Chapter 1:
The mud of the Ash-Wastes was freezing.
"Kneel!"
An iron boot crashed into my spine. "I folded into the gray slush. This land had been dead long before the soldiers arrived."
Beside me, my brother Xiao let out a sharp, broken sound. A soldier's heel ground into his neck. Xiao was ten, and already his skin was turning the translucent gray of those marked for the "Final Debt."
"Mercy!" My mother's forehead struck the stone. Thud. Thud. "She is a waste! She has no roots! Take me!"
The Commander of the Black Guard did not look at her. He adjusted his silk gauntlets, his eyes darting toward the black-draped carriage. He looked like a man standing on a trapdoor. The last three "vessels" had been carried out in jars. If he returned empty-handed again, he knew his clan would follow them into the ground.
"The Emperor is the Dam," the Commander rasped, his voice cracking with desperation. "And the Dam is leaking. We need a stone to plug the gap. Throw her in."
Two guards seized my arms. I let them. I looked the Commander in his bloodshot eyes.
"You are sending a candle to put out a forest fire," I said.
The Commander's grip tightened on his whip. "A waste dares speak of the Imperial Burden?"
"The 'Geniuses' you sent last month are screaming in the Void," I said, my voice thin and steady. "I have no roots. I am a hole in the world. You have spent ten years trying to fill the Emperor with spirit-stones. Why not try filling him with nothing?"
The Commander hesitated. He looked at the carriage, then at the girl who didn't even have enough spiritual energy to light a lamp. He was a drowning man; he would grab a razor if it floated.
"Let her enter."
The voice didn't come from the air. It came from the ground. A low, grinding vibration that made my teeth ache. It was the sound of shifting tectonic plates.
The Commander instantly hit the mud. "This subordinate obeys!"
I was cast through the black silk flaps.
Inside, the sun died.
Long Feng sat on a stone chair. Black veins writhed across his throat like parasites. His fingers were locked onto the armrests so hard the stone was powdering. He looked bored. Bored of the pain. Bored of the dying.
"Another bird for the cage," he said. The tectonic rumble of his voice had softened into a dry, hollow rasp. "Do you know what fate awaits those who touch this skin?"
"Death," I said. I walked closer. I did not kowtow. "But I am a Void-Born. My roots didn't wither—they were never there. There is nothing left for your curse to burn."
Long Feng opened his eyes. Gold fire burned in a sea of absolute black. He looked at me, and for the first time in a decade, the Emperor of Yan looked surprised.
"A hole in the tapestry," he murmured. "Come then. Show this King the depth of your nothingness."
He tore open his robe. His chest was a swirling vortex of black ink—the leak in the world.
I didn't think of the Empire. I thought of Xiao's face in the mud. I slammed my palm into the center of the darkness.
BOOM.
The carriage groaned. The black smoke didn't just pour into me; it was sucked in. My silver-black veins didn't scream; they thrummed with a cold, hollow resonance. It felt like my blood was being replaced by the vacuum of a winter night.
Long Feng's body arched. He seized my waist, crushing me against his chest.
Thump. Thump.
His heart restarted. The golden light of his cultivation, suppressed for years, flooded back.
"Ah..." Long Feng gasped, his forehead dropping onto my shoulder. His skin cooled. The writhing veins stilled. He stared at my arm, at the silver ink now living in my skin. "You... you did not break."
"The abyss does not shatter," I whispered. "It devours."
"Lin Mei!" Xiao's voice rang out from the mud outside.
I looked the Emperor in the eye. "The boy lives. Or I stop drinking."
Long Feng's grip tightened. A dark, possessive light dawned in his eyes.
"Commander!" he roared.
The flap flew open. The Commander struck the floor with his forehead. "My Lord! The Seal... it is stable!"
"Release the boy," Long Feng commanded. "Grant him the 'Heavenly Dragon Seal.' If he suffers so much as a scratch, I will turn your province into a graveyard."
Long Feng turned back to me. He seized my wrist, pulling me onto his lap.
Cold iron kissed my throat, biting into the skin. I gasped—not from the pain, but from the sudden, invasive pull, like a fish-hook lodged beneath my ribs, dragging my soul toward the center of him. A collar had formed where our blood threads stitched together.
"You saved the Dam," he whispered into my ear. "But now the water is rising. We are bound, little ghost. Take ten steps away from me—and we both vanish into the void."
I looked at him. I had saved my brother. I had become the lid on a coffin.
"Where this King treads, you shall follow," he murmured. "Do you understand your station?"
I did not bow.
"Then I shall see," I said softly, "whether the King can afford the price."