It's been eight days since she left the Han clan.
Eight days since she last heard her mother's voice...
The wind howled down from the cliffs of the northern valley like a dying beast — cold, dry and restless. For eight days, Han JiLan had ridden. The lush greenery of the Han family's territory had long since given way to sparse, rocky plains and jagged hills. The sun beat down by day, and the wind howled with a lonely chill by night. Even though solitude was an old companion to Han JiLan, this was different. Without her family's presence to anchor her, the grief and rage she had held in check began to curdle into something colder and sharper. Her thoughts were no longer much about honor or duty, but about strategy, infiltration, and the most efficient, merciless ways to uncover the murderer and deliver justice.
On the eighth day of the hell journey, a single flame flickered inside the mouth of a cave. Outside, snow whispered across the trees in Mount Yuan's lower forests, blanketing the world in silence. On this night, Han JiLan had found shelter in a shallow cave at the whispering bones1. A small, smokeless fire crackled merrily, a lone point of warmth in the vast, indifferent darkness.
Her cloak was dust-stained. Cheeks windburn. But her eyes… sharp, hollow, focused.
After a meager meal of dried rations, she began her daily nocturnal ritual; the cleaning and maintenance of her blade.
She drew Shattered Radiance. In the flickering firelight, the divine sword of her late mother gleamed with a pure, silver luminescence. It was a blade of honor, a symbol of protection. She ran a silk cloth along its edge, her movements practiced and precise. As always, she channeled a sliver of her qi into the blade to resonate with its spirit, to feel its connection to her own.
But this time, the sword recoiled.
A low, discordant hum vibrated up her arm, a feeling of pained rejection. The sword's inner light flickered erratically, like a star struggling to shine through a toxic haze. She looked at her reflection in the blade and saw not the composed face of Han JiLan, but a stranger whose eyes held a chilling, predatory focus—which startled her.
The sword was rejecting her. The damned truth she refused to believe for 21 years started to whisper with undeniable clarity.
"This sword is a vessel of righteousness. It was forged to protect the innocent and uphold honor. My intentions are neither righteous nor honorable. It's to deceive, to manipulate, and to kill. This blade—is the wrong tool. Or worse, my thoughts… my very soul is poisoning it."
She sheathed Shattered Radiance, the silence of the weapon a final, damning judgment. Her mission required a weapon that would not flinch from the darkness. A weapon that would embrace it.
Just then-
Another blade gleamed. Like a call from the darkness.
Her gaze fell upon the small, oilskin-wrapped bundle she had kept with her—the evidence from her brother . JiLan pulled it from her satchel slowly, as though it might bite. It was Feng Ruo's throwing knife which was laying silently on her palm, its dark metal seeming to drink the firelight. It was a simple yet brutally efficient tool of an assassin.
She held it up, turning it over and over in the light. It was a short dagger, dark and expertly crafted, perfectly balanced. Its hilt was carved in a style she couldn't recognize, but oddly familiar, neither wholly demonic nor orthodox —it had this crude elegance, like a lie carved in jade.
But she wasn't just looking at it; she was feeling it. She closed her eyes and sent a delicate tendril of her qi into the blade, not to control it, but to listen. To examine its structure, its history and its very essence. She needed to know if it could bear the weight of what she planned to give it. The dagger was wickedly sharp. Its qi signature was faint… but old. There were layers in this weapon — like it had known hands before the assassin.
Her senses mapped the Internal geometry of the metal, its density, the faint, lingering traces of its previous owner. But beneath that, she felt something else. An ancient coldness. A core of profound, resilient darkness, far older than the man who had last wielded it. The blade was not merely a piece of steel. It had a past. It had a capacity for darkness that resonated with the growing poison in her own soul.
LiuYan opened her eyes. In the quiet of the cave, she looked at the sheathed, silent purity of Shattered Radiance on one side, and the small, dark, promising malevolence of the traitor's blade in her hand.
The god and the demon. Her heart and her brain.
She had found the vessel. Now, she just needed the crucible . But suddenly-
The wind outside died.
Not drifted. Not slowed.
Just dead silence.
The crucible of the Desolation of Whispering Bones was nothing but ash- laced silence blanketed in snow and the remnants of old battles. But the cave on the ridge, where Han JiLan was standing — that was where a new one began.
She knelt by the fire, hands stained with blood — her own — and her breath calm, deliberate. Before her was the demon spawns of the black hollow clan. Twisted demonic warriors with eyes like ink and mouths that never stopped smiling. The very clan that had given Feng Ruo a safe passage.
Han JiLan's hand went for Shattered Radiance out of instinct.
The sword flared. But— It screamed.
The divine weapon seared her palm with white-hot light, rejecting her corrupted qi outright. JiLan hissed and staggered back, burned — not just physically, but spiritually. Her own blade refused to acknowledge her.
She was alone.
Her breath trembled, blood seeping down her arm. The leader of the demon clan stepped forward — taller than the rest, its obsidian horns curved like knives, and a voice like maggots crawling through silk.
"So… this is the phantom of the west? The mortal they fear more than storm or steel?"
A ripple of cruel laughter echoed through the pack.
"Look at that. A divine sword that rejects her. How fitting. You were always just an illusion, Han JiLan." The demons closed in as their leader spat, eyes glinting like flame-fed obsidian.
She didn't answer. She didn't have to.
But the phantom lunged.
Unarmed, wounded, her stance was unrefined — not the graceful style of the Moon-Cutting Reversal, but something more brutal. She kicked off a jagged rock, twisted midair, and snapped one demon's jaw sideways with the heel of her boot. Another swiped for her throat—she ducked, rolled, seized a broken branch from the fire and impaled it straight into the eye of the another beast.
But she was bleeding fast. Her right arm was failing. Her mind was fogging.
Yet four demons fell before they even realized she hadn't drawn her sword.
But there were too many.
She bled — not just from the cuts, but from her soul too…..
Shattered Radiance still wouldn't answer her. Her righteous blade remained sealed, silent, and cold.
"You burn with vengeance," the sword had whispered earlier. "That is not the light I follow, master. That's not who you truly are. "
She was losing.
Not to them — but to herself.
Blood on her tongue. Breaths ragged. Her mind screamed to adapt. The pain was sharp, the scent of her own blood cutting through the air. It was the final trigger. She could not win this fight as Han JiLan.
She drew the traitor's small knife. She closed her eyes for a single, agonizing second, and let go. There was no chant. No poetry. No final words. Only blood.
She plunged her hand deep into her own abdomen, near the solar plexus — where her qi vortex resided. Fingers trembling as they dug inward. She reached deep into her own soul and found the most cold, merciless part and gathered it—the rage, the grief, the chillingly logical desire for vengeance—and ripped it free from the part of her that loved and remembered her mother's warmth.
When she opened her eyes, they were glowing with a crimson light. She channeled her qi—no longer silver and pure, but a torrent of inky blackness shot through with threads of blood-red—into the small knife.
The blade screamed, a high-pitched shriek of tortured metal. In the heat of battle, as she parried a demonic scimitar, the knife began to grow. Black energy poured from her palm into the steel, the metal twisting, elongating, fed by her rage and the life force of the demons she had cut down. It was not a forging; it was a violent, cancerous birth.
Within ten heartbeats, the dagger was gone. In its place was a long, impossibly sharp sword, black as a starless night, with a single, crimson edge that seemed to weep blood. Those nasty creatures felt the shift as they staggered back, hissing. But Shen LiuYan wasn't done. The tide of the battle did not just turn; it was annihilated. The sword devoured the souls of those demons, like it has been starving for centuries. Her own blood was pooling at her feet.
Holding the new blade, Shen LiuYan was no longer just a warrior. She was a reaper. Her movements became a ballet of death, each strike a merciless, perfect execution. The demons, who had been fighting a noble general, now faced a silent, implacable god of death. The fight ended in a storm of black and crimson light, leaving only her.
She stood in the deafening silence, breathing heavily. The new sword felt chillingly perfect in her hand, humming with a cold, familiar intelligence. It felt like a missing part of her had come home.
But Shattered Radiance?
Still sealed. Still watching. But no longer judging.
Just… waiting.
But Han JiLan felt the pull. The cold logic, the hunger of the blade, threatening to consume all the other feeling. The warm memories of her family, of Xiao Hua's smile, began to feel distant, like faded paintings. In her victory, she was in danger of losing the very reason she had started this war.
She was quick to realized her mistake. She could not let the Brain rule alone.
With her other trembling hand which was already cut deep, she drew Shattered Radiance.
The moment the silver blade entered the air, the world stabilized. Its warm, righteous light pushed back against the encroaching cold of the new member. The dark blade's hungry hum quieted to a low, respectful thrum. They did not cancel each other out. They found a tense, yet a perfect equilibrium.
LiuYan stood under the cold moon, a blade of divine, protective light in her right hand, and a blade of absolute, merciless vengeance in her left. A perfect, terrifying balance. She was a human, caught between the god and the demon she held in her own two hands.
The Phantom General of the West had claimed her second weapon.
Not a sword of light or justice.
But a sword of will and purpose.
Crimson Mourning had been born...
Author's note:
1. THE WHISPERING BONES – A DESOLATED PLACE NEAR THE EASTERN PERIMETERS OF THE WESTERN BORDERS. THIS WAS A STRONGHOLD OF DEMONS BEFORE GENERAL HAN CONQUERED THE REGION, THUS LEADING TO THE PLACE BEING ISOLATED FROM THE REST BECAUSE OF THE CORRUPTED QI THERE.