The wind outside the marketplace carried the noise of vendors, carts, and faraway chatter, but none of it mattered to Empress Lian An. She walked with confident steps, her three ghosts following with floating impatience.
Fen Yu, still sulking, played with her transparent sleeves.
Li Shen drifted beside her like a bored scholar.
Wei Rong, the ghost general, kept glancing around as if expecting a new enemy hidden behind every street stall.
They were returning from Ghost Alley and the old shaman's hidden world—an experience that still felt unreal, even though the parchments and swords in their ghostly hands proved it had happened.
Fen Yu complained for the fifteenth time in ten minutes,
"I was so pretty in that dream world… I should have stayed longer."
Li Shen scoffed.
"You were caught by your own desires and cried for ten minutes straight."
"I DID NOT!" Fen Yu wailed.
Wei Rong added dryly,
"You cried loud enough to shake the sigil."
"I WAS EMOTIONAL!" she protested.
