The command did not come as a spoken word. It was a thread of spiritual sense, cold and precise as a needle of ice, that coiled directly from Xuán Líng's gaze into the heart of Li Wei's mind. Go and receive our guest, Lord Shen. Let us hear what news he brings of his... bride.
Li Wei's eyes flickered, a spark of predatory anticipation so brief it would have been missed by anyone but the women in this room of convalescence and shared fury. He gave a sharp, single nod, an acknowledgment that was both deference and a promise.
He turned to leave, his posture already shifting, radiating the calm, imposing authority of the pavilion's chief enforcer. But at the doorway, he stopped short, clicking his tongue in a rare, unguarded moment of self-reproof. The bloodlust had risen so quickly it had nearly washed away all else.
The tray. He had almost forgotten the true priority.
Turning back, his expression softening back into the concerned older brother for a fleeting moment, he retrieved the lacquered tray. On it sat two delicate porcelain boxes, their lids fitted snugly, one painted with a sprig of plum blossom, the other with a stalk of bamboo.
"Remember," he said, his voice a casual, familiar murmur as he placed the tray on a low table next to Qianyi's bed. His gaze, however, remained sharp and dark with the promise of what was to come. "The one with the plum blossom is sickeningly sweet, for Yisha. The one with the bamboo is milder, for Qianyi. Do not mix them up."
Then, without another word, the softness vanished from his face, replaced by an expression of serene, unshakeable composure. The Frost Fox was going to greet his prey.
The main hall of the Zuì Mèng Lóu, so vibrant and chaotic by night, was now a study in quiet efficiency. Servants moved like ghosts through the vast space, their movements economical and silent.
They replaced spent candles in intricate sconces, swept away the scattered petals and forgotten tokens from the night's revelries, and wiped down the polished surfaces of gaming tables with cloths soaked in lemongrass oil. The air was a strange, clean cocktail of polishing agents, fresh flowers, and the faint, ghostly echo of last night's perfumes.
And in the center of it all, Lord Shěn Míngxuān stood like a vulgar stain on a masterpiece. He preened, adjusting the embroidered cuffs of his forest-green and gold robes, his eyes leering at a young woman who was refilling the brass incense burners with fresh sandalwood powder. His personal assistant stood a pace behind him, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his face a mask of profound embarrassment.
The lord's smug grin faltered as a sudden, unnatural chill gripped him, a deep, penetrating cold that seeped into his marrow. It was a chill so sharp it felt like a blade of ice being drawn slowly down his spine. The air around him, and him alone, grew frigid; his every exhale plumed in a frosty cloud before his face. He spun around, heart hammering against his ribs, but saw nothing in the deep shadows of the empty alcove behind him.
He gulped, the sound loud in the quiet hall, and forced himself to turn back toward the center of the room.
He stumbled back a step, barely stifling a yelp.
Li Wei stood directly before him, having appeared without a whisper of sound. He was close enough to feel the cold radiating from his body, his expression a perfect, polite mask of neutrality. But his eyes—those dark amber eyes set in a face of wintery composure—held a glacial stillness that promised unspeakable, methodical violence.
He was a study in monochrome power. His tall, lean frame was draped in robes of absolute black, embroidered with silver thread that swirled like a trapped blizzard. His hair, the white of a killing frost, cascaded over his shoulders. In one hand, he idly, rhythmically, tapped a folded fan of stark black ironwood against his palm.
"Welcome, Lord Shen," Li Wei said, his voice a low, pleasant baritone that nonetheless carried the bite of a mountain wind.
Lord Shen, for his part, was a peacock who had mistakenly wandered into a den of wolves. He was handsome in a polished, conventional way, with finely sculpted features and carefully styled hair.
But he seemed to shrink within his expensive robes, his form lacking the unshakable core of a true cultivator. Where Li Wei was a sharp, enduring mountain peak sheathed in ice, Lord Shen was a sapling, decorative but hollow, ready to splinter under the slightest pressure.
Li Wei made a deliberate show of glancing around the near-empty hall. "A curious time for a visit. Where is our Qianyi? Shouldn't she be with you, for her first triumphant return home as a bride?"
Lord Shen opened his mouth, his lips trembling, struggling to form the first words of his carefully planned lie. The confident facade he had rehearsed during his journey crumbled to dust under that silent, frozen gaze. As the man stuttered, Li Wei continued to slowly circle him, a predator sizing up his kill.
"I-I n-n-need to—," Lord Shen stammered, his eyes darting to his assistant for support, only to freeze in fresh horror. His assistant stood rigid, a fine layer of rime glittering on his robes and eyelashes, his eyes wide with terror, utterly paralyzed and unable to speak or move.
"Y-y-you n-n-need to wha-what?" Li Wei calmly mocked, his voice a flawless, pitiless echo of the lord's stutter. He stopped his circling and tapped the folded fan harder against his palm. Thump. Thump. Thump. Like a drum counting down the seconds to an execution.
He's nothing, Li Wei thought, the cold in his core intensifying with his disdain. A complete fèiwù.
"A'Wei." Xuán Líng's voice, playful and melodic, floated down from the grand staircase. She descended with a languid grace, a goddess deigning to visit the mortal plane. "Are you entertaining our guest?"
"Zhǔrén," Li Wei reported, never taking his eyes off the trembling lord. "Qiānjīn didn't come with him. And he has yet to offer a satisfactory explanation for her absence."
Xuán Líng reached the main floor, her gaze sweeping over Shěn Míngxuān as if he were a particularly uninteresting insect. She did not stop, but glided behind the staircase toward a short, shadowed hallway that led to a single, unadorned door. Li Wei understood the silent command perfectly.
"Come," Li Wei said, the word a quiet, inarguable command. Lord Shen's legs moved of their own volition, obeying the sheer force of will in that single syllable. His assistant remained where he was, a frozen statue of dread.
They moved behind the grand staircase, away from the light and the clean, morning-bustle of the main hall. The ambient sounds of cleaning faded, replaced by the stark, lonely echo of their footsteps on stone.
The staff they passed—a woman polishing a bannister, a man carrying a crate of empty bottles—did not speak or leer. They simply stopped their work and watched. Their stares were not curious or threatening, but held a kind of knowing finality, as if watching a condemned man walk his last steps. Their silence was more terrifying than any shouted curse.
Li Wei opened the heavy, unadorned door, revealing a narrow, descending staircase carved from the living rock beneath the pavilion. A wave of cold, damp air, smelling of wet stone and something faintly metallic, like old blood and ozone, washed over them. The light from the hall penetrated only a few steps before being swallowed by a profound, waiting darkness below.
Without a word or a backward glance, Li Wei began his descent, his black robes merging seamlessly with the shadows. Lord Shěn, his heart a frantic bird beating against the cage of his ribs, had no choice but to follow the Frost Fox down into the belly of the beast.
Li Wei pushed open a final, heavy door at the bottom of the stairs, and Lord Shěn stumbled through into... a parlor.
His mind, braced for a dungeon of chains and torture racks, reeled in confusion. It was an opulent, windowless study, appointed with tasteful extravagance. Silks the color of bruised twilight draped the walls, a fine rosewood desk stood in one corner, and the air was scented with sandalwood incense. He felt a shaky, tentative breath escape his lips. Perhaps this was just for intimidation. Perhaps he could still talk his way out.
Li Wei politely gestured to a single, plush velvet chair of deep crimson, positioned at a decadently carved table in the room's center. "Zuò," he commanded, the single syllable leaving no room for debate.
Lord Shěn sat, perching on the edge of the chair. Trying to master his panic, he let his eyes dart around the room, searching for clues, for weapons, for escape. Bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes, a painted screen depicting a misty mountain landscape, a vase of eternal-pearl flowers that glowed with a soft light... it was all so normal. So civilized.
But that stench. Beneath the sandalwood, a cloying, coppery tang that clung to the back of his throat. Where was it coming from? The floor was impeccably clean; the walls were spotless.
He scratched his temple in a gesture of feigned nonchalance, tilting his head back with a sigh as if bored by the proceedings, letting his gaze drift upward.
That's when he saw it.
Directly above him, suspended from the shadowed heights of the vaulted ceiling by nearly invisible silken cords, were the bodies of his three personal guards. They were hog-tied, their limbs bent at impossible, grotesque angles, their faces frozen in silent, eternal screams.
Their dark robes were stained with ominous, dark patches, but not a single drop of blood dripped down; the Three Peonies, masters of their art, had seen to that. They hung like butchered meat in a larder, like grotesque chandeliers illuminating the room's true purpose.
A strangled, wet gasp tore from Lord Shěn's throat. His legs gave way and he slammed onto the cold stone floor, his knees cracking audibly, but he felt no pain, only a soul-deep, paralyzing terror that emptied his mind of all thought.
From the shadows behind him, Xuán Líng's voice cut through the silence, soft, alluring, and as sharp as a honed razor.
"Where are my girls, Lord Shěn?"
Li Wei did not need a verbal command. At the sound of her voice, he simply raised a hand, his fingers splayed. The humid air in the room suddenly grew dry and brittle. From the lingering vapor coalesced one hundred perfect, needle-thin shards of ice, each no longer than a fingernail, hovering around Lord Shěn's kneeling form like a glittering, frozen halo. They caught the lamplight, beautiful and utterly deadly.
"Now," Li Wei said, his voice devoid of all emotion, a flat, frozen plain. "Answer the question."
He flicked his wrist, a gesture as casual as shooing a fly. A dozen of the icy needles shot forward. They did not stab, but kissed his skin, tracing fine, deliberate lines across his arms and the backs of his thighs with the precision of a master calligrapher. Each one left a searing, paper-thin incision that burned with an unnatural, deep cold, a pain that felt less like a cut and more like the touch of death itself.
Lord Shěn screamed, a high-pitched, pathetic sound that echoed off the stone walls. His composure, his arrogance, his very sanity shattered completely in less than a minute of this exquisite, frozen torment.
"I'll talk! I'll talk!" he shrieked, his body convulsing, tears and snot mingling on his face. "The Tiānmìng Bǎoxǐ! My father seeks the Celestial Seal! He believes it's hidden in her bloodline! The wedding was a ruse for the transfer ritual! I dumped their bodies in the dried-up well in the woods, the one where my mother imprisoned Lady Fan from the Music Academy decades ago for bearing my father's child! I didn't want a brother to challenge my inheritance! And my father promised I could marry Ling'er after we had the seal! Please!"
The words became a desperate, babbling torrent, a floodgate of secrets opened by terror. "He steals from the clan treasury to fund his mistresses and blames the shortfall on poor harvests! His favorite concubine is the one who knows—she hid the ledger in the dried-up well, along with some of the old books he used to research the Celestial Clan! I didn't tell him about the ledger because she knows about the child I fathered with my mother's maid!"
Li Wei snapped his ironwood fan open with a sharp crack, fanning himself slowly as the remaining ice daggers shattered into a harmless, glittering mist. He and Xuán Líng exchanged a look over the sobbing wreck of a man. Amidst the hysterical confession of murder and betrayal, a single, seemingly useless piece of gossip, a hidden ledger, gleamed with unexpected potential.
Lord Shěn, broken and incoherent, was hauled away by two silent attendants who emerged from the shadows.
His assistant was still in the main hall, white as a ghost and trembling uncontrollably, the frost on his robes just beginning to melt. Li Wei ascended the stairs and walked toward him, his footsteps silent on the polished floor. He did not speak, but simply pressed a single, blood-stained hair stick belonging to Lord Shěn into the assistant's frozen palm. He leaned close, his voice a whisper of pure, unadulterated menace.
"Take this to Patriarch Shěn. Tell him 'Your son is our... guest. The bride price has just been raised. We await his improved offer. Do not keep us waiting.'"
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© 2025 Kiesha Richardson, writing as QiXia. All rights reserved.
Death Blooms for You is an original work of fiction by QiXia. Unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or adaptation of this story in any form is prohibited. All characters, events, and settings are created for entertainment purposes and bear no intentional resemblance to real persons or situations.