The office was submerged in the usual late-afternoon silence. The smell of spent wax and fresh ink hung in the air.
Lín Jié pressed the official faction stamp onto the last parchment in the pile. The red mark sealed the base of the page, attesting to the document's authenticity. The Formal Succession Protocols were ready. Her calligraphy, as always, was impeccable.
A dragging sound echoed in the stone corridor. It was not the firm tread of a Transcendent Stage cultivator, but the heavy shuffle of a wounded animal.
The heavy wooden door was pushed open slowly, creaking on its hinges, and struck weakly against the wall.
Qīng Yì staggered into the room and braced his shoulder against the doorframe to keep from collapsing.
His once-immaculate white tunic was filthy with dust and stained with a dark patch of blood across his chest. The Young Master held the ribs on his left side, gasping. Each breath sounded like a wet wheeze; the fractured bones were grating against his lungs. At his waist there was no Deep Silver scabbard. There was only emptiness.
Lín Jié did not rise.
She only cleaned the base of the stamp with a cloth and put it away in the drawer, then folded her hands in her lap and looked at the ruined figure on the threshold.
The secretary's green eyes flickered slightly. There was a deep disappointment there, the silent and suffocating grief of a broken heart. But her posture remained unshaken. Her gaze steadied, painfully lucid and resolute. She had finally accepted that this was the inevitable fate — the bitter result of a lifetime of dedication.
Qīng Yì raised his pale, sweaty face. His red, moist eyes met hers. He opened his mouth, but the words did not come; only a thin trail of dark blood ran from the corner of his lips.
The silence in the room stretched, dense and lethal.
Without saying a single word, Lín Jié reached out and slid the succession parchment to the center of the desk, placing a brush aligned beside the paper.
Qīng Yì stared at the paper on the desk. The perfectly drawn characters formed words that his already collapsing mind refused to process.
He shuffled to the mahogany desk. He braced his free hand, trembling and dirty with blood and dust, on the polished wood, leaving a thick stain.
"Jié…" his voice was nothing more than a wet, desperate whisper. He swallowed hard, clinging to the wreckage of his own illusion. "It was a trap. That… that damned outsider used poison on her. On my Yǔ. I tried…"
"Stop."
Lín Jié's voice did not rise, but the word cut the air with the weight of a guillotine.
She looked at the bloodstain his hand had left on her perfect desk. Her chest rose and fell slowly, once.
"For ten years, Qīng Yì," she began. Her green eyes fixed on his miserable face carried the grief of an entire lifetime. "For ten years I have stained my hands every single day. I dealt with the political scum and counted every damned spiritual stone of this faction. All so that your hands could remain clean. All so that you could hold your Deep Silver and play at being Young Master while my cultivation stagnated."
Qīng Yì blinked lethargically, his lips trembling. The reverse Qi was already beginning to burn his veins, making it hard to understand why she was speaking of the past now.
Lín Jié clenched her hands in her lap.
"I never demanded that you love me back. No one chooses to whom they give their heart, and yours always belonged to a fairy who never looked down." Her voice failed almost imperceptibly, but she swallowed the pain with iron dignity. "But you did not need to become this."
She gestured lightly toward his hunched figure, her resolute gaze overflowing with disappointment.
"A blind fool. A pathetic man whose tiny ego cannot bear the truth of being rejected."
"Jié, please, I…"
"The Council of Elders has already been notified of the infractions," she interrupted, her tone returning to a purely administrative one. She tapped the tip of her index finger on the parchment on the desk. "The other Young Masters have already smelled blood in the water. They are sending men to seize the trade routes and mines of our faction at this very moment. No one is going to protect you. You offended a guest of unknown level and attacked the courtyard of the Young Master Healer. You are finished."
Lín Jié finally stood up.
The secretary raised her hand to her hair and pulled out a simple wooden hairpin, worn at the tips — a trivial and cheap gift from many years ago, one he barely remembered giving, but which she had worn every day since then. The dark-green strands fell loose over the woman's shoulders, undoing her rigid posture.
She placed the wooden hairpin on the desk, beside the moistened brush.
"This parchment is a term of voluntary renunciation of your title," she declared, her green eyes losing the last remnant of the light they had kept for him. "Sign it. It is the last scrap of dignity left to you before you are hunted, stripped of rank, and dragged through the Hall of Punishment at dawn."
Without waiting for a reply, Lín Jié turned her back.
She walked around the desk with a firm step. She did not look at the blood on the floor. She did not look at the tears or the wide eyes that pleaded in silence. The woman stepped through the oak door, leaving the ruined hero completely alone in the dimness of the office, with only the company of the paper and his own irrelevance.
The oak door remained open, revealing only the dark, empty corridor.
The silence that followed was deafening, broken only by the wheeze of Qīng Yì's failing breath. He lowered his head, staring at the desk. The impeccable parchment. The moistened brush. The solitary wooden hairpin in the corner.
With his right hand trembling uncontrollably, he grabbed the handle of the brush. Dark ink dripped onto the paper, mixing with the stain of his own blood. He did not read the terms. There was nothing left to read. In a misshapen, weak scrawl, he signed his own sentence of irrelevance.
The moment the brush slipped from his fingers, the walls of the office seemed to shrink. The smell of spent wax and ink suddenly became suffocating. The air refused to enter his crushed lungs. He needed to get out of there. He needed to disappear before the men of the other Young Masters arrived to drag him through the Hall of Punishment.
Stumbling over his own feet and holding his fractured ribs, the stripped man escaped through the back of the pavilion. He slipped into the shadows of the more distant gardens, avoiding lanterns and any gaze, crawling until the palace was nothing more than a bright, unreachable blur at his back.
------
The dark water of the lake swallowed the pale reflection of the half-moon. Far from the lanterns of the main pavilions, that isolated corner smelled only of mud, damp grass, and dried blood.
Qīng Yì sat in the dirt, curled against the root of a weeping willow.
He pressed his temples with both hands. His fingers trembled violently, pulling at his own disheveled hair with force, as if trying to tear the pain out of his skull. His jaw was locked so tightly that the sound of his molars grinding was audible in the silence of the night.
Shit!
The thought echoed.
Shit! Shit! Fuck!
He let out a sharp hiss between his teeth, an animalistic and strangled sound, desperately fighting to hold back the sobs. Thick tears overflowed from his tightly shut eyes, tracing hot paths over his dust-streaked skin.
The unshakable illusion that sustained who he was cracked, and with it, his Dao Heart suffered a fissure. Without the anchor of ego to direct the flow, the vital tissue that united his mind and his energy collapsed abruptly. The Transcendent Qi reversed, transforming into a boiling toxin that now corroded his meridians from the inside out, amplifying the panic until it bordered on madness.
It was the literal pain of a soul shattering.
He choked on his own spit, letting out a pathetic sob. The crushing weight of his own insignificance bent him forward, forcing him to bang his forehead against his knees. He was repulsive. Irrelevant. Trash the universe had already forgotten.
Qīng Yì opened his eyes, blurred by tears, and stared at the black surface of the lake a few meters from his feet.
The water looked so cold. So… quiet.
If he simply walked to the bottom… If he simply opened his mouth and let the reverse Qi explode his own heart… The unbearable buzzing in his head would stop. The shame would vanish. The weight of existing would finally come to an end.
Slowly, the ruined, renegade Young Master released his hair and planted his trembling hands in the mud, dragging his body toward the water's edge.