The door creaked as Nalan Ziyan pushed it open, the sound unnaturally loud in the quiet of the evening. She winced and paused, listening. From inside came the familiar sounds—her father's labored breathing, the occasional wet cough that seemed to come from deep within his chest. He was still asleep, then. Good.
She stepped inside and closed the door behind her as quietly as she could manage.
The house was small. Calling it a house was generous, really. It was a single room with walls made of old wooden planks that had gaps between them, letting in cold air during winter and insects during summer. The roof was thatched and leaked in three places when it rained. In one corner, her father lay on a thin mat, covered with a patched blanket. In another corner was the cooking area—a small clay stove, a few pots, some bowls. There was no furniture except for a low wooden table that served multiple purposes.
This was everything they owned. This was their entire world.
Ziyan set the basket of wet clothes down in the corner near the door. She would hang them to dry tomorrow morning. Right now, she had other things on her mind.
She moved to the cooking area and drank some water from the clay pot. Her throat was dry, had been dry since she left the river. The water helped, but it couldn't wash away the images that kept playing in her mind. The body floating in the water. The ruined face. The smell of rotting flesh. The blood spreading through the clear water like red ink.
She shuddered.
Her father coughed in his sleep, a long, rattling sound that made her heart ache. She walked over to him and knelt beside his mat. In the dim light, she could see how thin he had become. His cheekbones jutted out sharply, and his skin had a grayish tinge that worried her. The village healer said it was a sickness of the lungs. She said he needed rest and medicine. But medicine cost money, and rest didn't fill an empty stomach.
He was all she had left. Her mother had died giving birth to a baby brother who had followed her into death just three days later. That was six years ago. Since then, it had been just the two of them.
"I'm home, Father," she said softly, knowing he couldn't hear her. "I'll make you some soup later. You need to eat something."
She stayed there for a moment, watching his chest rise and fall. Then she stood up and moved to her own sleeping area, a thin mat in the opposite corner of the room.
The two objects she had taken from the dead man were still pressed against her body, hidden under her clothes. She could feel them with every breath she took. The scroll was cold against her stomach. The necklace chain had left marks on her skin.
She needed to look at them. She needed to understand what she had taken.
But not now. Not while there was still light coming through the gaps in the walls. Anyone passing by might see.
So she waited.
She prepared a simple dinner—rice porridge with some vegetables that the neighbor, Mrs. Liu, had given them out of charity. She woke her father long enough to feed him a few spoonfuls, but he was too weak to eat much. He fell back asleep almost immediately, the medicine the healer had given him making him drowsy.
She ate her own small portion, washed the bowls, and then sat in the darkness, waiting.
The sun set. The light faded. Outside, the sounds of the village gradually died down as people finished their evening meals and retired to their homes. Dogs barked in the distance. Someone's baby cried for a while, then fell silent.
Ziyan waited until she was sure her father was deeply asleep. His breathing had become regular and slow, with only the occasional cough interrupting the rhythm. She counted to one hundred, then counted again, just to be safe.
Finally, she moved.
In the corner of the room, there was a small kerosene lamp that they used sparingly because oil cost money. Tonight, she would have to use it. She found the matches, struck one, and lit the lamp. A small flame came to life, casting a warm yellow glow across the room. Shadows danced on the walls.
She picked up the lamp and carried it to her sleeping mat. She positioned herself in the corner, her back against the wall, in a spot where she couldn't be seen if someone looked through the window. The lamp she set on the floor beside her, adjusting it so the light fell on her lap.
Her heart was beating fast now. Her hands were shaking slightly as she reached under her clothes and pulled out the two objects.
First came the scroll. She laid it on the floor in front of her. Then came the necklace, which she placed beside it.
In the lamplight, both objects seemed different than they had at the river. More real, somehow. More present.
She picked up the scroll first.
It was heavier than paper should be. The material was thick and stiff, definitely some kind of animal hide, but from what animal she couldn't guess. The texture was strange—smooth in some places, rough in others, as if the creature it came from had scales or unusual skin.
And it was cold. So cold. Like touching ice, or like touching the hand of a dead person. A chill ran up her arm as she held it.
There was a smell, too. Old blood. Dirt. Something else underneath, something she couldn't identify. Something that made her stomach turn.
She unrolled the scroll slowly, carefully.
What she saw made her draw back in shock.
The scroll was covered with drawings. Black ink on pale hide, showing images that seemed to writhe and twist even as she looked at them. Human figures, but wrong—their bodies bent in impossible angles, their limbs too long or too short, their faces twisted in expressions of agony or ecstasy. Skulls and bones were scattered throughout the drawings, arranged in patterns that made her eyes hurt when she tried to follow them.
There was writing, too. Characters she didn't recognize, in a language she had never seen. The letters—if they were letters—seemed to crawl across the page like insects. Or maybe that was just a trick of the flickering lamplight. She couldn't tell.
The longer she looked at the scroll, the worse she felt. Her head began to spin. Her stomach churned. A feeling of wrongness settled over her, a deep discomfort that seemed to come from somewhere inside her bones.
"This is evil," she thought. "This is something made by demons."
She wanted to roll the scroll back up. She wanted to throw it away, burn it, bury it somewhere far from here. Every instinct told her that this thing was dangerous, that nothing good could come from keeping it.
But then her eyes moved to the necklace.
If the scroll filled her with dread, the necklace filled her with longing.
It lay on the floor where she had placed it, the chain coiled loosely around the red stone in the center. In the lamplight, the stone seemed to glow with its own inner fire. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen—deep red, like the heart of a flame, like fresh blood, like the last light of sunset before darkness fell.
She reached for it and picked it up.
Where the scroll had been cold, the necklace was warm. The heat spread from her palm up through her arm, and she felt something loosen in her chest. Her fear faded slightly. Her breathing slowed.
It felt right in her hand. It felt like it belonged to her.
She looked at the scroll, then at the necklace. Back and forth. The scroll made her afraid. The necklace made her brave. They were complete opposites.
And yet they had been carried by the same person. That dead man had kept both of these things with him. Why? What was the connection between them?
Without really thinking about what she was doing, Ziyan brought her hands closer together. The scroll in one hand, the necklace in the other. She held the necklace above the scroll, letting the red stone hover over those terrible drawings.
What happened next changed everything.
The moment the red stone came close to the scroll, Ziyan felt her hands begin to shake. But it wasn't fear this time—it was something else. Something was happening between the two objects. She could feel it.
The necklace started to pull downward, drawn toward the scroll as if by an invisible force. Like a magnet pulling iron. Like water flowing downhill. Natural and unstoppable.
Ziyan tried to pull her hands apart. She tried to drop the objects, to let go, to get away from whatever was happening.
She couldn't move.
Her body had frozen in place. Her muscles wouldn't respond. She was trapped, forced to watch as the necklace descended toward the scroll.
The drawings on the scroll began to change.
The black ink figures started to move. At first, she thought it was the lamplight playing tricks on her eyes. But no—they were definitely moving. The twisted human shapes were writhing on the page, their mouths opening in silent screams. The skulls were turning, their empty eye sockets seeming to look at her.
And then the shadows began to rise.
From the surface of the scroll, dark shapes started to emerge. They looked like smoke, or like ink dissolving in water, or like the shadows cast by things that weren't there. They rose up in thin tendrils, reaching toward the red stone in the necklace.
At the same time, the stone began to glow brighter. The red light intensified until it hurt to look at, until the entire room was bathed in crimson.
Ziyan wanted to scream. She wanted to call for her father, for anyone, for help. But her voice was frozen along with her body. She could only watch.
The shadows from the scroll were being pulled into the red stone. Absorbed. Swallowed. The stone seemed to open like a mouth, drawing the darkness inside itself, consuming it.
And then the light struck her.
A beam of red light shot out from the stone and hit Ziyan directly in the center of her forehead.
Pain exploded through her skull. It felt like someone had driven a spike into her brain, like her head was being split open from the inside. She would have screamed if she could have made any sound. Her body convulsed, her back arching, but still she couldn't move, couldn't drop the objects, couldn't escape.
Images flooded her mind.
She saw things she had never seen before, things she couldn't have imagined. Cities made of white stone that touched the clouds. Men and women flying through the air without wings. Hands that shot flames, that conjured water from nothing, that moved mountains. Creatures with scales and claws and too many eyes. Battles that shook the earth. Power beyond anything she had ever conceived.
And she saw the scroll. She saw what it really was.
It was a manual. A teaching text. Instructions for how to gain power—real power, supernatural power. It taught how to breathe in special ways, how to move energy through the body, how to draw strength from sources that ordinary people couldn't see or touch.
The knowledge poured into her mind like water into an empty vessel. She didn't understand it all—couldn't understand it all, not yet—but it was there, burned into her memory, waiting to be accessed.
Then came the voice.
It was deep and old and came from everywhere and nowhere at once. It rang through her skull like a bell being struck.
"The path of blood... the power of shadows... accept what is given... become what you are meant to be..."
She didn't understand what the words meant. She didn't know what "cultivation" was, or "spiritual energy," or any of the other concepts that were suddenly lodged in her brain. But the knowledge was there nonetheless, planted like seeds waiting to grow.
The pain reached a peak—and then stopped.
The red light vanished. The shadows were gone. The scroll lay still on the floor, its drawings no longer moving. The necklace had fallen from her hand, its stone dim and ordinary-looking.
Ziyan collapsed backward onto her sleeping mat.
She lay there, gasping for breath, her body soaked with sweat. Every muscle ached as if she had been running for hours. Her head throbbed with a dull, persistent pain.
For a long time, she just lay there, staring at the ceiling, trying to understand what had happened.
Was it real? Had she imagined it? Was she losing her mind?
She turned her head and looked at the objects on the floor.
The scroll looked the same as before—disturbing, but no longer alive with that terrible energy. The drawings were just drawings now. The necklace was just a necklace.
But when she looked at the scroll, something was different.
Before, the strange writing had been meaningless to her. Characters in an unknown language, impossible to read.
Now, she could understand them.
Not perfectly, not completely. But when she looked at certain symbols, meanings floated up from somewhere in her mind. She knew what they represented. She knew what they were trying to teach.
"This is... about breathing?" she said aloud, her voice rough and weak. "About controlling breath?"
Yes. That was exactly what it was. The scroll was teaching a method—a way to breathe, a way to move something through the body, a way to become stronger.
Exhaustion crashed over her like a wave. She barely had the strength to move. With trembling hands, she gathered the scroll and the necklace and pushed them under her pillow. She checked on her father—still asleep, his breathing unchanged. He hadn't heard anything. Good.
She lay back down, pulling her thin blanket over herself.
Fear and excitement warred in her chest. What had she done? What had been done to her? Was this a blessing or a curse?
She didn't know. She couldn't know. Not yet.
But one thing was certain: she was not the same person she had been this morning. Something had changed inside her, something fundamental.
The ordinary washerwoman, Nalan Ziyan, was gone. Someone new was taking her place.
Outside, the wind moved through the trees. And somehow, Ziyan could hear it differently now—could feel it differently, as if she were connected to it in some way she couldn't explain.
Her eyes closed. Sleep pulled her down into darkness.