The chamber reeked of sulfur and scorched parchment.
Beneath the Temple of the Golden Flame, eight monks in blood-red robes knelt in a circle, their chants threading through shadows in a language long erased from imperial memory. Their voices trembled, not from effort—but from dread.
At the center stood Zhao, not yet Grand Commandant, arms bare to the shoulder. Intricate sigils glistened along his flesh, freshly inked in obsidian dye. Before him, a summoning basin shimmered with black smoke, shifting but never vanishing.
"By decree of Heaven's silence," one monk whispered, "we beckon what was banished."
The air pulsed.
Smoke convulsed into a shape—not quite human. A face emerged: eyes like oil-drenched coal, mouth twisting in impossible directions. Its laughter fractured the space around it, and its voice was every death-rattle from every battlefield.
"You dare."
The basin cracked. One monk collapsed, blood streaking down his cheeks. Another turned to ash without flame. Still, Zhao stood.
"We made you. We bind you."
The face multiplied—four overlapping visages, all laughing, all mocking.
"You made nothing. You are only the smoke of dying empires."
A boy among the monks burned alive, skin curling into smoke, eyes glassed in agony.
And still, Zhao did not waver.
He raised a talisman—jade, crescent-shaped, etched with phoenix feathers. Words that should never have been spoken tore from his throat.
The face shrieked. Not in pain. In rage.
And then—it vanished.
Not destroyed. Not banished.
Cast.
Into a vessel. A child, not yet born. A soul chosen by proximity. A prison.
Zhao dropped to one knee, sweat dripping down his brow. His voice was cold.
"Bury it. Deep."
Ziyan woke with her heart racing.
The fire had dimmed. Feiyan and Li Qiang slept beside their packs. Across from her, the girl lay curled with her straw doll, her thin arms trembling in sleep. But something was wrong.
The air had changed.
Ziyan sat up, clutching her palm. The phoenix emblem pulsed—erratic, not warning… something closer to dread.
She turned toward the child. For the first time, she saw it—not just silence, not just trauma. A stillness too profound. A weight older than pain.
The girl had not spoken once since she arrived in Nan Shu.
But Ziyan felt it now—something stirring. Something old. Something that remembered.
She reached out and touched the girl's wrist.
Her vision broke.
A monk screamed. A jade talisman rose. Fire without flame. Zhao's voice. The infant—the vessel. The thing inside it curled like smoke around memory itself.
When she returned to herself, the child was still asleep, her doll pressed to her chest.
Ziyan's voice was barely a whisper.
"She's a prison."
Shuye appeared at the doorway, breathless. "We're being watched. There are bootprints along the shrine wall. Deep ones."
Ziyan stood. "Then it begins."
The first sound was a birdcall—too sharp to be real.
Feiyan slipped across the rooftop, blade drawn. Li Qiang waited at the alleyway corner. Ziyan and Shuye remained near the shrine's steps.
They came in waves. Black-clad, masked, each strike precise.
"Assassins!" Feiyan called out.
Steel rang. Li Qiang dropped one man with a strike to the neck. Shuye disarmed another with a single kick. Ziyan threw her dagger before ducking behind the shrine wall.
A voice rang out, deeper than the rest.
"In the name of His Majesty, surrender the traitor and the girl."
Ziyan stepped forward, cloak rustling. The speaker emerged—an officer in forged imperial armor, holding a false decree sealed with crimson wax.
"Ziyan of House Li, and all her co-conspirators, are to be executed."
Li Qiang hissed. "This isn't law. It's slaughter."
Feiyan moved like lightning. "We hold them here."
Then something shifted.
The girl had stood.
She dropped her doll.
Her mouth moved. Her eyes glowed—not light, but pressure. Something unseen.
Ziyan tried to stop her.
"Wait—"
But the girl was already speaking.
The sound was not a language. It was a breaking.
Assassins clutched their throats. One began convulsing. Another bled from his ears, eyes wide in silent terror. A third fell and did not rise.
Feiyan's grip trembled.
"What is she?"
Ziyan stared at the girl, whose lips still moved in perfect calm.
"She's what Zhao tried to bury."
And now, she had woken.
In the Eastern Capital, Zhao watched the fire dance in a basin carved from black stone. A monk in a cracked porcelain mask knelt beside him.
"The entity stirred," the monk whispered. "The vessel... is speaking."
Zhao's fingers tightened around a fragment of jade—the same talisman used long ago.
"She was never sealed," Zhao said. "Only asleep."
The monk hesitated. "Why allow her to awaken?"
Zhao's smile was slow, cold.
"Because fear alone won't break Ziyan. But memory will."
He dropped the jade into the fire.
"She won't be killed by the girl. That would be mercy."
"Then why place the entity with her?"
Zhao stepped back into the dark.
"To remind her who she really is."
"And what is she?"
He did not answer.
But the flame turned black.
And the shadows swelled.