The smell of copper and burning sulfur cut through the clean mountain rain.
Ye Chen kicked open his front door, wooden bucket in hand, only to stop dead in his tracks. A man lay sprawled across the soaked gravel of his courtyard. Black linen robes, drenched in mud, were torn to shreds across his ribs.
Pinned to the stranger's collar was a silver brooch shaped like a coiled viper with empty eye sockets.
"Hey!" Ye Chen dropped the bucket. Cold water splashed his boots as he knelt beside the man. "Can you hear me?"
The man's eyes rolled back, white and unfocused. His trembling fingers clawed into Ye Chen's sleeve, smearing black, corrupted blood onto the coarse fabric.
"They... broke the perimeter," the dying courier rasped, his voice bubbling with fluid. "The hound... tracks the twin fish... Run, boy. The Shadow Sect is already in the valley—"
A violent spasm locked the courier's spine. His breath hitched once, twice, and then went completely still.
Ye Chen's chest flared with sudden, blinding heat.
It wasn't a metaphor. Beneath his rough linen shirt, the circular jade pendant his parents had left him nineteen years ago had turned searingly hot. It burned against his skin like a branding iron freshly pulled from the forge.
He reached beneath his collar to rip the cord off, but his fingers seized.
The jade was liquefying.
Crack.
The stone dissolved into a blinding needle of emerald light. Pain, sudden and absolute, ripped through Ye Chen's chest. He fell to his knees beside the corpse, gasping for air that wouldn't enter his lungs. The light sank beneath his skin, tunneling straight toward his heart.
"Ye Chen!"
A sharp, familiar voice cut through the ringing in his ears.
Footsteps splashed furiously through the courtyard puddles. Xiao Mei rounded the bamboo fence, her wicker basket of medicinal roots tumbling into the mud. She took in the dead courier, the scorch marks on Ye Chen's shirt, and the unnatural emerald glow bleeding through his ribs.
"What did you do?!" she shouted, dropping to her knees and grabbing his shoulders.
"Don't touch me—" Ye Chen choked out.
His veins were turning golden, bulging against his neck and arms. The pendant's energy was an unbridled inferno, flooding through channels his mortal body had never opened. It felt as though someone had poured molten bronze directly into his bloodstream.
Xiao Mei didn't back away. Her jaw set hard, she clamped both hands over his bare wrists. "Shut up! You're burning alive!"
The moment her palms made contact, a violent jolt shot through both of them.
Xiao Mei gasped, her head snapping back. A pale, icy mist burst from her fingertips, swirling into the air like winter frost. Where Ye Chen was an erupting furnace of Yang heat, her body instinctively answered with a deep, chilling reservoir of Yin Qi.
The energies didn't collide. They locked together like teeth on a gear.
The suffocating agony in Ye Chen's chest instantly eased. The molten heat rushing through his blood found an outlet, swirling toward Xiao Mei's hands, while her cooling energy flooded into his chest to quench the fire.
For three terrifying heartbeats, their breaths locked into the exact same rhythm. An ancient, dual-ringed symbol flashed across the wet stones beneath their knees.
Xiao Mei pulled back with a sharp cry, tumbling backward into the gravel. Her hands were trembling, covered in frost, while Ye Chen slumped forward onto his hands and knees, steam rising off his soaked clothes.
"What... was that?" Xiao Mei whispered, her chest heaving as she stared at her glowing palms, then at his chest.
Ye Chen touched his sternum. The pendant was gone. In its place, faint lines of green light pulsed beneath his skin, beating in time with his racing pulse.
Before either could speak, a low, guttural howl echoed from the mist down the valley trail. It was followed by the unmistakable sound of metal drawing against leather.
The courier hadn't lied. They were already here.