Red lanterns swayed overhead as the city breathed beneath dusk. The Pavilion District was alive—perfumed air, drunken cultivators, masked assassins posing as courtesans. The Red Pavilion Sect ran this place like a second spine behind the empire's back.
And Ren Zhe walked straight into the heart of it.
He didn't knock. He didn't announce himself. He simply passed through the outer guards, their memories hollowed out the instant they looked at him.
Inside, music spilled down marble staircases. Silk-clad disciples flirted with power in every gesture. The air was thick with incense, opium, and desire.
He moved like a ghost through velvet corridors until he reached the central chamber—where Elders drank spirit wine beneath a chandelier of frozen tears.
There were five of them.
Four, he ignored.
His eyes locked onto the fifth.
The man's name was Elder Qian. A name etched into Ren Zhe's soul like rust on bone.
Qian had been a junior back then—just another coward hiding behind politics when the sect declared Ren Zhe a heretic. But it was Qian who'd whispered to the Grand Elder. Qian who had dug the grave. Qian who had driven the first nail into the coffin.
And now Qian sat fat on his throne, robes stitched with flame sigils, drinking from a goblet made of dragon tooth.
Ren Zhe didn't speak.
He just dropped something onto the floor.
A piece of his own coffin.
Elder Qian paled. Not recognition—memory.
"You… No. Impossible."
Ren Zhe's voice came low. "I told you once, didn't I? That I would crawl back."
The room erupted in chaos.
Elders rose. Guards drew spirit blades. A formation circle cracked to life beneath their feet—six-pointed, blood-fed, sealed with a jade core.
It would have trapped a Sky Immortal.
It didn't trap him.
Because Ren Zhe didn't use qi. He didn't channel essence. He used bones.
Old ones. Forbidden ones. His marrow itself had become a scripture.
He whispered, "Unbind."
And the entire formation shattered like glass under a black sun.
Then came the screaming.
Two guards aged five hundred years in a second. One began clawing at his own chest as ancestral guilt manifested physically. The fourth melted—mind first, then flesh.
Elder Qian tried to flee. Ren Zhe let him.
For ten steps.
On the eleventh, the bone tether caught him by the ankle and dragged him back.
Ren Zhe watched him squirm, face pressed to the obsidian floor.
"I remember the way you laughed," he said. "When you thought the soil would swallow me forever."
Qian wept. "Please. Please, Ren Zhe, I was just following orders. The Grand Elder—he said you practiced forbidden arts. You threatened the balance."
"I threatened his lies."
Qian coughed blood. "We buried you because we were afraid."
"You should still be afraid."
He raised his hand. Bone light coiled down his wrist.
Qian screamed—until Ren Zhe silenced him by pressing two fingers to his chest. Not to kill. Not yet.
Instead, he peeled open the man's memory.
Soul-slice technique. One he'd perfected in the seventh century of his imprisonment.
What he found made his body still.
There was more.
The betrayal had gone higher than he remembered.
There was another name.
Not the Grand Elder.
But the woman he once loved.
Yun Xue.
She hadn't been executed like he thought. She hadn't died defending his name.
She'd become Matriarch of the Thousand Silk Valley.
And she'd signed the scroll that marked him for death.
The bone in his chest pulsed. He almost crushed it out of rage.
Instead, he stood.
"Your death would be a mercy, Qian," he said. "But I want you to do something worse."
The elder blinked.
"I want you to live."
He drew a bone needle. Pressed it into Qian's soul and left a mark that would never fade. A curse. A brand.
"You will remember me in every shadow. And one day, when they ask you who returned, you will say only this—"
His eyes burned with ancient fury.
"The dead do not forget."
Then he vanished.
Not teleported. Not cloaked.
Erased.
Outside the Red Pavilion, the city was still drunk on its own decadence.
But something had changed.
Somehow, they all knew.
Some primal whisper crawled across rooftops and into hearts.
He is back.
The beggars muttered it. The merchants avoided the grave paths. Even the sect scouts posted above the city gates sent hawks into the sky—coded feathers delivering warnings to the heavens.
By morning, three sects had mobilized.
Too late.
Ren Zhe had already left the city.
And Meimei followed him.
"Why do you walk behind me, girl?"
"Because you're not like the others."
"How do you know?"
"You killed a ghost for me. No one else even tried."
"That doesn't mean I'm good."
She looked at him, eyes too old for her face.
"You're worse than good. That's why I trust you."
He grunted. "Foolish."
They walked in silence.
After an hour, she asked, "What now?"
"I need information."
"About what?"
"About a woman who used to wear red. Who spoke of freedom. Who held my hand before she slit my throat."
Meimei stopped.
"There's a storyteller in the mountains. The last memory keeper. He knows things the sects burned long ago."
He turned.
"And why would he speak to me?"
"Because he's already dead."
Three days passed.
The path to the memory keeper led through the Bleeding Valley.
It was not named for flowers.
Ren Zhe found it unchanged. Even after ten thousand years, the soil still stained boots crimson.
A black stone temple crouched at the valley's heart. Ruined. Overgrown. But not empty.
They entered.
The air shifted. Time cracked.
And a voice spoke without breath:
"You should not have come."
"I came for names," Ren Zhe said.
"And if I refuse?"
"I dig them from your corpse."
The shadows trembled.
A figure emerged. Skeletal, robed in silence. Eyes blind, but face turned straight toward Ren Zhe.
"You stink of bone magic."
"And you reek of cowardice."
The figure chuckled.
"You're the one who was buried."
"I got better."
The figure held out a scroll.
"Then read. And remember."
Ren Zhe took it.
It was not parchment. It was flesh.
And it showed him everything.
The council vote. The bribes. The forged evidence. The secret order signed by Yun Xue—his lover, now his executioner.
He dropped the scroll.
Fire coiled beneath his tongue.
"She will die."
The figure nodded. "That is your right. But know this—she bore a child. Sealed the name. The blood carries your mark."
Ren Zhe froze.
His voice broke for the first time in ten millennia.
"A child?"
"A daughter. Hidden. Protected. Untrained."
He stepped back.
The world reeled.
"Where?"
"You'll find her when the bones call."
Ren Zhe vanished into the dark.
Meimei waited outside, holding a flower she'd picked from a corpse tree.
He didn't speak.
Neither did she.
They walked into the dusk as the mountains whispered old names once more.