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Chapter 38 - Chapter 37 - What Was Left to Burn

Nan Shu was a city clinging to memory. Once a proud trade stop between river and mountain, now it lay in ruin — its streets dulled by soot, its alleys hollowed by silence. The wind did not sing through its shattered roofs; it merely passed, as if trying not to disturb the dead.

Ziyan dismounted just beyond the crumbled gate, eyes fixed on the horizon where the city once touched the clouds with its watchtowers. Feiyan and Li Qiang followed in quiet formation, wary, listening.

"We should see movement," Feiyan muttered. "But there's nothing."

"No dogs, no carts. Just ash," Li Qiang added.

Ziyan moved forward anyway. "Then that's where we begin."

Their journey had been long — too long without trouble. It was the silence that troubled them most. No ambushes. No soldiers. Only eyes from windows, shuttered as quickly as they opened.

It was near a dried-up well that they found the child.

A faint cry echoed from behind the crumbling remnants of a collapsed roof. Ziyan rushed forward, lifting a shattered beam with Li Qiang's help. Beneath it, wrapped in a torn blanket and dirt, was a girl no older than six. Her face was hollow from hunger, her eyes wide and unblinking, full of a silence that had grown deeper than tears.

Feiyan gently lifted her into her arms.

Ziyan looked around. "There must be someone."

An old man hobbled from a nearby doorway, crooked and cane-bound, his eyes red from age or weeping. "She's the last," he said hoarsely. "The others are either buried or gone."

Ziyan stepped toward him. "Are you in charge here?"

"No one's in charge of the dead," he said. "But I keep the names. I remember them."

Feiyan offered the girl to the man. He shook his head. "She'll live better with you. My days are numbered."

Ziyan bowed. "May I ask your name?"

He looked at her with weary recognition. "Call me Uncle Hai. I was once cousin to Duan Rulan, before the banners came and tore us apart."

Her breath caught. "You knew her?"

"From childhood," he said. "And again, in war. Come. If you've come this far, there's a story you need to hear."

They followed him into what remained of a shrine. Inside, in the dust and half-light, he lit incense before a small portrait of a woman and child — their features faded, but their smiles enduring.

"Rulan came back to us during the war," he said. "After her husband was killed — one of many sacrificed in a campaign no one understood. She brought her daughter here, to her birth village. Said she wanted to raise her in peace."

"She never spoke of this to me," Ziyan said softly.

"She wouldn't. Rulan buried her grief. Her husband was lost because General Zhao mismanaged the western campaign. Supplies vanished. Roads collapsed. Men marched in circles while Xia forces outflanked them."

Ziyan narrowed her eyes. "And the village?"

Hai's voice turned bitter. "Zhao knew he'd failed. He needed a victory, even if only a rumor. So he spread word that Qi's lost supply caches were hidden in our village."

Li Qiang exhaled sharply. "He turned you into bait."

"Aye. Xia stormed us within days. Burned homes, scattered families. Rulan's daughter… she didn't make it." Hai's hands trembled as he lit another stick of incense. "But she survived. And she never forgot."

Ziyan stepped forward. "How do you know Zhao gave the order?"

Hai met her gaze. "Because I heard it. When I escaped through the eastern pass, I passed by the officer's camp. Two generals were laughing — said Zhao had fed the dogs a bone and now no one could question his loyalty."

Feiyan clenched her fists. "That man still commands from behind silk curtains while the bodies of children feed the earth."

Ziyan turned to the shrine and knelt, bowing low. "She fought for us even after loss. I will not let her justice be buried."

Uncle Hai placed a hand on her shoulder. "She believed you would come."

Ziyan looked up, startled. "What do you mean?"

"She left a sign for me — not words, but something only I would recognize. A scrap of red cloth, knotted the way her daughter used to tie her hair. She placed it beneath the floorboard here, days before she vanished. With it, a coin — foreign, marked by Xia, burned slightly at the edge."

He walked to a small nook beneath the altar and pulled out a cracked wooden box. Inside lay the cloth and the coin — and a name scrawled faintly in charcoal beneath the lid: Ziyan.

"She said someone with fire in her palm would come to finish the work she could not," Hai said. "She said this girl might one day carry both sword and sorrow — and still refuse to kneel."

Ziyan stood slowly, her throat tight. "She believed in a future I hadn't yet chosen."

Hai nodded. "And now you're here."

Outside, the little girl watched quietly, her hands gripping Feiyan's robe. And above the shrine door, barely visible, the shape of a phoenix had been etched into the old wood — half-faded, half-burned, but unmistakable.

Ziyan smiled faintly.

Ashes beneath the banner, yes — but even ash could feed new flame.

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