Yin Zhao hid in the secret room for three days.
The bluestone door at the entrance, weighing over a thousand pounds, silently protected her.
Until that night.
Following the CLACK of turning mechanisms, the stone door rumbled open.
“Wei Yinzhao?
You really are alive,” the newcomer sneered.
His tall figure stood silhouetted against the light.
Even clad in armor, he looked like a fierce ghost crawling out of hell.
The torchlight stung her eyes so fiercely that she couldn’t open them.
It took her a long while to recognize him.
He was Xie Pingzhang, the illustrious Marquis An Yuan and Xie Chen’s father.
Her mother had told her that someone would come to her rescue in three days, but she hadn’t said who.
At that moment, Yin Zhao understood everything.
Xie Pingzhang was not the one coming to save her.
She wondered how Xie Pingzhang had found her.
The secret passage in the ancestral hall was ingeniously designed and extremely difficult to discover.
Anyone unaware of its existence wouldn’t find the entrance even if they tore the hall down to its foundations.
Furthermore, her mother had already set fire to the building, destroying all traces…
Did her mother trust the wrong person?
Or was it…
Xie Chen?
She had brought Xie Chen to the Wei Family Ancestral Hall before.
Given how shrewd and perceptive he was, he had likely seen through the mechanism’s clues.
“Take her away.” Xie Pingzhang spat out the order and turned on his heel to leave.
Yin Zhao was dragged out of the secret chamber, pulled across the burnt ruins, over the corpses and pools of blood littering the ground.
There was blood everywhere.
A massive amount of it stretched from the corridors all the way to the front courtyard like a dark red river.
Charred beams lay slanted across the ground, and the green brick pavement was cracked from the intense heat.
Her bare feet were pierced by sharp rubble and scorched branches, but she felt no pain.
The front courtyard was no longer the place she knew.
Bodies lay haphazardly on the ground, while men dressed as government soldiers cleared the scene, hauling away the corpses.
She recognized Aunt Wang from the kitchen, sprawled over the threshold with a slash across her back, her clothes burned and melted into her flesh.
Uncle Liu from the accounting room had collapsed on the stone steps, half his face blistered from the fire, his eyes wide open, staring at the sky.
Old Li the gatekeeper leaned against the ruins of the screen wall, his lifeless eyes unblinking, still clutching a half-burnt door latch.
She was dragged the entire way, her body scraping over charred ash and broken porcelain.
Her grandmother lay in the main hall.
She was wearing the auspicious dress from her sister’s wedding day, tightly gripping her ebony cane.
Her hair was loose, spread out on the ground, curled and yellowed by the heat.
Her eyes were still open, staring toward the doorway, and her lips were slightly parted as if she were trying to say something.
However, the gaps between her teeth were filled entirely with ash.
Yin Zhao wanted to close her grandmother’s eyes, but they wouldn’t let her.
She was forced into a prison cart covered with black drapes and taken away from the Wei Mansion.
The once-familiar streets and alleys, the neighbors who used to smile and greet her, flashed past the gaps in the cart’s walls like a falling dream…
The once-illustrious family was reduced to scorched earth.
People from the government came and went, finding no leads to trace and no way to pass judgment.
It ultimately became an unresolved, cold case of a family massacre in Luojing.
No one knew that beneath the ruins, a single Wei Yinzhao had survived.
No one knew that a meticulously disguised assassination and a fire meant to destroy the corpses and erase all traces had concealed all the dark secrets.
From that day on, she was locked up in the South City Stone Prison.
The Stone Prison was underground.
Surrounded by cold stone walls on all sides, it never saw the light of day.
It was damp, freezing, and had more rats than people.
Later, she learned to curl her legs up and wrap them in the hem of her clothes while she slept.
In the Stone Prison, someone would come to take her blood every so often.
Whenever they drew her blood, she would count.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
She counted up to five years.
Over eighteen hundred days and nights.
The people who took her blood never spoke to her.
They always came in pairs—one to hold her arm down, the other wielding a specially made copper needle.
The needle was very thick.
Whenever it pierced her flesh, it would make a faint POP.
She didn’t feel the pain anymore.
Her wrists had been pricked so many times that they had long grown numb.
But that subtle vibration remained exceptionally clear, like a blade scraping against the surface of her bones, sending an ache all the way up to her shoulders.
Dark red blood would flow down her wrist into a white jade bowl.
Pain.
Hunger.
Cold.
Fear.
She had endured it all.
The only thing she couldn’t endure was the longing.
She missed the soup her mother used to brew, her sister’s laughter, and the scent of ink in her father’s study.
She missed the strict scoldings from her grandmother for lacking manners, the Flying Goddess Statue in the Wei Family Ancestral Hall, the snow in Luojing, and the fragrance that filled the entire city when the plum blossoms bloomed.
And then—there was the hatred.
In the Stone Prison, she had gouged out the Brother Hengzhi she had loved for so many years from her heart.
Later, hatred took his place, coiling around her heart, day and night.
She thought she would die in the Stone Prison, passing away in that place devoid of daylight.
But Xie Yunjin appeared.
That day, the door to the stone cell was opened from the outside, and lamplight spilled in.
Squinting, she saw a young man in a black brocade robe standing at the doorway, carrying a lantern.
Behind him lay a profound darkness, like the bottomless maw of a beast.
“Wei Yinzhao?” His voice was very low, cool and hoarse.
Yin Zhao didn’t answer.
By then, she hadn’t spoken to anyone in a very long time.
Her vocal cords felt rusted, unable to make a sound.
He crouched down, the candlelight illuminating his face.
He was very young, his features sharp, rugged, and handsome.
Even after five years, she surprisingly recognized those eyes with ease—they looked a bit like Xie Chen’s, but they were colder and wilder, like an untamed wolf.
“Xie…
Yunjin?”
He smiled.
“Want to leave this place?”
Yin Zhao looked at him and nodded.
He reached out and scooped her up from the pile of straw.
She was so thin she was nothing but a bag of bones, easily cradled in his arms like a bundle of firewood.
“Don’t be afraid.” His voice carried a smile, so soft it was almost as if he were muttering to himself.
“I’m here to take you away.”
“What are you thinking about?”
Xie Yunjin’s voice yanked Ci’er back to reality.
She froze for a moment, realizing she had zoned out at some point.
The candlelight in the morgue was still dancing.
Its pale blue light fell onto the corpse across from them, which remained frozen in a flying posture, making its hands look like two withered leaves.
“Nothing,” she said.
Xie Yunjin leaned against the autopsy table, his arms crossed over his chest as he looked at her.
“Wei Yinzhao,” he suddenly called her by her birth name. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
“There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you.”
“What?”
“In the past, you used to chase after my elder brother, shouting all over the Capital City that you wanted to marry him.
Why didn’t you ever give me a second glance?” Xie Yunjin’s tone was lazy, laced with a hint of teasing.
“Back then, I was also a dashing young man, perfectly suited to smoothly marry into your family.
How did I fail to catch Miss Wei’s eye?”
Ci’er shot him a look.
“Do you want to hear the truth, Second Master?”
“Speak.”
“Your face when you were a kid just looked like it needed a beating.” She wore a half-smile, showing no mercy at all.
“A dashing young man?
You were as skinny as a monkey, and your face always carried a hostile glare as if everyone owed you eight hundred taels of silver.
You looked exactly like a debt collector.
Why would I seek you out?
To seek death?”
“Wei Yinzhao.” Xie Yunjin’s voice was as light as a sigh.
“If your mouth weren’t so vicious, I would suspect you had been switched out by an impostor.”
“Vicious?” Ci’er retorted bluntly.
“Perhaps Second Master has forgotten the time you threw a dead rat at my face?”
Xie Yunjin’s mouth twitched.
“I never threw a dead rat.”
“You did.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“Fine, it wasn’t you.” Ci’er rolled her eyes.
“Even if it wasn’t you who threw it, you were annoying enough back then.
You ignored everyone you saw, spoke with thinly veiled sarcasm, and every girl in all of Luojing took a detour when they saw you.”
Xie Yunjin fell silent for a moment.
At that time, Xie Chen was the Heir of the Marquis Mansion, renowned throughout the capital.
He was as bright and clear as the moon and the breeze, noble and unmatched.
Wherever he went, he stood head and shoulders above the rest, envied by all.
And what about him?
A concubine-born son whose birth mother died early, unloved by his father, and disliked by his grandmother.
The servants in the mansion called him “Second Young Master” to his face, but behind his back, they called him “that bastard.” He had no friends and didn’t want to make any, pushing everyone far away.
Gloomy, reclusive, and covered in thorns, he silently forged himself into a blade.
If he hurt people first, he wouldn’t be hurt by them.
He smiled.
“It’s a good thing you didn’t seek me out.
The me back then couldn’t have protected you.”
Ci’er also smiled.
“Seeking anyone out would have been misplaced devotion.”
The morgue grew quiet.
Only the wick of the lamp occasionally let out a soft SPUTTER, like some sort of secret signal.
After a long time, Xie Yunjin slowly opened his mouth, his tone changing.
“What a pity.
Liu Tingyue treated the Wei family’s secrets as a bargaining chip to cling to my father, yet all she got in return was the status of a concubine.
And my father, despite exhausting all his schemes, only found six incomplete scrolls in the Wei Mansion.
The remaining six completely vanished without a trace following your grandmother’s martyrdom and your mother’s march to her death.”
Wei Yinzhao’s fingertips tightened slightly.
The more than two hundred lives of the Wei family were nothing more than stepping stones for Liu Tingyue’s rise to power, sacrifices to Xie Pingzhang’s ambitions.
“Wei Yinzhao, I’ve told you everything I know without reservation, so you should give me the truth as well.” Xie Yunjin narrowed his eyes at her.
“What exactly is the profound mystery behind the thousand gold blood of the Wei family’s daughter?
Why can it make the Dragon Bone Prophecy reveal itself?”
Ci’er’s tone was flat.
“My mother never mentioned it to me.”
“Think again.” Xie Yunjin took half a step closer.
The smile in his eyes was heavy with a chilling aura.
“If you don’t want the number of people dying in the Painted Skin Case to keep increasing…
if you don’t want the joys of this world to prove thinner than paper.”
Ci’er’s heart tightened.
She looked at Xie Yunjin, her gaze dark and heavy.
“I only remember that when I was young, I accidentally cut my hand once.
A drop of blood fell onto a parchment scroll my grandmother kept, and that painting seemed to come alive…”
“Come alive?”
“When the blood soaked into it, the parchment seemed to gain a life of its own, flowing across the paper…
But I developed a high fever that very night and only woke up after three days of a hazy stupor.” Ci’er recalled, the bizarre sensation still vivid in her mind to this day.
“After that, my grandmother locked the scroll in the study and strictly forbade everyone in the mansion from ever mentioning a single word about it…”
Xie Yunjin gave a soft hum and nodded.
“It seems that the ability of the Wei family’s daughter’s blood to connect to the profound and reveal secrets isn’t just a rumor.
But…
only a Wei family’s daughter with an all-yin birth chart is considered to possess the thousand gold blood.
Distant relatives of mixed blood or those without an all-yin birth chart don’t count, do they?”