The wind that carried Zhao Wei back to the ruined temple felt like a promise of reckoning. Lantern Grave had been left behind in flames, shadows scrambling, blood spilt, names whispered into the bone-carved ground. Yet the ache in her shoulder was not from battle alone. It came from the words that had lingered in the Messenger's mouth:

  "You should not have returned."

  Not you cannot. Not you must die. But should not, as if her presence was a breaking of fate itself. A trespass against time.

  And she would trespass again.

  The Ember remnants moved like phantoms through the overgrown path, dissolving into the woods behind her. Bai had been sent ahead with a satchel of scrolls, along one of the prearranged escape lines. Feng Ren limped beside her, his grin shallow, but still in place. His sleeve was burned, the scent of scorched talisman ink clinging to him.

  "You owe me a new robe," he muttered.

  Zhao Wei didn’t glance his way. “I owe you far more than that.”

  “Not if you get us all killed.”

  She stopped at the edge of the ridge that overlooked the ruins of the Eastern Shrine, the old Jade Spire Temple, abandoned since the War of Sundering. Once a place of elemental balance. Now, nothing but ash beneath cracked jade.

  Yet her feet carried memory like blood remembers a wound. She had bled here before. Not in this life, but in the one that came before it. When she was Wei Ning, the Lady of Twelve Stratagems. When she made her final gamble and lost.

  The wind shifted. Behind her, the others paused, wary.

  “I’m going down alone.”

  “Absolutely not,” Feng Ren barked. “Whatever’s down there, it’s bait. The Creed isn’t stupid.”

  Zhao Wei unsheathed her blade, its curve catching the pale morning light. Her voice, calm as midnight. “And I am?”

  “Compared to most? No. Compared to them?”

  She turned her gaze on him fully. “Compared to them, I am the ghost they forgot to bury.”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Before he could argue again, she descended the moss-covered steps into the heart of the temple.

  The Jade Spire still rose in fragments, veins of emerald stone jutting from the earth like broken ribs. Statues lay shattered in pools of rainwater, eyes gouged, hands reaching for gods long silent. She stepped into the inner sanctum, where the echoes thickened.

  A circle had been drawn anew. Not by her.

  Blood ink.

  Spirits hummed in the walls, awakened by the scent of memory.

  And at the center of it all, a girl.

  Not older than Zhao Wei’s current body. White robes stained, hair hanging like a curtain of shadows. Her eyes were not hers—they were someone else's, and they shimmered like stolen stars.

  “You took your time,” she said.

  Zhao Wei stiffened. “Do I know you?”

  “You did,” the girl said, voice lilting. “But you gave me up. Cast me out when you chose strategy over spirit. You said I was weakness.”

  The jade in the walls pulsed.

  Zhao Wei’s lips parted.

  “...Yin Yu.”

  Her spirit.

  The one she had once bonded with. The one she abandoned when war demanded sacrifice. A forbidden act, one that should have killed them both.

  But Yin Yu had not died.

  She had waited.

  “You shouldn’t be alive,” Zhao Wei whispered.

  The girl tilted her head. “Neither should you.”

  Above ground, Feng Ren paced restlessly.

  “She’s been too long,” he muttered.

  One of the Ember sentinels stepped forward. “We should prepare for an ambush.”

  Another flicked their gaze skyward. “The winds have changed.”

  Feng Ren clenched his jaw. “If she doesn’t return in ten”

  Thunder.

  No clouds. No lightning. Just a tremor that cracked the ground, sending a gust of emerald-drenched air rolling across the ridge. It reeked of old contracts and broken pacts.

  “Form a perimeter!” Feng Ren shouted. “No one goes in unless I say so!”

  Zhao Wei stood unmoving in the sanctum. Yin Yu circled her slowly.

  “You left me for dead, Wei Ning. And yet I bled into the stone. I became something else.”

  “You became unbound.”

  “I became free.”

  The circle pulsed beneath them, and Zhao Wei felt the weight of her past press down on her ribs like chains.

  “I did what I had to do,” she said.

  Yin Yu’s laughter was hollow. “That’s what they all say before they burn.”

  The air trembled as symbols appeared in firelight around them, runic echoes of their original bond.

  “You want to reclaim me,” Yin Yu said. “But the one you were is not the one you are. Can we still merge?”

  Zhao Wei met her gaze.

  “I don’t want to reclaim you. I want to make a new oath. One forged in fire, not desperation. Will you accept it?”

  Yin Yu paused.

  Then she knelt.

  And the circle ignited.

  The jade spire cracked as spirit and soul rejoined, older, angrier, and infinitely more dangerous.

  When Zhao Wei stepped out of the ruins, her presence stopped the wind.

  Feng Ren turned, relief turning to awe.

  Her eyes now shimmered with twin rings, one dark, one light. Her aura was different. Ancient.

  “Did you”

  “She agreed,” Zhao Wei said softly. “We are whole again.”

  “Then the Creed won’t be the only ones afraid.”

  Zhao Wei looked out beyond the ridge. “Let them come.”

  In the distance, the blood moon was still visible in daylight.

  And this time, it watched her.