"Ice remembers even what flame tries to forget."
The late afternoon sun cast long shadows over Emberheart Sect, yet Lan Xueyi remained in the orchard beneath the silver-barked plum trees. The world around her lay quiet and frozen—petals glazed in frost, branches stiff with the memory of storms.
Stillness suited her.
The Sect praised Shen Li for his fire, but it had been Lan Xueyi's stillness that made her dangerous. She listened. She watched. She remembered.
And lately, she had been remembering far too much.
A Change in Shen LiShen Li had always carried the Sect's burdens with his shoulders squared and his tongue sharpened. He fought with fury and laughed with ferocity. But something had shifted in him. The fire still burned—but it had grown quiet. Focused.
Distant.
He came to her less, spoke in riddles more. Smiled too easily. And when she touched his wrist two nights ago in the courtyard beneath the prayer bells, she'd felt a flicker of something caged beneath his skin. A second heartbeat, coiled and watchful.
Not fear.
Revelation.
Something happened during the Bloodrift... something more than we were told.
Her fingers tightened around the embroidered edge of her sleeve.
She made her way toward the Hall of Records at dusk, her footsteps light and even. Her expression was serene—the way the Sect liked her: composed, obedient, polite.
None of them realized how much power lay in that mask.
She was already crafting her excuse. "Lineage research," she'd say. "An interest in prior holders of the Beastmark, since Shen Li's cultivation has accelerated again." Plausible. Harmless. Expected.
The junior archivist barely looked up when she arrived.
"Senior Sister Lan, good evening. The archives are open, of course. Do you require a companion?"
She offered her signature, faintly cool smile. "I'll browse alone. Thank you."
Once inside the rows of scrolls, her demeanor sharpened.
She wasn't looking for cultivation records or battle techniques. She was hunting gaps—eras with missing documentation, names quietly removed from succession scrolls. Liansheng's name had once appeared beside the title of Heir, briefly, in old mission logs. Then vanished.
She found the scroll in question. It had been re-copied two decades ago, updated with a cleaner format. But she recognized the signature pattern of erased ink—the slight thinning of the paper beneath the symbol for "Heir."
The Sect tried to bury him.
But the Sect did not understand Lan Xueyi. She was not Shen Li, bold enough to confront a wall.
She became the water that seeped beneath it.
She exited the Hall of Records just before nightfall. Her robe sleeves caught the breeze, trailing behind her like slow-moving banners of silk and snow.
She didn't head to her quarters.
Instead, she veered toward the Old Moon Garden—a disused meditation court behind the eastern pagodas. No surveillance or tracking arrays here. Most avoided it, thinking it cursed by the death of a prior elder during an inner-sect duel.
But Lan Xueyi remembered it differently.
She remembered Shen Li sitting here, years ago, back when they were newly inducted inner disciples. He had said this was the one place where the Sect's eyes didn't reach.
"The stone's too old," he told her. "It remembers its own blood. So the Sect leaves it alone."
Now she could feel what he meant.
As she knelt by the arched bridge of stone and let her spiritual sense flow, she sensed a distortion—subtle, masked under layers of fading suppression. Beastfire.
But not Shen Li's.
Something older. Wilder.
She slid a silver talisman from her belt and sent a strand of spiritual water through it. The mirror's surface shimmered, showing the faint outline of a burned glyph under the bridge.
Hidden, and forgotten. But not destroyed.
Carefully, she dismantled the spellwork.
Within moments, a hollow in the stone clicked open, revealing a scroll pouch of charred silk.
Inside were fragments: brittle paper memory slips, coded in an older style of Flame Script, frayed from age and spiritual decay. She cradled them like dying embers.
She read one name: Liansheng.
Then a phrase, scorched along the edge:
"…last heir to bear the Beastmark in full… sealed for divergence… truth fire awakens blood…"
Her blood chilled.
He was like Shen Li. More like him than they admit.
Was that what Shen Li had been chasing?
Not power. Not politics. Truth.
She barely had time to conceal the slips in her sleeve before she felt a presence behind her.
Light, but deliberate.
She rose without turning.
"You shouldn't be out here, Sister Lan."
Su Lin's voice. Calm. Almost casual.
But when she turned to face him, she saw it—just a flicker—the tension in his stance, the quick dart of his eyes to the pouch in her hand.
She gave nothing away.
"Neither should you."
He stepped forward, hands behind his back.
"I could ask what you found."
She arched one brow, lips softening in a slow, polite smile.
"You could. But you'd have to admit you were following me."
He didn't deny it.
For a moment, silence stretched between them—tense and laced with unspoken things.
"You think Shen Li is in danger," Su Lin said at last.
"I think he's chasing ghosts," she replied. "But some ghosts leave trails."
Su Lin's gaze sharpened.
"Then we'd best hope he doesn't catch one."
Lan Xueyi turned, her voice low.
"Or that when he does, we're not on the wrong side of the flame."