The ink of the archives was still fresh in my mind, a dark stain on my soul that finally made sense of the world. I stepped out of the heavy stone doors. The archive door groaned shut behind me. For a moment, I just stood there.Not moving, not thinking.Just… feeling.The weight of everything I had just uncovered pressed against my chest like a second ribcage. Heavy, tight and alive. The palace felt different now. Not grand, not powerful.Just.. Hollow. Like a corpse dressed in gold.I adjusted my sleeves, my heartbeat a steady, rhythmic drum of war. I was getting ready. I took a step forward. Then another.Slow. Measured. But something felt wrong. The air felt tight.. the weight of something large sharing the atmosphere with me, causing a ripple in the stagnant air. Then came the flicker.To my left, at the edge of my peripheral vision, a shadow moved. It wasn’t the stiff, armored clank of a guard or the hurried shuffle of a servant. It was a fluid, ghostly sweep of a pale silk

The screams of the Emperor faded behind me, muffled by the heavy thrum of my own pulse. I walked through the palace gates, past the curfew guards and no one cast me a glance at me. They've come to terms with the fact that I move whenever I want. The palace main gate closed behind me without resistance.No alarms. No pursuit.Just… silence.I walked into the night like a man leaving a funeral he hadn’t finished attending.I had just broken the most powerful man in the empire, dismantled his pride, and left him whimpering on a floor stained with his own guards' blood.I should have felt victorious. I should have felt the weight of a decade’s worth of vengeance lightening.Instead, my chest felt like it was filled with cold lead.The victory was a hollow shell. My clan hadn't just been betrayed; they had been harvested. And even as I walked through the cool night air of the Capital, the image of that silk-clad ghost—the one who inhaled my Void techniques like a child catching snowflake

The city was too quiet.I stood by the window, my back to Yan Hu, watching the way the moonlight hit the rooftops of the Capital. Usually, the wind carries the scent of coal and distant street food, but tonight, the air was sterile. Dead.“She always did hate waiting,” I murmured my heart hammering in my chest. Not from lost emotions, but from uncertainty. For the first time since the night of the massacre, I felt a pain worse than the anger of betrayal. The name echoed in the hollows of my chest. Chen-chen.It wasn’t a title. It wasn’t a threat. It was a ghost—a silk thread from a life that had been burned to ash ten years ago.A cold chill ran down my spine. Behind me, I could hear Yan Hu’s shallow breathing. He was waiting for the explosion. He was waiting for the Void to spill out of me and level the room, for me to roar in grief or rage.And honestly, I thought I would. I thought the next time I heard about her I would erase her from the surface of the earth but now..I felt n

I hated the thought of death…. But nothing compared to the thought of being killed by someone else. Yet, as the darkness clouded my vision, I felt like I should just cut off the thread tying me to life. But even the darkness gave me no peace. A high-pitched ringing, thin and sharp as a needle, pierced through the center of my skull. It was a singular, agonizing note that refused to fade.Beneath the noise, there were fragments. The irregular drip-slosh of water hitting a cold surface. The rhythmic, heavy thud of footsteps—not my own. I felt weightless yet crushed, as if I were being dragged through a sea of thick oil. Every time I tried to reach for the Void, my internal sea felt like a mirror shattered into a million jagged pieces.Then, light came… It wasn't a soft dawn; it was a brutal, blinding white that forced its way through my eyelids. Heat pressed against my skin, followed by a surge of instinctive, cold terror. I was being chased—not by a person, but by the very act of

Yan Hu’s brows furrowed, but he knew the story he heard. “What…. isn’t that what happened? He took you birthright, he brought the coup system into Yan, he…” "He didn’t. He told the world the Long Clan were puppets of Malphas. He told them our power didn't come from the heavens, but from a deal with the millennial demon. He told them the Long heir didn't carry the primordial marrow, but a seed of the catastrophe that would end the world."I grabbed the collar of my guard uniform, shaking it. "If I walk out there today and claim to be a Long, the people won't bow. They won't cheer. They will scream in terror and try to tear me apart. To them, I am not a King, I am not a prodigy blessed by the heavens. I am the demon seed they’ve been taught to fear for a generation.”The silence that followed was heavy with the weight of twenty years of lies."I won't just kill Wei Jue, Hu,” I whispered, my rage cooling into a hard, diamond-sharp focus. "I will tear down every lie he built. I will ma