The dust of the lower streets of the Pale Gold Capital clung to the hem of Lín Jié's tunic, mixing with the cold sweat running down her spine.
Throughout the entire day following the trial and the expropriation, the secretary did not stop running. She had left the Young Master's empty quarters after her explosion of hatred, but ten years of blind loyalty spoke louder. Lín Jié refused to stop walking.
She spent twenty-four hours knocking on rotting wooden doors in the marginal rings of the city. She knelt before former vassals who once kissed the ground the Qīngluán Clan walked on, and tried to access emergency funds not registered by the Imperial Council. Her plan was simple: gather the hidden gold, bribe the guards of the eastern gates in the dead of night, get Qīng Yì out of the capital before the humiliation devoured him completely, and start the lineage anew in the border provinces. Far from the fairies, far from politics, far from shame.
But the cultivation world did not forgive the weak. At every door she knocked on, she found only smiles of mockery and empty promises. The allies had evaporated as soon as the shadow of the expropriation fell over the hero.
When the sun rose on the morning of the fourth day after the invasion of the guest pavilion, Lín Jié dragged herself back to the ruined courtyard of the Qīng lineage.
Her legs trembled from pure physical exhaustion and sleep deprivation. Her fingers, eternally stained with India ink, were shaking and dirty with earth. Her cultivation, stagnant at the 9th Mortal Stage for a decade, lacked the necessary vitality to endure that uninterrupted march.
She crossed the silent corridors. There were no servants. There were no guards. The council had already taken even the silk carpets from the common areas.
"Young Master..." Lín Jié's voice came out as a scratched wheeze in her dry throat. She stopped before the wooden door of the room where she had left him huddled two days ago. The cheap wooden hairpin in her hair weighed like lead. "I made a contact in the southern caravan. We can leave here tonight... we can start over..."
She pushed the sliding door. The wood creaked slightly on the dry track.
The smell hit her face even before her eyes could adapt to the dimness. It wasn't the scent of floral incense or green tea. It was the thick, sweet, metallic odor of coagulated blood, mixed with the acidic stench of burned Qi.
Lín Jié's heart stopped.
Qīng Yì was not huddled against the wall. He was sprawled in the center of the bare floor, his back facing the ceiling.
The secretary's knees gave out. She collapsed onto the wooden floor with a dull thud, her eyes wide, her breath caught suffocatingly in her throat. Lín Jié crawled frantically across the dirty floor, her nails scratching the wood until she reached the body. With trembling hands, she grabbed the man's stiff, cold shoulders and turned him face up.
The woman's breath shattered.
The hero of the empire had not died fighting. Unable to endure his shattered ego, he had chosen the most cowardly way out possible. His face, once the image of orthodox perfection, was disfigured. Pools of thick, dark blood had trickled from the man's eyes, ears, and mouth, drying and cracking on his skin during the time she had run through the streets trying to save him.
The white training tunic was soaked in a sticky blackness. Lín Jié's horrified gaze moved down. His abdomen was completely sunken. A black hole of dead flesh where the clan's future had once shone. Qīng Yì had forced the rotation of his own Inner Astro to spin in reverse, imploding his Dantian and shattering his own meridians from the inside out.
"No... no, no, no..." strangled sobs escaped Lín Jié's lips.
She crawled frantically across the dirty floor, her nails scratching the wood until she reached the body. She grabbed the man's cold and rigid shoulders, shaking him. Hot tears gushed from her brown eyes, falling onto Qīng Yì's stained and disfigured face.
The pain tore through her chest for long minutes. She cried for the boy she had accompanied, cried for the warrior with the wooden sword, cried for the man to whom she had dedicated her best years.
But tears are finite. And the biological reality of the cold corpse beneath her hands was relentless.
The tremors in the secretary's shoulders began to subside. The sobs lost their strength, turning into an empty wheeze. Her teeth clenched, and the crying ceased.
Lín Jié let go of the dingy fabric of his tunic. She sat back on her own heels and raised her hands. Her fingers were dirty with Qīng Yì's dried, black blood, mixed with the India ink she could never completely wash off.
The illusion melted away, and her brown eyes dried.
She looked at his imploded abdomen. He didn't think of her. He didn't think of the two hundred years of his lineage. He didn't think of the sweat she had shed forging reports and maneuvering enemies. When his pedestal was broken, he simply gave up. He preferred death over getting his own hands dirty.
The warmth in her chest died. The love that had guided her for a decade turned to instant ashes.
Lín Jié lowered her arms. Her features emptied, covering her mature, dark-circled face with a hollow mask. She had stagnated at the 9th Mortal Stage. She had sacrificed her own time and martial ascension to polish a coward's armor. Her life had been spent for the sake of an abyss that gave nothing back.
The world seemed absurdly cold, mechanical, and meaningless.
In sepulchral silence, without shedding a single tear more for the man on the floor, Lín Jié stood up. She didn't call the guards. She didn't notify the council. She just turned her back on the ruins of her past and walked toward the door.
---
The darkness of the night seemed to grow infinitely colder and hollower over the Two-Faced Empire.
Miles away from the political chaos boiling in the grand halls of the capital, a vast lake of still waters reflected the silver light of the full moon. The Silver Lotus Lake was an isolated refuge at the edge of the imperial gardens, surrounded by weeping willows and stone bridges forgotten by the guards.
Sitting on one of the marble steps sinking into the dark water, Lín Jié hugged her own knees.
The secretary's dark green hair, almost black in the lack of light, fell disheveled down her back. Her bureaucratic tunic, always buttoned up to the neck in a strictly demure fashion, failed miserably to hide the mature and voluptuous proportions of her body—a bounty of curves that owed nothing in volume to the very goddess who had ruined her. Her face preserved the freshness and beauty of her twenties, but her martial stagnation and blind, silent devotion in the hero's shadow had made her spend her entire life invisible to the world, without ever having a suitor who truly noticed her.
Her green eyes, marked by deep dark circles and exhaustion, were now glazed over the still surface of the lake. There were no thoughts of revenge formulating in her mind; the only target was already rotting on the floorboards. She just breathed, feeling her lungs heavy. She was a blank piece of paper, with no ink, no seal, no utility.
The cold wind blew through the willow leaves, but the sound of the waters was gently overlaid by a melody.
It wasn't an abrupt noise. The music flowed through the dense night air with an ancient and heavy slowness. The deep sound of a black bamboo flute filled the isolation of the lake, each note carrying the weight of someone who had already seen eternity born and die countless times.
Lín Jié blinked. The woman slowly turned her face toward the stone bridge to her right.
He was walking there.
The man's footsteps made not the slightest sound against the marble. Zhì Yuǎn walked under the moonlight with the black bamboo flute resting against his lips. His broad chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm, and the air around him smelled of an inebriating mixture of sandalwood, ozone, and the sweet musk of a Yin that had just been consumed.
His gaze covered the entire capital. He didn't need to search; he simply found the ink-stained woman sitting on the stones, with her mind cracked.
Zhì Yuǎn stopped three paces away from her.
The melody sighed its last note, dissolving into the lake water. He lowered the flute, holding the polished wood alongside his body.
Lín Jié did not cower. Under the mesh of the Karmic Illusion, her mortal eyes registered only the features of a tired man, a rustic outsider. However, before Lín Jié could blink, Zhì Yuǎn passively suspended his own illusion.
The air between them distorted with a mute crack. The worn image melted away under the silver light.
Lín Jié's breath caught instantly.
The raw, naked divinity tore through the secretary's retinas. The face sculpted in primordial beauty, the charcoal-gray tunic outlining a terrifying physical structure, and the infinite lethargy in his dark eyes revealed themselves. Zhì Yuǎn's irises swallowed the moonlight. The dark water at their feet, which previously rippled with the wind, smoothed into an absolute mirror, forced into immobility by the mere approach of that body.
"The sky of this world is frighteningly low, Lín Jié," the god's deep, velvety voice broke the silence, vibrating directly in the secretary's stagnant chest. "The mortals here build glass ceilings and call it immortality. They write laws on bamboo slips and believe they rule the storm. And when the ceiling cracks... they prefer to implode their own foundation rather than face the wind outside."
His dark gaze fell upon her prostrate figure. There was no pity or mockery. There was only the surgical statement of a fact.
"You spent ten years of your life trying to polish that hero's glass so the world wouldn't see the cracks," continued Zhì Yuǎn, walking slowly until he stopped beside her. He looked at the woman's hands. "Look at the ink impregnated in your skin. You stopped your own time. You destroyed your own cultivation to sweep the dirt from the path of a boy who couldn't bear to see the naked truth."
Lín Jié lowered her face, looking at the black blood and India ink on her fingers.
"The truth always destroys the weak," the woman's voice sounded hollow. "You, Lord, destroyed our utopia. You took the woman he adored. And in the end... my sacrifice turned to dust. My vessel is broken at the 9th Mortal Stage. My existence is no longer useful for anything."
Silence reigned for a brief second. The cold wind blew through the silver lotuses, but the heat emanating from Zhì Yuǎn's body warmed the woman's pale skin.
He lowered the bamboo flute to his side. The lethargy in his gaze dissipated, giving way to a mild, practical, and incredibly relaxed gleam.
"I usually wouldn't make such an offer so quickly, Lín Jié," the god's deep voice vibrated in the silence of the lake, his tone brimming with dry, ironic humor. "Especially since recruiting you like this, straight to our altar, spoils a bit of my first wife's fun in breaking and molding minds. But the mortal world has a terrible habit of throwing its best intellects in the trash because of weak hearts, and your potential is being wasted managing the egos of ants."
He took a step down, standing exactly on the same step as the secretary. His dark eyes met her green ones.
"I offer you divinity," he continued, his voice losing its irony and gaining the unfathomable weight of a universe. "I will place you on an unshakable pedestal, where your intelligence will be venerated. In exchange, I expect only two things. Your body and your soul."
Zhì Yuǎn raised his right hand. The man's large, calloused palm hovered millimeters from her dirty, trembling hands. The thick heat radiating from him enveloped the coldness of the night air.
"Abandon the dust and the dead, ink woman," he murmured, a slight, good-humored, and incredibly intimate smile curving the corners of his lips. "Come get your hands dirty in my world."