The scent of greasepaint and stale orchid incense always clung to Lu Xinyuan's skin long after the stage lights had died.
In the modern metropolis of the 21st century, the Peking Opera was a ghost of a bygone era, yet Xinyuan moved through it like its living heart. Tonight, he had performed the role of a scholar lost in a dream, his phoenix eyes elongated by strokes of crimson ink, his lips painted the color of a fresh wound. As he stepped out of the stage door, the humid city air felt like a physical weight against his slender frame. He was exhausted—a deep, marrow-aching weariness that made the neon signs of the city blur into streaks of artificial fire.
He took the shortcut. It was a path few dared after midnight—a narrow, winding road that skirted the edge of the "Imperial Valley of the White Tiger." Here, the gleaming skyscrapers of the city seemed to recoil, leaving behind a hollow of silence and shadows.
The air changed.
One step, it was the smell of exhaust and rain-slicked asphalt. The next, it was the biting, metallic chill of a tomb.
Xinyuan stopped. His breath hitched, blooming in a small, white cloud before his face—an impossibility in the summer heat. Beneath the skeletal remains of a collapsed stone archway, nestled in the overgrown weeds that tasted of ancient dust, lay a flash of violent color.
A red envelope.
It was pristine, its silk casing embroidered with gold thread so fine it looked like veins of sunlight. In any other context, it was a symbol of luck. Here, in the ruins of a massacred dynasty, it was a trap.
Common sense screamed at him to turn back. But Xinyuan was a creature of the stage; he was drawn to tragedy. His fingers, still pale from the remnants of his theatrical powder, reached down. The moment his skin brushed the silk, a jolt of electricity—cold enough to burn—shot up his arm and settled in his chest, right where his heart hammered against his ribs.
Clack
The sound of a wooden fan snapping open echoed through the ruins.
"You've kept me waiting," a voice whispered. It wasn't heard with the ears, but felt in the blood. It was a voice like velvet dragged over broken glass—regal, exhausted, and terrifyingly intimate.
Xinyuan turned. The ruins were no longer empty.
Standing amidst the rubble was a figure that shouldn't exist. He was tall, his broad shoulders draped in the heavy, ink-blue silks of a Ming Dynasty prince. His hair, long and dark as a starless night, caught no reflection from the distant city lights. But it was his eyes that froze Xinyuan in place—dark, bottomless pools that looked at Xinyuan not as a stranger, but as a prize.
The ghost prince stepped forward, the scent of cold sandalwood and dried blood blooming around him. He didn't walk; he glided, a predator reclaiming his territory. His hand, long-fingered and marble-pale, reached out to tilt Xinyuan's chin upward.
The touch was ice. It was death. And yet, as the prince's gaze dropped to Xinyuan's plump, trembling lips, the air between them began to simmer with a sudden, violent heat.
"A beautiful bride," the prince murmured, his thumb brushing over Xinyuan's lower lip, smearing the leftover red paint. "Though you've arrived three hundred years too late... I suppose I can forgive the delay."
In that moment, the red envelope in Xinyuan's hand began to glow. The "marriage" was sealed. Lu Xinyuan hadn't just picked up a relic; he had invited a starving, lonely god into his bed, and the price of that company would be paid in skin, soul, and blood.