Shu Mingye struck down the last puppet guard, his blade cutting clean through the chest. The thing shuddered, then collapsed onto the blood-soaked ground. He stood in the center of the training ground, painted red from head to toe. Blood dripped from his hands, streaked across his face, even tangled in his usually neat hair. Some of it wasn't his. But a lot of it was.
Bite marks chewed into his legs. A deep slash crossed his shoulder. Angry claw marks burned across his back. But Shu Mingye stood tall, unbending, as if pain was a minor inconvenience he didn't have time for.
Boyi came running, breathless. "Lord! The shadow guard following the princess… he just reported in. They… they're missing!"
Shu Mingye's heart dropped. His eyes narrowed. "What do you mean missing? Did they just vanish into the air?"
Boyi shook his head quickly. "No. They entered a doll store. And they didn't come out for a long time. The shopkeeper said they left through a side door after buying dolls."
Shu Mingye's eyebrow twitched. "...And then?"
"The guard searched the entire store. They weren't inside. They followed the road from the side door but—" Boyi gulped. "They disappeared. No trace."
Shu Mingye's face darkened. His jaw clenched, his fists curling until blood dripped from his knuckles.
First puppets. Now the entire group missing. And dolls? Of all things, dolls??
He took a deep breath. "What kind of disaster have they walked into this time?" he muttered.
Shanjun rushed up, his armor smeared with blood, urgency rough in his voice. "Lord, the northern side, things are getting worse. The soldiers can't hold on much longer."
Shu Mingye didn't answer right away. His eyes narrowed, and he sank into a deep, grim silence. For a heartbeat, it seemed he had not heard. Then his voice cut through, cold and sharp. "Shanjun, go find the princess. Search every single corner of that damn doll store. Tear it apart if you must. Use threats if needed. Take few guards with you."
He jerked his chin toward Boyi. "You, come with me."
Shanjun stunned. "Wait, what? No—Lord, I'll stay with you! We can look for the princess later. The situation in the north is more critical right now!"
Shu Mingye turned his head slowly, his voice dropping to a low, cold growl. "You're ignoring orders now?"
Shanjun's jaw clenched. He bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste iron. "…Understood."
Shu Mingye didn't wait. "Find them quickly. Make sure the princess is safe."
Then he strode off toward the northern palace, blood streaked and fearsome, his presence alone burning like fire. He moved as if he intended to win by sheer intimidation, or by glaring at the battlefield until it surrendered out of fear.
The northern palace was a mess. A bloody, smoky, screaming mess. Half of his soldiers had already fallen. Maybe a hundred were still fighting. Meanwhile, more than two hundred soldiers from Prince and Princess Han's side were still going strong. Clearly, they had the numbers. And the nerve.
This wasn't a battle that could be won with brute force alone. It was going to be long, messy, and exhausting. Time was something he didn't have, and patience was something he had never bothered to cultivate. Reports from the Shulin-Shenlin border had already come in. The enemy was stirring there too. And Queen Shen had already stationed her own forces there. They were probably waiting for perfect moment to strike when he was injured and vulnerable. How convenient.
It didn't take a genius to see what was going on. Prince and Princess Han were colluding with Shenlin. He wasn't even surprised anymore. Of course they were. They had probably rushed the plan the moment they realized he had started digging too deep into their secrets.
He stood on a high step, arms behind his back, quietly watching the chaos below. Soldiers clashed. Steel rang. Shouts echoed. The once-white tiles of the palace ran red with blood. And then slowly, he smiled. A cold, dangerous, this-is-a-terrible-idea-but-I'm-doing-it-anyway kind of smile.
Boyi, standing nearby, caught sight of it and felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. That smile. He had seen it before. It was the smile Shu Mingye wore right before something very, very bad happened to someone else.
Shu Mingye turned to him. "Station the water cultivator soldiers in that remote courtyard."
Boyi blinked. "What? Why there?"
Shu Mingye's smile didn't fade. "Precaution," he said.
Boyi didn't ask more. Mostly because he was afraid of the answer.
Without another word, Shu Mingye walked toward the battlefield, robes fluttering behind him. He just needed to stall. Stall until the "precaution" was ready. And if that meant blowing half the courtyard off the map—well, that was a problem for future Shu Mingye.
...…
After what felt like the longest questioning session in history, complete with aggressive nodding, dramatic head-shaking, and a lot of stabbing things for punctuation, they finally pieced together a rough idea of what was going on.
There were no words, of course. But still, between Shen Zhenyu's intimidating glares and Linyue's unnervingly calm suggestions of "Should we test acupuncture on his other leg?" they made progress.
Turned out, they were deep underground. This whole place was beneath the doll store. A hidden maze of creepy rooms and even creepier purposes. The shopkeeper was luring people in and trapping them down here. Once the victims were knocked out, drugged with something foul-smelling and entirely illegal, the big man would haul them off for… whatever came next.
He Yuying groaned. "Lucky us. Today's victims weren't normal customers." He waved a hand vaguely at their ragged, dirt-covered group. "We're chaos with legs. The worst possible shipment."
Apparently, the big man had been working alone today. Maybe because his boss assumed a little knockout powder was enough to handle unarmed civilians. Because no amount of planning could have prepared them for flying shoes, ankle-biting herbalists, or Shen Zhenyu being thrown into the corpse pile at least three times.
Rookie mistake.
With the keyring jangling cheerfully in Song Meiyu's hand (who had enthusiastically claimed it after the big guy got poked into submission), they moved room by room. Each space was just as suspicious and stomach-turning as the last, lined with cages too small for anything but misery, rickety tables stained with things that weren't tea spills, and odd, sinister-looking tools no one dared name out loud.
He Yuying peeked at a spiked contraption and whispered, "That's either a back scratcher or my new recurring nightmare."
They left the big man in the dumping room, mostly because he wasn't going anywhere. What was he going to do? Chase them? He didn't even have eyeballs anymore.
Then in one of the smaller, dustier rooms, they finally found something actually useful. Dozens of scrolls. Stacked neatly on a cracked table, bound with ominous red string.
Song Meiyu, fueled by equal parts of curiosity and panic, started untying them. One scroll. Then another. And another. The others gathered close, the air tightening around them with every new line they read.
The contents? Horrifying.
This underground lab had been running for four years. They had kidnapped people, ordinary people off the streets, and used them for experiments. Real, terrifying ones. Bones replaced. Marrow extracted. Muscles cut and reshaped like they were dough. Failed experiments? Dismantled and turned into doll parts. It was a gruesome, blood-stained recycling system.
It got worse.
Linyue found a set of notes tucked between two heavier scrolls. She frowned while reading, then slowly handed it to Shen Zhenyu. He read in silence for a moment. His grip on the paper tightened. His face darkened.
"They found a way to control people," he said at last. His voice was calm.
"What do you mean control?" Prince Lu asked, already regretting the question.
Linyue pointed at the diagram on the scroll. A human figure with dozens of sharp, jagged lines drawn across its back. "They slice open the back to expose the meridians. Then they use special needles like the one I stole to hook into the lines and reroute them. Unnaturally."
He Yuying blinked. "Reroute meridians? That's not just creepy, that's illegal."
Song Meiyu skimmed another scroll, her lips moving as she read. Her voice was small. "Wait… there's more. After the meridians are twisted, the controller or whoever's running this infuses their spiritual energy directly into the victim's messed-up meridian system."
Shen Zhenyu finished grimly, his eyes still fixed on the paper. "And controls them like a puppet."
Prince Lu let out a strangled noise that was part gasp, part retch. "That's disgusting! That's—no. No, no, no. I need to scrub my brain."
"The worst part," Linyue added quietly, "is that the victim is awake the whole time. The scroll says the process must be done while the person is fully conscious. For… better spiritual alignment."
Song Meiyu turned a shade of green. She slapped a hand over her mouth. "I'm going to throw up. Right here. Right now. On the scrolls. I don't even care."
Shen Zhenyu pointed to another ugly diagram. "It also explains the puppets could still move even with their heads or arms chopped off. As long as spiritual energy flows through the rerouted meridians, the body can keep going."
Prince Lu backed away from the table. "I'm going to need tea. Strong tea. And a bath. Possibly five baths."
No one laughed. They couldn't. The air was too heavy, thick with the weight of what they had just read. But beneath the shock and disgust, one thought rippled through all of them. A quiet, mutual agreement that they didn't say out loud: This wasn't just horrifying. This was completely insane. Even by their standards.
They stood around the table in silence, the air thick with ink, blood-stained scrolls, and too many questions. The quiet stretched long until Linyue broke it with a question.
"Who did this experiment?"
All heads turned at once. It was the question they had been avoiding.