A crease had sat between Yan Ruyu’s brows ever since they’d reached this divine mountain—never once easing.
He read the letter once, then set it alight. The page curled and went up in a pale blue flame.
Around him, a host of cultivators waited on the mountaintop, eyes fixed on him for orders.
“Your Imperial Majesty, how should we respond to the demon star’s arrival?” one asked.
“Everything is in your hands, Sovereign. We beg you—save the people of Jiuzhou from calamity,” another pleaded.
The words “demon star” made the crowd shiver. Even to the scholars who’d only ever encountered the phrase in old books and plays, it conjured images of damnation: ravening, monstrous things that devoured hundreds at a bite. In the histories and the legends, a demon star was an abomination—beyond kin, beyond mercy. It was always the enemy that righteous men were meant to slay.
No one had ever asked why a demon star came into being, where it came from. They only knew it was stronger than they were by an immeasurable margin—and therefore, a threat.
Yan Ruyu burned the paper to ash, then offered a single, quiet command.
“Return to your posts.”
The men looked up at him in stunned disbelief. He was the figure they had treated as a god walking among them; when he spoke, they obeyed without question. Yet now—“Return”? What did that mean?
“We can stay and help,” Zhao Huai said, his tone imperial, hungry for a fight. “With two exalted sovereigns here, we can eliminate the demon star. Let us join you—”
“She’s not yours to judge,” Yan Ruyu cut in coldly. The chill in his voice ran deeper than mere weather; it was the kind of frost that slid under skin and settled in bone. For a heartbeat the crowd felt it, the oppressive presence of a true sovereign—an aura that even a hundred years of cultivation couldn’t mimic.
Zhao Huai’s face tightened into a sneer. “You think us incapable?”
“Go back,” Yan Ruyu repeated. “Whatever happens here is none of your concern.”
They pressed, incredulous. “The mountain pass was sealed when we arrived. We could enter, not leave—how are we to go back?”
Yan Ruyu turned. He released a fingertip of spirit-energy. The release rebounded like striking a wall—blocked by the mountain’s seal. Zhao Huai swore under his breath.
“She’s up to something,” he muttered. “What on earth is Ning’er playing at? Those people—each of them may look insignificant, but add them together and even a handful could drown her. Why drag herself into this? For what? A continent? Tens of thousands of lives? She doesn’t need to—”
Yan allowed a small, almost imperceptible smile to pass over his features. “Perhaps she does,” he said softly. “Perhaps she is doing exactly what you say.”
Zhao Huai’s eyes went hard. “You mean—she’s courting death?”
“She may be dying for them,” Yan replied. He looked over the assembly and his eyes slowed as they passed certain names—Ye Xingchen, Xie An, Chu Wenchu, Ye Xingrui, Gu Zhiruo, Dongfang Yuxi, and the younger disciples like Shui Yunsheng. Her kin in the Zhao clan. Her people in the Eastern Marsh. Even Zhao Huai, and then himself. “Or perhaps she’s doing it for herself—for those in Jiuzhou who once gave her warmth and tenderness.”
A murmur rose among them. “Sovereign—there truly is no demon star? It’s all illusion?”
Yan had not yet answered when the sky itself answered for him.
The sun that had been fierce and warm a moment before slid behind a bank of cloud. The clouds roiled and churned, darkening the heavens. A pressure—old and vicious—fell over the mountain, like a beast inhaling the air before it pounced.
“You ants,” a voice boomed from within the storm, low and hungry, “you dare plot the murder of a god?”
From the black of cloud a shadow detached itself—no form at first, only a blot in the air. Its voice echoed as if born in some hollow gorge. The old seal over the mountain thrummed; perhaps that was why its words carried such resonance.
“What is that—?” someone whispered.
“Demon star!” another cried.
“Demon king!” a voice choked.
The formless silhouette advanced. Each step it took the shape shifted: first a suggestion of feet, then legs, a waist, a chest, shoulders—and finally, a face. What had been a void became definition, and definition became a person.
When it stopped in the air before them, it had the body of an unmatched beauty.
Zhao Shuning.
But not exactly. Her face wore the features of Luo Feiyan—soft, elegant, impossibly perfect. The group behind Yan Ruyu—Ye Xingchen and the others—watched, stunned, as the darkness had resolved itself into Zhao Shuning’s likeness. Confusion rippled through them. How could she be here? What did this specter have to do with the woman who had been so hated, so accused?
“Your Grace—what is this?” voices asked, frantic. “How does it look like her? Did he do something to Ling—our Ling?”
Zhao Shuning stood draped in a dress of scarlet that trailed to the ground like liquid flame. Black hair fell in a glossy curtain down past her waist, straight and perfect. A sliver of leg peeked from the gown’s fold, pale and tempting in the dusk. Her fingers moved with languid grace; the spirit-energy that lifted with them trembled the air.
At the center of her forehead bloomed a red spider lily, vivid and obscene against her skin. Her eyes glittered—seductive and bloodthirsty at once.
To call her beauty breathtaking was an insult; it was transfixing, murderous. It made it impossible to reconcile this image with the monstrous, fanged maw conjured by the old tales of demon stars. How could such a visage belong to any of those things?
Yet the mountain trembled, the clouds hissed, and the voice that had spoken from the storm curled like a blade. The answer would come not from arguments, but from the thing that had chosen this face to present itself.