The world returned not with the clash of steel or the gasp of a death rattle, but with a crushing, helpless pressure, followed by a blinding, shocking cold. A desperate, instinctive breath flooded his lungs with air that felt like shards of ice, and a sound he did not will—a piercing, infant's cry—tore from his throat.
Where…?
Confusion, vast and drowning, swallowed Lin Xuan's consciousness. The memory was absolute: the golden talon, the searing pain, the Patriarch's cursed hand, the final darkness. Yet here was sensation. Here was light, blurred and too bright. Here was cold, so profound it felt ingrained in the very stones around him.
His vision, weak and unfocused, began to resolve. He was swaddled in heavy, silver-threaded brocade, held in arms that trembled. Above him was a face, pale as moonlight, etched with exhaustion and a worry so deep it seemed to have hollowed her cheeks. A young woman, her beauty sharp and delicate like frost on a windowpane, her eyes the color of a winter twilight, stared down at him with a mixture of awe, terror, and ferocious love.
"My son," she whispered, her voice a fragile thread of sound. "My little Xuan."
Son? Xuan?
The cognitive dissonance was a physical blow. He tried to speak, to demand answers, but only another mewling cry emerged. He tried to move, to push away, but his limbs were useless, pudgy things he could not command. The reality, impossible and horrifying, crashed down upon the fragments of his assassin's mind.
Rebirth.
The ancient tales, the whispered legends of powerful souls seizing a new vessel… He had become one of them. But this was no heroic reincarnation. This was a prison of helpless flesh.
The room came into sharper focus. It was vast, built of pale blue-grey stone. Frost clung to the corners of the high windows despite the roaring fire in a monumental hearth. The air thrummed with a dense, cold spiritual energy—the energy of the Northern Region, a world away from the humid, fertile south of his past life. Symbols of a mighty clan were carved into the stone and woven into the tapestries: a towering, ancient pine tree wreathed in perpetual mist. The Lin Clan.
A door of dark ironwood swung open, and a presence filled the chamber. An old man entered, his robes the deep green of pine needles, his long beard white as the peak snow. His eyes held the weight of centuries and the sharpness of a glacier crack. He was power and authority incarnate. Behind him trailed several others—elders with stern faces, a severe-looking matron, a scholarly man clutching a jade diagnostic tablet.
"Feng'er," the old man's voice resonated, deep and calm, yet it silenced the very crackle of the fire. "Let me see the child."
The young woman—Lin Feng, his mother—hesitated for only a heartbeat before steeling herself. She presented the swaddled bundle. "Grandfather. Father."
The Old Patriarch of the Lin Clan, Lin Zongyan, peered down at Lin Xuan. His gaze was not one of grandfatherly warmth, but of a strategist assessing a new and unpredictable variable. He extended a finger, calloused and crackling with restrained power, and touched it to Lin Xuan's forehead.
A wave of energy, probing and immense, flooded Lin Xuan's tiny body. He felt it course through his undeveloped meridians, a deep, glacial force that sought to understand his very essence. In his past life, he would have shrouded his core, twisted his qi to misdirect. Now, he was an open book, utterly vulnerable.
The Patriarch's eyes widened imperceptibly. The scholarly man with the jade tablet gasped, the stone in his hands flaring with a sudden, brilliant, yet eerily cold light—a silvery-white luminescence that cast no warmth.
"As reported," the scholar breathed, voice hushed with dread and fascination. "The Celestial Yin Physique. Purer than any record I have ever seen. But… it manifests in a male form."
A murmur rippled through the elders. The severe matron's lips thinned. "An aberration," she stated flatly. "The Celestial Yin is the gift of the Moon Goddess, the birthright of our highest female cultivators. It is the crucible that forges True Celestials from our line. In a boy… it is a paradox. A sickness."
Celestial Yin Physique? Lin Xuan's mind, reeling, grasped at the term. In his past life, he'd heard whispers of such legendary constitutions, God-given templates that propelled cultivators to heights others could only dream of. But this felt nothing like a gift. The cold wasn't just in the air; it was in his bones, leaching into his marrow. It was a hollow, draining chill. Instead of a formidable core coalescing within him, he felt a subtle, persistent leak, as if his very vitality was being siphoned away into the endless, hungry Yin.
"It is not strengthening him," Lin Zongyan confirmed, withdrawing his finger, his brow furrowed. "The Yang essence necessary to balance and activate the physique in a male body is absent. The Yin runs rampant, unchecked. It is consuming his foundational life force."
Lin Feng clutched him tighter. "What does that mean, Father? He is my son. Your great-grandson!"
"It means," the severe matron, Elder Lin Mei, interjected, "that unless a miracle is found, the physique that should make him a peerless genius will instead slowly wither him. He may not see his first year, let alone his first spiritual awakening."
A stone settled in the pit of Lin Xuan's non-existent stomach. Weakening. Withering. To have cheated death only to be delivered into a body dying from its own nature? The irony was a poison more bitter than any he'd ever tasted.
"And the father?" Patriarch Lin Zongyan asked, his tone turning to flint.
Lin Feng's face, already pale, went ghostly white. She straightened her spine, meeting his gaze with a defiance that seemed to cost her dearly. "I have said all I will say on that. He is of my blood. Of Lin blood. That is all that matters."
The silence that followed was heavier than the mountain above them. The mystery of his father hung in the frigid air, another mark against him, another source of whispered condemnation.
The Patriarch studied his great-grandson for a long, silent moment. He saw the unusual silver sheen to the infant's eyes, felt the unsettling, vacuum-like pull of the unformed Yin physique. He saw the daughter he cherished, holding this fragile, cursed blessing with desperate strength.
"His life is a thread in a blizzard," Lin Zongyan pronounced finally. "The Celestial Yin cannot be removed. It is his soul's imprint. We must seek a way to stabilize it, to find the impossible Yang to match this profound Yin. Until then…" He looked at Lin Feng, and for a fleeting second, something softened in his glacial eyes. "Keep him in the west pavilion. The 'Frostbloom Garden'. Its ambient energy may soothe the symptoms. He will have every resource our archives can provide."
It was not a declaration of unwavering support, but a stay of execution. A commitment to study the problem, not necessarily to save the child.
As the elders filed out, murmuring amongst themselves about "wasted resources" and "heaven's mistake," Lin Feng sank onto a chair by the fire, pressing Lin Xuan close. Tears, cold as the rest of her, finally spilled over, tracing paths down her cheeks.
"I'm sorry," she whispered into the soft, silver-flecked hair on his head. "I'm so sorry, Xuan'er. This world is so cold for you."
Lin Xuan, trapped in the body of a newborn, could offer no comfort. His mind, however, burned with a cold fire of its own.
Zhang Li, the thought formed, sharp as an assassin's needle in the quiet of his infant mind. You cursed a hand. Fate, it seems, has cursed an entire life.
He looked through his new, silver-hued eyes at the frost patterns on the window, at the dancing flames that gave no heat he could feel. The weakness was infuriating. The circumstances were a gilded cage lined with thorns of ice. But within the crumbling fortress of this dying physique, the soul of Lin Xuan, the Sharpest Shadow, stirred.
He had overcome a Heart-Thread Gu. He had struck a vengeful blow from the jaws of death itself. A problematic physique? A northern clan of icy politics? A mother with secrets and a missing father?
It was merely a different kind of battlefield.
And Lin Xuan, though he could not yet hold a finger, had never forgotten how to fight.