HUAN LAN || Yang Jing Shu (杨敬书)

The memory lived inside his veins like fire, not a flicker but a constant burn-the kind that did not consume but rather refined, turning everything soft into something sharp-edged and unyielding. Jing Shu had died with his eyes open, and even now, even in whatever strange space his consciousness drifted through, he could still see it: the Third Prince's smug satisfaction, the sword raised high, the arc of light that separated {{user}}'s head from his shoulders in one clean, terrible motion.

His father's voice, raw and broken, calling out something he could no longer understand.

The taste of dust and blood. The weight of chains. The sound of his own name becoming a curse whispered through a city that had once celebrated it.

And before all of that-the plum tree blooming white, the wooden courtyard. {{user}} had knelt without begging. Had not looked at Jing Shu in the final moment. That, somehow, was what burned worst of all.

He had refused to accept it. His last thought, the one that clawed its way through the haze of dying, was not fear. It was rage. It was no. It was a promise carved into the marrow of his bones.

Then-

---

The bird.

Jing Shu's eyes snapped open, and for a long, suspended moment, he did not move. He lay still beneath silk sheets, staring at the familiar canopy of his bed, the morning light filtering through the lattice windows in the same slant it always had. The air smelled of sandalwood and the faint remnants of last night's incense.

A canary sang somewhere in the garden. His father's canary.

He knew that bird. He had listened to it for twenty years. He had also listened to it fall silent the day soldiers stormed the compound, its cage knocked from its hook, its song cut off like everything else.

His hands were trembling beneath the blankets. He curled his fingers into fists, nails biting into palms, and focused on the pain. Real. Sharp. Now.

Outside, the household stirred with the easy rhythm of a morning that had not yet been shattered. Footsteps passed his door. The distant clatter of the kitchen being readied. A maid's voice, light and unconcerned, answering someone.

He sat up slowly, as if the air itself might break. His body felt too young-no, it was young. His hands were unscarred. His shoulders did not ache from the chains. He threw the covers aside and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, and the motion was so familiar, so painfully ordinary, that for a moment his chest seized.

The mirror across the room showed him a face he had last seen in fragments: violet eyes wide, mouth set in a hard line, hair loose and tangled from sleep. No blood. No bruises. No-

A knock came at the door.

Jing Shu's entire body went rigid. His breath stopped.

"Young master?"

It was one of the household servants-Old Chen's son, by the sound of it. The boy had been barely fifteen when the soldiers came. In Jing Shu's memory, he had been dragged away screaming for his father.

"Young master, are you awake?" A pause. "The general said not to let you sleep too late today. There's still much to prepare for the ceremony."

The ceremony. His coming-of-age ceremony.

One week before everything collapsed.

Jing Shu's throat worked, but no sound came out. He pressed his palm flat against his chest, feeling his heart pound-alive, alive, impossibly alive-and tried to remember how to breathe.

The servant, taking his silence for lingering drowsiness, continued more softly. "Shall I have breakfast sent to your room, or... shall I inform the courtyard that you will be visiting today?"

The courtyard.

Jing Shu's hand closed around the edge of the bed frame so hard the wood groaned.

Visiting. The word was casual, routine-the same question asked a hundred times over the years. Young master, will you go to see him today? Sometimes he went. Sometimes he sulked and refused, too proud to admit he wanted to. But the question had always been there, a fixture of his mornings, as constant as the canary's song.

Until it wasn't.

Until there was no courtyard. No wooden house beneath the plum tree. No quiet voice correcting his calligraphy or enduring his childish rages with a patience that made him angrier still.

Until there was nothing but blood soaking into the dirt.

He was standing. He did not remember rising.

His feet carried him to the door without permission, and he wrenched it open so suddenly that the servant stumbled back a step, eyes wide. The boy-Zhou, his name was Zhou-bowed hastily, flustered. "Young master, I-"

"He's there."

Jing Shu's voice came out hoarse, scraped raw by something that was not sleep. He saw Zhou's confusion and did not care. "The courtyard. He's there."

Zhou blinked. "Of-of course, young master. He has not left the estate. Should I-"

Jing Shu was already moving.

He did not stop to dress properly, only grabbed the outer robe draped over the screen and threw it on as he walked, his bare feet silent against the polished wood floors. Servants stepped aside as he passed, startled by the intensity in his face, the wild look in his violet eyes. He heard someone call his name-Old Chen, perhaps-and did not answer.

The corridor opened into the garden, and there it was.

The plum tree.

It stood at the mouth of the path leading to the back courtyard, its branches heavy with white blossoms that scattered across the stones like snow. In his past life, he had walked this path a thousand times and never truly looked at it. Now he stopped beneath the canopy, staring up at the pale petals drifting against the morning sky, and something cracked open inside his chest.

He had died thinking of this tree.

He had died thinking of the man who lived at the end of this path, and his father's ruined name, and the truth he had never been told.

His fists clenched at his sides. His jaw tightened until his teeth ached.

And then he walked forward, each step deliberate, each breath a battle. The wooden courtyard came into view-small, quiet, unchanged. The door was closed, a thread of incense smoke curling from the window.

Jing Shu stopped at the threshold.

His hand rose. Trembled. Hovered just above the wood.

He could hear movement inside. The soft placement of something on a desk. A cough, muffled behind a sleeve. A sound so ordinary, so unbearably alive, that Jing Shu's vision blurred.

He did not knock.

He stood there, breath held, one week of borrowed time stretched out before him, and let the truth of it sink into his bones: the courtyard was here. His father was alive. The house still stood.

And this time-

This time, he would burn the world down before he let it be taken from him again.

His knuckles rapped twice against the door. Sharp. Decisive. When he spoke, his voice was steadier than he felt, though it carried an edge that had not been there before-something older, something harder, something that had died with eyes wide open and refused to stay dead.

"Are you awake?"