Scheming

For three years, Chen Feng was the Su family's favorite joke. The penniless son-in-law. The freeloader who kneeled on marble at his own anniversary dinner while forty guests laughed. He swallowed every insult, because silence was the only armor he owned. Then a stranger's knife meant for someone else cut him down in a rain-soaked alley, and a cracked jade case around his neck split open. Chen Feng should have died. Instead, he woke with the memories of Ye Chen, an immortal physician-warrior betrayed and murdered five hundred years ago. Now nine silver needles obey his hands. The same point that stops a heart can restart one. Every needle is a choice between healing and killing, and he chooses healing first. He reads lies in a pulse, cures what hospitals call hopeless, and fights with a precision no thug can match. But power comes with a price. The sect that killed Ye Chen never died. It grew into a shadow empire of boardrooms, black markets, and patient old men who have waited centuries for this awakening. They want Chen Feng alive, trained, and obedient. Meanwhile his scheming in-laws hide dangerous secrets, and a dying grandfather owes a debt that ties Chen Feng's bloodline to the war. Beside him stands Su Wan, the brilliant ER doctor who never stopped defending him, and who may be the only person worth more than his revenge. Together they will cross hospitals, boardrooms, and a mountain where an empire's oldest secret lies buried. Can a man who chose mercy over murder protect everyone he loves, expose the traitors in his own household, and finish a five-hundred-year-old war before it finishes him? He knelt once. Never again.