Before the first dawn, Heaven wrote nine laws in fire.
The first commanded that all things be born from light.The second, that all things return to silence.The third, that no mortal hand reach past the clouds.The fourth, that names be given by Heaven and taken by Heaven.The fifth, that blood should wash away sin, but never stain the sky.The sixth, that every soul bow before the Edict Rings.The seventh, that mercy belonged to the divine alone.The eighth, that desire be a chain, not a sword.The ninth, that death be the end, and only the end.
The tenth law was never spoken.It lived in the gaps between prayers, in the breath held before judgment, in the corner of every angel's eye where doubt gathered like dust.
The tenth law was simple:
Anything that defies Heaven must be erased.
On the night the Lin Clan died, the sky over Yanzhou burned white.
Not red. Not gold.
White, like bone boiled clean.
The mortal world looked up and called it a blessing.The spirits in the rivers felt their currents choke and called it famine.Only the Lin Clan, huddled within their mountain estate, understood what that color meant.
Heaven had noticed them.
Bells rang from the city below, their tones polished, ceremonial, thin.Inside the Lin ancestral hall, another bell rang out—old copper, cracked, the sound more sob than song.
Lin Zhen, Patriarch of the Lin Clan, pressed his palm to the altar stone. Beneath his hand lay nine ancestral tablets, painted with faded ink and dried tears.
"Hold the barrier," he whispered to the elders around him. "Bow. Don't run. Heaven does not strike those who kneel."
He wanted to believe it.
On the estate's eastern terrace, a younger voice laughed once, bitter and soft.
Ren Xian stood with his sword still sheathed, wind tearing at his robes, watching the white fire pour down through the clouds in slow coils. Each strand of light carved a path across the night, humming with a sound that scraped at the teeth and spine.
"That isn't a blessing," he murmured. "That's a knife."
Behind him, children cried. Servants prayed. The clan's guardian beasts whined and pressed their muzzles against the stone.
On the cliff face below, unseen by any mortal eye, Heaven's first Envoys spread their wings.
They weren't beautiful. Saints in stories never are.
Their wings were made of script—bladed feathers inscribed with the laws of Heaven, each stroke a verdict. Their faces were masked in porcelain veils, blank except for the burning lines of judgment etched where eyes should be.
They descended without wind. Without sound. Without hesitation.
The first Envoy raised a hand.
The sky bent.
Light fell.
The barrier of the Lin Clan lasted three breaths.
On the first breath, the outer wards flared—a fragile dome of light trembling under pure celestial force. The mountain shook. Frost shattered from distant peaks. Every lantern on the estate burst, glass teeth flying through the air.
On the second breath, the ancestral tablets on the altar cracked from top to bottom, the inked names bleeding as if the dead themselves had been cut. The old copper bell rang of its own accord, swinging on rusted chain, shrieking a note that hurt mortal ears and made spirits flee.
On the third breath, the barrier broke.
The celestial light struck the central courtyard like a hammer of scripture. The stone floor did not explode outward; it folded, like parchment crumpled in a bored hand. Bodies flew—not away, but up, caught in the twisting laws that had rewritten the air.
Ren Xian watched his younger cousin lifted screaming into that white spiral. Her limbs stretched into impossible angles as glyphs of fire crawled over her skin, each line spelling out a single word:
ERASE.
She did not fall back down.
Where she had been, there was only a smear of red mist and the faint smell of incense burned too long.
Then the Envoys stepped fully onto the courtyard stones.
They did not need to open their mouths to speak. Their words burned directly into the minds of every living thing within the estate, searing themselves like brands behind the eyes.
BY EDICT OF HEAVEN, THE LIN CLAN IS FOUND CORRUPT.YOUR SOUL MIRROR ARTS HAVE TOUCHED WHAT MUST NOT BE TOUCHED.REINCARNATION IS NOT YOURS TO HOLD.
An elder screamed something about loyalty. Another shouted that their techniques were blessings from Heaven itself. A third tried to flee and turned to ash halfway through his first step, his outline burning in the air before drifting apart, grain by grain.
Ren Xian drew his sword.
The Envoy closest to him turned its faceless mask.
From within the porcelain, two points of white light brightened, focused.
Ren felt the stare like a hand around his throat.
He moved anyway.
He was young, yes. But he was Lin Zhen's son—child of a lineage that mended shattered souls and stitched broken fates. His sword was not yet legendary, but it was sharp, and grief had always been better fuel than qi.
He leapt, blade flashing in an arc meant to cut through neck and mask and law alike.
The Envoy did not dodge.
The blade struck its chest and stopped, biting a handspan into script-feathers and then no farther. The sound was like steel scraping on stone and on something that was not stone, something that sang when it was wounded.
Ren's wrist jolted. The impact drove pain up to his shoulder.
The Envoy lifted its own arm.
A single feather detached from its wing and became a sword of written light halfway through its fall, every stroke of script along its edge carved from the laws of Heaven.
When that blade moved, the world moved with it.
It did not cut his flesh.
It cut his name.
For an instant, Ren Xian felt something drag at his core—at the shape of his self, at every memory that knew itself as I. He heard his mother's laughter, his father's stern praise, the rustle of old scrolls, the bark of the clan's dogs. He saw Yue Shiran smile in the courtyard with a tray of medicine bowls, breeze lifting a loose strand of hair across her cheek.
All of it shivered.
The feather-sword traced a diagonal line from his collarbone to his hip.
His flesh opened an instant later.
Blood burst out in a dark, hot sheet, painting the courtyard stones already slick with it. His vision lurched. The world tilted. The sky cracked again as Heaven poured more light into the estate.
He did not fall gently.
He slammed onto his back, breath torn from his lungs, limbs jerking. Something sharp embedded in his hand; he realized dumbly that it was a shattered fragment of the ancestral altar.
Far above, the bell screamed and screamed.
He turned his head.
He saw Lin Zhen, his father, on his knees before the Envoys. The old man's hands were bloody from pressing them together in prayer, fingers split at the knuckles.
"Please," Lin Zhen whispered, voice raw. "If we have erred, correct us. Erase our teachings, not our children. Grant me punishment alone. Let the clan live."
The leading Envoy raised two fingers.
The world froze.
Wind halted. Cinders hung in the air like a constellation of dim red stars. The ragged edges of Ren's wound stopped throbbing, each droplet of blood suspended where it fell.
The Envoy turned its mask slightly, as if listening to something far above the clouds, far beyond the sky.
When it spoke again, the words burned colder.
MERCY IS NOT PERMITTED WHERE EDICT HAS BEEN BROKEN.ORDER DEMANDS ERASURE.
A second feather lifted from its wing.
Lin Zhen bowed his head.
The feather fell.
Ren Xian couldn't even scream.
He watched his father's body split from crown to navel in a single line of pale light, watched the flesh open and the organs within vanish into blank radiance before the halves of the body toppled aside, empty as butchered robes.
There was very little blood.
Heaven didn't like mess.
The Lin Clan died in moments, in pieces. Children imploded into particles of light and then vanished altogether. Elders toppled as their hearts turned to ash inside their chests. The household beasts went mad, gnashing their own tongues to pulp as chains of invisible law wrapped around their throats and tightened.
Ren Xian lay on the stones bleeding out, clutching the broken fragment of altar tablet against his chest as if it might anchor him to the world.
It did not.
The Envoy who had struck him approached, feather-blade still humming.
REN XIAN, its voice carved inside his skull.YOU SOUGHT TO CUT HEAVEN. YOU SOUGHT TO STEAL REBIRTH FROM OUR HANDS.BY NINTH EDICT, YOUR SOUL SHALL NOT PASS THROUGH THE RINGS. YOU WILL NOT RETURN. YOU WILL NOT BE REMEMBERED.
The blade plunged down.
He felt it enter his chest—not as metal, but as silence.
Sound vanished.
Light vanished.
Pain vanished last, dragged from him fiber by fiber, until he felt himself pulled loose from his body entirely.
The courtyard, the corpses, the screaming sky—all of it snapped away like paper burned to black.
There was nothing.
True, perfect, obedient nothing.
No thought. No time. No self.
Just a single, lingering echo of the bell.
It should have ended there.
By the will of Heaven, by the Edicts carved into the skeleton of the cosmos, Ren Xian's soul should have drifted to the Edict Rings, been weighed and found wanting, then erased completely.
The rings waited.
The first ring measured his sins. It weighed the blood he had spilled, the rage he had nurtured, the contempt he had held for Heaven's laws.
The second measured his grief.
The third favored filial piety and loyalty to clan.
The fourth tasted the echoes of Yue Shiran's name in his heart and shivered once, like a string plucked out of tune.
The fifth found the moment he had stood on that terrace and named Heaven a knife.
The sixth found the moment he had leapt anyway.
The seventh found the memory of his father's bloodless death.
The eighth found the silence that followed.
The ninth, the Ring of Termination, reached out to close around him.
Something else reached first.
It came not from above, but from below, from the root of the world where light could not reach and law had never descended.
A hand.
A hand made of black petals and old, old hunger.
The Edict Ring clenched. The hand closed. The soul snapped free like a bone ripped from a joint.
Silence tore.
For the first time since Heaven's founding, a soul marked for erasure slipped sideways, not up or down, but between.
In a chamber deep beneath the mountain, where the Lin Clan's oldest, nameless dead had been interred, a woman knelt by a stone sarcophagus.
The chamber's walls were lined with skulls mortared into the rock, rows upon rows of empty eyes stuffed with guttering candles, each flame greenish and thin.
At the center, the coffin lay open.
Ren Xian's body rested inside, pale and broken, chest wound gaping, ribs exposed like a shattered cage. The blood that had poured from him had long since dried into dark flaking rivers down his sides.
Lady Ruoxi of the Black Lotus Order looked down at him and smiled without mirth.
Her robes were the color of midnight ink. Her hair fell unbound to her waist. In her left hand she held a curved knife made of something that wasn't quite metal, wasn't quite bone. In her right, she held a lotus.
The lotus was black.
Its petals were veined with faint, pulsing lines of crimson. With every beat, the faint glow crawled outward, tracing the shape of each petal like the stroke of a brush filled with blood.
"Come back," Ruoxi whispered, voice barely louder than the candle flames. "Come back, butcher prince. Come back and take from Heaven what it stole from you."
She pressed the knife's edge into her palm. Flesh parted. Blood welled bright and hot, more vivid than any candle flame. It dripped onto Ren Xian's chest, into the cold hollow where his heart had been shattered.
Each drop hissed as it touched him, smoke rising and curling like script in the air.
Ruoxi lifted the black lotus over his body and squeezed.
Thick, dark fluid oozed from between the petals. It smelled of grave-dirt, incense, and something older: the sour-metal scent of rusted chains, the breath of forgotten gods.
The ichor spilled into his chest.
It did not fill the wound. It vanished, absorbed, sinking into the pale bone underneath like ink into paper.
"Your name," Ruoxi whispered. "They tried to cut it. I'll write it again."
She leaned down until her lips were almost touching his ear.
"Ren Xian."
The candles flickered.
"Ren Xian."
The skulls in the wall rattled softly, teeth clicking.
"REN XIAN."
The chamber shook.
Far, far above, beyond clouds and stars and the crystalline palaces of Heaven, the Nine Archons felt something wrong and turned their faceless gazes downward.
Too late.
In the coffin, the corpse twitched.
The gaping wound in his chest spasmed. The broken ribs shuddered and then slowly drew together, bone grating on bone as if remembering their old shape.
Veins bloomed across his skin, dark and webbed, filling with something thicker than blood.
A sound rose from the stone:
Not a breath.
A heartbeat.
One. Slow. Heavy.
Ruoxi's smile softened, a flash of something almost tender passing through her eyes.
"Good," she murmured. "Again."
The lotus in her hand withered, its petals curling inward, crumbling into black ash that drifted over the coffin and settled on Ren Xian's skin, staining him in scattered shadows.
Second heartbeat. Faster.
The candles along the walls flared, green turning to blue, blue to a sickly violet. The skulls' empty eyes filled with ghostly light as stray souls crowded to watch.
Third heartbeat.
The air grew thick. The silence in the chamber deepened until Ruoxi's breathing and the faint crackle of the candles seemed obscene.
Ren Xian's fingers twitched.
His eyes snapped open.
They were not the eyes he had died with.
Once, they had been dark, clear, human.
Now, black lotus petals seemed to unfurl within them, ringed by a thin line of dim, simmering red, as if someone had pressed a brand into the iris and left it there to smolder.
He inhaled for the first time since his death.
The air scraped his throat raw. His lungs expanded like torn bellows. Pain detonated through his body—ripples of molten agony racing along every nerve, every meridian, as his blood remembered how to move.
He coughed.
Black fluid and clotted blood poured from his mouth, splattering across the coffin stone, steaming as it touched the air. With it came fragments of something pale and fragile—scraps of golden script, broken characters that flared and vanished, remnants of the Edict that had tried to claim him.
The tenth law screamed as pieces of it died.
Ren Xian clutched at the edge of the coffin, fingers digging into stone hard enough to crack it. His body arched, muscles locking in spasm as the Abyssal lotus seed sank fully into his heart.
He remembered everything.
The Envoys.The white sky.His father splitting open without blood.The promise that he would not return.That he would not be remembered.
He remembered his name being cut.
He felt where it had been patched over—messier, darker, stitched together with foreign will and old sorrow. The soul never healed smooth from that kind of wound.
Ruoxi leaned over him, silhouette framed in candlelight, hair falling around them like a curtain of night.
"Welcome back, Ren Xian," she said softly. "Heaven has a vacancy in its heart, and you have a debt to collect."
He stared up at her, chest heaving, fingers leaving bloody handprints on the stone.
His first words scraped out of a throat still tasting of ash and scripture.
"Heaven," he rasped, voice little more than broken glass. "I'll…kill Heaven."
Ruoxi's smile turned sharp.
"No," she said. "You will reforge it."
She placed her bloodied hand flat over the ruined skin of his chest, pressing the lotus seed deeper into him.
In the distance, beyond stone and soil, beyond roots and bones, beyond all the layers of reality Heaven thought it owned, something ancient stirred in the dark and smiled without a mouth.
The tenth law shuddered.
In the Black Grave beneath the world, the Butcher Prince drew his first breath, and Heaven began to bleed.