The familiar scent of aged ink and paper lingered in the air, mingling with the subtle, cooling remnant of sandalwood and incense that drifted from the burner positioned near the window ledge. The stick had long since burned itself to ash, collapsing quietly into its tray at some point during the night, untouched and unmoved, a small monument to hours that had passed unnoticed. No one had been awake to tend to it. No one had been awake at all.
Dust motes drifted in the pale gold light that crept through the latticed window, each particle suspended in that peculiar stillness that belongs only to early morning. The light moved slow as honey across the worn floorboards, casting long shadows that stretched and swayed along the walls in a silent performance, a shifting theater that gave away the hour more honestly than any bell could. It was the kind of morning that felt apologetic for arriving, as though the sun itself was aware it was intruding on something fragile.
Within the sect's inner compound, the core disciples' residential wing was just beginning to stir. From somewhere down the corridor came the distant clatter of a water basin, the soft shuffle of feet across wood, the low murmur of early risers already preparing for morning forms. No one had thought to check on the smallest room at the far end of the hall, not yet.
He Renxiao had always been punctual. He had always been at morning practice before anyone else, standing at the edge of the training ground in the grey pre-dawn, his sword already drawn, his breath already misting in the cold air. It had never once occurred to his fellow disciples that they might need to knock.
They would have been shocked, then, had they known what was happening inside that room.
A sharp gasp tore through the silence.
He Renxiao shot upright from his bed with the blind, violent urgency of a drowning man breaching the surface of dark water, his breath coming in ragged pulls, quick and thin. For a long, disoriented moment, he simply sat there, chest heaving, fingers knotted in the bedsheets beneath him. His eyes were wide, fixed on nothing.
Slowly, as though moving through something thicker than air, he lowered his gaze to his hands.
They looked wrong.
They were soft in the morning light. Smooth. Unblemished, without callus or scar, without the rough, hardened texture that years of relentless swordplay had carved into his palms. The skin was almost delicate in its unmarked state, pale and fine-boned. These were not his hands. His hands were rough maps of everything he had survived, scarred by blade and by grip, by the cold iron of chains and the crueler weight of a golden core slowly being shattered from the inside out.
A nightmare. He'd had a nightmare.
That in itself was not unusual. His sleep had been plagued by demons, both real and imagined, for longer than he cared to measure.
He had grown almost resigned to it over the years, the way one grows resigned to an old injury that never fully heals, just flares up at the worst possible moments and reminds you it was always there. But this one had been different. This nightmare clung to him even now as consciousness settled, seeping into his bones with a cold that had nothing to do with the morning air.
And yet, try as he might to grasp at the fragments, to pull them into focus, to understand what had reduced him to this breathless, trembling state, the dream slipped through the cracks of his memory like water through fingers. Nothing remained.
His fingers continued to tremble where they clutched the sheets. It was only then that he realized the fabric was damp.
He touched his face with shaking hands and found the wet tracks still fresh on his cheeks. He stared at his fingers afterward as though they had betrayed him, as though the evidence of tears was something deeply embarrassing, a weakness he had not consented to display even to an empty room.
Everything felt surreal.
The walls were the same.
The furniture was the same.
The faint sandalwood scent, the latticed window, the worn floor, all exactly as it should be.
And yet he felt entirely unmoored, adrift from himself, as though whatever had haunted him in sleep had left a sliver of itself inside him when it fled.
He pressed the heel of his palm against his forehead with a low groan. Pain, sharp and radiating, greeted the pressure immediately, a headache that pulsed outward in waves from somewhere behind his eyes, making the edges of his vision blur. He breathed through his nose, slow and deliberate, applying the same method he had once used to endure things far worse than headaches.
When the worst of the pulsing had dulled to something merely unpleasant, he attempted to swing his legs over the side of the bed.
His entire body protested. It was not a mild complaint, his muscles screaming as though he had been put through a training gauntlet the day before, or as though someone had beaten him while he slept. His shoulders ached. His back throbbed. His legs felt dense and foreign. It made no sense. He could not recall sparring, could not recall training past the point of exhaustion, could not recall doing anything that would explain this level of physical misery.
Strange fragments flickered through his mind as he sat hunched at the edge of the bed, trying to breathe through the soreness. A flash of a jade pendant. Raised voices, his own among them, raw with something that might have been fury or desperation or both. The figure of Mo Shuyi. A blade. The cold sensation of stone beneath him, and something warm pooling beneath his side.
And then nothing. The rest was empty.
He Renxiao had always prided himself on his memory. It was one of the few things he had never questioned about himself, that sharp, precise recall that allowed him to remember the smallest details of a situation hours or days after the fact.
It had served him well in cultivation, and it had served him even better in survival, which had, for a considerable stretch of his life, required far more careful attention to detail than any martial technique. These gaps, these blank stretches where important things should have been, were not just frustrating.
He rose from the bed with careful, deliberate movements, bracing himself against the bedframe until he was certain his legs would hold.
A low growl escaped his throat. Pure frustration. Pure discomfort. He already knew, with the absolute certainty of someone who had survived too many terrible days to count, that today was going to be horrible.
His gaze drifted across the room and found the bronze mirror on the far wall. Old, the metal dulled with age and slight tarnish at its edges, it had hung there long enough that it had become part of the room's furniture in the way all permanent things do.
He approached it with the slow, reluctant steps of someone approaching a verdict.
The reflection that met him was his own. He recognized the dark crimson-gold eyes, unusual enough in their coloring that they had drawn comment throughout his entire life.The architecture of the face was familiar. But the face itself was wrong in a way he could not immediately articulate, wrong the way a painting of someone you love is wrong.
It was young.
Not just young in the way he might appear after rest or before stress had settled into his features. It was the face of a boy.
Fourteen, perhaps, or fifteen at the absolute most.
Unblemished skin over a face that had not yet learned how to hold grief in its lines. A face He Renxiao recognized the way you recognize a person you loved dearly a very long time ago, with an ache that is equal parts warmth and loss.
He stood before that mirror for a long time, taking in the impossible scene with a growing, cold clarity.
And then, with a quiet sigh that seemed to come from somewhere very deep and very tired, the only possible conclusion settled over him like snow.
He was dreaming.
He thought of Mo Shuyi. Of the fight that had not seemed deadly at first. He could remember, with painful precision, the sensation of cold steel sliding between his ribs, the hot-cold spread of it moving through his chest. It had not struck the heart. He had convinced himself of that in the moments when blood pooled beneath him across ancient stone. It had not been a mortal wound, not for the cultivator he had once been, the one with a strong golden core and advanced healing and something to fight back with.
But his golden core was no longer what it had been. Mo Shuyi had seen to that, slowly and systematically, over more time than He Renxiao liked to think about. What might once have been survivable had perhaps simply been too much for what remained of him.
He did not know whether to laugh or to cry. He stood in the hazy liminal space between those two responses for a long moment, doing neither, and then he turned away from the mirror.
He was here. Whatever "here" was. And while he was here, he might as well let himself exist in it without fighting.
Lucid dreaming was not uncommon for him. His mind was a precise and stubborn instrument that often refused to fully relinquish consciousness even in sleep, constructing careful architectures out of memory and grief and recycled pain. He knew this dream for what it was.
This one was not alarming. Not shocking. Always calm, and yet somehow different, somehow quieter, more careful in its rendering than the nightmares that usually claimed him.
He turned to his closet and opened it.
He Renxiao was, technically, one of the young masters of the sect. This was a designation that had always sat somewhat awkwardly on him, like a formal robe cut for someone else's measurements. He knew his father was the sect leader. He also knew his father as a distant figure at best, a man whose face appeared at formal functions and whose acknowledgment arrived in the form of material provision rather than anything warmer or more human than that.
His mother had died when he was very small. His twin brother had gone with her, taken by the same fire that He Renxiao had barely survived himself. He did not remember his brother's face. He did not remember his mother's face, either, though he had been told, by Lan Qiang and by a few others, that she had been beautiful. He chose to believe this. It was one of the few pieces of her he had access to, and he held it carefully.
She had worked at a brothel, or had become a brothel maiden after he was born, the specifics were something He Renxiao had never fully untangled. She had hidden him and his brother in a small bunker she had made herself, concealing them from the clients and from the world, making them pretend to be her younger brothers on the rare occasions they could not be hidden at all.
If anyone had known she had children, both her life and theirs would have been more complicated and more dangerous than they already were. He Renxiao had never blamed her for any of it. She had done what she could with what she had. He understood that now in a way he had not been old enough to understand when she was still alive.
His father, Li Chengyuan, had apparently loved his mother before the brothel, before whatever complicated chain of events had led her there. According to the him, she had run away in order to protect their child, a story He Renxiao had heard once and filed away without comment. He had opinions about it. He kept them to himself.
The name "He Renxiao" had come from a night of grief and alcohol. His father, informed of the infant's existence, had been intoxicated when he chose the name, assuming on the basis of what he had been told that the child was a girl. He Renxiao, taken from "He Ren," his mother's name, combined with "xiao," meaning small or little.
A little version of Madame He.
A milk name, a childhood name, something soft and feminine that had been given to a small boy who had grown into someone complicated.
He had a formal name, Li Meiling, bestowed upon him by Lan Qiang in the ceremony that had made him an official disciple instead of his father.
He used it when he had to. But He Renxiao was the name his mother had chosen for him, the name that carried her in it, and he had never been able to let it go.
His fellow disciples had understood this without being told.
They called him what he asked to be called. Lan Qiang, who had given him the formal name in the first place, was the only one He Renxiao had been too afraid to correct, and so he answered to both. One more formally, and the other a familiar term.
He pulled a set of robes from the closet and stood holding them for a moment.
The navy blue robe with the laced sleeves. The blackish-blue belt that clipped at the waist. His sect had no formal uniform unless at public events, only a color preference, the deep and varied range of blues, royal, sky, light, navy, and He Renxiao had always defaulted to the darkest of them. It suited him, he thought. Or perhaps he had simply worn it so long it had become part of his self-image.
He looked at the matching ribbon for a long moment. It would tie up half his hair in the way he'd worn it back then, the rest twisted back and braided neatly. He'd forgotten how much thought had gone into it, in those early days. How deliberate even small things like this had been.
He set the ribbon aside.
It had been years since he'd last had reason to wear those robes. The first time Mo Shuyi had taken him, the robes had been ruined in the process, torn and then, he had always assumed, burned.
He had been left with only white inner robes afterward, a detail so deliberately humiliating that it had taken considerable effort not to let it break something fundamental in him. The white had felt like a statement. He had never been sure if Mo Shuyi had intended it to be one or if it had simply been convenient cruelty.
The ribbon felt wrong now. Too proper. Too much like someone He Renxiao was no longer capable of being, someone he had been before suffering had rearranged the furniture of his personality into configurations more suited to survival than softness.
He left the ribbon where it was and dressed without it.
Before he turned to the door, he paused in front of the mirror once more. This time he looked not at the face but lower, where the inner robes lay smooth and unmarked against young skin. In his real life, those robes would have revealed scars. A constellation of them, some faint with age, some still sharp in the memory even if they had faded on the surface. He had used a spell to clear them, early on, when hiding his past had still felt like something he could manage. The spell had worked. The scars were gone. He still remembered every single one of them.
It was stupid, the part of him that sometimes missed them. He hated the scars. He had always hated them. But they had been proof, in their own ugly way, of everything he had endured and not been destroyed by. Without them, there was only the smooth evidence of a life that, on the surface, appeared to have happened to someone else.
He turned from the mirror and went to the door.
He Renxiao had barely turned the handle before the door swung open from the other side.
He yelped. A startled, reflexive yelp of someone whose nerves had already been worn to a thin, frayed edge, and whose body reacted before his mind could interfere. He stumbled backward, several steps of pure uncoordinated retreat, until the back of his legs met the edge of the bed and he caught himself against the bedframe with both hands, heart hammering so hard he could feel it in his jaw.
Standing in the doorway, eyes wide and expression pitched somewhere between relief and scolding, was Jing Peishi.
He was seventeen, perhaps eighteen, with a round, younger-looking face that he had been teased about more than once and that he bore with the long-suffering patience of someone who had learned there was no point fighting certain battles.
He was a disciple of Elder Liu Shibao, one of the five disciples He Renxiao had known and been close to within the sect's broader community, in other words the core disciples', and he had always, always worried too much about everyone around him. It was perhaps his most defining characteristic, the way concern seemed to radiate off him in constant, low-level waves, sharpening into something almost frantic when any of his younger martial siblings gave him cause for it.
He was giving He Renxiao that look now. The frantic one.
"Xiao-Shidi!" His voice carried the particular pitch of someone who had been genuinely worried and was now channeling that worry into something that sounded almost like accusation. "Where were you? I've been standing out here for ten minutes, and everyone else has been wondering, and I was about to go get Shizun myself, you made me so worried—"
He Renxiao exhaled through his nose, slowly, and straightened his posture.
He had forgotten. Of course he had forgotten. In his mind, he had only just arrived here, only just manifested into this dream's careful reconstruction of the past, and he had had no way of knowing that from the perspective of everyone else in this dream, he was simply late to morning lessons. He had missed half the morning. He was never late. They had every reason to worry.
He thought, with a dark humor that surprised even himself: Even in death, I'm late to morning lessons. Shizun would have said something cutting about it.
He cleared his throat. "Sorry to worry you, Shi-Shixiong," he said, and his voice came out measured, composed, giving nothing away. He had learned that particular skill through long necessity. "I just wasn't feeling well."
Jing Peishi stepped forward immediately, face shifting into the concentrated, searching expression of someone running a private diagnostic. He lifted one hand and pressed it gently to He Renxiao's cheek, tilting the younger boy's face slightly to look at him with the hard-eyed focus of someone convinced that the truth was hidden somewhere in the complexion if you looked closely enough.
The touch was gentle. Warm. Thoroughly, heartbreakingly normal.
It was the kind of concern He Renxiao had not experienced in a very long time, the direct, uncomplicated worry of someone who simply cared whether you were all right and had no ulterior motive behind the asking. He had forgotten it could exist without conditions attached.
In the real past, the one He Renxiao carried inside him, Jing Peishi had been one of the first. One of Mo Shuyi's earliest victims, back when everything had first begun to fracture, when the caring senior brother they had all known had started his transformation into something unrecognizable.
He had died before He Renxiao had understood what was happening, before any of them had understood, before anyone had been given the chance to do anything at all.
He Renxiao had not been present when it happened. He had been told after the fact, in a way designed to maximize his compliance, and the grief had been weaponized against him before he even had time to properly feel it.
Seeing Jing Peishi now, alive and present and worried in that excessive, familiar way of his, was more than He Renxiao had been prepared for.
His eyes burned. He did not allow them to do anything further.
"I'm alright now, Shi-ge. Thank you." He made his voice stay even. A smile followed, practiced and precise, the kind he had spent years perfecting until it sat so naturally on his face that even people who had known him a long time could not always tell it was made rather than felt. He took Jing Peishi's hands in his own, feeling the warmth of them, and gently moved them away from his face. "You don't need to fuss."
Jing Peishi allowed his hands to be moved, but his expression remained unconvinced. He studied He Renxiao with the particular brand of skepticism that came not from suspicion but from simple, practiced knowledge of his junior's habits. "If you say so, Shidi," he murmured, still looking down at the smaller boy with an air of undimmed concern. Then his gaze shifted toward the corridor, and his expression eased slightly into something more ordinary.
"Well. Do you want to come down to the food pavilion? Mo Shuyi said he'd get everyone soup." He paused. "He's been waiting with it for a while, actually. Getting annoyed, if I'm honest."
The name landed like a stone dropped into still water.
He Renxiao went rigid. It happened faster than thought, the full-body seizing of someone who had learned over many years to react to that name the way prey reacts to the sound of something hunting in the dark. He could not help it. The discomfort crossed his face before he had time to put anything in front of it, and Jing Peishi, who was observant in the specific way that worried people tend to be, caught it immediately.
"Shidi." His voice sharpened. "Are you sure you're alright? You're very pale. Perhaps you should go see your Shizun after all." He stepped forward again, hand rising toward He Renxiao's forehead this time. "Let me check if you have a fever—"
He Renxiao slapped the hand away.
The sound of it was sharper than he had intended, a crack that rang out in the corridor with a clarity that made both of them still. It had not been a harsh slap, not one designed to hurt, but it had been quick and hard and unmistakable in its refusal. He Renxiao's jaw tightened. "I'm fine," he said, and the words came out with an edge that was entirely at odds with the soft-faced boy he appeared to be. "I don't need to see Shizun. I said I'm fine."
The silence that followed was not comfortable.
Jing Peishi stood very still. The expression on his face was the particular dumbstruck look of someone who had extended an ordinary kindness and received something entirely unexpected in return, the expression of someone recalibrating, trying to understand what they'd done to cause this response. He did not speak. He simply stared at He Renxiao with wide eyes and an open expression, the hurt in it unguarded and undisguised, because Jing Peishi had never learned, or never needed, to hide when something had caught him off guard.
He Renxiao looked at him and felt the familiar, sickening weight of having done exactly what he had not meant to do. It showed how much a person could change. The younger He Renxiao, the one whose body he currently occupied, had been all warmth and eagerness and perhaps too much trust. He had never once raised a hand against a sect sibling in his early years, not in anger, not in defense of himself. He had cried over small things and laughed easily and asked for help without shame, because he had not yet learned that being that open was a vulnerability that could be reached into and used against you.
That boy was gone. And even here, even in this careful dream reconstruction, He Renxiao could not fully become him again. He could put on the robes and play the part. He could not put on the person.
He reached out toward Jing Peishi, his hand trembling slightly in the space between them. He needed to say something. To explain, or at least to take the edge off what had just happened, to acknowledge that it had not been Jing Peishi's fault and that the anger had not been aimed at him.
But before he could speak, footsteps sounded at the end of the corridor.
Jing Peishi heard them too. He turned his head, visibly relieved at the interruption, and took a small step to the side to make room in the hallway, his eyes still not quite meeting He Renxiao's.
"Did you two fall down the stairs, or something?" The voice arrived ahead of its owner, dry and carrying a faint edge of exasperation that was clearly not its first this morning. "It's been ten minutes since you left, and Mei-Mei and I have been waiting at least fifteen."
He Renxiao did not breathe.
He turned his head with the slow, unwilling movement of someone approaching something they cannot avoid but deeply do not want to face. His gaze traveled the length of the corridor and found, at the far end of it, a face that had no right to look the way it looked right now.
Mo Shuyi.