In the city of Willowshade, no tale was told more often than the mystery of its ruler.
The chaos had begun when the Immortal Road Sage's voice reached the city and shattered the old laws with a single decree. In the wake of that madness—when clans fell upon practitioners and the streets drowned in blood—men tried to seize control. Bands of cultivators rose, calling themselves guardians, protectors, even kings. Yet one after another, they all met the same fate—vanished without so much as a corpse left behind.
Years passed like this, until a nameless band appeared. They carried no banners, spoke no grand words, and their leader refused to take a title. But the city, beaten into fear and obedience, began to whisper a name for him: the City Lord.
It was said he appeared from nowhere. That no records of his clan, sect, or past could be found. And though no one had ever seen his face beneath the black veil he wore, none doubted the weight of his presence.
Beneath the lord's mansion, past sealed doors and guarded halls, lay a chamber that the living rarely entered. Its walls curved into catacombs, and bones filled the alcoves from floor to ceiling—skulls stacked neatly, femurs slotted like bricks, jaws locked into grim mockeries of smiles. A stench lingered there, dry and sharp, as if the bones themselves still remembered blood.
Candles flickered in the shape of a ritual circle, their light painting grotesque shadows over the piles of the dead. Hooded cultivators stood around the chamber, motionless, like statues cast in black.
At the center of it all stood a woman—slender, bare, her robe sliding down her shoulders to pool at her feet. She stood naked before five towering mirrors, each rimmed in iron and cracked through with fine, web-like fractures. From those cracks seeped whispers—hundreds of them—rasped voices murmuring in tongues older than memory, scratching against the bones of the chamber.
The woman did not flinch. Her eyes, cold and sharp as knives, never left her own reflection.
Then, one of the mirrors rippled. Its surface broke like disturbed water. A ghoulish figure pressed against it from the other side, half-formed, its skull-like face stretched in a silent scream.
The thing lunged—yet stopped short, as though dragged backward by unseen chains. The glass shuddered violently, and with a sound like bones splitting, the mirror shattered.
At once, every candle in the chamber extinguished, plunging the basement into suffocating black. The whispers swelled, louder than before, crawling into ears, throats, lungs, until it felt like the dead themselves were breathing down the necks of the living.
In the darkness, the woman only smiled.
The black-robed cultivators remained frozen in their places, though their knuckles whitened beneath their sleeves. None dared move. None dared breathe louder than the whispers.
And in the silence after the shatter, it was unclear—had something failed to escape the mirror… or had something slipped free unseen?