Snow drifted softly across the Stone Orchid Vale, where silence clung like a shroud. The protagonist—Yue Lian—walked beneath a moonless sky, the map of jade slips etched into her memory, drawing her deeper into the forbidden zone once known as the Blood-Echo Basin.
This was the place Yan Zhuo had last been seen alive.
And if the final slip was correct, it held the ashes of something ancient—his inheritance.
The basin was a ruin of black stone and red sand, a scar left upon the earth that no sect dared reclaim. Even beasts avoided it. Lin Xue's spirit sense had grown sharper since retrieving the fifth slip—sharper, and stranger. At night, her dreams were not hers alone. She had begun to see him.
Not the tyrant in scrolls.
Not the demon of sect legends.
But the man who knelt in the rain beside a dying girl, whispering prayers he no longer believed in.
A voice stirred the sand.
"Turn back."
She spun. No one.
"Too much blood was sown here. You will reap nothing but pain."
Still no one.
She pressed forward. The basin trembled.
And then the storm rose.
Black wind. Crimson lightning. The sky above fractured like glass.
She fell to her knees.
A skeletal tree grew before her in seconds, blooming from nothing. And at its roots, a tomb—sealed in molten jade.
Here lies the Tyrant Who Bled for the Heavens.
Yue Lian wept.
Not because of fear.
Because the voice that whispered from the tomb... was sad.
In another part of the continent, three names stirred.
Feiyan, Lu Chengwei, and Shen Wu—all once counted among Yan Zhuo's inner circle—awoke from the same dream.
A tree. A girl. A storm.
And the sound of a flute being played by hands long turned to dust.
They set out. Separately. But drawn to the same place.
Back in the basin, Yue Lian knelt and placed her hand against the tomb.
The jade rippled. A sigil formed beneath her fingers.
And then, a voice:
"Name yourself, Inheritor."
She hesitated. Her lips trembled.
"I... I don't know who I am anymore. But I want to know who he was."
Silence.
Then the sigil blazed.
"You carry the blood of the one he saved. Your soul remembers. So you may enter."
The tomb opened.
Inside was no corpse.
Only a field of ash.
Floating above it, a scroll bound in golden thread, and a single strand of black hair tied in red silk.
Yue Lian reached for it—and the basin exploded with light.
Memories crashed into her mind:
—A boy crying as flames consumed his village. —A sword he refused to draw, even as the sect demanded blood. —A girl named Meilan, smiling with a flower in her hair. —A betrayal carved in divine decree.
Her eyes bled. Her mind fractured.
She screamed.
And was reborn.
Hours later, she lay at the foot of the tomb, a mark burning on her palm—a six-pointed flame.
She didn't remember all of it.
But she knew this: Yan Zhuo had not left an inheritance of power.
He had left a burden.
A truth too terrible to be spoken.
A truth worth dying for.
At the edge of the basin, cloaked in shadow, a man in silver watched.
"Too soon," he muttered.
The Silver Judges would come.
But not for her.
For the truth she now carried.
And once again, the world would bleed.