“And the soul-marking?” Elder Yue asked from the shadows. His voice was low, but there was no mistaking the undercurrent of fury.

Jin Fan exchanged a glance with Young Master Xue. “Confirmed. The dark qi traces embedded in the venom match the Yewan Sect’s markings. They used soul-threading – an outlawed technique from the southern heretic branches. It allows the poison to not just reside within the body, but to mirror the mind.”

“Meaning?” Ziyu asked.

“Meaning it doesn’t just poison him,” Young Master Xue said. “It becomes him. It crafts dreams from buried memories. Embeds self-hatred in his own voice. It weaponizes everything he fears.”

The silence hit like a funeral bell.

“And you’re certain it was deliberate?” Ziyu said, brow pinched together – the light from the candles casting dark shadows across his face, making his usually affable face grim.

“We are,” Jin Fan answered. “Gong Yuanzhi wasn’t the target by chance.”

“And why him?” Ziyu asked, though he already knew the answer.

Jin Fan didn’t hesitate. “Because he’s brilliant. And loyal. To Gong Shangjue, specifically. That bond is well known.”

Young Master Xue’s voice dropped. “He’s the knife closest to the heart. If you can’t break the Sword Wielder outright, you target the one his general would burn the world to protect.”

“They wanted to unmoor you,” Elder Yue said. “And shake Ziyu’s foundation at the same time. You’re both pillars. Remove one, and the house tilts.”

Ziyu’s gaze flicked briefly toward Shangjue. “And it’s working.”

Shangjue didn’t answer.

“They want fractures,” Jin Fan continued. “In your leadership. In your brotherhood. If Gong Shangjue falters, your foundation trembles.”

Ziyu’s voice, when it came again, was low. “Then we can’t afford to misstep.”

Shangjue stepped away from the table.

“You said the Yewan Sect did this.”

“Yes,” Jin Fan replied. “What’s left of them. They operate in whispers now – outlawed, scattered. But we believe one of their inner circle still practices soul-marking out of Yuzhou, under the name Master Huiye.”

Young Master Xue added, “We have no proof. Only rumors. But we tracked two toxin sales that match Yuanzhi’s corruption pattern. Both point to him.”

“Is he still there?” someone asked.

“Maybe,” Jin Fan said. “But going after him is dangerous. He doesn’t deal through couriers. You’d have to approach him as a supplicant.”

“A supplicant,” Shangjue echoed. “To a cultist, a heretic, who tortures souls.”

Elder Yue stepped forward. “You can’t be serious. If you approach the Yewan directly, you invite a stain upon yourself. If the elders–”

“I don’t care what the elders think,” Shangjue snapped, deliberately ignoring the fact that he is in front of the very same elders he is choosing to disregard. His voice didn’t rise. But it cut. “My brother is dying. And every second we waste debating my reputation, he slips further.”

“But if you’re corrupted,” Elder Yue said, “we lose both of you.”

“I’ll wear a talisman seal. I’ll take antidotes. I’ll chain myself to the courtyard wall if I have to – but I’m going. I will look that man in the eye and make him give me the reversal technique. Whatever it takes.”

Ziyu didn’t stop him.

Instead, he stepped forward. His voice tinged with quiet finality.

“You’ll take Jin Fan.”

Shangjue looked up, surprised.

Ziyu met his eyes. “And my authority. If Huiye wants to trade, you trade under my name – not yours. If you fall, we fall. But if he tries to use this to provoke rebellion or scandal, it dies with me.”

“…Understood.”

Elder Yue turned away, jaw tight. “You’re all mad.”

Jin Fan moved to Shangjue’s side. “We’ll leave by nightfall. It’s better we don’t travel under a Gong banner.”

Shangjue’s gaze fell again to the poisoned script – to the warped ghost of Yuanzhi’s work, so brilliant and broken all at once.

He didn’t look up as he said, “Tell me everything we know about this Huiye. And how to reach him without alerting the rest of the cult.”

Ziyu nodded once, then turned to close the chamber doors himself.

“Then let’s begin.”

Ziyu lingered in the war room long after the others had gone quiet.

The parchment still lay on the table, edges curling slightly from the damp in the air. The ink hadn’t faded, but it felt brittle now – as if too much truth had been pressed into its fibers. A blueprint of betrayal. Of genius warped. Of a brother dismantling from the inside out.

Shangjue stood across from him, still silent.

Ziyu’s gaze moved from the notes to his cousin – no, his brother. That word had always carried weight between them. Shangjue bore it with armor; Ziyu had learned to carry it with silence.

“Yuanzhi-didi…” he said softly, tasting the name like a stone under his tongue.

Not just the poison master with steady hands and sharper words. Not just the smirking boy who met danger with insolence and mockery. No longer just the one who hurled barbs like knives and wore defiance like armor. He was their youngest – the one who spoke too boldly, insulted too freely, and loved too fiercely in silence.

The one who survived when others hadn’t.

The one Ziyu had once fought with, clashed with, nearly disowned in anger, and yet now…the ache of his absence pressed like a bruise behind the ribs.

He moved around the table, footsteps measured, stopping beside Shangjue. His voice dropped – quiet enough that it stayed between them.

“I didn’t think it would be him,” Ziyu admitted. “Of all of us, I thought he was the safest. The most invisible.”

Shangjue’s jaw tensed. “He was never invisible.”

“I know,” Ziyu said. “That’s why they chose him.”

The Sword Wielder let out a breath, fingers brushing the table’s edge.

“You always stood firm when the rest of us cracked,” he said. “Even when things broke around you. While I…”

He paused, then smiled. Small, rueful. “I used to wear my heart so far out on my sleeve, Yuanzhi-didi could’ve laced it with powder and I wouldn’t have noticed.”

Shangjue exhaled through his nose. Not quite a laugh, but close.

Ziyu looked away. “I think he hated me for that.”

“He didn’t hate you.”

“He distrusted me,” Ziyu corrected, quietly. “And I didn’t blame him. I was soft. Unready. The title came before I earned the respect. He saw that.”

“He sees too much,” Shangjue muttered.

Ziyu nodded. “He’s still a brat.”

Shangjue smirked faintly – the first real expression to crack through in hours. “That he is.”

Ziyu allowed himself a slow exhale, not quite relief, not quite hope. Just a moment.

“I tempered myself,” he continued. “It’s what the clan needed. What you needed. But sometimes I wonder if I lost something in doing it.”

“You didn’t lose it,” Shangjue said, glancing over. “You just buried it deep enough to survive.”

Ziyu blinked.

And Shangjue, who never wasted words, gave the smallest of nods. As if to say: I see you. I understand.

That was all.

Ziyu reached into his sleeve and handed over a folded parchment. “Huiye’s last known trail. Jin Fan already flagged three of the cult’s proxies – but this trader here…” He tapped the name. “He vanishes whenever a sale goes through. Slippery. But consistent.”

Shangjue took it, tucking the document into his sleeve.

“Don’t approach as a general,” Ziyu said. “Approach as someone desperate.”

“I am.”

Ziyu held his gaze. “Then make sure you come back.”

Shangjue didn’t answer. But as he turned away, the smallest shift in his posture – the faintest pause – said more than words.

Outside, Jin Fan was waiting beneath the overhang, hood pulled low against the rain. A second horse stood beside him, saddle cinched, stirrups ready.

“You’re sure?” Jin Fan asked.

“I’m already too far in to turn back.”

Jin Fan gave a short nod. “Then let’s ride before the sky decides to drown us.”

They mounted. The courtyard was quiet but for the storm whispering through the high pines. No fanfare. No banners. Just two riders vanishing into the dusk.

From the upper window of the Pavilion, Ziyu watched them go.

His hand gripped the sill, knuckles pale.

Yuanzhi was the youngest. The last one left from the old bloodline still standing beside them. Still sharp, still defiant. Still theirs.

Ziyu closed his eyes.

“Come back,” he murmured. “Both of you.”

The wind didn’t answer.

But the rain, for a moment, softened…as if the storm itself was listening.

Chapter Text

The forest was a cathedral of shadows.

Even in daylight, the canopy overhead choked the sun, filtering the light into muted greens and ash-gray streaks. The pine needles underfoot softened their horses’ steps, muffling sound until it felt like the world was holding its breath.

Mist coiled between the trees like ghosts with unfinished business. It clung to the folds of Shangjue’s robes, dampening the silk, weaving into his hairline.

Each breath he took tasted of moss, bark, and the sharp tang of wet stone. The wind howled like something feral, and still, they rode.

They had been riding for hours.

The Gong banners had been left behind; no insignias, no crests.

Just two men – one silent, the other watchful – cutting through a forest path too narrow for comfort and too quiet for peace.

Jin Fan rode ahead, reins loose, gaze scanning for movement with the calm of someone who knew how many ways the woods could lie.

Shangjue rode behind him – jaw set, spine straight despite the cold, one hand always hovering near his sword even now.

He had not slept. Probably hadn’t since Yuanzhi’s collapse.

Every breath he took felt like it was braced against something.

He hadn't spoken since they passed the stone marker that marked the edge of Gong territory.

Words felt brittle now. Like they might splinter if forced.

The memory of Yuanzhi's scream still lingered – not just in his ears, but under his skin. That single, fractured sound, dragged from somewhere so deep even pain had forgotten its name.

Shangjue closed his eyes briefly, just long enough to suppress the flash of Yuanzhi convulsing in the rain. Not now.

He couldn’t afford that weakness now.

Jin Fan glanced back. “You haven’t slept.”

“I don’t need rest,” Shangjue said without looking at him.

Jin Fan raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been saying that since we left. Eventually, even you need sleep.”

Shangjue didn’t answer because anything he said would come out like gravel. The truth was lodged in his throat, sharp-edged and unspoken: if he slept, he might not wake up in time. And if he didn’t wake up, Yuanzhi might not be there to save.

So he kept riding.

For the boy who once stood in the ruins of a burning compound, ash clinging to his lashes, refusing to cry. For the child who didn’t flinch even when adults flinched at him.

Jin Fan didn’t push. “This plan of yours. Trading with Huiye. Bargaining for the reversal technique. You know it’s not just dangerous.”

“I’m aware.”

“He doesn’t just sell poisons,” Jin Fan continued. “He trades in memories. Regrets. Parts of the soul. You might not leave with what you came for. Or you might leave with something worse.”

Shangjue’s voice was cold. “If he asks for my sword hand, he can have it. If he asks for my memories, he can take everything except Yuanzhi.”

There was something terrible in the way he said it. Not rage. Not desperation. Something quieter. Harder. Like steel being bent into a cage.

“…You really would,” Jin Fan said softly. “Give everything.”

Shangjue didn’t respond.

“Trail’s narrowing,” Jin Fan said, breaking the silence. “We’re near.”

The trail narrowed until the forest seemed to fold in on itself – pine trunks crowding close, their bark gnarled and slick with moss. The branches above grew tangled, forming a natural archway that blocked what little light filtered through. They dismounted without a word. The horses, usually steady, shifted restlessly behind them, ears twitching at sounds too soft for human hearing.

Every step forward was a negotiation with the woods. Roots snaked over the path like veins. Stones jutted sharp from the earth. Mist clung low, curling around their ankles as if reluctant to let them pass.

It was quiet. Different from the peaceful quiet of an undisturbed forest, but a silence that felt intentional. Like something had pressed its weight over the world and told it to hush.

Then a shift.

Barely more than the suggestion of movement ahead. A flicker where there should have been stillness.

Jin Fan raised a hand. Both men stopped.

A figure stood just ahead on the path. Alone.

He was lean, his face shadowed beneath a wide straw hat. Cloak plain, stained at the hem. No visible weapons. No pack. Just standing as if he’d been there for hours. Or days.

Shangjue didn’t speak right away. His hand hovered just shy of his sword, eyes scanning not the figure, but the trees behind him. No birds. No rustle. No wind.

The man inclined his head, like someone greeting a regular at a tavern.

“You’re late,” he said.

Shangjue’s voice was quiet. “We weren’t told there was a time.”

“There always is,” the man, the trader, replied, tone unreadable. “You just don’t always know it.”

Jin Fan stepped forward. “We’re here for Master Huiye.”

That name hung in the air like a blade, unsheathed and pointed.

The man didn’t react. Instead, he reached into his sleeve – slow, deliberate – and drew out a strip of black cloth. Weathered. Fraying at the edges. A faint red sigil marked the center: a sealed eye inked in something too dark to be dye.

He didn’t offer it. Just dropped it on a flat stone at the center of the path.

“Wait until dusk,” he said. “If he wants to see you, someone will come.”

“And if he doesn’t?” Shangjue asked.

The man tilted his head again. “Then hope the forest lets you back out.”

Jin Fan’s hand drifted toward his belt. “That a threat?”

“No,” the man said. “Just a pattern. Not everyone leaves the same way they came in.”

Then, without another word, he turned and walked into the trees. Each step softer. Each stride smaller. Until the forest simply reclaimed him.

They waited in silence for a long beat.

Then Shangjue stepped forward and picked up the cloth. It was damp, smelling faintly of pine resin and something metallic. The sigil pulsed with a subtle hum under his fingers…a sensation. Old, strange magic. Not Gong clan work.

“Tracker’s sigil,” Jin Fan said quietly. “That’ll mark us.”

Shangjue slipped it into his sleeve. “Good. I want him to know we’re here.”

They didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just listened.

Somewhere behind the trees, a crow cawed once. Sharp and lonely. The air shifted again. Heavier.

“He’s watching already,” Jin Fan murmured.

Shangjue nodded once. “Then let him.”

The storm had not returned, but the silence left in its wake felt heavier.

Ziyu stood at the edge of the veranda overlooking the eastern courtyard, arms folded, his robe sleeves fluttering slightly in the humid wind. From here, he could see the faint trail the horses had taken – two fading impressions in the mud, already being erased by time and weather.

They were gone.

And with them, any illusion of control.

Behind him, the war table had been cleared. The stolen poison schematics locked away. But the room still smelled faintly of ash and old ink, and the ghost of that conversation clung to the wood like a scar. He hadn’t moved since they’d left. Had barely blinked.

Footsteps approached. Light, assured.

“You’re still out here,” Yun Weishan said softly.

Ziyu didn’t turn. “Couldn’t sleep.”

She stepped beside him, her presence quiet but grounding. “You should rest. There’s nothing more to be done tonight.”

“There’s everything to be done,” he murmured. “And not enough night left.”

They stood in silence for a while, the wind rising and falling like breath between them.

Then she asked, “Do you regret sending him?”

Ziyu’s lips pressed into a line. “No.”

A pause.

“But I regret that it had to be him.”

Yun Weishan’s eyes lingered on the distant trees. “He would’ve gone, no matter what you said.”

“I know.”

She turned slightly, studying his face in profile. “You weren’t meant to carry this alone.”

Ziyu let out a breath, slow and quiet. “Tell that to the elders who placed the sword in my hand before I stopped being a boy.”

“You were chosen,” she said, “because you saw the weight – and still chose to lift it.”

“That used to be strength.” His tone sharpened. “Now it’s leverage.”

He finally turned, leaning against the railing, one hand braced as if the building might shift beneath him. “Do you know what Yuanzhi said to me the last time we argued?”

Yun Weishan arched a brow. “Which time?”

Ziyu huffed, the sound similar to a laugh cut short. “He accused me of underestimating him. Said I still saw the boy who spent more time with jars of beetles than with people. The boy who catalogued poisons before he could tie his own sash. He told me, ‘You look at me and see something wrong.’”

Yun Weishan didn’t speak, but Ziyu could feel the question forming.

“And maybe I did,” he said. “Maybe I still do.”

He shifted his weight, voice tightening. “When he was a child, people whispered. That he didn’t cry at his father’s funeral. That he dissected insects and smiled at their insides. Even then, I… I kept my distance.”

“Because you didn’t understand him?”

Ziyu’s lips pressed thin. “Because I didn’t trust him.”

That admission sat heavy in the air.

He swallowed. “I hated that I didn’t.”

A pause. Then:

“He called me a bastard once. Said I wasn’t truly a Gong. That I was my mother’s lie, not my father’s heir.” His mouth twisted faintly. “He was seven.”

Yun Weishan inhaled, slow. “He didn’t know– ”

“He knew enough,” Ziyu cut in. “Or he repeated what someone said behind closed doors. Either way, it wasn’t the last time.”

He straightened, eyes fixed on the horizon. “He said it again when I was named Sword Wielder. I had barely stepped into the chamber when he and Gong Shangjue demanded proof – bloodlines, scrolls, testaments. Like I hadn’t bled for this clan. Like legitimacy was something I had to perform.”

“And you’ve never forgiven him.”

“I thought I had,” Ziyu said. “But when I look at him, even now, there’s a part of me that still flinches.”

His jaw tightened.

“I know he’s brilliant. Unshakable in his own way. But he made me doubt myself at the moment I needed to believe. And I don’t know if that part of me ever really healed.”

Weishan was quiet for a moment.

Then she asked, “Do you hate him?”

Ziyu closed his eyes briefly. “No.”

“Then what?”

“I envy him,” Ziyu said. “Because even when he was wrong, he was certain. Because Gong Shangjue never looked at him the way the clan looked at me – with quiet calculation, measuring if I could carry a name I didn’t ask to be born with.”

A pause.

“And because if he dies, I don’t know if I’ll ever have the chance to tell him… that I never wanted to compete. I just wanted to be brothers.”

Silence folded around them, heavy and damp.

Weishan’s hand found his, fingers cool and steady.

“He’s still fighting,” she said, quiet but sure. “So is Gong Shangjue.”

Ziyu nodded, slowly. “That’s what terrifies me.”

She tilted her head. “Why?”

“Because the ones who fight the hardest are the ones we lose first.”

His voice was almost a whisper.

He turned to her then, something raw flickering in his expression. “If we lose him… I don’t know how to carry that, A-Yun. Not on top of everything else.”

She looked at him and reached up to rest a hand against his cheek.

“Then pray we don’t,” she said. “And prepare as if we might.”

Ziyu’s throat bobbed.

He turned, robes stirring in the humid wind. “I want a report from Young Master Xue by first light. I want every trace of Huiye’s known routes. If Shangjue-ge fails, I want to know where to strike.”

Weishan gave a small nod, her hand falling away.

She stepped back into the shadows without another word.

Ziyu stayed where he was, eyes fixed on the tree line that had swallowed his brother.

A pale, liminal light filtered through the high lattice windows of the eastern infirmary, silvering the edges of the wooden beams and dust motes alike. Outside, the storm had broken hours ago, leaving only a thick, sodden hush in its wake. The air still smelled faintly of iron-rich soil and wet pine.

Elder Yue sat beside the bed. He had been there for hours – perhaps since before dawn – but time had a way of softening at the edges when you were waiting for a fever to break. Or for a boy to return.

Yuanzhi hadn’t stirred.

His breathing was shallow but steady, his brow furrowed in a way that made him look perpetually displeased – even unconscious. The linens had been changed, the sweat from the last episode wiped away, but the flush had returned to his cheeks again. Too warm. His pulse, when Elder Yue checked it, was fluttery and thin. A bird’s heartbeat.

His body had stopped convulsing hours ago, but the stillness he’d settled into was not peace. His eyes would sometimes flutter open without recognition, lips moving to form words that had no shape, no sound. Once, he had laughed – a low, broken thing that had no place in his mouth.

Elder Yue had stood over him then, powerless. Listening.

Now, he sat again. Waiting.

The silence was deceptive. The kind that came before a storm, or after a scream.

He adjusted the wet cloth on Yuanzhi’s forehead and studied the boy’s face – if he could still be called that. Almost grown. But in sleep, stripped of his words and weaponry, he looked younger. Not innocent – Yuanzhi had never had that kind of softness – but bare. Like a blade filed down to its most essential edge.

It felt wrong, somehow, to see him this still. This quiet. As if the fire that had once lived behind those eyes had been drawn inward, coiled tight and hidden beneath layers no one could reach.

Elder Yue remembered the first time he had heard of Gong Yuanzhi. Whispers carried from the central compound to the back hills. A child who didn’t cry at his father’s funeral. Who dissected insects and labeled them in jars. Who preferred beetles to people and poison to praise.

Strange, they said. Dangerous. Unfit.

Elder Yue had believed them.

Until the Chuyun Chonglian bloomed.

A flower thought extinct. Known to heal even heart-wounds if applied at the brink of death. Sacred, temperamental, and nearly impossible to grow.

Yuanzhi had coaxed it from a cracked seed tucked in soil soaked with bone ash and night rain.

Elder Yue, still just a boy then – without title or permission – had slipped out of the back hills to see it with his own eyes. He remembered crouching behind the lantern post in the courtyard, breath held, watching.

Yuanzhi had been kneeling beside the bloom, whispering something into its petals like they were old friends. And the flower had opened.

That was the moment Elder Yue stopped believing the rumors.

Now, watching that same boy lie motionless beneath a veil of fever and fractured mind, Elder Yue felt the ache return. Not fear. Not yet. Something quieter. Like reverence blurred with mourning.

Someone had asked him not long ago if the Chuyun Chonglian might help. Maybe it was Shangjue. Or Ziyu. Or Zishang, her usual cheerful face lined with worry. If they could use it to bring Yuanzhi back.

“The Chuyun Chonglian was never meant for this,” Elder Yue had told them. “It can call someone back from death if the body is failing. But Yuanzhi’s body is alive. It’s his mind that’s dying…and the flower cannot bloom where memory rots.”

He dipped the cloth in cool water and pressed it gently to Yuanzhi’s brow. The heat was rising again. He could feel it before his fingers even touched skin. There was tension behind the boy’s jaw, and a flutter in the corner of his mouth. Signs of something stirring beneath the surface.

“You never used to sit still,” Yue murmured, half to himself.

He looked at Yuanzhi’s face again. The flicker of his lashes. The faint twitch in the corner of his mouth. Something was happening beneath the surface.

Another stir. This time the fingers moved. Twitched once. Then curled tighter into the blanket.

“Still fighting,” Yue said under his breath. “Good.”

The door slid open quietly. A junior medic stepped inside and bowed, holding out a small tray with two new vials. Freshly prepared under Elder Yue’s request.

He waved the boy off and took the tray himself, holding one up to the light. The liquid inside shimmered faintly, an experimental stabilizer. Not a cure. But maybe enough to buy more time.

“We’re buying time,” Yue murmured as he poured the contents into a spoon and held it to Yuanzhi’s lips. “For your brother. For answers. And for the things we should’ve said when you were awake.”

It took effort, but Yuanzhi swallowed.

Yue eased back, watching his face for signs of pain or reaction. There was none. Just a faint tension in the line of his jaw that never really went away.

The boy looked so small here.

And that, more than anything, unsettled him. Because Yuanzhi was never still. Never quiet. Even when he didn’t speak, there was fire in the way he stood, the way he stared down anyone who underestimated him. Now there was only breath and blood and silence.

“Your brother’s gone to fetch your mind back,” Elder Yue said softly. “If that isn’t proof you’re still part of this clan, I don’t know what is.”

The fingers in his right hand twitched again.

And Elder Yue, who had seen boys break under pressure lesser than this, allowed himself the smallest breath of hope.

“Just hold on,” he said quietly. “Just a little longer.”

He reached out, adjusted the blanket, and sat back once more.

The scent came first.






It wasn’t the clean sharpness of pine or rain-soaked bark, but something sweeter – cloying, metallic. Like overripe fruit steeped in old blood. It slid through the mist like silk through fingers, quiet and persistent.

Jin Fan stiffened. His hand ghosted toward his blade.

Then the mist drew back, and a man stepped into view. Huiye.

He moved without disturbance, as if the forest had learned to part for him. His robes were pale, expressionless. Hair long and loose, cascading like ink over bare shoulders. And his eyes – wide, dark, unreadable – carried the weight of someone who had looked too long into the space between thought and memory.

He said nothing at first. Just studied Gong Shangjue as if he were reading something written across his bones.

“You’ve come far,” Huiye said finally, his tone even. Too even, like a thread pulled taut.

Shangjue didn’t blink. “You already knew we would.”

Huiye gave a small nod. “Of course. I know how far a brother will walk when death touches the hem of his household.”

His gaze flicked to Jin Fan and back again.

“There are few things more predictable than desperation shaped by love. But I wasn’t sure you’d have the stomach to walk this far without your titles.”

He walked slowly, bare feet silent on damp earth. “You wear loyalty like armor, Gong Shangjue. But armor rusts when soaked in guilt.”

He tilted his head slightly, voice lowering. “But that’s not why I agreed to meet you.”

Jin Fan’s hand had drifted fully to his weapon now. “Then why are we here?”

Huiye’s gaze flicked to him – brief and bland. “Because something is rotting inside my house. And I am not in the habit of feeding the mold.”

From within his sleeve, he drew a folded slip of parchment – small, brittle at the edges, the surface etched with spidery glyphs. Without flourish, he let it fall into the shallow pool between them. It vanished without ripple, swallowed whole by the still water.

“I admit that the poison was born here,” Huiye said. “But not by my hand.”

Shangjue said nothing. His silence was heavier than any accusation.

“The prototype,” Huiye continued, “was one of your brother’s own designs. I presume you know it already. A mind-breaker. It mimics the late stages of spiritual corrosion but refined, elegant. It doesn’t simply destroy.”

His gaze darkened. “Your brother created it as a theoretical deterrent. Something to be understood. Feared. Not used.”

Shangjue’s jaw tightened. “And yet it was.”

“Yes,” Huiye said. “Because it was stolen. Then passed without my sanction to a rogue faction within Yewan.”

He began to move, slow, circling the edges of the clearing as if speaking the truth required motion to keep the balance.

“I wanted to stop them,” Huiye said. “But ambition moves faster than honor. By the time I traced the theft, it had already taken root. Refined further, twisted into a delivery method I never approved.”

His expression did not change, but there was a flicker behind his eyes. Disdain.

“They didn’t understand what they were playing with. They wanted control. Precision. A tool that would rot the mind without touching the body. The perfect way to neutralize a threat while leaving no blade in sight.”

“And Wufeng?” Shangjue asked coldly.

Huiye’s smile was thin. “Chaos disguised as strategy. They wanted to destabilize your house. Remove your sharpest edges without raising alarm. The poison master is your youngest. But he was never your weakest. You just didn’t think they’d come for him first.”

Jin Fan’s mouth thinned. “So you knew. And now you help?”

Shangjue’s gaze didn’t waver. “Why?”

The clearing fell still.

Then Huiye’s voice dropped, softer than before and colder for it.

“I disagree with theft. With waste. And with cowards who hijack genius because they lack the discipline to create their own – those who weaponize genius to serve their cowardice.”

He looked directly at Shangjue. “I am not interested in revenge. Or retribution. But I do not tolerate parasites. Something is festering in the roots of my sect and if I let it spread, the whole tree rots.”

The air between them buzzed faintly, the sigil cloth in Shangjue’s sleeve growing warm, reacting.

A beat of silence.

“Which is why I’m helping you. Not for your house. Not even for your brother.” He stilled. A breath. Then: “But because there is something sacred in a mind like his. And I will not see it destroyed to feed the pride of lesser men.”

Silence thickened, then slowly unraveled.

“I’ll give you the cure,” Huiye said. “But I want something in return.”

Shangjue’s hand dropped slightly from his weapon. “What.”

“Your first memory.”

Huiye’s expression was calm in the way still water is calm. Deep, fathomless, concealing something ancient underneath.

“Not the one you tell others. Not the first time you held a sword, or earned a title, or took a vow. I want the moment before. Before they put duty in your mouth like an oath. Before the clan etched your name in stone. I want the thread that came before the armor.”

Jin Fan’s hand hovered near his sword, unease flickering through him. “Why would you want that?”

“Because memory is the first shape the soul learns to take,” Huiye said. “Not a thought. Not a name. A wound. An anchor.”

He took a step closer, voice dropping like a weight in still water.

“You believe this is about power. Leverage. Secrets. It isn’t. I want the fracture. The moment the boy who would become Gong Shangjue first broke and learned how not to show it.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

“Because what was done to Gong Yuanzhi mimics corrosion, yes – but it begins at the same place all unraveling begins. The first crack. The ache that teaches you how to carry pain so quietly it forgets its own name.”

He paused. His gaze didn’t leave Shangjue’s.

“If I understand yours, I can trace his.”

There was a silence that felt like a blade just before it strikes.

Shangjue’s expression didn’t move. But something behind his eyes shifted just slightly. A flicker. As if remembering wasn’t the hard part… choosing to give it away was.

“You want to see the first wound,” he said at last, voice low.

“Yes,” Huiye replied. “Because that wound shaped the man who shapes others. And you of all people should understand this: nothing forged in fire comes without cost.”

Another pause.

Jin Fan looked between them, unsettled. “If he gives it to you, will he lose it?”

“No,” Huiye said. “But the memory will no longer belong only to him. It will no longer be buried. It will no longer be his shield.”

A deeper quiet fell.

Shangjue stood still. Unmoving. But the silence inside him echoed too loud.

Because he knew what the first memory was.

Not the ceremony. Not the first sword.

But the taste of blood on his tongue as Langjue’s hand went cold in his. The smell of ash and silk. The moment he realized the only sound left in the courtyard was his own breathing – and Yuanzhi’s, too quiet and too steady, standing barefoot in the ruin, blinking at death like it meant nothing.

That was the moment everything ended. And everything began.

It wasn’t the past. It was a faultline.

He had built himself around it.

And now–

Now he was being asked to hand it over. To let someone else crawl inside that moment and see him as he was before the armor, before the orders, before even his own name felt real.

He could refuse.

But Yuanzhi’s breath was slipping. And Shangjue had always been willing to bleed first.

Huiye, watching the silence close in around Shangjue, said softly, “You mourned the first so fiercely… you let the second grow twisted in the shadow of your guilt.”

Shangjue inhaled once, slow and sharp, as if drawing steel from a scabbard.

Then -

“Take it.”

No flourish. No defiance. A slow, deliberate unfastening of something he had long held shut.

Just the quiet weight of a man unmaking himself to save someone else.

And Huiye – heretic, witness, collector of broken things – lowered his head.

“We begin.”

Chapter Text

Moonlight spilled across the forest floor in fractured lines, filtering through the canopy like ghost light. A ring of talismans fluttered at the perimeter – paper inked in red and bound with spiritual thread, suspended midair by invisible force. The boundary shimmered with subtle pulses, like the breath of something ancient and alive.


In the center stood Gong Shangjue.

Still as stone. Armorless. Cloaked in travel-worn robes, boots caked with forest mud, eyes fixed on Huiye.

The heretic moved like a shadow carved into flesh, gliding barefoot across the moss, trailing faint sigils of soulwater that hissed as they kissed the earth. He had drawn a complex weave into the clearing’s center: concentric circles etched in ash and powdered bone, intersecting lines filled with silver-dust ink, an unbroken spiral of sealing script tracing inward toward the anchor point.

Huiye’s voice, when it came, was low and resonant. “The first memory is stored not in the mind, but in the marrow. It is pre-language. Pre-self. The original thread.”

He stepped closer to Shangjue, holding no talisman, no blade. Only a thin filament of silver thread – impossibly fine, almost weightless – coiled around his fingers like spun light.

Shangjue didn’t flinch. “What do you need me to do?”

“Nothing,” Huiye said. “The memory already wants to be seen.”

He lifted a small, inked charm, a sliver of translucent quartz inscribed with a spiraling character that seemed to shift even as it was viewed. “I will draw it from the spine. From the soul’s root.”

Jin Fan tensed at the edge of the circle. But Shangjue nodded, jaw locked, breath held.

The thread touched the base of Shangjue’s neck – and sank.

It wasn’t pain. Not exactly.

It was something worse.

Like a chisel driven into a place no blade was ever meant to reach. A place beyond flesh, deeper than bone. A nerve buried so far inside the body it had forgotten how to scream. His breath seized. His spine bowed under invisible weight. His hands jerked into fists. The breath tore from his throat, ragged and involuntary. Something old and wordless cracked open inside him.

Then came the voice.

“Don’t resist.”

The clearing darkened. The lines of the ritual bled at the edges of his vision. Shapes blurred. Sound narrowed to a pulse. He was no longer standing in the circle.

He was kneeling.

Eighteen. Bloodied, bruised, breath ragged in his throat.

The fight at the front gates had been brutal – steel against steel, screams tangled with flame, Wufeng blades slicing through the air like whispers of death. He’d led the counterstrike himself, shoulder to shoulder with their best men. They’d held the outer wall. They won.

Too late.

The moment he stepped through the breached gate and saw the sky above the inner courtyard black with smoke. He knew.

Something inside him had already started breaking before he found them.

Langjue was the first.

His baby brother.

Just six years old. Still with his hair tied crookedly the way their mother did it. Still in embroidered slippers, one of which had slipped off in the chaos. He lay on the scorched tile, cradled in the curve of their mother’s arm.

Shangjue dropped to his knees, hard.

His hands fumbled – blood-slicked, shaking – as he reached for Langjue’s pulse, for any flicker of warmth. But the boy’s chest didn’t rise. His lips were pale. His lashes still.

His little hand, always so eager to tug at Shangjue’s sleeve or wrap around his finger, was frozen mid-reach. As if he’d still been looking for him when the end came.

And their mother–

She’d died fighting.

A Wufeng blade had pierced her through. The hilt still jutted from her ribs, her robe soaked black. Her eyes were open, wide with something that had outlived pain – fear.

She had died seeing it.

Shangjue couldn’t move. Couldn’t scream.

He had just come from the front, where he'd fought like a storm, convinced he was protecting them. That if he held the line, if he was strong enough, fast enough – he could keep them safe.

But Wufeng hadn’t needed to win the battle. Just to slip one elite inside.

One shadow through the side gate. One knife through the silk of everything he loved.

His body bowed under the weight of it. His forehead touched stone.

The smoke stung his eyes, but he didn’t blink.

He stayed there, unmoving, between their broken bodies, like if he didn’t look away, they wouldn’t disappear. Like if he held perfectly still, time would rewind. The blade would miss. The fire would die. His brother would breathe.

A sound caught in his throat – a fractured breath, not quite a sob.

He should’ve been there.

He should’ve been faster.

His duty had taken him to the gate.

His duty had cost him everything inside it.

And then –

Yuanzhi.

Younger. Much younger.

Standing barefoot amid the ruin, the hem of his clothes singed. His arms hung limp at his sides. His face expressionless. Eyes open, blank, reflecting firelight like glass. He hadn’t cried. Not then.

Just stood there, silent and watching. Like the bodies around him were stones. Like the flames had always been there.

Like he’d already learned that no one would come for them.

Shangjue’s throat closed.

He couldn't fall apart.

Because someone had to be the one left standing.

Because if he shattered, there’d be no one left to carry what remained.

That was the moment.

That was the first fracture. The moment duty became marrow. The moment grief calcified into control.

Shangjue’s mouth opened, but no sound came. He gasped like he was surfacing from a lake of blood. The afterimage clung to his skin, his teeth, his lungs. He staggered once, caught himself, and blinked the memory out of his eyes like smoke that wouldn’t lift.

For a moment, the clearing held its breath.

Wind whispered through the leaves but did not stir the ritual space. Time seemed reluctant to move forward, as if even the forest understood what had just been given.

Across the circle, Huiye remained silent. He cupped the silver thread with both hands, the way one might hold a final breath, and lowered it into the basin of soulwater. The liquid rippled violently, then drew inward, swallowing the thread whole. Light and ink twisted together in a shimmer that pulsed once…folding into itself as the memory vanished beneath its surface.

“You carried it well,” Huiye said softly. “But not without cost.”

Shangjue didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The phantom echo of Langjue’s hand still lingered in his palm, small and cold and fading.

Huiye turned, his sleeves brushing the moss at the edge of the circle. He placed both hands on the ritual’s boundary and exhaled, slow and deliberate.

“The memory is accepted,” he intoned, though it felt less like a declaration and more like an invocation. “Now we begin the counter-weaving.”

He dipped his fingers into the basin and flicked three droplets toward the sky. They hung there, suspended, before slowly descending into the talisman ring. At once, the ink symbols ignited. Silent, radiant lines unfurled across the forest floor like veins of glowing rootwork.

He reached for Shangjue’s hand. “You will anchor him. I will weave the outer net – through thread, symbol, and spirit. But it is your voice he’ll hear inside.”

“Understood,” Shangjue said, throat dry, his heart a staccato of beats, phantom pains numbing his hands and legs.

“No,” Huiye said, meeting his gaze. “You must feel it. You must let him feel you. If you go in cold, he won’t follow you back.”

Shangjue didn’t answer. He pressed his hand against his chest, still aching from the wound the memory had torn open.

Then he nodded once.

A soldier’s promise.

The talismans began to hum. The trees bent inwards with pressure, as if the ritual was pulling the very fabric of the space into itself.

Then Huiye pressed his palm to Shangjue’s sternum.

The world cracked.

The clearing blurred.

And Shangjue fell forward – not physically, but inward.

Into memory. Into shadow. Into the poisoned labyrinth of Gong Yuanzhi’s mind.

The descent was slow, deliberate. Like stepping into water that had no surface. The colors dimmed. The scent of pine and ash peeled away.

Whispers echoed from beneath thought. Shapes flickered where shapes should not be. Something brushed against the edge of his mind. A voice half-formed, a memory misremembered.

Shangjue took a breath and stepped deeper.

He was inside the dream now.

Not his.

Yuanzhi’s.

And it was unraveling.

Outside the circle, the clearing had turned breathless.

Jin Fan stood just beyond the edge of the ritual boundary, his hand resting lightly on the hilt at his side, not drawn, but not idle either. His eyes tracked every movement within the weave, the way the soulthread pulsed faintly between Shangjue’s chest and the charm now anchored in the center. A living tether, trembling under its own weight.

“This isn’t a cure,” he muttered, gaze sharp.

“No,” Huiye said, his voice nearly inaudible over the rustling leaves. “It’s a mirror. One lined with glass so thin it cuts on the way through.”

Jin Fan’s jaw flexed. “If he doesn’t make it back–”

“He will,” Huiye interrupted, calm but not unfeeling. His hands hovered over the circle, fingers forming small counterseals in midair, adjusting the flow of qi around the ritual to protect the anchor thread.

“You speak like you’re certain.”

“I’ve seen men break under less,” Huiye said, eyes still on the weave. “But I’ve never seen someone wear their grief so tightly that it became the very armor they fight with.”

His fingers twitched once. A shimmer passed through the ink lines – stabilizing the outer edge of the pattern.

“He is not whole,” Huiye added. “But that is what makes him powerful. The fracture he gave me? It still burns. Not with weakness. With memory. It knows what it cost him to become what he is.”

Jin Fan didn’t answer.

Instead, his gaze shifted to the soulthread. Still trembling, still intact. Connecting the stone charm to the man now disappearing into shadow.

“It’s holding,” he said quietly. “For now.”

Huiye adjusted a talisman at the edge of the circle, his movements precise. “It’ll hold as long as he remembers who he is.”

A breeze stirred the branches above, scattering a few leaves into the flickering lines of the ritual.

“And if he doesn’t?” Jin Fan asked, waiting for an answer he had already braced himself for.

Huiye’s voice was soft. “Then it’s not the thread that breaks. It’s the man.”

Jin Fan said nothing.

But after a pause, he added, “He knew that before he stepped forward.”

Huiye nodded once, the weight of that truth folding into the silence between them.

For a breath, there was silence. Only the wind moving through the leaves, and the slow, steady pulse of the ritual, like a heartbeat beneath the earth.

Then the weave pulsed harder.

And the shadows inside the circle… shifted.

Huiye’s expression darkened.

“He’s crossed the threshold,” he said. “Now comes the hard part.”

At first, Shangjue thought the ritual had failed.

The scent of scorched silk and iron was gone. In its place drifted the warm spice of cedar incense, curling from a brazier shaped like a crane. Sunlight spilled like honey through carved lattice windows, casting golden latticework shadows across polished floors. Beyond the courtyard, bells chimed – even, delicate, like laughter held in wind.

He stood at the threshold of the Gong Pavilion.

Unscarred.

Whole.

The walls were unmarred, no trace of ash or ruin. The lacquer gleamed as if freshly polished. Red banners rippled lazily from the beams above, caught in a spring breeze that smelled of sandalwood and honeysuckle. Somewhere deeper in the estate, someone laughed. Light, high-pitched, unburdened. A child.

Everything looked exactly as it had before the fire.

Before the swords.

Before Langjue bled out in his arms.

And yet here it was – the past, impossibly preserved. Memory rendered in gold.

The courtyard opened before him like a prayer answered too late. Plum blossoms drifted from the trees in soft, aimless spirals. Raked stone paths gleamed beneath them, each one familiar enough to ache. But it wasn’t the scenery that made him forget how to move.

It was the voices.

Laughter. Two of them, layered – one light and lilting, the other warm, grounding. A harmony long buried beneath ten years of silence.

He followed it.

Each step slow, as if any sudden motion might shatter the illusion. The world shimmered around him, too soft at the edges like an old painting pressed into silk. His shadow stretched ahead of him on stone worn smooth by childhood steps.

Beneath the plum tree, they sat.

His brother. Langjue.

His mother. Madam Ling.

Her hair was coiled into the style she’d worn the year Langjue was born. Her sleeves were rolled up, stained faintly with ink. She was smiling, laughing, as she gently scolded the child beside her for getting paint on his nose.

Langjue. Lang-didi.

His baby brother, maybe six at most. Bright-eyed, red-cheeked, squirming with the boundless energy of someone who still believed every day would end in joy. His robes were stained, his hands messy, a wooden sword forgotten in the grass beside him.

Alive.

Not a ghost, not a hallucination, not a bloodstain in the past but whole.

Shangjue’s heart stopped,


..then restarted painfully in his chest.


The sight struck so hard he almost fell to his knees. His limbs forgot themselves. His vision blurred not from poison or illusion but from something crueler.

Hope.

He hadn’t dared imagine them like this in years. Not this vividly. Not this close.

He didn’t speak.

Couldn’t.

He just stood there and watched as Lang-didi turned, saw him, and grinned.

“Gege!” the boy called, waving both arms. “Come spar with me! I learned the footwork you showed me. Look!”

He scrambled to his feet, wobbling a little as he mimicked a stance, too wide and too proud. Shangjue’s throat closed.

He took a step forward, dazed. “Lang…?”

His mother looked up, calm and serene. “Jue’er. You’re back from patrol already?”

That voice.

He hadn’t heard it in so long he’d forgotten its weight – how it softened his name, made him feel like something other than a soldier, a commander, a keeper of ghosts.

“Mother,” he whispered, and it scraped his throat raw.

She smiled as if nothing was out of place. “Are you hungry? I had the kitchen prepare that soup you liked. Lang-er refused to wait and already stole half the dumplings.”

“Did not!” Langjue shouted with mock outrage, ducking behind her with a laugh. “She’s making that up!”

It was perfect.

Too perfect.

But his body betrayed him. Shangjue sank to his knees before he even realized what he was doing. His hands shaking as he gathered Langjue close, pressing his forehead to soft hair that had only ever existed in memories drenched in blood. The boy laughed against his shoulder, warm and solid – not a ghost, not a corpse – just a boy who still believed his big brother could fix everything.

His mother watched, fond, her eyes unmarred by sorrow. Wind stirred the petals. A lullaby hummed low in her throat.

The courtyard shimmered with memory, or something trying to mimic it so perfectly that his soul ached from the resemblance.

This was everything he had once begged the gods to return. Everything he had failed to protect.

And some desperate, fractured part of him wanted to crawl into it. Let go. Let it take him. Forget the blood, the graves, the decades of carrying the weight of someone else’s childhood.

He wanted to stay.

He could feel the ghost of that little boy’s hand in his again…warm, not cold. The ash was gone. The blood never spilled. There were no pyres, no funerals, no graves to visit in secret.

He looked at his mother’s face. The soft lines of it. The way she tucked a strand of hair behind Langjue’s ear, the gentle hum. A lullaby he hadn’t heard since before the fire.

Before the funerals.

Before the silence.

But even in the glow, something faltered.

The harmony of the dream frayed at its seams. The sunlight clung too perfectly to the leaves. The breeze didn’t shift. The hush was too deep.

A perfect stillness. And perfection – Shangjue had learned – always came at a price.

He glanced around the courtyard, suddenly alert.

There should have been another presence. Another voice. The boy who always hovered just at the edge of notice, sharp-eyed and sharper-tongued, content to be overlooked until it suited him not to be.

Someone who would have muttered a snide comment about children sparring in flower gardens. Someone who brewed poisons with crushed petals and painted monsters inside empty jars.

Someone who–

Yuanzhi.

Where–?

He shot to his feet. “Where is Yuanzhi?”

His mother blinked, calm as ever. “Who?”

The word punched the air from his lungs.

Langjue tilted his head. “Yuanzhi?” he echoed. “Is that one of the new cooks?”

The courtyard went quiet.

No.

The air collapsed in on itself. Sound fled. The warmth curdled.

That silence – that silence – the one he remembered from the ruins. The one that rang louder than screams. That scraped along his ribs and whispered, too late, too late, too late–

Shangjue turned.

And ran.

Through the courtyard. Down the hall. His boots slapped stone, breath heaving. “Yuanzhi!”

He tore past silk banners, past the kitchen, past the storerooms. His body moved before thought could catch up. Instinct driving him like a blade against his own throat.

West wing. Herb paths. Cliffs.

He has to be here. He’s always here.

“Yuanzhi!”

There. The stairwell where ink bottles should be stacked in careless defiance. Empty.

No ink bottles by the stairwell. No herb jars left open in protest. No powder trails or dead bugs. No scrawled notes about toxin testing. No fragments of a boy too brilliant for the world to hold gently.

Nothing.

It was like he had never existed.

Not lost.

Erased.

That’s when it hit him.

Shangjue staggered to a stop, chest heaving. “No–”

The truth dropped, brutal and merciless.

This wasn’t his dream.

It was Yuanzhi’s.

And Yuanzhi had cut himself out of it.

Because in this world – this beautiful, unbroken, impossible world where Langjue lived and Lady Ling hummed lullabies in the spring – Yuanzhi had no place. There had never been a reason to keep him.

A replacement was no longer needed.

And so the world had done what the clan always whispered behind closed doors: it cast out the strange, sharp child who never smiled at the right time and never cried when he should have. It erased the orphan who talked to poisons and refused to bow.

Shangjue’s breath hitched.

Yuanzhi thought the only reason he was ever allowed to stay was because Langjue had died.

Because Shangjue had needed someone to protect. Because there had been a vacancy – not a home.

And without that vacancy… he believed there was no place for him.

Yuanzhi had believed it.

Had built a world where he never existed at all.

Shangjue’s heart fractured.

“No,” he whispered. “No, no, no-”

He ran.

Again.

Past the red banners.


Past the paintings.


Past the life that was never theirs to begin with.

He ran like he could tear through the illusion by force. Like he could drag Yuanzhi back by name alone.

“Yuanzhi-didi!” he shouted, voice cracking. “I’m here,” he said, to no one and to everything.

Because even if this dream had forgotten him, Shangjue hadn’t.

Even if Yuanzhi chose to vanish–

Shangjue would not let him go.

And he never would.

Not in dreams.

Not in paradise.

Not in any version of this life.

The room had no windows.

Only stone. Only silence.

The kind of silence that seeped into the mortar and stayed there. That hummed against the walls like a sound long buried and half-alive. Dust hung suspended in the air, so thick, it felt like breath that had been exhaled and forgotten. Nothing moved here except for time, and even that dragged its feet.

Shelves sagged along the walls, lined with glass jars in various stages of decay. Labels curled in on themselves like dried petals, ink bled to illegibility. The contents were no better – roots turned brittle, powders clumped with age. A single moth beat itself against the lip of a cracked bowl, slow and aimless, as if it too had lost the memory of what light was.

Somewhere above, footsteps echoed. Barely. Distant.

But they were never for this room.

No one came here.

No one remembered it even existed.

Yuanzhi sat curled in the farthest corner, a smear of shadow in a place that had long stopped needing names. Knees pulled tight to his chest. Arms locked around himself. Not for comfort. For containment. As though something inside him was splintering and leaking out, and he didn’t know how to stop it.

His hands trembled.

A pestle lay in his palm, hard and foreign, though it must have once been familiar. His fingers were stained. Rust-red. Or brown. Or black. He couldn’t tell. Couldn’t remember when it had started or why.

There had been a mixture.

Petals. Ash. Bitter bark ground into powder. The scent clung to his skin. Cloying, wrong, too sweet. It should’ve told him something.

But the memory dissolved before it reached him.

He blinked.

What was it for?

He should know. He always knew. Formulas lived in his ribs, in the crook of his spine. He was the one who measured things that couldn’t be measured. Who stitched poisons like lullabies. Who–

Wasn’t he?

The thought hit him like a lash. Sudden. Raw.

His head throbbed, not like pain but like pressure. A weight behind the eyes. Behind everything. Each thought that surfaced was already cracked, slipping through his grip like wet stone. He reached for a memory and felt it break. He reached again and came away empty. His thoughts bumped into each other like blind insects. Slipping. Tumbling. Breaking.

Who am I?

The words sat heavy in his mouth but would not form.

There was a name.

His name.

I am – 

    Ḡ̵̴̢̯̟̟̫͓̠̊͂ο̵̶̢̗͚̮̣̖͊̈́̎͞ν̴̲̙̣̳ͪ͛̃ͨͥ͟͢͟͝г̷̷̣͙̼͈̭ͩ̓̔̅ͮ͒͠ ̴̟͎͙͙̒͛ͮ̾̀͟͞Ы̷̮͚͈̑͌͂͋̾́͜͝͞у̶̴̸̷̗͖͎̩͙ͪͮ̋̓а̴̢̠̥̝̻̳̼̋̑͘͘͞ν͉̲̲̞̃̉͊͟͟͠з̵̟̲̳̱͓̏ͬ͋̈́ͧͥͫ̀̀͜͠𝖍̢̡̳͕̗ͧ̒ͯ̄̇͟͞i̷̵̙̩̣̖̹̬ͮ̿͊̾̀̀

 

He choked on it. Not because it was gone, but because it no longer fit. Like a coat taken from someone else’s corpse. Like a sound that once belonged to a person who no longer existed.

Gong— 

No.

That name belonged to others. Boys who stood with straight backs and swords in their hands. Hair shining under dappled sunlight. Boys who cast long shadows in sunlit courtyards and wore purpose like armor. That name was clean. Sharp. Whole.

Not this.

Not him.

He wasn’t a warrior.

He was ink-stained sleeves and quiet footsteps. Beetle shells and unspoken rules. He was the one they only remembered when something needed fixing. When something needed sacrificing.

Was.

His throat tightened.

He looked down. The pestle was still there. His fingers wrapped too tight around it, like it might hold the answer.

Why was he here?

Why was he always here?

A flicker of something touched the edge of his mind. A voice – half-mocking, half-fond. A smile pulled at the memory like sunlight through fog. Someone had leaned close, once. Said something warm. Called him–


Y͍͕͔̜̳͍̙̒̈́̊̄̄ͩ́͜ű̶̲̘̻̦̟̞̮͐̂̃͂͊͟a̭̭̱̒̿ͯ̆͗ͅn̯̼̗̪̦͛̑̆ͣͧ͜z̵̦͈̜͔̖̈ͤ̉͟h̴̫̦̒̓ͦ̆͐ͅi͓̗̱̙͔͐ͭ̂̆̅͞-̶̯͙̺͎̟͒͛ͫͧͅd̴ͮ̾̃ͬ̀ĭ̢̱͕̦͈͎̮̖̌ͫ̈͝d̡̲̗͓̝̟̮̐ͩͨ͒ͫ́i̘̹̱̬͗̈ͫ͐́͜

No.

He had said it.

Hadn’t he?

“I’ll listen to you, ge.”

To someone. 


S̵͈̝͖̓̏͘͢͠н̱͖̪̗̥͉̋̌̀͞а̴̵͈̩̺̺͎̠̑͂ͪ̿ͤͩ͟н̷̡̮͚̙̙ͩͧ́͝γ̵̯͈͇̐ͥͣ̀͝͝͞й̴̡̫̬̯̭͙̈̅͂͛̀͢υ̡̠͚̺͒ͥͥ͢͝ͅε̸̸̡̞͖͎ͭ̒ͭ-̶̢̖̳͚̰ͬ͗̾ͥ̽͢г̶̷̡̟̪͍̼͊͋̃̋́ͅе̵̶̢͔͍̯ͫ͊͗͗͢.̸̵̢͔̫͖̒̋̇͝ ̩͒̈́͌ͯͫ͜͞͝g̵̻̳̱͂̃̈́ͪ͞е̢̙̪̗͈̜̅ͫͥ͢г̶̙̻̒̂̃̇̅̀͘͜͞e̢̟͔̰̦̰͎̍͂͌ͫ̍̋͐͝͝.̷̘͕̦͕̪̯ͤ̐ͩ̅ ̢̗̼͍̆͊ͦ̓̀͟г̸̸̡̤̖̣̊̎͗̐̓ͮ͂̀𝖊̸̢̮̘̯͔̄̐͌̎͢͝ͅγ̷̶̡̖ͬ̌ͧͨ̆͊е̢̥̯̦͒̉ͮͪ͘͠͞.̷͎̥͌̃͌ͪͧ̅̇͢͠͞ ̵̸̡̮̱͇̤̒ͨ̎͑͘͟γ̢̮̤͚̘̠̫̭ͭ̐̓́͘͠ε̷̴̞͉ͥ̋ͦͨ̀͘ͅг̴̸̥̮̣̂ͥ̌͜͞е̶̴̮͈̯̤̎͗̊͠.̸̶̱̻̺̰̱̄̎̓̈͝͠г̘͈̥̟̀͗ͨ̀̀͠e̸̟̙͇ͦ̆ͫ͢͟͞γ̶̖̗ͩ̽͞е̖͕̲̙͗ͤ̌͒̀͟͟͞.̸̸͖̣̝͍͋̈́̊̂́̓͜͝͝

Someone who stood like a blade too long honed. Someone who never flinched. Who never left.

His chest clenched. A hollow echo. A warning bell.

He wouldn’t leave me. He wouldn’t.

Would he?

Or maybe that boy wasn’t real at all. Maybe he’d been carved from longing. Woven together out of the silence. A ghost dressed in protection and steadiness.

A lie.

Yuanzhi pressed a shaking hand to his chest, trying to feel something. Warmth. Rhythm. Proof.

There was none.

Only space. Too much of it. Too empty.

He was unraveling.

Thread by thread.



Name by name.



Memory by memory.

Maybe he had always been.

Maybe this – this silence, this dust, this stone – wasn’t a prison, but a mirror. Showing him what was always true.

That in a world without war, without death, without the need for poisons or scapegoats or brilliant, broken boys–

He simply ceased to be.

No role. No name. No purpose.

A mistake erased. A shadow that once served its function and was now discarded. A placeholder no longer needed.

He rocked forward slowly, forehead against his knees. The pestle slipped from his hand, rolled across the stone, and came to rest with a hollow clink.

The sound echoed. Too loud. Loud enough to seem like it should summon someone.

Anyone.

But the silence swallowed it whole.

Chapter Text

Shangjue’s footsteps echoed through the palace like thunder, but the halls remained silent. Too silent it swallowed sound and gave nothing back.

Every room he tore through was untouched. Pristine. No scroll out of place. No robe hung crooked. The dream had wiped everything clean. The servants bowed politely but offered no names, no answers, no recognition. He wasn’t real to them. None of this was.

The air smelled like camellia tea and burning memory.

“Yuanzhi!” he barked, voice sharp, but it bounced off lacquered pillars and vanished into stillness. “Yuanzhi–!”

No reply. 

He shoved open door after door – main pavilion, the lotus garden, even the old southern wall where Yuanzhi once set fire to a crate of medicinal scrolls just to prove Elder Hua wrong. Nothing. Not even the scorch mark remained.

His pulse climbed higher, erratic. The west wing was next.

Of course it was empty.

Yuanzhi had never lived there. Not in this version of the world.

Shangjue’s lungs stung, not just from the running, but from the dread coiling behind his ribs, sinking its teeth in deeper with every unanswered breath. He wasn’t running anymore – just frantic. Unmoored.

“Zhi’er!” he shouted again, voice cracking around the edges as it echoed through courtyards built of dreams and denial. “Answer me!”

Still nothing.

There’s only the wind, sweetened by a peace that felt more like anesthesia.

He spun on his heel, breath ragged, bolting back toward the inner estate. Past the kitchens. Through the servant’s wing. Into corners of the palace that no longer had names. Places they’d once hidden in as boys. Places Yuanzhi used to slink into when he didn’t want to be found.

But he wasn’t there.

He wasn’t anywhere.

Every turn of a corridor felt like it might be the one, every shadow a trick. Shangjue flung open side doors. Yanked curtains back. Kicked through storage rooms. His mind raced faster than his feet, conjuring images he couldn’t shut out: Yuanzhi on the floor. Yuanzhi glassy-eyed. Yuanzhi fading, again, because Shangjue was too late to catch him.

He even stormed through the ancestral shrine, nearly toppling one of the offering lanterns, heart thundering, willing the dream to break. To bleed at the edges, to give him some sign.

“Show me,” he hissed. “Give me something–”

Still. Nothing.

He stopped in his tracks, chest heaving, throat raw. His voice dropped, soft and ragged.

“Zhi’er…”

The word cracked open something in him. He could barely hear himself over the thrum of his heartbeat.

Then –

A sound.

Faint.

The drag of something against stone.

Shangjue froze. Every muscle locked. He held his breath.

Again. A soft scrape. Barely audible. Like nails against slate. Soft, scraping. Like someone moving in a crawlspace that wasn’t meant for living things.

Beneath him.

He dropped low, listening. His ears straining, pulse hammering.

There.

Without thinking, he turned and bolted down a narrow corridor, one barely wide enough to walk through sideways. The lights dimmed. No torches here. The walls were stone. Not even plastered. Cold. Cracked. Forgotten.

He ran his fingers along one wall.

A seam.

His breath hitched.

A door?

No. Not even that. Just a jagged opening. Half-covered by a drape, frayed and moth-eaten.

Shangjue pushed it aside and ducked in.

It was barely a room.

A hollowed-out pocket behind the servants’ quarters – windowless, airless, no more than a storage cavity in the bones of the estate. There was no bed, no mat. Just a stack of old boxes pushed aside, some faded scrolls curling into themselves. A shattered mirror leaning in the corner. A single cracked bowl, half-filled with stagnant water.

And in the center of that decay – hunched, silent, knees drawn to chest like a folded shadow – sat Yuanzhi.

Shangjue froze. The air left his lungs like a punch to the sternum. He staggered forward a step, then stopped again, throat closing.

This wasn’t the boy he knew.

He was young. Far too young.

The age he'd been when Shangjue found him after the massacre, standing barefoot in the ruin with ash on his skin and blood on his hands. In this dream, he looked even smaller. Shrunk. Like memory had pressed him in too tight a mold and left the edges to rot.

It was him. It is Yuanzhi. But it was like staring at a memory that had been locked in a box for too long and come out moth-eaten. Silent. Folded too tightly to breathe.

Yuanzhi’s hair hung limp in his face, uneven and knotted, like no one had ever bothered to cut it properly. His robes were threadbare, patched at the sleeves, the hem trailing like he’d outgrown it years ago and no one had noticed. His arms were too thin, knobby at the joints. He was drawing something on the stone with the edge of a shattered tile, jagged lines that looped and curled with no discernible shape. The motion was methodical. Repetitive. Not quite present.

A faint circle was etched into the floor. Incomplete. Forgotten.

Shangjue stared. He tried to speak…..failed.

Tried again.

“Zhi’er...?”

Yuanzhi flinched.

Just a twitch. But it was the kind of flinch that made Shangjue’s stomach twist violently. The kind that said don’t touch me, I’ve been touched too roughly before.

“Yuanzhi-didi,” Shangjue said, softly this time.

The boy didn’t look up. His hand kept moving, dragging broken porcelain across stone like he was trying to carve something out of his own mind.

“I’m not supposed to talk,” Yuanzhi mumbled, voice flat, barely audible. “Talking makes it worse. If I talk, I’ll forget faster.”

Something in Shangjue squeezed. “…forget what?”

Yuanzhi blinked, slow. “There was something I had to hold onto. Something I promised not to lose. But it’s gone now. I think I lost it. Or… maybe it wasn’t mine.”

He sounded tired.

Shangjue reached toward him, slow, like approaching a wounded animal.

“You didn’t lose it,” he said. “I’m here. I came to find you.”

Yuanzhi tried to move away, a short aborted step that didn’t quite make it, eyes glassy, unfocused. “You’re not real,” he said. “You’re from the world where I mattered.”

The sentence felt like it had been carved into him.

“You matter,” Shangjue said, voice steady but his hands betrayed him, shaking, as though bracing against something he couldn’t name.

Yuanzhi didn’t reply. Didn’t look at him. His gaze stayed fixed on the jagged lines scratched into the stone, the movements of his hand slowing but never stopping, like a ritual too ingrained to abandon. Then he pressed his forehead to his knees and whispered something like a name.

Shangjue didn’t catch the word. Didn’t need to. There was a shape to that kind of whisper the kind hollowed out from grief so old it no longer cried out, only echoed.


For a moment, the only sound was the faint scrape of his sleeve against stone. The air between them was thick with all the things that had never been said. Years of silence, of loyalty mistaken for peace. Shangjue watched him fold in on himself with a precision that felt too deliberate to be unintentional. A motion repeated so often it had become instinct.

He crossed the space and drew him into his arms. Not to mend anything, not to speak sense into the silence, but simply because it was the only thing left. His arms tightened around Yuanzhi with the quiet desperation of someone trying to hold together a breaking thing. To keep what's left from spilling. 

Time dragged. The silence between them stretched thin. It was the kind of silence that grew teeth, the kind that gnawed at the edges of memory and identity until nothing remained but a shape that used to resemble a person.

Yuanzhi didn’t look up.

Didn’t blink.

Didn’t breathe like someone who still thought he deserved to.

Shangjue stayed there, hunched awkwardly in the dimness, one arm locked protectively around the boy’s narrow shoulders, the other clenched tight in the folds of his own robe, trying not to shatter.

“Didi,” he whispered, as if the name alone might stitch something back together. “Please.”

Yuanzhi stirred slightly. From the shift of a thought. From some echo dredged up from beneath layers of numbness.


“They say if I make noise ,” he mumbled, “I’ll be r̢͐e͎͌́p͖̀̔̌͘l̖ͪ̑ḁ̷̭ͦc̷̤̘ͤͬ̽e̬d̈́ͩ. Again.”

The words landed like stones in a still pond. Rippling outward. Dragging breath from Shangjue’s lungs. Around them, the dream seemed to listen. The faint hum in the walls deepened, just enough for the ear to notice. A warped, low-pitched drone, vibrating at the edges of hearing. The shadows in the far corner crawled, slow and deliberate, as if drawn by the fracture in his voice.

“They said I should be grateful,” Yuanzhi went on, voice barely audible. “That I had a roof. That I had robes. That I was still alive. But I think…”

He paused.

Something flickered. Not light - something deeper, embedded in the fabric of the room.

He trailed off. His eyes drifted to the cracked bowl in the corner, half-filled with stagnant water that hadn’t been touched in days.

“̜͔̞ͧ̔͌̃Ị͖̈́ͮͤ͛͛͌͗ ̯̝̭ͣ͌͌̾̅̏t̗̝̯̊͑ͨͯ̋h̹͚̙ͥͦͮ͊̇͂ḭ͚̽̿̈́n͚ͫ̑̋ͫk͖̞͍̂͛̒̑̐̌ I w̜͍͊̓͛̈́̀ͅͅȧ̺̝̙̺̩̈̌͗̇s̞̅̃ͫ̆n̤̹ͣͩ’͖̈ͧ̄̽̋t̻̪͖͗ͥͮ ̰s̺̯͔̮̓̓̄͒ͣͭu̳̖̘̤͒̍ͩ̅̒ͥp̮̝̜̥͌̿̊́p̠̳̼ͮ͂ͧo̙̣̙ͭͯ̊s͙̹̥̖̒ͥͩe̘̖̦͌̒͒͛ͭͧď̟̟̅̓ ̻̰̟͖̏̏͒͊̏ͅṯ̝̤͎̉͛̽͌̈́o̤͍̤̮̼̠̐̃̌̈́̓̒ ͈͉̘̪̃͂ͮ̿͗̌e̦̻̗̎̌x̙̘͚͋͊͗͒̓̂ȉ͎̼̥̅̃s̪̪͊ͫ̅̑͒͂͛̄t̳͈̺͓̾̐̈ͪ.͉̇”̭̜̼͔͂̅̇͑͋

The sentence broke the air. Not with volume, but with distortion. A pressure that seemed to ripple sideways through the room instead of forward, like space itself had flinched.

For a second, Shangjue felt his own thoughts stagger. Like the meaning of the words was trying to be rewritten while he heard them.

“They said Langjue lived and I… didn’t need to.”

Yuanzhi wasn’t speaking to him. Not really. He was reciting something. He was unspooling a truth that had lived too long inside his bones. A rule, a belief. The kind learned not in words, but in glances not returned, in invitations not extended, in a hundred small erasures that rewrote his existence one omission at a time.

The air in the room had gone thin and sour, like memory rotting into something poisonous.

And Shangjue understood – this was the poison. Not just the one in the body. But the one that sank into the soul through silence and time.

A world where Gong Yuanzhi was not needed. Not wanted. A world too pristine, too perfect to accommodate someone like him. So it made a neat correction – folded him out of the narrative, tucked him into a storage hollow like a forgotten relic. Left him to fade.

“I used to think,” Yuanzhi whispered, “that if I worked hard enough… you’d stop looking for him in me.”

Shangjue flinched. The room flared, subtly. The walls listened.

“I̜̰̯̒̀̓̓̾̄’̓̆̽m̲̰̅ͪ̏͒͂ ͖͕͓̒̑̓̽̇̑͛s̭̭͉͐͐̿̂̑ͯo̦̹͍̎͊r̭͈̦̞͒ͪ̇̆ͣ͂r̬̻̙̐͐ͩ̂̋͋ẏ̱̝ͫͭ,” Yuanzhi added, and the words were worse than any accusation.



There was a split-second dissonance, like two versions of the sentence overlapping out of sync. Then-


“I didn’t mean to take his place.” 

He reached out, slow and careful and pulled the cracked mirror into his lap. Turned it toward himself.

Studied the reflection.

“Does he look like this?” he asked. “The brother you lost?”

“No,” Shangjue said, heart breaking. “You never looked like him. You never had to.”

Yuanzhi’s hand trembled harder. “Then why do I feel like I only exist because he doesn’t?”

Yuanzhi looked at him with wide, unreadable eyes.

“Then why,” he whispered, “did they only start seeing me after he died?”

Shangjue’s breath shattered in his lungs. He  folded forward, his hand rising – hesitating – before he pressed his forehead gently against the top of Yuanzhi’s head.

It wasn’t an embrace.

It was an apology.

“Because they were blind,” he said hoarsely. “Because I was.”

He closed his eyes.

Shangjue’s hands clenched into the floor.

“I thought if I protected you, it would be enough. But I let them treat you like you were a placeholder for someone we could never have back.”

He remembered. The way elders had whispered behind fans. The way the servants had tiptoed around Yuanzhi like he was a defective heirloom that might shatter if spoken to too loudly – or worse, infect the others with his silence.

“I kept waiting for the day you’d see it,” Yuanzhi said. “That I wasn’t enough. That I was too much. That maybe if Lang-didi had lived, I could’ve just… stayed in the background. Unnoticed.”

His fingers curled over the mirror.

Yuanzhi looked up at him again, and it was like being gutted.

“I didn’t want to replace him,” he said. “But I didn’t want to be sent away either..”

He inhaled shakily.

“I didn’t mind disappearing. Not really. Not if it meant you could smile again.”

Shangjue surged forward, hands shaking as he reached out, not grabbing, just cupping Yuanzhi’s shoulders with aching gentleness.

“You were never a burden,” he said. “You were never too much.”

“͓͎̹̮̯̍̑̎̉B͙̰̻̫̳ͫ͗̋͐u̟͓͔̭ͦ͐̉̌̈́t͖̘̗̳̙̱́̌̍̂ ̗͙͖͈̺̘̪͛ͯȈ̗̝͖͚̹̭̞͌ ̯͈͓̰̤̭̰͕̬͛̈w̫̞̘̪͈͙̄ͦ́ͩͅa̝̫͍͖̟͗̋ͪ̉ͣ̐̒s̮̖̬̙ͭ̓͐̆ ͍͓͎͈̟ͧ̉̂ň͓̭̰͉͉̞̦̀ͯ͗ë̫̥̦̦̤̠͚̺́v͕̥͉͙͔̆͂ͩͪ́͊ẽ͎̱̟̏ͪ̏ͧ̀r̘̲̣̹̫͗ͮͮͅ ̯̱̰̺̟͇͛̒̉̂...chosen ė͕̫̘̗͔̺̒̈̄ͅī͖̯͎̭̯̯ͦ̇t͙̺͈͙̺͉̭͍̦̏ͪͯ͂̀h̰̫̞͎̊͗̿ͭ̇e̩̱̞̲͓͛̒ͮͧ̓̃͗r̮̠̫͔̫̒̊ͭ.̣̜̣̝͚̼̦̫͉̉̋ͯ̋̿̔
 


The floor beneath them seemed to pulse once – so faint it might have been imagined. The shadows in the far corner shifted again, almost leaning closer. Then froze. As if something watching had blinked.


Yuanzhi hadn’t grown hard. He hadn’t grown cruel. He had simply learned to go quiet. To exist in corners. To fold himself so small that no one would notice if he vanished. And in this dream – this perfect, poisoned dream – had followed the logic of the wound. Of the lie Yuanzhi had swallowed so often it tasted like truth:

That the world only had room for one boy.

And he wasn’t it.

“I would choose you,” Shangjue said, and the words felt pulled from the marrow of him. “Even if Lang-didi lived. Even if Mother smiled again and the walls never burned – I would still look for you. I would still find you. I would still want you.”

Yuanzhi stared.

But something cracked in him, something brittle and silent and ancient. A breath escaped like it had been trapped behind his ribs for years.

“I don’t know how to believe that,” he said.

The words hollowed something out of Shangjue.

Because now he saw it – too late, too clearly. All the moments he’d let pass: the sharp humor that cut when it should have deflected, the sleepless eyes, the way Yuanzhi’s shoulders tightened whenever Langjue’s name was spoken. He’d never pressed. Never asked.

Because part of him had believed Yuanzhi was stronger than all of it. That his silence was stoicism. That his obedience was just fierce loyalty, not a quiet kind of punishment he kept inflicting on himself.

But it wasn’t strength.

It was guilt.

Yuanzhi had been blaming himself all this time.

For surviving. For being the one left standing. For breathing when Langjue had not.

And Shangjue – gods – he hadn’t seen it.

“You mourned the first so fiercely you let the second grow twisted in the shadow of your guilt.” Shangjue thought numbly, Huiye’s voice echoing like judgment and grief in his skull.

And this was the truth of it. Not just Yuanzhi’s pain. But Shangjue’s failure. His grief had built a shrine so large, it left no space for the boy who had survived it.

It was a punishment.

A quiet, carefully constructed world Yuanzhi had crafted for himself. One where everyone else was happy. Where Langjue was alive. Where Shangjue could smile again. And where Yuanzhi was tucked neatly out of sight – because that, in his mind, was the only way all of those things could coexist.

“I didn’t know,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “Yuanzhi-didi, I didn’t know you thought it was your fault.”

Yuanzhi looked away, shoulders trembling. The mirror slipped from his grasp and hit the floor –falling quiet.

“I would’ve given it back, ge,” he said, each word quiet but certain. “The life. The body. If it meant he could have yours again.”

“I know,” Shangjue whispered.

It was the deepest grief he had ever admitted. The confession scraped raw.

“I know,” he repeated, voice trembling. “And it kills me. Because I never wanted you to carry that weight. I never asked you to trade anything for me. I never wanted Lang-didi to live instead. Never.”

“I͔̲̣̣͓̻̟̹ͪ̏ͩ͑ ̦̘̠̞̼͉͉̖̏ͨd͚͇̙̤̠̤͕̳̦̓̈́̌̌o͙̜̫̗͍͎͍̭͚ͬͩ̔̉n͎͓̰͓̞͎̪̜̯̾ͧ̉’̙̣̻̱̻̳̻̥̭̏ͨ̓͂͂t̜͚͉̺̣͓̥͐ͭ͗̒ ̘̥̫͎̤̗̥̪̋̑͌̽̎ͅk͔̼̝͕̾̏ͫͨ͂ͅn̗͖̯̠̠̭̼͖͈̙ͯ̽́́o̤͈̦͉̺̩̎̊̏͌̆̀w̗̲̲͍̬͈̳̤̘̱̉ͭ̓̽ ̭̯̗̬̻͊ͣͯͪ̐ͅw͉̗͖̺͚̤̘̟̏͒̎̾̏̇ͅh͖͍̞̭̩̥̲̥̊͌ͪͫͅo͈̳̰̝͑̅͂̒̋́ ̰͖̩̞̤̣̈́ͨ̏I͕͙͕̟̣̞̠͌͐̋̾̾̾ͅͅ’̘̥̫̯̥̣̺͂̔͒̔̋ͬ́m̩̠̜̦̝̫̭̙̻̃̏̈́ ̞̼͔̗̝͕̗̠ͯ̾ͨ̔̏̅s͇̪̭͎̰ͧ͐͂͑ͅȗ̫̤̞̦͙̉ͨͭp̩͖̘̠̼͇̹̓̆ͦ̓̉̊p̗͕͉͚͇̙͎̋̒ͯ̏̽̈́ͅo̲͉͚̯͉͈͍̻͓ͣ̐̊ͪ̇ṣ͇͉̪͖̫̞̹̗͉̙͋̾́̓͌̽̔ë͈̦̭̩͖͙̖̖͒̃̑̽d̼̻̙̜̮̻͎̦̪̞͊̈́̊ͦ͒ ̼̭̝͓̬͓͕̂̃t̻͚͎͔͓͖͈̣͇̝͌ͫͫ̾͛̽ͅo͎̫̞̰̜̻͑̌̊ͫͥ̍ ͔̱̘͕̂̓̈̊ͥ̌b̬̘̬̰̰͈̝ͮ̐ͦͭ̌̈̍e͉̠̫̭̠͇̞ͮ̄ ̹̦̞̟̻̦͔̠͑̌ͣȉ̥̜͓͈̬̆͋̊̒̾n̹̫̳̘̗͙̞ͮ͛̑̽ͅ ̠̝̰̤̼̙̭͇̯̯ͮ̓̃͗͗t̘̤͚̞͔̬͐ͪ̎h̩͚̤͍̙̘̊̊͒͊͐̓i̻͖͕͔̱̥̿̔ͫ̅ͦ̋s̤̣̖͓̯͓̺͔̺̈́̍́͑ͮ ̘̗̞̜̮̭̮́̃̃̉́ͅŵ̩͇̥͇̼͍̱̲͖͇̓ͩ͒̒̉õ̯̺̰͇͙͈̹͂̃̄̇͐ͣr͎̞͈̬ͥ̆ͬ̑̄l̻̭͚͇̣̮̅ͩ̒̍̽̊d̗̠̰̝̤̫̟̝̗ͨ̑̅̊̅̿.”

Somewhere beyond the walls, the wind passed with an uneven pitch, like it carried the echo of another voice but lost it before it reached the room.

Shangjue’s stomach twisted.

Because he had done that.

Had watched Yuanzhi in those first few months out of unbearable loss. Trying to find a thread of Langjue in him. A voice. A flicker. Anything.

And Yuanzhi, already strange and quiet and terrifyingly clever, had been nothing like his brother.

Not soft. Not open. Not bright-eyed or gentle. He was razor edges and unspoken words and long silences full of unvoiced calculation.

But he had stayed. He had learned.

And he had loved fiercely with every strange and thorned part of himself.

And Shangjue had never once told him that was enough.

“You’re supposed to be you,” Shangjue whispered. “Even if this dream forgot you. I never did.”

Yuanzhi’s finger twitched.

And for the first time, they curled – lightly, uncertainly – around Shangjue’s wrist. Barely there. Like he didn’t trust his own right to hold on.

“I don’t want to be f̟̞̙̣̫̯̎ͬ͒ͨ̿ͩ͗ỏ͇̲͓̞̯̓r̬̭ͦͤ̂̃g͍̖̭̰͚̖̙͎̊ͪ͑̆ō͉̬̹̣͔̻̐̃̀t͓̘̰͚͔̀̆ͧt̤̻̠̺͎̬͎̤̋ͅé͎͔͈̜̮͈̗̬́́n͎͔̭̬̻͓͍̗̍̇ͬͮ,” he whispered.

“You won’t be,” Shangjue said fiercely, cradling the back of his head. “Not ever. Not by me.”

He gathered Yuanzhi into his arms, not like someone lifting a burden, but like someone recovering something sacred that had once been his and nearly lost.

“I want to ġ̮͚̮̪͈̬̲̃͊̿o̞̬͇̞͊̈ ̳̪̜̮͍̈́ͨͦͦͅh̖̭̝̤̦͓̊͂̉̾̊͛̇o̦̮̥͇͍̠͑̾̅m͓͎̜̝͑̂ͯ̀ͅe̞̘͕͖͕̒̂ͩͧ,” Yuanzhi said. Soft. Sudden.

Shangjue breathed in slowly, unevenly, his face turned into the crown of Yuanzhi’s hair. He could feel the boy’s weight – light, almost brittle – resting against him. There was no resistance in it, but no surrender either. Only that tremor in the bones, that guarded stillness of someone who wasn’t certain they were allowed to be held, to be wanted.

 
“I want to go home,” Yuanzhi repeated, a little louder now. The words weren’t firm. They frayed at the edges – half an admission, half a wish whispered into an empty room. The sentence existed, but loosely, like it was holding on by fragments of memory.

A tether. 

But even as Shangjue felt it stir the air – faint as a ripple through silk – there was something in the way Yuanzhi’s fingers didn’t quite curl back, the way his shoulders stayed half-tensed. The wanting was there, but so was the weight of something that wouldn’t release him. 

The walls gave the first warning. A faint vibration in the stone beneath them, then a deeper shiver. The room groaned like old wood shifting under too much strain.

On the floor, the mirror cracked again. Its surface crawling with a spiderweb fracture that split Yuanzhi’s reflection into shards. In those fragments, his face blurred and thinned, like the dream was already trying to pull him back into its fog. For the briefest heartbeat, his blurred face in the glass did not move in sync with the boy in Shangjue’s arms.

Shangjue’s arms tightened, anchoring them both. “Then we go. Now.”

He tried to rise, but the air thickened around them. Compressed. The space itself stalled. The walls pulsed, slow and arrhythmic. The floor vibrated under their knees, soft and sickly, like muscle memory about to spasm.


Then-


The dream obeyed in its own violent way. The wind began low, a strange hum in the corridors, and then it built – too loud, too hollow. The stack of boxes in the corner collapsed in on itself like leaves left to rot. The stagnant water in the cracked bowl spread black across the floor, thick and slow as ink spilled from a wound.

The air tasted faintly of iron.

From the corners of the room, shapes seemed to flicker – only for an instant – like figures caught in the periphery. Familiar, unfamiliar. Watching. Waiting. When Shangjue looked directly, there was nothing.

Yuanzhi flinched at the sound. “It’s coming apart.”

“It has to,” Shangjue murmured. “You’re waking up.”

But Yuanzhi’s head jerked against his chest, a sharp shake. “No!,” Yuanzhi said –panicked. “Not yet. Just… a little longer.”

The edges of Yuanzhi’s form wavered for a heartbeat, like the dream were trying to unmake him. He clutched at Shangjue’s sleeves, hands trembling with a kind of terror that didn’t belong to the waking world. The space behind him darkened. Not shadow, but erasure, the corner of the room blurring, collapsing into visual static.

“Zhi’er-”

“Please.” His hands in Shangjue’s sleeves, clutching hard now, like the dream might rip them apart. “Ge, I need to keep this. That you came. T̲̝̺̿̄̾̂h̬̦ͅa̦͗t̗̝̖͛ͬ ̜̺̀͌̈́̈y͖̺͔͚̭͋̆o̯̻͚͙͛ͥ̽ͣŭ̗̰̇̊ ͉̜͑s͍̺͗́͂a͓̬͖ͫ̈ͅẅ͕̲͍͕̅ ̹̟͛̿͒m̯̼̾̏e̙̠̔̅ͨ.”

The words cut through him because they carried that quiet disbelief that had poisoned Yuanzhi far longer than the venom in his veins.

Shangjue’s throat closed. He pressed his forehead to Yuanzhi’s, closing his eyes against the tearing edges of the room. “Then remember this: I would choose you. Every time. I’m not here because I lost him. I’m here because I couldn’t bear to lose you.”

The wind rose to a howl, tearing at the walls. The cracks split wider. The mirror shattered completely, its pieces vanishing before they touched the ground, as if the dream was swallowing the last of itself.

And still, Shangjue held him.

As the last fragments fell away, the air around Yuanzhi seemed to lag – a faint shimmer clinging to his outline, like the dream’s grip had not fully loosened.

A sharp breath tore through the clearing.

Huiye’s eyes flew open first – the silver ink smeared across his fingertips still glowing faintly before dimming to ash. His breath caught in his throat as he gasped like someone surfacing from too deep underwater. For a moment, he didn’t move. Just lay sprawled across the moss-ringed boundary of the ritual circle, his robes soaked through with sweat, his lashes trembling.

Jin Fan was beside him in an instant, crouched low, hand steady against his shoulder. “Master Huiye.”

Huiye’s head lolled slightly. Then he blinked – once, twice – and the focus returned to his eyes.

“…He made it,” Huiye rasped.

A truth.

And in front of him, Shangjue sucked in a shuddering breath.

He jolted upright with a sharp noise caught halfway between a gasp and a cry. His hands clutched the air first. Reaching, searching, before he realized he wasn’t holding anything. No dream. No boy. Just damp forest air and the tremble of his own body.

He curled forward violently, bracing himself on trembling arms, forehead nearly hitting the dirt.

“Zhi’er,” he choked. “Yuanzhi–”

“Easy,” Huiye’s voice cut through the fog, hoarse but steady. “Don’t move. The tether broke on its own – you were ejected.”

Shangjue didn’t hear him at first. Or didn’t care. His pulse was still roaring in his ears, full of wind and collapsing walls and the feel of Yuanzhi’s fingers fisted in his sleeves.

He pressed his palm flat against the ground.

The silver thread that once connected him to the ritual – to Yuanzhi – had unraveled, frayed into threads of light now dissolving into the soil.

What does that mean?” Shangjue rasped. “Where is he?”

“Not here,” Huiye said. “You returned. Alone.”

“No– he–” Shangjue surged to his feet, stumbling. The weight of the memory still hung on his shoulders like chains: Yuanzhi’s trembling voice, the cracked mirror, the soft, desperate Please. “He said he wanted to go home.”

“Then he will,” Huiye said. “But not now. Not through me.”

Shangjue’s breath caught. “He’s still unconscious.”

“Yes.” Huiye pressed his palm to his brow, blinking as if shaking off dizziness. “But the seed of return has been planted. If you reached him – truly reached him – he’ll wake.”

Shangjue stared at him.

The dream had collapsed in his arms. Yuanzhi had clung to him, had cried without sound, had looked into his face and asked why he only existed in absence. He had remembered.

But he hadn’t come back.

Not yet.

Not to this world. Not to his own breath.

Shangjue’s heart beat so loud it sounded like galloping hooves in his skull.

A sound tore from him - low, involuntary. Like someone whose ribs had cracked around a promise and found it breaking anyway.

“I promised him,” he whispered. “I told him we’d go together.”

“You did go,” Huiye murmured. “You held him in the dark. You helped him choose.”

“Then why isn’t he awake?” Shangjue’s voice rose, brittle. “Why didn’t he come through?”

“Because choosing to return is not the same as believing he’s allowed to.”

The forest blurred.

Trees tore past like ghosts. The world funneled to a single thought – a single need – a single name burning behind his eyes like a second heartbeat.

Yuanzhi.

Not again. Not this time. Not when he had finally heard the words his brother had never said out loud, the ones he’d been screaming in silence for years.

He had failed once. Let guilt eat the boy’s shadow until even the dream itself forgot him.

He would not let reality do the same.

The forest whipped past in a blur of shadow and light as the horses thundered over the worn path, their hooves churning up damp earth and fallen leaves. Shangjue leaned forward low over the reins, his jaw locked, wind snapping through his hair like a blade. Jin Fan rode at his flank without question, matching his pace stride for stride, their shared silence thick with tension.

They didn’t speak.

There was no time.

Every second stretched tighter around Shangjue’s chest – a cord winding toward a breaking point. His knuckles were white where he gripped the reins. His robe was torn from the forest’s claws, streaked with ash from the ritual and sweat from the weight of failure breathing down his neck.

He could still feel Yuanzhi’s voice in his ears.

I want to go home.

And yet, he hadn’t woken.

Not when Shangjue had held him. Not when the dream crumbled. Not when his name was spoken over and over like a lifeline.

Why isn’t he awake?

Shangjue drove his heels harder into the stallion’s sides.

The palace walls rose in the distance – grey stone and morning mist wreathed in silence. He didn’t wait for the gate to finish opening. The guards barely scrambled out of the way before he galloped through like a storm breaking.

“Open the inner court!” Jin Fan shouted behind him, but Shangjue was already gone.

The horses skidded to a halt in the stone courtyard outside the infirmary, breath huffing like steam engines. Shangjue dismounted before the beast had fully stopped, his boots slamming against the ground as he sprinted up the steps. He didn’t knock. Didn’t pause.

He burst through the infirmary doors.

“OUT.”

The room jolted to a halt. Elder Yue looked up from Yuanzhi’s bedside, startled but not surprised. The younger healers paled at the fury in Shangjue’s voice, scattering like leaves before a gale.

Elder Yue stood, but did not move.

“He hasn’t woken.”

The words dropped like lead into Shangjue’s chest.

He crossed the room in a blur, breath ragged, heart a war drum.

And there lay Yuanzhi.

Unmoving.

His skin too pale, his lashes dark against his cheeks. The fever had broken, but his body lay curled too tightly into itself, like someone still hiding from a blow. His hands were fisted in the sheets, his breath shallow and uneven, lips parted slightly as though mid-dream.

Shangjue  dropped to his knees beside the bed.

“Zhi’er.”

No answer.

He reached forward, one hand brushing Yuanzhi’s forehead, the other finding one curled fist and folding around it.

“I came back,” he whispered.

Yuanzhi didn’t move.

“I told you we’d go home,” he murmured, voice cracking. “So here we are.”

No response.

But the talisman tucked under Yuanzhi’s pillow pulsed – once, then again – slow and faint.

“Come back to me,” Shangjue said.

He leaned down, resting his forehead lightly against Yuanzhi’s temple.

“I’m here,” he whispered. “Come home, didi. Please.”

Chapter Text

The silence in the Gong estate was different now.

Not the cultivated stillness of discipline.

Not the reverent quiet of protocol.

This silence held its breath – and it hadn’t exhaled since the moment Gong Shangjue rode through the palace gates like a blade unsheathed.

Even now, hours later, the hush lingered.

It clung to the corridors, heavy and listening. It curled beneath the eaves of the inner court, wound through the cedar beams above the infirmary, and settled in the corners of the west wing like a prayer too afraid to be spoken.

Inside the high chamber, only a few had gathered – the ones who had the right to know, and the sense to tread lightly.

Gong Ziyu stood at the head of the war table, posture composed, expression unreadable, but the tension in his knuckles where they pressed against the lacquered wood betrayed him. Beside him sat the three clan elders: Yue, Xue, and Hua. Each carved from a different kind of stillness. Elder Yue, contemplative and grieving. Elder Hua, sharp-eyed, his concern laced with control. Elder Xue, rigid with the kind of dread that disguised itself as principle.

Jin Fan stood before them, wind-dried mud still clinging to the hem of his robes, dust pressed into the creases of his shoulders. He looked older than he had that night they left.

“You rode with him. Tell us.” Ziyu broke the silence first.

Jin Fan exhaled. “It wasn’t a poison cure. Not in the way we hoped. Master Huiye offered something different…..something older. A ritual that threads memory into the spirit, and walks the mind from within.”

Elder Xue’s brows drew together. “What was the price?”

Jin Fan hesitated. “….his first memory.”

That drew a visible shift from all three elders.

Ziyu frowned slightly, voice quiet but sharp. “First memory…..what does that mean?”

Jin Fan met his gaze. “It means the memory that anchors you. The one that forms the root of who you are. It’s not just a moment. It’s identity. If it’s given, it’s not forgotten. But the person who gives it… is changed. It’s like removing the first thread from a tapestry. Everything still holds, but it never quite sits the same.”

His voice lowered further, almost reluctant. “To give that away is to unmoor yourself. The first memory isn’t only what you remember – it’s what shapes you. Strip it away, and the world still stands… but you no longer stand in it the same.”

Ziyu didn’t speak for a moment. His lips pressed together, the silence stretching taut in the chamber as if he were weighing Jin Fan’s words against the marrow of his own memory. His gaze fixed not on Jin Fan, nor on the elders, but on the empty space above the lacquered table – as though he were staring into something none of them could see.

His fingers curled slightly against the wood, whitening at the knuckles, and when he finally spoke, his voice came low and deliberate, each word carved from restraint.

“…Langjue-didi.”

The syllables carried no ceremony, no softness, yet the weight of them struck through the quiet like a hidden blade. It was not posed as a question. It was not an idle guess. It was recognition. A name drawn from a place too raw to be coincidence.

Jin Fan’s eyes flickered upward. He did not answer, but the silence in his throat spoke loudly enough. He didn’t confirm. Didn’t deny. Because how could he? Only Master Huiye and Gong Shangjue knew the truth – and one had vanished into ritual, the other had returned too quiet to explain.

The pause between them was filled with the gravity of what could not be confirmed without tearing the air wider open.

The implication needed no elaboration. For Shangjue, the first memory could only have been that night – the one that had shaped him, cut him into the man he became. The last breath of his younger brother. The moment when innocence was torn away and duty took its place. To surrender that was not to part with an image or a scent; it was to carve away the root that had given every choice since its shadow.

The price had not been cheap. It had been everything.

At last, he forced the words out, quieter than before. “What memory it was… he never said. Only that the price was paid.”

Ziyu looked at him again. Quiet and assessing. “And after?”

Jin Fan’s eyes flickered. For the first time since entering the room, something in his composure wavered – not uncertainty, but the weight of something he hadn’t yet found the words for. His throat worked as though shaping a truth too jagged to fit into speech.

“I don’t know,” he admitted at last. “I wasn’t permitted within the circle. But when he returned, he was…”

He trailed off, searching, failing, the silence stretching with every heartbeat. His hands folded behind his back – a soldier’s instinct to hold steady when the words could not.

“He was not the same.”

Elder Hua’s voice cut through, soft but unsparing. “Not the same how?”

Jin Fan’s eyes dropped, then rose again with the heaviness of a man who had carried a glimpse of something unspeakable. “Like someone who had spoken with grief. And lost again.”

He paused, and when he went on, the words came slower, as though each one was a weight pressed into the chamber. “I’ve seen Gong Shangjue wounded. I’ve seen him furious, reckless, determined. But I have never seen him hollow. Not like that. Not like something had been scraped out from the inside, leaving only the shape of what used to be there. He walked as though he had returned, but part of him had stayed behind.”

A silence settled again. Heavy. Absolute.

When Jin Fan finally spoke once more, his voice was hushed, as if afraid the walls themselves might recoil from what he named. “Whatever he saw in Yuanzhi’s mind… it wasn’t just memory. It was a world. A world where Yuanzhi had been unmade. Forgotten. Shangjue went in to bring him back – but to do that, he had to see what it looked like when Yuanzhi had no place in it.”

The words hung there like a shadow with its own breath. In the chamber’s stillness, the image formed unbidden: a world in which the boy who had lived at Shangjue’s side since childhood was erased as though he had never existed. Not slain, not absent – but unwoven from the fabric of memory, leaving only an emptiness where he should have stood.

And Shangjue, forced to walk through that void, to touch the edges of a reality where Yuanzhi had never been needed, never remembered, never loved. Forced to carry back not just Yuanzhi’s hand, but the knowledge of what the world would look like without him.

A silence deeper than before opened in the room, the kind that forms when something terrible is understood, and no one wishes to disturb the shape of it.

It was Elder Yue who moved first — a slow closing of the eyes, as if in refusing to see he could unsee what his mind had already conjured. His voice followed like a breath drawn from beneath centuries of ink and mourning.

“That kind of dream doesn’t vanish,” he said. “It stains. It lingers in the marrow. It leaves residue.”

Ziyu’s jaw tightened. “A mind can fracture in silence,” he said. “Especially when it walks alone.”

The chamber did not breathe. Even the air seemed unwilling to stir, as if to name the fear outright might make it real: that both Shangjue and Yuanzhi had walked too close to a place from which the self did not return whole.

Ziyu stood straighter, trying to break the quiet heavy pressure that engulfed the room. He folded his hands behind his back like he was reassembling command one piece at a time. His gaze swept the room – steady, unreadable now.

“There’s nothing more to be done here.”

Ziyu’s voice didn’t waver. But it carried a new edge – not cold, but honed.

“Double the guards on the infirmary wing. No one enters without my seal. No advisors. No whispers. If Yuanzhi wakes, it will be to peace – not scrutiny.”

Jin Fan inclined his head. “Understood.”

Ziyu’s gaze lingered on the half-curled talisman on the war table – the one Shangjue had left behind before riding into the forest. The ink was smudged now. A faint fingerprint marked the edge.

He turned to Elder Yue.

“If there’s any shift – in his breathing, his pulse, his dreams – I want to know the moment it happens. Wake me if you must.”

Elder Yue gave a quiet nod. “You’ll be the first to know.”

Ziyu stood a moment longer, like he wanted to say more – but whatever words came to him didn’t pass his lips. Instead, he gave a single sharp nod, then turned.

The folds of his robes whispered against the stone floor as he left, shoulders square beneath the weight of command. But his hands, hidden behind his back, curled slowly into fists.

Not for discipline.

For what he hadn’t seen.

For what he still feared he might lose.

It had been sixteen days since Gong Shangjue returned from the forest.

Sixteen days since the ritual.

Sixteen days since he’d handed over the first thread of who he was in exchange for a boy who still hadn’t woken.

Yuanzhi had stirred once. Barely. A fevered murmur, syllables slurring around a name too soft to hear properly. And then, nothing.

This quiet had settled in. Stagnant. Worn.

Not even dreams they could catch.
Just stillness.

And the longer he remained like that, adrift, the more it felt like something essential was unraveling.
Not just within him.
Within the ones who stayed.

The infirmary bore it all in silence.

Even the walls had begun to feel tired. The stone floor held the imprint of too many sleepless steps. The curtains had not been drawn in days – not because they forgot, but because light had begun to feel like a trespass. Even the herbs that Elder Yue brought – their fragrance once sharp and clean – now smelled stale, cloying, as if clinging to their purpose out of habit more than hope.

Shangjue hadn’t left.

Not once. Not fully.

They had tried – Elder Yue, Jin Fan, even Ziyu once, briefly and with the quiet authority of command – but each had been turned away with a look, not of defiance, but finality. A kind of silence that said: This is where I will be. Until he isn’t.

He slept rarely, and only when forced. He ate less. His sword, normally within reach, now lay untouched in the corner of the room as if it no longer served any use in the kind of battle he now fought.

He sat beside the bed, body folded forward, hands clasped in front of his mouth, not in prayer, but in something more primal. Something like containment. As if words might spill from him if he wasn’t careful.

But he didn’t speak.

What was there to say?

That the boy who once stood with fire in his mouth now lay silent and unmoving, veins fading beneath skin too light for life?

That he had gone into Yuanzhi’s mind and seen the shape of a world that erased him? That he had walked that nightmare and dragged the thread back only to find it unraveling anyway?

That he feared – truly feared – that Yuanzhi no longer wanted to return?

The days had blurred. Lamps trimmed, herbs replaced, fever watched and measured. Shangjue knew the schedule by heart now – when Elder Yue would arrive to change the tincture; when the light from the high window would fall in an arc across Yuanzhi’s chest and disappear again.

The only thing that didn’t move was him.

And Yuanzhi.

The younger boy’s breath came in shallow, steady rhythms. Too steady it made Shangjue feel like he was watching a metronome, not a person. There were no shifts. No flinches. Not even the unconscious twitch of someone lost in deep dream.

Just stillness.
Not rest.
Just… absence.

He had spoken to him, on the first day.

Soft things, half-remembered.

Tales of when they were younger – the burnt edge of the garden where Yuanzhi once tried to grow blackroot in the middle of winter; the night Shangjue found him asleep beside the archives, ink-stained fingers wrapped around a book on nerve-gas and moon beetles.

He’d tried humor, too. Dry. Clumsy. An old favorite about Jin Fu accidentally mixing up the wine flasks and sleep tonic before a banquet. No response.

He’d tried anger once – sharp, barely leashed.

“Don’t you dare stay there,” he had said through clenched teeth, gripping the edge of the bed so hard his knuckles split. “Don’t you dare.”

Now he didn’t try anything at all.

He just watched.

Not Yuanzhi’s face – not anymore.
It was the chest. The breath. The only proof that something still remained.

And he hated it.

Because watching breath meant counting seconds. And counting seconds meant measuring how long someone could survive when the rest of them didn’t want to.

The room had begun to smell of drying herbs and old ink. The corners of the windows were filmed with dust. Someone had left a dish of sliced fruit earlier. Untouched, now browning at the edges.

A breeze moved through the open lattice – faint, brushing the torn strip of sash still tied there, the one from Yuanzhi’s robes. It stirred slightly. Nothing else did.

Shangjue leaned forward.

He didn’t speak. Didn’t reach for the boy’s hand.

He only watched.

Because something in him – something deeper than logic, older than memory – whispered that if he looked away for even a moment, Yuanzhi would slip further.

Would vanish.

And this time, he wouldn’t be able to follow.

A shadow crossed the courtyard – slow, passing – and for a moment, the light inside the infirmary dimmed. No wind. No voice. No sound but the faint brush of air across the open lattice and the ever-steady rise and fall of breath that barely moved the blanket.

Shangjue did not stir at first. He had grown accustomed to stillness – had memorized its shape and rhythm the way a soldier memorizes the beat of a war drum. He knew the subtle lift of each inhale, the delicate pause before the next exhale. It was the only measure of time that mattered.

But this time, something changed.

At first it felt like a trick of the eyes. A quiver, too soft to be certain. But it was there again. The faintest tremor in the fingers resting near the edge of the blanket. A slow twitch, as though the nerves beneath the skin were testing themselves against the world. As though the hand was reaching for something long gone. Or trying to remember how to.

Then again.

A motion with more intent. Weak, but real.

Shangjue rose so quickly the chair behind him tipped and struck the wall. He didn’t notice. His entire body leaned forward, drawn by a force that wasn’t panic or command, but something deeper.

Something raw. Like instinct stretched thin from too many hours spent in watchful silence.

Yuanzhi’s hand spasmed again.

The movement had been real. Deliberate. Not reflexive like the occasional fever twitch. There had been a will behind it. Weak, yes. Distant. But undeniably present. A movement born of something stirring far below the surface, trying to find its way back through the dark.

His brow tensed. A shadow crossed his face – brief, barely visible – the kind of expression that formed in sleep only when the soul began to stir. The faint crease between his eyebrows looked almost familiar. A furrow Shangjue had seen a thousand times in the field, when Yuanzhi was working through a formula no one else could follow. But now it surfaced like a ripple across still water.

His head turned fractionally toward the window, where the late afternoon light filtered through the lattice in narrow gold bands.

A strand of hair fell across his face.

Shangjue reached out. He didn’t touch him fully – just let his fingers hover near the edge of Yuanzhi’s hand. An offering. Quiet. Steady. A presence to lean toward if there was anything inside that still remembered how.

The silence felt brittle.

And then-



A breath. Staggered. Disrupted. The rhythm faltered, catching like a wheel in mud.

Shangjue’s heart twisted. A jolt too sudden to name. It was enough to break something open in Shangjue’s chest, a pressure that had been coiled there since the forest, since the ritual, since the moment he handed over his first memory and returned with nothing but silence in exchange.

His pulse roared, but he didn’t speak. Didn’t dare break the fragile thread beginning to pull taut between them.

Yuanzhi’s lips parted. There was no sound at first. Just the shape of a word trying to find its way past cracked lips and dry throat. A voice returning from the long dark.

“…cold…”

It wasn’t conscious. There was no clarity in it. The syllable was thin, raw, like wind scraping across old stone. A ghost of speech, and yet it shattered the silence more completely than a scream ever could.

Shangjue’s throat burned.

His body moved without decision, grabbing the folded blanket at the foot of the bed with trembling fingers and drawing it up, layer by layer, until it cradled Yuanzhi’s shoulders.

The boy didn’t move again.

His hand remained slack against the sheets. His eyelids didn’t twitch. The breath that came next was shallow but steadier than before.

There was color at the edge of his lips now. Faint. A flush born from effort or something deeper – Shangjue couldn’t tell. He only knew that for the first time in days, the stillness had broken. The waxen stillness of a boy who had nearly slipped from the world had begun to thaw.

Shangjue sat again, this time closer than before, forearms resting on the edge of the mattress. Hands shaking minutely. The blanket still rustled faintly from the movement, the folds settling against Yuanzhi’s chest like the final gesture in a sacred rite.

His fingers drifted to Yuanzhi’s hand – no pressure, only presence. His skin was still cool to the touch. Not lifeless. But not yet warm.

The closeness was unbearable. And still, he couldn’t pull away.

His voice, when it came, was hoarse – barely audible, rasped from exhaustion and something deeper, something cut into him like a buried blade that would never be pulled free.

“I’m here,” he said.

The words came out thin, scraped down to their marrow.

No poetry.

Only truth.

Because this time, it wasn’t just breath.

It was a thread. A pull.

A choice.

And Shangjue would be there – hands outstretched, silent, steady – for as long as it took Yuanzhi to follow it back.

It was quieter here.

Not like the dream.

The dream had been mercilessly vivid – cruel in its brightness, its edges sharpened to cut, its warmth hollowed into absence. Illusions always burn too clean, and this one had left its scorch. But this place… this was something else entirely.

Here, everything felt submerged.

Time did not pass so much as dissolve, like ink spilling into water, its outlines thinning before he could trace them. He floated, though perhaps it was more like drifting. The body that should have been his felt distant, unfamiliar, as though it had been stitched for someone else and slipped onto him by mistake. Too loose at the shoulders. Too tight at the throat.

Sometimes there were sounds.

A voice – low, steady, familiar. Not a command. Not a plea. Merely there. A weight pressed gently into the stillness, like an anchor dropped into deep water.

But he could not reach it. Not yet.

Every time he tried to move toward it, something inside recoiled. The effort sent jolts through him, as if a bruise deep within had been pressed. Worse still, as if his very being turned away, instinctively avoiding the thing it most wanted, the way eyes flinch from a truth too sharp to look at directly.

He had nearly woken once.

He remembered. The warmth of something draped around his shoulders, so vivid it startled him. The brief chill of air across his skin. And a word, slipping from his lips raw, clumsy, and unguarded – a name, or a plea, he could not tell. Real, all the same.

And then… he had faltered.

Not from refusal, but from something heavier, older. A whisper in the marrow of him: Not yet.

Because waking meant remembering.

And remembering meant standing face to face with what the dream had shown him.

That world where he did not matter.

Where he was nothing but a shadow skirting the edges of other lives.

Where his name was a footnote, his face blurred, his presence unnecessary.

He could not hold the dream’s details now – its edges bled away when he tried to seize them – but the weight of it clung still, like smoke that refused to leave the lungs. That ache of being disposable. The poison had not merely touched his body. It had tried to hollow out his meaning.

And yet–

And yet, the voice remained.

He could not discern its words, only the cadence, the shape pressed through the quiet like a pulse. Firm. Tired. Enduring.  Like hands against glass on the other side: not breaking, not forcing, only waiting. Only staying.

He did not know how long it had lingered there.
He did not know why it had not given up.

But something in him – fragile, reluctant, yet stubborn – reached back with the aching need of lungs relearning air.

He felt again the remembered weight of the blanket across his shoulders. The place where fingers had almost touched his own. A tether, faint but unbroken.

And for the first time, the frost inside him cracked. Only slightly. A hairline fracture beneath the first breath of sun.

Almost, he thought.
Almost enough.

But still, he lingered.

Not asleep. Not awake. Suspended in the seam between, where grief still wove through the lining of his mind and memory curled in on itself for protection.

Still, that voice waited.

And because it waited, he would try again.

If not now, then later. If not later, then soon.

Because it was still there.

And so was he.

Chapter Text

The change began in fragments.

It wasn’t sudden, not the kind of cinematic miracle where a body sits up gasping, the fever broken, the nightmare fled. No, this was slower, stranger, more fragile, like watching a frost-rimmed window thaw one drop at a time.

Yuanzhi had already stirred once, two days ago, whispering a single syllable into the quiet – cold – and then falling back into silence. Shangjue had clung to that moment as though it were a rope thrown across a gulf. It had not been enough to draw him back, but it had been proof: the boy was still inside, still fighting, still capable of naming the world.

Now the signs returned, hesitant and stuttering. Fingers twitching against the blanket. A shallow pause in his breath, breaking the metronome rhythm that had tormented Shangjue for weeks. The smallest crease at his brow, fleeting, but so achingly familiar.

Shangjue felt it like a blow.

He had watched so many false starts – spasms of fever, meaningless tremors – that his body should have been numb to them. But this was different. He knew the weight of Yuanzhi’s stillness, knew the cruel tricks fever played. This was no trick. This was a boy testing the edges of return.

He leaned forward until his knees struck the bedframe, one hand braced against the mattress. His eyes devoured every inch of the boy’s face, desperate for certainty.

Yuanzhi’s lashes fluttered. The lids opened by degrees, heavy, reluctant, as though the effort alone threatened to drag him back under. His gaze did not sharpen immediately; it drifted, unfocused, tracing the ceiling beams, the lattice, the shifting bands of light. His lips moved faintly, no sound emerging, just the bare shape of speech rehearsed in a dream.

Shangjue’s own breath caught, an ache sharp and merciless behind his ribs. He did not speak his name – he dared not. To press too hard was to risk breaking whatever fragile thread was pulling Yuanzhi back toward him.

Then – at last – the eyes found him.

They were clouded, heavy with exhaustion, but recognition flickered there, a light dim but undeniable. The unfocused haze gave way to presence, and it struck Shangjue like sunlight breaking into a tomb.

Yuanzhi swallowed, throat working painfully around dryness. His lips cracked as he drew breath enough to rasp, soft and halting, “…ge.”

The syllable was raw, thin as paper, more air than sound. Yet it struck harder than thunder.

Shangjue’s composure cracked. For over sixteen days, fear had lived in his marrow, every hour another stone laid heavier on his chest. Weeks of imagining the boy slipping further, of imagining a hand he could not reach, of imagining the silence turning final. But that word, frail as it was, shattered his discipline more cleanly than a blade could.

Relief was not a gentle thing. It came like collapse. It tore through him like floodwater, a rush too vast for his body to contain. His hands trembled against the mattress; his chest heaved as if it had forgotten how to breathe. His throat burned, raw with a sound he didn’t let escape. No tears came, but it felt as though the weight of all the ones he’d never shed pressed against his ribs, demanding release.

He had not prepared for this.

His lungs emptied in a single shudder, a soundless gasp that stole his strength. He bent forward, trembling, until his shadow covered Yuanzhi like armor. One hand hovered just above the boy’s wrist, close enough to feel the faint thrum of pulse against skin still cool.

He moved closer until the distance between them was gone. A ghost of a kiss pressed on Yuanzhi’s forehead.

“I’m here,” he said. His voice was low, rasped raw from sleepless nights.

Yuanzhi’s gaze lingered. His lips curved, faint and uncertain, the ghost of a smile, the barest echo of the sharp smirk that so often played at his mouth. But it was softer now, unguarded, as if some part of him had slipped past his usual armor in the act of return.

Shangjue felt his throat tighten, heat burning behind his eyes. He pressed it down, the way he always did. No sobs. No break. He would not collapse here, not when Yuanzhi’s first sight of the world was him. He would be steady, unshaken, the anchor Yuanzhi could reach for.

And yet the word – ge – still reverberated through him, rattling his ribs like something too large to hold. He had wanted it for so long, begged for it in silence, demanded it in fury, prayed for it against his nature. Now it was here, fragile and broken on Yuanzhi’s lips, and Shangjue almost could not bear the weight of it.

He pressed his hand tighter to the mattress, grounding himself. His body shook as though after battle, the kind of tremor that followed only once the blood cooled, once survival became undeniable. Yet this was no battlefield. The enemy was not slain. It was sleep, poison, silence – and the fact that Yuanzhi had clawed his way back from it at all felt like something beyond victory.

For days, Shangjue had lived with the certainty of loss. He had watched Yuanzhi’s stillness and thought: I will bury him too. He had imagined the rites, the ashes, the emptiness of a room stripped of his presence.

He had lived each hour as if it were the last, and the terror had settled deep in his bones, heavier than armor.

Now that weight cracked. And the shattering left him unsteady. 

“You came back,” he breathed. The words were low, hoarse, broken in a way that battle-cries never were.

It did not matter that Yuanzhi’s eyes were already slipping closed again, the fragile flicker of consciousness retreating into shallow sleep. The truth had been spoken. The silence had been broken. And Shangjue could finally let his body collapse into the knowledge that the boy was still tethered to this world.

He wanted to laugh, to sob, to shout until the walls shook. Instead he lowered himself slowly, trembling.

Sixteen days of terror unspooled inside him all at once. He saw again the endless stillness, the bowl of fruit left to rot untouched, the herbs turned sour, the storm of that first night when he had pored over scrolls with shaking hands. He remembered gripping the edge of the bed until his knuckles split, snarling don’t you dare to a boy who did not move. He remembered the moment in the forest when Huiye had drawn the thread of his first memory from him, when he had given up the sound of Langjue’s last breath, the warmth of that small hand going cold in his own.

He could no longer recall his baby brother’s face. Not clearly. It slid from him when he reached for it, blurred at the edges, drowned in ash. That grief had been the shape of his life, and now it was gone.

But Yuanzhi was here.

The faint twitch of his fingers beneath the blanket. The rasp of his voice. The fragile weight of his gaze clinging to him as if even in weakness, even in fever, he knew who had waited.

This…this was his anchor now.

Not the night of loss. Not the silence of ashes.

Yuanzhi’s hand. Yuanzhi’s breath. Yuanzhi’s voice calling him ge.

This boy had stood at his side through every storm since childhood. The one who never cried, never reacted like other children did, who smirked instead of wept, who made poisons instead of games. The one people had whispered about, called strange, called odd. The one Shangjue had chosen anyway, again and again, as his own.

And he had nearly lost him.

His throat constricted. He wanted to speak more, to tell Yuanzhi everything – the fear, the weight, the relief that felt like drowning – but the words caught. They were too large for speech, too raw for air. If he spoke them aloud, they might split him apart.

Shangjue closed his eyes, chest shuddering with the force of it. Relief hollowed him out and filled him in the same breath – wild, uncontrollable. For the first time in weeks, he believed – not hoped, not begged, not commanded – but believed that Yuanzhi would not leave him.

His lips brushed the boy’s knuckles, not a kiss, not even contact, just the trembling ghost of one. He didn’t dare more. The intimacy was unbearable already.

“You stayed,” he whispered, the words nearly lost to the quiet, as if saying them aloud might still undo them.

It was agonizing, the contradiction of it: that the boy who never cried, never clung, had been the one to tether him all these years. And now Shangjue was the one unmoored, the one clutching too tightly, as if the faint rise and fall of Yuanzhi’s chest was the last proof that the world still held.

His lips shaped words he did not let free – thank you, I love you, don’t leave, I can’t bear it. They clogged in his throat, too large for air. Instead, he pressed the boy’s knuckles closer to his brow, as if by that nearness alone he could anchor himself.

His body sagged forward, shoulders shaking once, hard, before he forced them still again. He would not sob. He would not frighten Yuanzhi with the storm he carried. But the relief roared through him, unstoppable, tearing apart the iron chains he had bound around himself for sixteen days.

He had lost Langjue once. He had lost everything that night.

But not this boy. Not Yuanzhi.

Not now.

Never.

The silence that followed was no longer the silence of absence. It was the silence of return, fragile and electric, trembling with the weight of what had just been spoken back into the world.

Shangjue, still bent close, let himself breathe as though he intended never to stop. And his chest, long caged in fear, finally remembered how to breathe.

The door slid open on a whisper of wood. Elder Yue stepped into the chamber, shoulders bowed beneath the familiar weight of tinctures balanced on a lacquered tray. He had made this walk so many times in the last sixteen days that the stones of the corridor seemed to have memorized the sound of his footfalls.

He expected stillness. He always did. The same tableau he had found at every visit: Shangjue rooted at the bedside like a sentinel carved from granite, Yuanzhi lying motionless in a body that betrayed neither progress nor surrender. He had learned to school his face to neutrality, to bow his head, to measure herbs and change poultices in silence, as though sound itself might offend the fragile balance that kept the boy tethered.

But this time was different.

The tray wavered in his hands. His heart caught, stumbled, then raced with a ferocity that startled him. For there, upon the bed where absence had ruled, Yuanzhi’s eyes were open.

Not wide, not bright. Clouded, heavy, as though the lids themselves weighed as much as iron. Yet they were open. Alive.

And Shangjue – Elder Yue’s breath faltered at the sight – was not the unmoving statue he had become. He was bent low, closer to the boy than Yue had ever seen, shoulders trembling with a contained storm, head bowed as if in prayer. His hand hovered over Yuanzhi’s, steady yet shaking, the posture of a man who dared not grip too tightly for fear that the miracle might dissolve back into silence.

It was an intimacy Yue felt almost wrong to witness. He lingered at the threshold, unseen, his own chest tightening as though a band had been drawn around his ribs.

The healer in him wanted to rush forward, to check the boy’s pulse, to measure his fever, to test his clarity of mind. But another part of him – the part that remembered being young and sneaking from the back hills to see the strange boy who had coaxed a nearly extinct flower to bloom – knew he had no right to intrude.

Because this was not a medical awakening. It was something more sacred.

Elder Yue’s eyes softened. He remembered the boy Yuanzhi had been: quiet where others clamored, sharp where others dulled, a child who spoke of poisons with the same wonder others reserved for poetry. He remembered the way people looked at him then – with suspicion, sometimes disdain. And yet here he was, the object of such unshakable devotion that Gong Shangjue had surrendered the root of his very being to bring him back.

What did it mean, Yue wondered, for the clan that one of its heirs was cherished so completely? What did it mean for their future that Yuanzhi had survived, not by medicine alone, but by love that refused to fracture?

The tray in Yue’s hands felt suddenly heavy. He set it down quietly on a side table, as though even the sound of wood against wood might desecrate the moment. He did not speak. Did not move closer.

His gaze lingered on Shangjue. He had always respected the man for his discipline, his loyalty, his steadiness in the face of duty. But now he saw another truth: Shangjue was not stone at all. He was flesh and marrow, bent nearly to breaking under the weight of love and fear, and still refusing to let go.

It humbled him.

Elder Yue closed his eyes briefly, bowing his head. For once, he prayed – not to any god he believed in, but to the fragile thread of fate itself – that the boy would not slip back into silence, that Shangjue’s sacrifice would not have been for nothing.

When he opened them again, he backed away. His steps were measured, soundless, his presence erased as though he had never been there at all. This moment belonged to the brothers, not to him.

And yet, even as he withdrew, Elder Yue carried with him a fierce, unshakable certainty: the Gong clan had witnessed many miracles in its long history, but few as profound as this.

The chamber was hushed, the weight of scrolls and maps pressing down like a second ceiling. Ziyu had been standing at the head of the table for some time, his gaze pinned to inked battle routes he wasn’t truly reading. His thoughts, despite every effort, had drifted again and again to the west wing, to the silence that had rooted itself there.

When the door slid open, the sound cut sharp through the quiet. Elder Yue entered, bowing low, a tray of fresh tinctures in his hands. His composure, always studied, always even, carried the faintest ripple now.

Ziyu saw it. His chest tightened before a word was spoken. “Well?” he asked, voice quiet, but the question beneath it thundered.

“He stirred,” Yue said, tone deliberately steady, though the undercurrent betrayed him. “Yuanzhi...he’s awake.” The elder’s gaze flicked up, reverent, almost unbelieving.

For a moment, Ziyu’s body forgot itself. His hands remained folded behind his back, his shoulders square, but inside….inside something wrenched. Sixteen days of dread collapsed inward, leaving him dizzy, as though the ground beneath him had shifted.

Alive.

The word filled him, too heavy to hold, too fragile to breathe out.

He had braced for the opposite. He had steeled himself through those endless days, convinced that when silence finally broke, it would be to tell him that Yuanzhi-didi was gone. He had prepared himself to carry another loss, to stand over another grave, to keep the clan from splintering under grief once more. He had worn that anticipation like armor, rehearsed it until it became the air in his lungs.

And now…Yuanzhi lived.

The boy who had always carried sharpness like a blade, who had cut Ziyu once with words so precise they had left scars: not a true Gong. That wound still ached, even now. But it meant nothing compared to this: the image of him lying silent, fading, had haunted Ziyu to the point of fury. And the thought of him gone – the youngest of them – was unbearable.

Because Yuanzhi was not merely a difficult cousin, not merely a thorn in his pride. Yuanzhi was family – brother, in blood if not in smooth affection. And Ziyu could not, would not, bear to lose another brother.

His body shook once, hard. He forced it still again.

When he turned back, his eyes were rimmed with unshed heat. He did not hide it. Not from Elder Yue. Not now. Not yet.

“What of Shangjue-ge?” he asked, voice rawer than he meant.

“He has not moved from his side,” Elder Yue replied gently. “He is hollowed, yes. but there is light in him now where there was only silence before.”

Ziyu swallowed hard, forcing control into his breathing. He was Sword Wielder. He was command. Yet he had never been stone. Even now, with the weight of the title across his shoulders, his heart beat too openly, too fiercely.

“…good,” he said finally, though the word trembled at its edges. “Then let him have quiet. No visitors. No council. No eyes upon him until he is ready. This is not for the estate. This is for him.”

Elder Yue bowed, eyes softened with something close to respect.

When he left, Ziyu remained at the window. His reflection wavered faintly in the polished lattice, his own face blurred by light. He raised a hand, pressed fist to chest, and let out a breath that came ragged, uneven, too full.

“Thank Heavens,” he breathed, voice breaking low, rough, honest.

His gaze went to the courtyard washed pale in morning light. The banners along the cedar beams swayed faintly, guards crossing in silent formation. Everything looked unchanged, yet to Ziyu it felt as if the very air had loosened.

The estate had been holding its breath for sixteen days. Now it exhaled.

He would not let himself join it, not fully. Not here. But the ache behind his eyes told him he wanted to. Ziyu remained standing at the window, his reflection faint against the light. His hand curled slowly into a fist behind his back. For relief so sharp it felt like grief turned inside out. For the storm he could not show. For the boy who had come back from silence, and the truth he would never say aloud.

He had been afraid – terrified – that this time, nothing would return.

Now, with Yuanzhi’s eyes open again, Gong Ziyu, Sword Wielder, allowed himself to weep once, quietly, where no one but the walls could see.

“Yuanzhi-didi.”

Then he drew the next steady breath, carrying it as Sword Wielder once more.

The courtyard stones were still damp from the night’s dew when Jin Fan crossed them, his boots leaving faint marks in the pale grit. The estate had shifted almost imperceptibly since dawn: attendants moving quicker, guards speaking softer, as though every person sensed some great weight had lifted but did not yet dare to name it aloud.

He knew why.

The boy had woken. Not fully, not firmly – but enough. Enough to send a ripple through the household that loosened shoulders and unclenched jaws, even among those who had not set foot near the infirmary.

Jin Fan walked with the stiffness of a man carrying not just news but memory. He could still see the ritual carved against his mind’s eye – the circle drawn in earth and ash, the smoke curling with symbols that twisted too old to read. He remembered Gong Shangjue stepping into its center, face like iron, while Huiye’s voice cut low and merciless around them. Your first memory, the price had been named.

And Shangjue had given it. Without hesitation, without bargaining, without even a flicker of fear. He had handed over the root of himself as if it were already owed.

Jin Fan had not seen what Shangjue saw within Yuanzhi’s mindscape – Master Huiye had forbidden it – but he had seen what emerged after. A man hollowed, carrying something jagged and invisible. A man who had returned with Yuanzhi’s thread in his grasp, yet seemed emptied of something vital, like a vessel poured out and left to echo.

And still, he had stayed. For over sixteen days, he had not moved from the boy’s side.

Jin Fan had been soldier long enough to watch men unravel in their loyalty. He had seen comrades break under lesser burdens. But Shangjue – he had endured. He had chosen it, again and again, every hour, every sleepless night.

That kind of devotion was not something Jin Fan could speak aloud. He did not have the language for it, nor the right. His duty was service, not sentiment. And yet, as he reached the steps of the west wing, his chest tightened with something dangerously close to reverence.

The guards at the door straightened when they saw him. They knew who he served, and they made way without question.

Inside, the air was thick with the lingering smell of herbs and oil. The quiet was different than it had been before – not suffocating absence, but the hushed awe of a place where something miraculous had occurred.

Jin Fan paused at the threshold. Shangjue was there, of course, bent close to the bed, one hand resting near Yuanzhi’s wrist as though that fragile pulse was the axis of the world. Yuanzhi slept again, his face still too pale, but color touched faintly at his lips now. His breathing, shallow but uneven, sounded human again – no longer the mechanical rhythm of someone trapped in poisoned stillness.

Jin Fan did not step forward. He stood at the edge, a silent witness.

This is what you gave your memory for, he thought. Not glory. Not power. Not even for the clan. You gave it for him.

He bowed his head, though no one was looking, and allowed himself one unguarded thought: that the Gong family was not held together by swords, or seals, or titles. It was held by this – brothers bound by something deeper than blood.

Jin Fan turned and withdrew as quietly as he had entered. His boots made no sound on the stones. His face betrayed nothing when he stepped back into the courtyard light. He was, as ever, the Sword Wielder’s guardian, the clan’s shield.

But inside, he carried an image he would not forget: Gong Shangjue, hollowed yet unbroken, holding vigil at a bedside as though his very soul were tied to the boy who slept there.

And perhaps, Jin Fan thought, it was.

The light shifted slowly across the infirmary floor as the hours stretched, the slant of the sun moving from sharp gold into the softer weight of afternoon. Shangjue had not moved. He sat close, elbows braced on his knees, his hand resting near Yuanzhi’s wrist as though even the faintest brush of warmth might vanish if he looked away.

For a time, there was only the sound of breath – uneven, shallow, yet unmistakably alive. The kind of breathing that spoke of struggle, not surrender. Shangjue listened to it like a man starved, every inhale a reminder that the boy had not slipped from him.

Then Yuanzhi stirred, lashes trembling, gaze dragging itself upward until it found him. Recognition flickered. Fragile, uncertain, but enough.

“Ge…” The word rasped, torn from a throat too long unused.

Shangjue leaned in at once, his hand closing over Yuanzhi’s with a steadiness that belied the tremor in his chest. “I’m here.”

For a while, that was enough. They simply breathed, the silence full but not empty, charged with something too raw to name. Shangjue could have remained like that for hours, anchored only by the fragile warmth beneath his palm.

But Yuanzhi’s lips moved again, voice halting, strained. “I thought… it would be easier… if I stayed there.” His eyes drifted, unfocused, as though he still half-saw the poisoned dream. “Easier… for everyone.”

The words cut. Shangjue’s grip tightened. He wanted to deny them, to silence the thought before it could poison the air, but the confession was too heavy, too true. Yuanzhi had believed it. And that belief had nearly stolen him.

“Don’t,” Shangjue whispered, his hand closing firmly over Yuanzhi’s. The calluses of his palm pressed against skin still too cool, but the contact was real, solid. He leaned in further, until his forehead almost brushed the boy’s temple. His voice broke against the closeness. “Don’t ever say that. Don’t ever believe it.”

Yuanzhi blinked, slow and heavy, his breath hitching. “I only bring trouble. Sharp words. Poison. I thought…” His voice cracked, almost lost. “Better if I was gone.”

The world seemed to tilt beneath Shangjue. For weeks days, he had feared losing him. Now, to hear Yuanzhi admit he had considered surrendering himself to that loss – it was more unbearable than all the silence that had come before.

He could not hold himself back. His free hand cupped Yuanzhi’s cheek, thumb brushing against the hollow beneath his eye. The boy was thinner than he remembered, fragile where he had always been sharp.

Shangjue’s thumb lingered against Yuanzhi’s cheek, tracing the line of bone beneath skin that had grown too thin, too delicate. He had always remembered Yuanzhi with edges – sharp eyes, sharp tongue, a presence that cut rather than yielded. Now the sharpness was there only in memory. What lay beneath his touch was frail, almost insubstantial, as though the boy might dissolve into air if he let go.

“You think the world is better without you?” Shangjue’s words were flayed raw, edged with something darker than grief. His hand cradled Yuanzhi’s face with a gentleness that belied the violence trembling in his veins. “I walked that world. I saw it. And it was nothing but ash.”

He bent closer until their foreheads brushed, his breath mingling with Yuanzhi’s uneven draw. “Don’t ever ask me to endure it again,” he whispered, fierce and absolute. “If you leave me, I will follow. And I will drag the world down with me, until every stone is blackened, every name erased, until nothing remains to remind me you were taken.”

The infirmary held its breath with them. The walls seemed to press inward, the shadows bending close, the thick scent of herbs unable to disguise the raw, human fragility unfolding at the bedside.

Yuanzhi’s lips parted, his lashes lowering as a tear escaped, sliding slowly toward Shangjue’s thumb. He tried to turn his face away, weakly, but Shangjue’s hand refused to let him go.

 “I’m sorry,” he rasped. “I thought it would hurt less for you… if I disappeared. I thought I’d only weigh you down.”

The apology pierced him deeper than the admission itself. Shangjue drew back just enough to look at him, hand sliding down to the fragile line of his throat, tracing life with desperate reverence. “Never,” he said, fierce and shaking. “You’ve never been a weight. You are the reason I still draw breath. Without you–” His voice fractured, the silence that followed darker than words. He pressed his lips tight, as if holding back something fatal. “Without you, I would have no breath to take.”

Yuanzhi’s lips parted, and for a moment Shangjue feared more words of surrender. Instead, a faint curve appeared, fragile and broken. “Ge,” he whispered, the syllable soaked with more feeling than he usually allowed himself. “You don’t have to—”

“I do,” Shangjue cut in, almost desperate, his fingers slipping into Yuanzhi’s hair, combing through strands damp with sweat. He bent closer, nose brushing the boy’s temple, lips barely grazing his brow. He couldn’t stop touching him – cheek, hair, the hollow at his collarbone – again and again, needing to remind himself again and again that this boy, his little brother, was real, alive, warm beneath his hands.

“I’m sorry,” Shangjue murmured against his skin, voice rough, every word a wound. “I told myself I could protect you from anything, but still you suffered. You almost slipped away while I watched. That failure is mine.”

Weak fingers shifted beneath the blanket, trembling as they tried to curl against Shangjue’s sleeve. The gesture was clumsy, but it was enough to halt the spiral of guilt. Yuanzhi’s gaze lifted, unfocused but burning with stubborn clarity. “You didn’t fail me. You gave me your strength when I had none.”

Shangjue closed his eyes, pressing his forehead against Yuanzhi’s once more, unable to contain the shaking of his body. The intimacy was overwhelming, a culmination of days of silence and years of restraint. He kissed the corner of Yuanzhi’s hairline, then the fragile curve of his temple, then rested again at his cheek, breathing him in. Every touch was reverent, desperate, like a man starving who had finally been allowed food again.

“You’re mine,” Shangjue said hoarsely, almost to himself, but the confession carried, naked and true. “Mine to keep. Every breath, every flicker of your eyes – I’ll hold them all. You hear me? I’ll hold them until you’re steady again. You’ll never go where I can’t follow. Never.”

Yuanzhi exhaled, shaky and uneven, but it sounded closer to release than despair. His hand – still weak, still trembling – tightened minutely on Shangjue’s sleeve. “Then you’re stuck with me, ge.”

Shangjue gathered him carefully into his arms, lifting enough so that Yuanzhi’s head rested against his shoulder. He felt the fragile rhythm of his breath against his collarbone, the uneven thrum of life slowly reasserting itself. His arms encircled him, steady, unyielding, as if to shield him from memory itself.

He pressed his lips once to the crown of Yuanzhi’s hair, eyes burning. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

He paused. “If the world dares take you again,” he whispered, voice low and unholy with promise, “I’ll tear it down to nothing and follow you into the ruin.”

The boy shuddered once, sound breaking out of him – half sob, half laugh, torn from somewhere deep. He clung as best he could, face buried against the warmth of Shangjue’s neck.

Shangjue held him tighter, unable, unwilling to let go, every heartbeat exhaling the same truth into Yuanzhi’s hair: “You’re not alone. You’ll never be alone.”

And as night deepened, they remained in each other’s hold – two brothers scarred, unmoored, but bound by a love so absolute it had defied silence, poison, and dream. For the first time since the nightmare began, the rhythm of their breaths wove together, steady, inseparable, alive.

Dawn thinned the dark to a pale rind. The last lamp guttered, a wick spent to ash. Outside, a thrush tried a hesitant note and thought better of it. Inside, the air had changed in ways too small for the eye – cooler against the skin, less stale with old smoke. The night’s vigil had gentled into the first hour where things could be put back into human shape.

Shangjue woke from the kind of half-sleep that is only a pause between alarms. Yuanzhi’s breath warmed the hollow above his collarbone, a faint, steady brush that felt like a hand counting him alive. When he tried to ease back, Yuanzhi’s fingers twitched and caught the edge of his robe, a child’s instinct made clumsy by exhaustion.

“I’m here,” Shangjue murmured, because the boy’s body answered truth better than silence. He shifted so the pillow took Yuanzhi’s weight and slid a palm beneath the nape of his neck, thumb rubbing a small circle there until the muscles unknotted.

“Water,” Yuanzhi rasped, barely more than air.

Shangjue reached one-handed for the cup Elder Yue left each night, held it to Yuanzhi’s mouth, and tipped just enough to wet his lips. “Slowly,” he said – gentle, but the command in him never slept.

Yuanzhi swallowed. Even that effort seemed to pull shadows through his face. “Tastes… like dust.”

“It’s water,” Shangjue said, dry. “You’re out of practice.”

The faintest line appeared at the corner of Yuanzhi’s mouth. Not quite a smile. The shape remembered how.

Shangjue set the cup aside and with his free hand rang the small bell once – soft, a request rather than a summons. He could hear the change in footfalls in the corridor: the light, deliberate cadence that meant Elder Yue, not an attendant.

Before the healer arrived, he dampened a cloth and wrung it carefully, then wiped the sweat from Yuanzhi’s brow, along the line of his cheek, under the jaw where fever had sketched hollows. He moved with a care that bordered on hunger, like a man relearning a language through his hands – temple, cheekbone, the ridge of the ear, the fragile hinge of the shoulder. Each place he touched he named silently to himself, as if reciting the boy into being again.

Yuanzhi watched him from under heavy lids. When Shangjue’s fingers paused at his wrist, taking the pulse more by habit than need, Yuanzhi turned his hand and, with effort, threaded his fingers through Shangjue’s. The fit was awkward – their palms misaligned by the blanket’s bulk – but it steadied them both.

A knock, soft as a breath. Elder Yue slid inside, then paused at the threshold until Shangjue looked up. The healer’s gaze flitted over the small evidences of living that had crept back into the room: the emptied cup at the bedside, the bowl of fruit replaced with fresh slices that hadn’t yet browned, the discarded band of linen where sweat had dampened it through.

“Let me look,” Elder Yue murmured.

Shangjue eased back reluctantly and only by increments, his hand never fully leaving Yuanzhi’s. Elder Yue checked the pulse at the wrist, then at the throat, two fingers resting with practiced patience. He watched the minute swell at the ribs, the pattern of breath: nothing effortless, but no longer a metronome of absence either. He drew back a lid with the gentlest pressure – Yuanzhi’s eyes, heavy with exhaustion, still tried to find the light.

“Drink,” Elder Yue said, and held the cup. Yuanzhi swallowed, every motion careful, his throat working around small hurts. A thread of color lifted at his mouth afterward, so faint an untrained eye might have missed it. Shangjue did not.

Elder Yue’s hands moved in quiet circles: the poultice replaced, the tincture measured and marked, the folded compress set aside. “The poison’s echo will linger,” he said softly, to both of them, not as a warning but a truth. “Dreams may feel more like rooms than thoughts for a while. If he falters, do not call it failure. It is only the mind sorting its way back through the dark.”

Yuanzhi’s lashes tipped lower. “Rooms,” he repeated, as if tasting the word for accuracy. He turned his face slightly, toward Shangjue’s palm. A choice. Even small, it steadied the room.

Elder Yue watched that turn and allowed himself the smallest smile. “Good.” A pause. Then. "I'm glad you're back, Young Master Yuanzhi."

The words lingered between them, light but unshakable. Elder Yue did not intrude further; he only gathered his tools with the quiet efficiency of someone who understood the limits of medicine. The rest was not his to hold.

He set the cup aside and rose. “I’ll have the night herbs sent. If there is any pain–”

“I’ll know,” Shangjue said. It was simple statement, as neutral and irrefutable as gravity.

Elder Yue studied him for a quiet, weighted second – the hollows beneath the eyes, the line of a mouth that had refused to collapse, the hand that never stopped telling the same truth against Yuanzhi’s ribs: here, here, here. He bowed, a fraction deeper than custom required, and withdrew.

Silence returned.



Yuanzhi’s lashes lowered, and for a moment Shangjue thought he’d slipped back under. Then the boy’s gaze found him again, clearer. “What did you give?”

The words were quiet, but they landed with the gravity of ink dropped into water – spreading, tinting everything. Not accusation. Not even curiosity. A reckoning. A ledger laid open between them with every empty line demanding truth.

Shangjue’s hand went still on the blanket. He could have deflected, wrapped them both in gentler cloth for a few more hours. But this boy had never been spared the sharp edge of the world, and Shangjue had never met him with anything but the same edge, turned honest. When it mattered, he did not lie.

“My first memory,” he said.

Silence deepened, not colder but denser, drawing close around the shape of those three words. Even the lamp-flame seemed to listen. Yuanzhi stilled in that precise way he had when a theorem clicked into place – stillness not of shock, but of arrival.

“….which?” he asked, and though his voice thinned on the second syllable, Shangjue heard in it the ache of foreknowledge, like a wound prodding its own bruise.

Shangjue let out a breath that felt older than his lungs. “Langjue-didi,” he answered, and the name slid unfamiliar in his mouth – as if he’d borrowed it from someone else’s memory, a house he recognized only by the door. “The moment that made the rest of me.”

Yuanzhi’s fingers tightened – weak, shaking – but decisive. “Ge…”

“It is done,” Shangjue said, too quickly at first, then softer, as if smoothing the word into the room. Only then did he realize his thumb had already returned to that small, steady circle inside Yuanzhi’s wrist – an instinct teaching bone and blood that nothing was breaking here. “Don’t try to give it back to me. Let it stand. Let the price be the price.”

Yuanzhi looked at him as if memorizing the architecture of his face – the places grief had hollowed and love had roofed over. Fever had not clouded that gaze; if anything, it had burned away the mercies between them. “Then take this instead,” he whispered.

His body trembled with the effort, but he lifted their joined hands and pressed Shangjue’s knuckles to his mouth. Not a brush, not a token, but a lingering press - lips, breath, the damp heat of fever. It was raw, unornamented, unashamed. A vow laid bare in skin and air, one that left nothing between them.

“Make this your first memory,” Yuanzhi said, his mouth still against him. His words ghosted over Shangjue’s skin, sinking deeper for the nearness. “That I returned. That I chose you. That even from the dark, I found my way here - to you.”

Every syllable rang like a brand pressed to Shangjue’s soul. His throat closed around a sound he did not release, something too wild, too desperate, too relieved to escape. Inside him, the knot that had bound him since Langjue’s last breath came undone with a silent rip, a loosening that hurt as much as it healed. His eyes shut, lashes trembling, and his body swayed - every part of him leaned toward the fragile heat of that vow, pulled inexorably closer to the anchor Yuanzhi had become.

When he opened them again, his face bore no collapse a stranger could see. But in his voice, everything had shifted. It rang through the quiet like a bell struck deep in stone, reverberating with salt and prayer, with the ruin and the rebuilding both.

“All right,” he said, and the words carried salt and prayer. His fingers curled more securely around Yuanzhi’s, as if fitting a key back into its lock. “All right.”

Time melted.

Lamps were lit somewhere outside; their warm reach slipped through the lattice, laying amber bars over stone and blanket and the slope of Shangjue’s shoulder. Dust motes turned to slow constellations.

A soft knock touched the frame just past twilight. Gong Ziyu’s form filled the narrow opening, a silhouette against the hallway lantern.

Ziyu did not enter immediately. He stood on the threshold long enough for the discipline to catch up to the heart hammering at his ribs. Then the door slid back, and he stepped in with his title set aside so thoroughly that Shangjue, even in the fog of sleeplessness, felt the shock of it.

“Yuanzhi-didi,” Ziyu said, voice rough.

Yuanzhi turned his head. The effort cost him, but he did it. Ziyu crossed the room in two strides and stopped as if he’d reached a cliff. Shangjue shifted only enough to make space without letting go.

Ziyu went to one knee – a man who had knelt for no one in years – and set his palm, hesitant, on the blanket above Yuanzhi’s ankle, as if touching flesh would break something sacred. “You look terrible,” he said, and then made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a sob. “Thank the ancestors you do.”

Yuanzhi’s mouth tugged. “Sword Wielder,” he murmured, and there was mischief hidden deep in the exhaustion. “You’re leaking.”

Ziyu huffed out air that might once have been a scold. “Say it again and I’ll post a guard in your room solely to applaud each time you swallow broth without spilling.”

“Cruel,” Yuanzhi said, but the breathy note was fond.

Ziyu’s hand tightened on the blanket. He looked up, caught Shangjue’s gaze, and in that glance said a dozen things he could not speak with the boy listening: You did it. I see you. I am sorry. Thank you. Then he bowed his head, this time not as Sword Wielder, but as family. “I will keep the estate quiet,” he said. “The door answers only to your seal.” He stood, and before he left, he touched Yuanzhi’s shoulder – brief, warm, unabashed. “Rest, Zhi-er.”

When the door closed, the room felt larger for a few breaths, then settled back into its smallness, the way a chest finally learns to expand after pain.

A soft knock, and Jin Fan’s calm face appeared around the frame. He carried a stoneware bowl and a spoon, steam curling in thin threads. “Congee,” he said. “With nothing in it, as requested by no one, approved by everyone.”

Shangjue reached for it. “I’ll do it.”

Jin Fan did not argue. He set the bowl on the small table, placed the spoon across its rim, and – after a look at Yuanzhi that contained all the relief he would ever permit himself – retreated.

Shangjue stirred the bowl, testing the temperature with the back of his wrist as if he had done this a thousand times. Perhaps he had, in other rooms, under other nights, for smaller wounds. He scooped a little, blew, tipped the spoon to Yuanzhi’s mouth.

Yuanzhi grimaced. “Insulting.”

“It is rice and water,” Shangjue said. “You are welcome to barter for flavor when you can sit up on your own.”

Yuanzhi accepted another spoonful, then a third. Strength announced itself in tiny, practical ways – less spill at the corner of the mouth, less pause between swallows, a muscle in his jaw remembering its job. Between bites, Shangjue wiped his lip with the cloth, and for reasons even he could not have explained, his hands began to steady.

“Cold?” he asked, after a while.

“Less,” Yuanzhi said. “Here.” He tapped faintly at his sternum with two fingers.

Shangjue set the bowl aside and rubbed his palms together until heat bloomed, then laid both hands over that place – flat, firm, the way Elder Yue had taught him as a boy to warm a fading limb. He kept them there, eyes on Yuanzhi’s face, and watched color creep up from the collar to the mouth, to the delicate ridges around the eyes.

“You always do that,” Yuanzhi said, a whisper shaped like teasing. “Fix things with your hands.”

Shangjue’s mouth softened. “If the world were smaller, it would all fit beneath them.”

Yuanzhi’s eyes glinted, briefly sharp. “Don’t try to hold the world,” he said. “Hold me.”

“I am,” Shangjue said simply.

Time spilled in small measures: a dozen slow breaths, two more spoonfuls of food, the way a shaft of light slid across the floorboard until it touched the edge of the bed.

“Sleep,” Shangjue said at last. “I’ll be here when you wake.”

Yuanzhi’s lashes lowered. “I know.”

He drifted quickly, as those exhausted by survival do, sinking into the kind of sleep that repairs rather than erases. Shangjue stayed as he had promised, one hand at Yuanzhi’s sternum, the other in his, palms warming bone and pulse. He watched the little changes only a long watcher notices – the way the left corner of Yuanzhi’s mouth relaxed last, the way his fingers curled once before slackening, the way his breath, for three inhales, caught on the same stutter and then smoothed.

Shangjue let himself lean back, not far, just enough that the edge of the chair caught him between the shoulder blades. He looked at their linked hands and, because he had told the truth and would keep telling it, allowed himself to make a new memory there, on purpose: the weight and shape of Yuanzhi’s fingers laced with his, the faint damp where the broth had touched a knuckle, the way the pulse rose to meet his thumb as if glad to be counted.

Yuanzhi stirred again, not fully waking – only turned his face into Shangjue’s wrist where their hands met, as if to put his breath against the very place that had measured it. The gesture was small. It undid him more than any miracle.

Shangjue bent and pressed his mouth to Yuanzhi’s hair, to the place where boyhood had given way to man and back to boy again in the span of a fortnight. “Rest,” he said into it. “I’ll count for both of us.”

He did. Inhale, exhale. A keeping. A promise.

For a long time, there was nothing to do but be. Dawn crossed the room and made a new geometry of light. The herb smell faded as night jars cooled. Someone laughed distantly in the courtyard and was not shushed at once.

Shangjue counted these things as a soldier counts arrows left in the quiver: not with fear anymore, but with quiet satisfaction. Enough to see them through the day. Enough to meet the next. Enough, finally, to believe in what came after.

He breathed in. He breathed out. The rhythm answered him.

“You’re here,” Yuanzhi said, as if reminding both of them in case either forgot.

“I’m here,” Shangjue answered, and the words did what Elder Yue’s draughts could not: they steadied, they warmed, they stitched.

The frost had thawed.

Drop by drop, then all at once.

And beneath it, what endured was not merely survival, but the shape of love that had carried them back: hands and breath and the ordinary miracle of shared air, filling a room that had finally remembered how to exhale.