SU TANG (素醣)

  Day 8, 5th Month of the Lunar Calendar, 6000th Year of the Yun Dynasty, Taishan Province, Tian’an Sect

  Su Tang~

  Wake up.

  Sunlight.

  Moonlight.

  Darkness.

  I blinked.

  Then gasped, jolting upright as if some phantom had just torn me out of sleep by the collarbone. My hand flew to my shoulder. I expected the sting. The warm trickle of blood. The burst of pain, even just a throb.

  But…there was nothing. No wound. No tear. No blood.

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  Just...absence. A hollow echo where agony should have lived.

  What a terrible dream.

  I leaned back against the stone wall, the cold pressing against my spine like a second skin and tilted my head until I could see the ceiling through the bars of shadow. A sigh escaped my mouth.

  Night. Surely, it must be night.

  Somewhere down the corridor, chains clattered, and bodies shuffled. I flinched. The sound echoed too much, like it belonged in another world. A world I couldn’t unsee. A world where Ying Yue smiled.

  No, not smiled. That would’ve been too human. It had been satisfaction, thinly veiled beneath that porcelain mask she called a face. A serene little expression as she twisted the blade deeper and deeper and deeper. Like she was adjusting the bloom of a chrysanthemum, not disembowelling her once-friend.

  I shuddered and hugged my knees to my chest. Or tried to.

  The last time I attempted this motion, I’d screamed loud enough to startle a passing guard. That had been after the Heavenly Lightning trial. Since then, pain had settled into my joints like an unwelcome tenant, content to remind me that I was breakable.

  That I had broken.

  But now—no pain.

  My limbs bent. My spine curled. My body obeyed. No needles under the skin. No brittle crunch of bone.

  Something was wrong.

  This was a new body.

  New, soft flesh.

  New, white skin—unmarked, unblemished.

  Except that line.

  The dreaded, oil-black thread twisting down the length of my arm like ink spilled in water. Elegant, almost, the way it curved and branched like a withering vine.

  A reminder.

  Of what still lived inside me.

  Of what they wanted from me.