The air was thick with the scent of herbs and desperation. Candle flames trembled, casting crimson shadows that danced like dying embers.
Inside the thatched cottage, Chu Hongying sat rigid as stone, her gaze chained to Shen Yuzhu's deathly pallor.
The Medicine Elder's golden needle glinted, a sliver of cold light tracing a deliberate arc in the firelight. Her eyes—ancient and unblinking—reflected the fear and obsession festering in Chu Hongying's soul, a silent inquisitor presiding over a sacred trial.
Click.
The sound of the first needle striking home was crisp, final—an icicle snapping in the deep freeze of winter.
Shen Yuzhu's body convulsed, then fell terrifyingly slack. His breath vanished. The wolf-head brand on his nape faded from a searing crimson to the grey of a long-dead hearth.
Chu Hongying lunged forward instinctively, only to be frozen by the Medicine Elder's voice—a child's pitch wielding an executioner's chill.
"First death. The breath only feigns its end. The heart meridian still holds—do not falter now."
She collapsed back onto the stool, nails carving half-moons into her palms. This was but the first verse. Seven days of funeral dirges awaited; seven times she would watch him die, and seven times she must wrest him back from the void.
Day Two — The Fever
A firestorm raged within him. He burned, thrashing and crying out to phantoms in his delirium. Chu Hongying shed her armor, the iron shell of a general, and in nothing but her thin under-robes, she gently cradled his head in her lap. With a cloth steeped in melted snow, she wiped the sweat from his brow—her touch awkward, unpracticed in tenderness.
"Shen Yuzhu," she whispered, her voice scraped raw by a vigil she had never known she could keep. "When I was seven, my father put a spear in my hands for the first time. On a night just as cold. He told me it was my spine—to be carried straight, or broken clean."
He did not hear her, lost to fever dreams. Still, she spoke, unraveling the tightly bound threads of her past for the first time.
"At twelve, they called my family traitors. My father's last act was to press this spear and a half-burned, bloodstained scroll into my hands. Live, he commanded. Learn the truth."
"At fifteen, I put on a man's armor and killed for the first time. I spent the night behind the barracks, vomiting into the snow until my throat was torn."
Her words fell softly, a confession offered only to the crackle of the fire and the man who could not hear.
"All my life, I believed that if I held this spear fast enough, I could uphold my father's will, cleanse my family's name, and protect this bitter stretch of frontier."
Her fingers, calloused and sure around a shaft of steel, brushed a damp lock of hair from his forehead with terrifying fragility.
"But these past nights… I have felt this hand tremble."
"It seems I, Chu Hongying, wish for nothing more than to guard this single, fragile breath of yours."
She finally understood: beyond the duty of guarding a border, there was the terrifying, vital act of guarding a person.
Day Three — The Living Brand
As another needle found its mark, the Medicine Elder spoke, her gaze never leaving the wolf-mark.
"The Wolf-Soul Pact is no inert seal. It is a living thing. It feeds on his spirit, whispers to what sleeps behind the Bronze Door." Her ancient eyes shifted to Chu Hongying. "You have tied your life to his—with three years of your sun and a drop of your heart's blood. Your threads are one. His calamity is now yours."
A long silence filled the space between heartbeats.
"How is it undone?"
The needle twisted. A faint moan escaped Shen Yuzhu's lips.
"Find the hand that cast the pact and still its heart. Or…" Her voice carried a hidden weight, a secret path. "…smother it with a bond of greater strength."
Within the Nightmare
Shen Yuzhu drowned in a private hell.
The world was fire and ash—the pyres of Snow Wolf Valley, the screams of a butchered clan. The memory of searing iron bit into his neck once more, Helian Sha's voice a venomous chill: "You are a pawn of the Wolf God. A blade for the Talon Battalion. Nothing more."
From the consuming dark, a legion of wolf-head marks swarmed, twisting into chains that sought to drag him into the abyss.
As surrender claimed him, a figure of blazing crimson tore through the gloom.
He reached, a drowning man for light.
"Shen Yuzhu—look at me. I am here."
Her voice was a blade, shearing through the nightmare. The darkness recoiled. The red of her presence became his only tether to life.
Day Four — The Waning Pulse
His life force flickered—a storm-tossed lantern. One moment, his veins ran with fire; the next, with the ice of the deepest grave. Chu Hongying peeled away her steel gauntlets and wrapped his frozen hands in her own, willing her warmth into him.
Day Five — The Distant Howl
The storm had quieted. Into the fragile silence came the long, low howl of a wolf.
Through a crack in the window, Chu Hongying saw him—Helian Sha, a silhouette of iron and shadow atop a distant ridge, a pack of wolves at his heels. His lieutenant murmured; a cold, almost reverent smile touched the Wolf Prince's lips—a salute to a worthy rival on the cusp of awakening.
His whisper, carried on the wind, was a blade pointed at her heart: "…Could the Wind-Splitter Spear… be the final key?"
A wisp of green smoke, conjured from nothing, coiled into a sigil before Lu Wanning. Her face tightened. She crushed the symbol.
"The camp is restless," she said, her voice low. "They say their General abandoned them for a strategist. Gu Changfeng holds the line, but the poison has reached the capital."
Internal strife and external threat converged.
The Medicine Elder's eyes snapped open.
"Rats at the edge of my mist," she declared, her childish voice flat. "Their scent is of the capital."
The reach of the capital had already crept this far north.
Day Six — The Silent Vigil
His breath was a ghost—a scant mist on cold glass. Chu Hongying did not move, did not sleep, her entire world narrowed to the faint, terrifying rise and fall of his chest.
Day Seven — Severance and Return
In the dark hour before dawn, the Medicine Elder selected her final needle. It was long, and gleamed with a sinister, liquid blue. With the gravity of a star shifting its course, she guided it between his brows.
Shen Yuzhu's body bowed from the bed. His eyes flew open, vacant and staring. A great, wrenching cough seized him, and he vomited a torrent of black, clotted blood onto the sheets before collapsing, his breathing finally deepening into the steady rhythm of life.
The vicious brand on his neck faded, leaving only the pink, tender skin of a newborn scar.
The Medicine Elder exhaled, a tremor of exhaustion betraying her immortal guise.
"The dirge is sung," she whispered. "His life—wrested back from the King of Hell."
And in that moment of victory, Chu Hongying finally broke.
The iron cable of her will, stretched over seven endless nights, snapped. The strength fled her body. She swayed, a hand flying to her brow, and found it wet with tears she did not remember shedding.
The Medicine Elder placed a small jade vial beside her.
"One pill with each new moon. It will leash the wolf-poison for a year. No more." Her gaze was profound, a well of forgotten ages. "The true cure lies not in my arts, but in Severing the Pact. Do not forget."
The first ray of dawn pierced the clouds, spilling liquid gold through the paper window.
Chu Hongying, her vigil ended, slumped beside the bed and surrendered to the darkness. As she fell into the depths of sleep, she felt it—a faint, cold pressure as his fingers tightened weakly around her own, the hand she had refused to relinquish.
Outside, the world was hushed, blanketed in a pristine, untrammeled white.
On the far ridge, Helian Sha stood sentinel, his eyes fixed on the cottage and the two silhouettes merged as one against the window. Something unreadable flickered in his gaze before it stilled, frozen over like a winter lake.
He drew a single arrow from his quiver, its fletching carved into the shape of a wolf's head. With the full force of his body, he cast it forth.
Whoosh—
The arrow's flight was a silver hymn. It struck deep into the heart of a snow-laden pine at the edge of the clearing, its shaft humming with the echo of its passage.
—A farewell. And a promise of war yet to come.