"Some flowers bloom only once. In blood."
Aren didn't sleep anymore.
Not truly.
When he closed his eyes, he didn't drift into rest. He slipped. Fell. Through ink and bone and dreams that weren't dreams at all.
So he sat awake in the ashes of Hai'ren Hollow, the scroll in his lap, its parchment warm. Yin slept beside a scorched pillar, arms crossed, one eye half-open as if even sleep couldn't erase the survival instinct of a girl who had seen too much.
Above them, the stars bled.
Or maybe that was just Aren's imagination. He couldn't trust what he saw anymore. Every time he died, his senses twisted slightly, as if reality were being corrected… or remembered.
He didn't know how much longer his mind would remain his own.
But he had the scroll now. And it wanted to be read.
So he opened it.
The first page was the vow.He'd already memorized it.
I shall not live. I shall not die.I will become the wound the heavens cannot close.
The second page bled ink as he touched it. The words shifted, shimmered, and rearranged themselves into a map.
But not of places.
Of deaths.
Each marker on the map was a blood-drop, with thin, vein-like lines connecting them. At the center: the Ninth Death.
His.
He touched it, and the scroll pulsed.
Then the next death flared.
The Seventh."A Garden of Needles."
The scroll whispered.
He screamed.
Yin woke to the sound of him gasping, his hands trembling, veins blackened as if poisoned by something not of this world.
"Aren—!"
He dropped the scroll. It sizzled against the stone, then curled shut like a living tongue retreating.
"I'm fine," he lied.
"You're bleeding."
"I'm always bleeding."
She didn't argue. She just sat beside him and stared at the ruins.
"You spoke in your sleep again," she said softly.
"I didn't sleep."
"Well, you sounded like you were begging someone not to plant something inside you."
Aren went still.
He hadn't told her about the roots.
The ones he felt in his lungs. In his spine. As if some ancient seed had been buried in him long ago, and each death watered it.
That was the curse.
Not immortality.
But becoming soil for something older.
Something scarlet.
They left Hai'ren Hollow at dawn.
The fire had eaten every trace of the Hall. No scrolls remained. No records. Only memory.
And memory was a cruel keeper.
Yin didn't ask where they were going. She trusted him now—or maybe she'd simply run out of better options.
Aren walked north. Not because he had a plan, but because the scroll had shown him a flower.
A bleeding flower.
Growing in a place called Yinghua Vale.
The name meant "Petal of Shadow."
A sect once ruled there, long ago, famous for their gardens and poisons. Cultivators who trained not with swords or fists, but with fragrance and fear.
The sect had been eradicated.
But the flower still bloomed.
They reached Yinghua Vale after five days of travel, though Aren barely felt the time pass. The further they walked, the stranger the world became.
Insects whispered in his ears in dead languages.
Trees bent slightly when he passed, as if bowing in pain.
At night, Yin found bruises blooming on her arms for no reason. She stopped mentioning them after the second night.
Something was watching them.
But only Aren could feel it breathing beneath the soil.
Yinghua Vale wasn't a vale at all.
It was a pit.
A crater of red blossoms that stretched for miles, their petals slick with dew that smelled like rot and honey. The land was quiet. Too quiet. No birds. No wind. Just the slow, rhythmic pulse of the flowers swaying to a music no living thing should hear.
Aren stepped into the field.
Yin grabbed his arm. "Are you sure?"
"No."
"But you're going anyway."
"Yes."
She nodded and let go.
Every flower he stepped on screamed.
Not aloud.
In his head.
Echoes of girls buried beneath soil, weeping. Cultivators who'd knelt in prayer and choked on roots. A whole sect consumed by something they'd worshipped.
At the center of the field stood a single stalk.
Black. Tall. Leafless.
And atop it: a bud that hadn't yet opened.
Aren approached it.
The scroll pulsed in his robe.
He reached for the flower.
It breathed.
And then it bloomed.
The petals unfurled, revealing not pollen, not stamen, not beauty—
But a face.
A woman's face.
Pale. Ageless. Eyes sewn shut with red thread. Mouth open in silent song.
Then her lips moved.
And she whispered:
"Seven of Thirteen.Buried beneath the garden of needles.Return to your grave, O daughter of scent."
And Aren saw it.
Her death.
A girl born without a tongue. Given to the sect as tribute. Trained to tend flowers that could kill with a touch. She learned to speak with scent. To craft poisons that made memories rot.
But she fell in love.
And her love betrayed her.
Buried her alive beneath the roots of her own garden, so she could "nourish" it forever.
Her screams became perfume. Her soul became pollen.
And now, she bloomed only for the cursed.
Only for the Thirteen.
Aren dropped to his knees.
The roots curled around his ankles, wrists, neck.
The flower kissed his forehead.
And his ninth death shivered.
"You are one of us," she whispered.
"No," Aren rasped. "I want to live."
"Then you must die again," she said, smiling with blood-stained teeth.
"Why?"
"Because the truth is not given. It is bled."
And she sank back into the petals.
When Aren woke, he was lying outside the field, Yin watching him with pale terror in her eyes.
His robe was soaked in nectar.His body was whole.But a new scar had formed over his chest—one shaped like a petal.
"What happened?" Yin whispered.
"I found the Seventh."
"Who… what is the Seventh?"
Aren didn't answer.
He just pulled out the scroll.
And the second page was no longer a map.
It was a poem.
-- " Seven bloomed, but never wept
She bled her garden sweet and kept
A vow in roots, in silence deep—
To wake again, she first must sleep." --
Yin looked over his shoulder, reading silently.
Then: "How many more like her are there?"
"Twelve," Aren said.
"But only thirteen in total. And you're the Ninth."
He nodded.
"Then where's the Tenth?"
Aren looked north.
And the scroll pulsed again.
🩸 End of Chapter 7 – "A Flower That Bleeds"
Next: Chapter 8 – "The Man Who Named the Dead"