Sharp light cut through the temple hall and painted Xi Youran's face in cold shards. The air smelled of old incense and iron — a scent that had come to mean betrayal.
"Mom? What is the meaning of this?" Xi Youran's voice was small at first; then it hardened. "Why are you with them?"
Xi Jia's eyes stared past her, glassy and patient as an empty well. For a heartbeat Xi Youran imagined the mother who once brewed tea and hummed lullabies. The image fell apart like ash.
"What do you mean? I was always with them," Xi Jia answered, voice flat. No heat. No recognition. Only the cadence of a puppet reading lines.
Tears gathered and failed to fall. Xi Youran gripped the hilt of her resolve until her knuckles whitened. She tried again, softer this time. "Mom…"
The woman at the center of her memory did not turn. The silence that answered was worse than any scream.
Something broke inside Xi Youran — not with noise but with a hush. The child who had begged beneath a roof of warmth died, and in her place a steel edge took root.
"Fine." Her whisper was a vow. "If this is what it must be, then I will fight the Shadow Clan to the end. Even if it costs me my life."They had taken so much: father, brother, grandfather, Master Mu Fei, Hui. They had taken truth itself. From this moment, Xi Youran bowed to no illusion.
She stepped forward and, with a precision only a practiced alchemist could muster, wrenched herself free from the last snare of hope. She forced a contract on her own memory — a small, cruel cutting that sealed the sweetest recollections away like poison. The mother who once smiled at sewing needles and rice steam was buried beneath the weight of necessity.
"You will not call me daughter any longer," she told the woman who wore her past like a mask. "You are a vessel now — a thing to be outwitted and, if need be, destroyed."
Xi Youran turned away, each step measured, each breath colder than the one before. She did not look back as she fell back into the mountain gloom; to stare was to lose the edge she had forged. She remembered every name of those she had loved — and then she carved their graves from her heart so they would not slow her.
The truth she learned in that hall was brutal and simple: the Shadow Clan were not people to bleed. They were not bodies bound to heat and pulse. They were absence made cunning. Where they touched, blood did not fall — only quiet, permanent sleep, and the taste of erasure on the tongue.
That realization bent the shape of war.
Xi Youran, last scion of the Blood Clan and successor of Mu Fei's craft, folded her hood up and vanished toward the mountain paths. The moon watched like a coin balanced on its edge. Below, the world kept turning, ignorant and loud.
Above the cliffs, Master Zen's rune glowed in the dark. Somewhere, Lu Han closed a scroll and muttered a prayer to whatever gods still listened. In the capital, JianZi sharpened plans that were no longer only political. Yuan Fei's rift had ripped the sky; the balance did not simply wobble — it snapped.
Xi Youran walked into it with a pale smile and a promise carved in bloodless stone:Her revenge would be endless, and her war would not be against flesh alone.