The palace was still burning when the night fell.
Not the great halls—no, those were too visible. But the lesser courts, the shadow rooms, the servant towers... they went up in flame without a single witness.
Those who survived whispered of red feathers falling from the sky, like silent ash.
The Emperor locked himself in the inner chamber.
He summoned fortune tellers, spirit mediums, even ancient talisman priests who hadn't left their tomb-temples in decades. None had answers. One went mad from a single vision. Another clawed his own eyes out and laughed until he bled to death.
> "The Red God walks without a face..."
"...and the sky has already forgotten us."
The next morning, their bodies were buried in unmarked graves. The palace denied they were ever summoned.
---
Yi Mochen stood by the river where the capital met the southern marshlands.
It was quiet. Fog rolled in from the reeds. The moonlight painted long silver lines across the water. He stood alone, though he was never truly alone.
A masked figure knelt behind him.
> "The Blood Sparrow Syndicate failed," the masked one said.
"The prince's death is being pinned on them. Your name hasn't come up."
> "Good," Yi Mochen replied.
"Let the world focus on ghosts."
The masked figure hesitated.
> "What now, my lord?"
Yi Mochen turned his gaze toward the Blackstone Mountains far beyond the horizon.
> "Now… we awaken the Silent Sect."
The masked figure trembled.
> "But they were sealed for—"
> "Nothing stays sealed forever," Mochen said.
"Especially not vengeance."
---
In the far north, deep inside the Frostpine Wastes, a sect long thought extinct felt the shift.
Their leader, a woman with eyes like dead stars, opened her meditation after forty years. Her skin was cracked like ice, and her voice was colder than the wind.
> "The Crimson Dao... has resurfaced."
One of her disciples asked, "Should we intervene?"
She didn't answer. She simply drew a line across the ice with her fingernail.
Where the line passed, the frozen lake shattered.
---
Meanwhile, in the eastern city of Yuhua, corpses began washing up along the jade canal.
Each one was marked with the same sigil burned into their chests—a circle split in half by a single vertical line.
Scholars searched for meaning. Cultivators demanded answers.
Only the old beggars knew what it was.
They called it "The Mark of the Silent Moon."
A curse from a time before empires.
> "He's not just killing them," said one elder.
"He's unmaking them."
---
In his private quarters, Yi Mochen opened a lacquered box.
Inside were seven jade slips—each one stolen, inherited, or claimed through blood. Together, they formed a forbidden scripture thought lost to time.
He slid his fingers across the first one. A pulse of black-red qi rose from it.
> Crimson Dao: Fragment One
"Emotion is a chain. Break it."
He closed his eyes.
And for the first time in weeks...
He smiled.
---