The Golden Lute Pavilion shrank behind him, swallowed by lantern smoke and the first washed-out shades of morning. Jin Yue slipped through the back alleys with the same silence he used to kill...light, controlled, unreadable.
His veil was gone.
His robe...still lilac, still soft...looked too bright in the bleeding dawn.
But no one stirred in these narrow streets.
It was the hour when drunkards slept, bakers had not yet lit their fires, and the world hovered in a fragile stillness.
Perfect for disappearing.
Jin Yue walked.
Each step carried him farther from the brothel, from Shen Ling's fever-heavy breaths, from the warmth of the blanket he had pulled up around her trembling form.
But his own pulse…
had not yet slowed.
He flexed his fingers once.
They still remembered the tension of the fishing line.
The way Zhang's choking breath rattled.
The way life left a body...quietly, without honor or meaning.
Jin Yue inhaled through his nose, as if the cold air could scrub memory clean.
It didn't.
The scent of wine, fear, and spilled silver lingered in his thoughts like ghosts brushing against his ribs.
You killed again, a quiet voice murmured inside him.
You said you wouldn't unless you had to.
He did have to.
He would do it again.
But the weight never left.
The alley twisted sharply, opening into the fringes of the morning market square. A few vendors were dragging crates onto the street, yawning beneath half-flickering lanterns. One of them glanced up at him...tired, uninterested.
Good.
No one saw a killer.
No one saw anything at all.
He slipped past a butcher sweeping yesterday's dried blood from the stones, past a noodle shop owner preparing broth, past a yawning child clutching a broom half her size. All of it mundane. All of it painfully ordinary.
Jin Yue's steps faltered only once.
A cat sat atop a toppled crate, licking its paw as the world stirred around it. For a moment, its green eyes glimmered in the dim light...reflecting him.
Not the lilac robe.
Not the trembling servant-girl illusion.
Him.
Moon-pale skin.
Shadowed eyes.
A man who lived too long beside death.
The cat blinked, bored, and looked away.
Jin Yue exhaled and kept moving.
His feet carried him beyond the square, along a narrow path that curved toward the outskirts of the city...past the small river that fed the temple grounds. The water moved softly, carrying the last shreds of night on its back.
He stopped at the riverbank.
The lilac robe clung to him in a way that suddenly felt wrong. Heavy. Dishonest. A lie he had worn long enough.
He untied the sash.
Loosened the silk.
Slipped the borrowed softness from his shoulders.
For a heartbeat, the robe hung weightless in his hands...like a remnant of someone he had never been.
Then he cast it into the water.
The silk drifted, pale and ghostlike, catching a faint echo of moonlight before sinking beneath the surface. Ripples fanned out, erasing the disguise, swallowing the last traces of the woman he had pretended to be.
A clean break.
Jin Yue knelt by the river's edge.
The water reflected his face...a face he could never escape. Moon-pale skin, smooth despite years of survival. Long lashes. Straight nose. Lips soft in a way that did not belong to a world as sharp as his.
A beautiful face.
A deceiving face.
A face that never felt like it belonged to him.
And he knew why.
He was an omega...one of the rare, lightly touched by ancestral instincts and biology, born with a beauty meant to be protected, claimed, coveted. A body the world often tried to define for him, shape for him, trap for him.
Jin Yue stared at the river's reflection...moon-pale skin, long lashes, quiet beauty shaped by hands he could not remember. The water quivered, distorting the image before returning it crystal-clear again, as if reminding him that no matter how he moved, no matter how he hid…
this face always came back to him.
He never wanted it.
Never asked for it.
Yet it deceived people everywhere he went.
But what unsettled him more than the reflection…
was the silence behind it.
He had no mother's eyes to recall.
No father's voice to remember.
No family traits to anchor him in this world of countless lineages.
In this kingdom, most were born with a Pulse Origin...
one of the many elemental currents passed down through long bloodlines...
but some came into the world with none at all.
Fire descendants traced their burning lineages back through dynasties.
Thunder clans carried the roar of storms in their bones.
Metal-born warriors felt blades hum when danger neared.
Wood Pulse healers heard the whispers of forests their ancestors once tended.
Ice children carried winter in their breath.
Shadow cultivators disappeared into darkness with ancestral ease.
Light Pulse bloodlines shone with gentle radiance.
Dozens more existed.
Each origin a map leading back to someone, somewhere…
a mother, a father, a clan, a past.
But Jin Yue...
he had all of them.
Fire, water, wind, metal, wood, thunder, frost, shadow, light, earth…
and something else...
something sky-touched and ancient that no scholar had ever written about.
His Pulse was a storm with no center.
A song with no first note.
A lineage with no ancestors.
He searched for answers anyway.
When he was young, he tried to sense where his Pulse wanted to return...
to mountains, rivers, forests, thunder plains, sacred peaks…
but it never pulled toward anything.
Because it didn't come from anywhere.
It had no home to return to.
Just like him.
His reflection wavered again, scattering into broken pieces.
Jin Yue's jaw tightened.
People find identity through their Pulse.
Through the blood that came before them.
Through the home it calls back to.
But his Pulse called to nothing.
Belonged to no root.
No clan.
No story.
He dipped a hand into the cold river.
The water slid between his fingers, carrying no answers.
He stood and continued up the path toward the old temple.
The abandoned structure sat just beyond the city walls, half-swallowed by ivy, half-broken by time. But the moment he stepped inside… something felt different.
Candle wax...new, recently melted...dotted the floor near the Suanni statue. Fresh footprints, too small to belong to adults, crossed the dusty stone.
Shen Mu.
Jin Yue's eyes softened by a fraction.
A child who still believed in spirits.
A child who prayed for miracles.
A child who whispered his wishes into the dark with trembling hands.
He stepped deeper into the temple, letting the quiet swallow the remnants of dawn.
The cold wind brushed his cheeks.
Jin Yue paused at the threshold, fingers curling as the early morning air slipped beneath the thin fabric of his robe. Dawn hovered between blue and gray, neither bright nor dark...like the world itself was holding its breath.
Just like him.
He walked forward, footsteps echoing across the aged stones.
This place… it felt like a memory waiting to wake.
He approached the Suanni statue.
A mythical guardian meant to ward off evil.
Yet tonight, it had guarded a child's hope instead.
At its base lay a new offering:
Two copper coins.
A small rice cake wrapped in cloth.
A folded paper talisman, ink lines shaky and uneven.
To protect my sister.
To protect the kind spirit who helped her.
The handwriting wobbled...childish, earnest.
Something tightened behind Jin Yue's ribs.
He knelt.
His shadow stretched across the floor...long, fragile, strangely inhuman for a moment as the morning light fractured through broken tiles overhead. He lifted the rice cake gently.
"…Thank you," he said inside his heart.
He ate the rice cake.
And he took the talisman.
Its smudged ink stained his fingertips as he folded it once and slipped it into his sleeve.
He stayed kneeling for a moment more, breath steadying.
Then...
He reached into his pocket.
Smooth river pebbles brushed against his fingertips...small, worn by water, collected over years without reason. They simply felt like things he could hold onto when the world became too heavy.
He chose one.
Soft gray.
Round from years of river flow.
Cool against his skin.
With a quiet motion, he drew the small carving knife tucked against his boot.
The blade caught the faint light.
He held the pebble steady.
Then carved.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
Each stroke shallow but sure.
A crescent moon took form on its surface.
Carving steadied him.
It always had.
A meditation sharper than prayer and softer than guilt.
When he finished, he turned the pebble over once in his palm, letting the carved moon gleam faintly in the fractured morning light.
It was small.
Insignificant.
Yet somehow… complete.
He placed it beneath the statue.
Not for praise.
Not for worship.
Not even for thanks.
Simply a message.
A silent promise:
Your prayer was heard.
Your sister survived.
You were not forgotten.
Only then did Jin Yue rise, the weight in his chest settling...not gone, but bearable.
And the temple, touched by dawn, held its breath with him.