The silence in the chamber is a held breath, a suspended moment between the death of an old will and the birth of a new one. Yile's whispered confession hangs in the air as a fragile, undeniable truth, a tiny, hard-won ember in the vast darkness of his despair.

For Kexing, perched upon him like a victorious queen, the words are not just a rejection; they are an impossibility. Her entire architecture of control, meticulously built over years of psychological torture, is predicated on his brokenness. This ember of will is a structural flaw in her masterpiece. Her serene mask, a fixture of such perfect malice, flickers. The hand holding the hairpin, which has been as steady as the polar star, betrays her with an almost imperceptible tremor.

That tremor is the catalyst.

It is the sight of that tiny, human fallibility in his tormentor that ignites the kindling Meicao's love has laid. The raw, biological imperative of a cornered animal, explodes through Yile's depleted frame. It is clumsy, graceless, all frantic elbows and a violent arch of his back. He simply shoves, a convulsive heave to get the crushing weight of her presence off him.

The move is so artless, so fundamentally human in its desperation, that it bypasses all of Kexing's prepared calculations for elegant resistance or counter-threats. She stumbles backward, her silk slippers skidding on the polished floor, her balance lost for one crucial, catastrophic second. The poisoned hairpin, a moment ago a promise at his throat, describes a harmless silver arc in the air.

Her eyes, those deep pools of calculated calm, widen into perfect circles of pure, unadulterated shock. The universe has deviated from her script. The puppet has not just cut its strings; it has slapped the puppeteer.

"You…?"

The single syllable is torn from her, stripped of all honey and venom, reduced to a bare, incredulous gasp. It is the most honest sound she has made in years.

In the electric space of that shock, a new understanding passes between the sisters. Meicao, still on her knees, and Meibei, standing guard, have spent a lifetime speaking a language of violence and duty that needs no words. Their shared childhood in the Behani temples, their years as rival blades in Yile's service, their recent brutal duel—it has all forged a silent lexicon between them.

Meicao's head turns. Her eyes, still swimming with tears, now hold a different fire—a clean, focused killing intent. She meets Meibei's gaze. There is no time for reconciliation, for apologies, for the untangling of eight years of betrayal and grief. There is only the immediate, glaring problem: the poison in human form now scrambling to its feet.

Meibei's eyes answer. The conflict, the duty to the Emperor, the memory of her own complicity—it all collapses into a single, undeniable imperative. The brother they shared, the man they both, in their fractured ways, loved, has chosen life. They will clear the path for it.

A single, sharp nod from Meicao.

A mirrored nod from Meibei.

The pact is sealed.

The unified front, the synchronized purpose in their stances, is a force more terrifying to Kexing than any individual attack. Her game of divide and conquer lies in ruins at her feet. The calculus of her survival instantly recalibrates. The intimate, controlled environment of the chamber is now a death trap.

Her composure, so recently fractured, shatters entirely. The serene mask dissolves into a rictus of panicked fury. She does not try to fight. She scrambles backward, her elegant robes tangling around her legs, her movements those of a spider fleeing a fire. She gains the doorway, her head whipping around into the corridor beyond.

The scream that rips from her throat is the raw, piercing shriek of a cornered animal, designed for one purpose: to bring the full, crushing weight of the empire down upon them.

"GUARDS! THE PRISONERS ARE LOOSE! THEY TRY TO FREE THE DOG! THEY'VE GONE MAD!"

Kexing's scream is a key turned in a lock deep within the palace's heart, and the door it opens unleashes a torrent of polished steel and imperial green. They pour in, a flood of guardsmen filling the doorway and spilling into the hallway beyond, their armored boots striking the floor in a unified, terrifying rhythm.

With practiced, impersonal efficiency, the first four guards form a tight, protective cordon around Kexing, their shields interlocking to create a wall between her and the fugitives. Their protocol is simple: a loyal servant of the court is under threat from dangerous prisoners.

In the eye of this suddenly formed storm, Meicao's world narrows. The fleeing Kexing is a ghost at the edge of her vision, disappearing behind a wall of living armor. The greater threat is now the empire itself, embodied in these faceless, obedient men. She spins, her back to Meibei in a gesture of primal trust, her gaze sweeping over her other companions.

Jinhuang stands poised, but her face is pale. Fol is a mountain of tension, his hands clenched, his eyes darting, counting the opponents—eight in the room, dozens in the hall, hundreds undoubtedly coming. The odds are not just bad; they are a final, absolute sentence.

"I'm sorry to drag you into this," Meicao says, her voice a tight, urgent wire, stripped of all ornamentation. "But I need your help to take her down. Whatever the cost." The last four words hang in the air, heavier than any armor. Whatever the cost means their lives. It means capture, torture, a gibbet in the public square.

Jinhuang and Fol exchange a single, wary look. It is a conversation in a glance. To fight is suicide. It is not a question of courage, but of futility. Their eyes then shift, almost in unison, to San Lian. The spy, the strategist, the drunkard, the old man who has just days ago been weeping over a xiangqi board. He is their expected voice of reason, the one who will articulate the cold logic of surrender.

The surprise is absolute.

San Lian is already moving. But it is not a retreat. A profound transformation has overtaken him. The anxious hunch of his shoulders is gone, replaced by a soldier's posture. The nervous flutter in his hands has stilled into the calm, ready stance of a combatant. The eyes that usually dart with intellectual anxiety are now cold, analytical, and frighteningly focused. He is not looking at the guards as a terrifying mob, but as a collection of components, a machine whose blueprint he possesses.

He is the first to charge.

His movement is the precise, opening gambit of a tactician. He feints toward the guard on the far left, a classic probing attack. As the guard predictably shifts his weight to brace, San Lian drops, his leg sweeping in a low, brutal arc. It connects with the back of the man's knee with a sickening crack of breaking cartilage. The guard screams, his leg buckling, the perfect shield wall fracturing as he falls.

"I know these men," he says, his voice low and steady, devoid of its usual obsequious tremor. It is the voice of a junior officer addressing his squad. "I trained with them in the Moukopl auxiliaries. I know their drills. I know all their weak points."

The scholar is gone, and the soldier he had once been, buried for years under layers of espionage and fear, has returned in an instant.

"The left pauldron!" San Lian barks, rolling back to his feet. "Their armor is weak at the strap! A solid blow dislocates the shoulder!"

The chamber erupts into chaos. San Lian's first, brutal strike is the downbeat, and the group instinctively forms around it. They are no longer individuals; they are a single organism, a weapon honed by shared purpose and desperation, and they begin to carve their way out of the room and into the heart of the imperial palace.

San Lian is the mind of the weapon, his voice a calm, cutting stream of data in the storm. "Second man, the gap between breastplate and fauld—a knife upward, now!" As a guard lunges, he sidesteps and drives his own captured shortsword into the specified gap with surgical precision. The man gurgles, collapsing. "The next rank will try to envelop! Fol, the one with the green plume—look at him! his shield arm is over-extended from a drilling injury. Break it." His knowledge is their map, turning the guards' strength—their uniformity—into their greatest weakness.

Jinhuang is the unbreakable anchor, the brute force that translates San Lian's calculations into reality. When a shield wall forms in the corridor ahead, she doesn't try to find a gap. She becomes a battering ram, lowering his shoulder and charging with a roar that echoes off the jade-inlaid walls. The impact is thunderous, wood splintering and men screaming as the formation disintegrates. She grabs a fallen shield and uses it as a massive bludgeon, swinging it in wide, devastating arcs that create a bubble of shattered bone and reeling bodies, forcing the imperial guards back and creating the openings the others need. "Too slow, you imperial oaf!" she taunts as she ducks under a wild swing, hamstringing the guardsman with a vicious slash of a dagger she's snatched from a fallen opponent. Her violence is personal, furious, a release for all the pent-up frustration of her captivity.

On the flanks, Fol and Meibei become a deadly, complementary whirlwind. Fol is a dervish of sharp, economical motion. He darts in and out of Jinhuang's shadow, his needles finding eyes, throats, and the unarmored backs of knees. He is a ghost, a flicker of pain that disappears before a counter-strike can land.

Meibei is his mirror and opposite. Where Fol is fluid and opportunistic, Meibei is the essence of disciplined, beautiful destruction. Her lance is an extension of her will, a silver blur that weaves a net of certain death around the wedge's periphery. A thrust pierces a gorget, the point finding a throat. A sweeping strike shatters a kneecap. She moves with the serene, terrible grace of a temple dancer performing a lethal kata, every motion efficient, every outcome fatal. She is the unbreachable wall, the scythe that cuts down any threat that seeks to close in from the sides.

And at the heart of the storm, driving it forward with the force of a singular, burning obsession, is Meicao. She is the tip of the spear, her gaze locked not on the guards she dispatches with efficient, brutal strokes, but on the fleeting glimpses of Kexing, who is scrambling backward through the ranks of her protectors, her face a pale mask of terrified fury. Meicao uses the openings Jinhuang creates, follows the paths San Lian identifies, and trusts the flanks to Fol and her sister. She is a force of nature, a river of vengeance cutting through the imperial rock. A guard steps in her path; she breaks his wrist with a sharp kick, disarms him, and shoves his own sword into his gut without breaking her forward momentum.

They burst from the corridor into a vast reception hall. The opulence is staggering—silken tapestries depicting imperial conquests, floors of polished obsidian, ceilings so high they seem to hold their own weather. The setting becomes a surreal backdrop to the carnage. The wedge adapts, using gilded pillars for cover, splattering deep crimson blood across murals of serene mountain landscapes.

It is here, as a fresh wave of guards pours from an archway to their left, that Meibei makes her choice. The lance is a magnificent weapon for holding a line, but the hunt now requires a predator's tool. In the middle of a spinning parry that opens a guardsman from hip to rib, she catches Meicao's eye.

"Sis!" she calls out, her voice cutting through the din of battle.

Meicao turns, her chest heaving, just in time to see the flash of polished steel. Meibei tosses one of her butterfly swords. Meicao's hand snaps out, catching the hilt with an instinctual, satisfying smack.

"Finish it," Meibei commands, and in those two words is an entire history: forgiveness, alliance, and the passing of a sacred duty.

The gift transforms Meicao. The borrowed sword feels like an old friend, a key to a part of herself she had locked away. She meets her sister's gaze for a single, profound moment and gives a sharp, definitive nod.

The wedge reforms, now a blade with a sharper point. They crash through a set of lacquered doors into a serene interior garden. The contrast is jarring. The air, once thick with blood and sweat, is now filled with the perfume of night-blooming flowers and the gentle plash of a fountain. The graceful arched bridges and meticulously raked gravel become a new battlefield. Guards slip on the stones; Jinhuang uses the fountain's edge to gain height, bringing her shield down on a helmet with a resonant gong that silences the crickets.

The imperial guards, learning from their losses, no longer present a broad front. They come in smaller, tighter groups, attacking from multiple paths simultaneously, forcing the wedge to fragment.

For a glorious, bloody stretch, Meicao and Meibei fight as a single entity. With Meicao now armed with the butterfly sword, their styles merge into a devastating duet. They are two halves of a spinning blade. Meicao flows low, her strikes aimed at ankles and knees, a scythe cutting down the grass. Meibei moves high, her lance a viper striking at eyes and throats. They move in a circle of synchronized death, a whirlwind of silver and steel where no guard can survive for more than a heartbeat. A guard lunges at Meicao's back; Meibei's lance intercepts, deflecting the blow, and in the same motion, Meicao pivots and drives her sword up under the man's arm.

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But the pressure is immense. The guards are endless, a relentless tide of green and steel. A coordinated push from a side path forces Fol and Jinhuang to peel away, forming a desperate second front to protect the sisters' flanks. Now the battle splits, the flying wedge broken into two desperate, fighting pairs.

Fol and Jinhuang are pushed back toward a decorative koi pond, their boots churning the meticulously raked gravel into mud. Jinhuang is a bastion, her captured shield a wall of splintered wood and dented metal. She absorbs blows that would shatter a lesser man, her returns short, brutal hammer-strikes with her fist or the shield's edge that crush armor and bone. Fol is her shadow and her spark, his movements a frantic, dazzling counterpoint to her immovable strength. He darts and weaves, his needles finding the microscopic gaps in armor.

He is her unyielding earth; she is his unpredictable lightning.

The turning point comes with a silent, coordinated attack from three guards. Two engage Fol directly while a third, seeing Jinhuang isolated for a split second, lunges from the blind spot of a weeping willow. The spear point aims for her spine.

Fol sees it. There is no time for a graceful block, no time for a shouted warning. There is only instinct.

With a guttural roar that seems to shake the very leaves, he abandons his defense. He takes a crushing blow from a mace on his shoulder, the sound of cracking bone audible, and uses the momentum of the impact to spin. He reaches for her shield.

The heavy, broken disc of wood and metal spins through the air like a monstrous, unorthodox throwing star. It hits the spear. The wooden shaft explodes into splinters an inch from Jinhuang's back, the force of the impact sending the guardsman stumbling back, his weapon gone.

In the sudden, frozen second that follows, Jinhuang turns. She sees Fol, his left arm hanging uselessly, his face a mask of pain and fury, having taken a hit meant to take her life. The last of her walls crumbles. The battlefield, the screaming guards, the chaos—it all fades into a muffled roar. There is only him.

Another guard charges. Fol, with his good arm, grabs the man's helmeted head and smashes it down onto his rising knee with a sickening crunch of metal and bone.

Panting, bleeding, standing back-to-back in a momentary lull, Jinhuang speaks, her voice raw but clear, a diamond in the rough.

"Fol!"

He grunts, shoving a body off his leg.

"If we survive this," she says, blocking a weak sword thrust almost absently, "you want to get married?"

Fol stops for a half-second, then casually breaks the wrist of the man who had just thrust at Jinhuang. He looks down at her, his face showing a flicker of something other than grim determination. It might be amusement. It might be wonder.

"Yes," he rumbles, the single word as solid and unshakeable as he is.

A wild, breathless laugh escapes Jinhuang, a sound of pure, defiant joy amidst the carnage. "Good!"

But their moment is stolen. A fresh wave of guards surges from the main path, their numbers finally overwhelming. A sword slash catches Jinhuang on the thigh, and she cries out, stumbling. Fol bellows, sweeping her behind him, a wounded bear protecting its mate, but the ground is lost. They are being pushed back, cornered against the pond, their world shrinking to a small circle of blood-slicked stone.

Ahead, through the thinning line of guards, they see Meicao, a lone, relentless figure, still driving forward, chasing the ghost of Kexing, leaving them to hold a tide that can no longer be held.

The world narrows to a single, filthy corridor. The majestic perfumes of the palace gardens vanish, replaced by the stench of rotting garbage and stagnant water. The sounds of combat—the shouts, the clashing steel, the roaring of her friends—fade into a muffled echo behind her. Meicao bursts from a narrow service entrance into the damp gloom of a back alley, her chest heaving, the butterfly sword a gleaming extension of her will. And there, cornered against a weeping stone wall slick with moss, is Kexing.

This is the place. The very stones where years ago, a calculated performance of bullying had been staged, where the leash had been offered and accepted. The universe, it seems, has a sense of poetic justice.

Kexing is trapped. Her silken robes are torn and smeared with filth, her elaborate coiffure unraveled into a wild mane. The serene mask of the predator is gone, stripped away to reveal the cornered rodent beneath. Her eyes dart, wild and desperate, finding no escape. The perfect architect of suffering is now caged within her own masterpiece of ruin.

"Your sister should have killed you," Kexing spits, her voice a ragged shred of its former silk.

She throws the poisoned hairpin.

It is the culmination of a lifetime of precise cruelty, aimed with the deadly accuracy of a scorpion's sting. It flies straight for Meicao's throat.

Meicao does not flinch. Her body moves with the fluid economy her sister's gift has unlocked. The butterfly sword becomes a silver fan, whipping up in a short, defensive arc. The sound is a clean, high ping as the hairpin is deflected, spinning end over end through the dank air.

But Kexing's own poisoned karma, intervenes. As Kexing stumbles forward with the throw's momentum, the deflected pin describes its unintended trajectory. It sinks, with a soft, wet thud, deep into the meat of her own thigh.

A gasp, sharp and involuntary, escapes her. She looks down, her eyes wide with disbelief, at the lacquered needle protruding from her leg. Then, the poison does its work. A wave of cold numbness radiates from the wound, crawling up her limb like a fast-growing frost. Her leg gives way, buckling beneath her. She collapses onto the filthy cobblestones, a puppet with its strings cut. The paralysis spreads, a chilling tide locking her muscles, freezing her in a pose of agonized collapse. She can only stare up as Meicao approaches, her body a prison, her mind a screaming, trapped thing.

Meicao stops before her. She simply stands, looking down at the woman who had orchestrated so much pain. Her face is a placid, terrifying mask of absolute clarity. The battle-fever is gone, replaced by a cold, judicial calm.

"No," Meicao says, her voice low and even, devoid of all emotion. It is the sound of a verdict being read. "This is not good. You don't get to die so easily. Not for what you've done to him. To us. Not by your own hand, and not by accident."

She kneels. The movement is ritualistic. She is a priestess at a dark altar.

Her eyes assess the wound with a detached, clinical air. The poison is fast, but not instantaneous. She needs time. With the point of the butterfly sword, she begins to cut. It is a swift, precise excision. She carves out the flesh around the embedded pin, a small, bloody crater in Kexing's thigh. The poisoned tissue is removed, the spread of the toxin slowed. It is an act of horrific mercy, performed only to prolong the suffering to come. Kexing cannot scream; the paralysis has seized her vocal cords. A silent, desperate keen is trapped in her throat, her eyes wide with a horror beyond pain.

Meicao moves to Kexing's other leg. The sword point finds the back of the knee, probing with an artisan's touch. With a quick, sure flick of her wrist, she severs the hamstring. A shudder runs through Kexing's body, a seismic tremor of agony she cannot voice.

Meicao shifts her position. She takes Kexing's right arm, stretching it out on the cold stone. The butterfly sword flashes, once, twice. The tendons at the wrist and inside the elbow part with soft, popping sounds. The arm falls, useless.

She repeats the process on the left arm. Now, Kexing is fully immobilized, a living, breathing, feeling thing pinned to the earth, a specimen of utter helplessness. Her eyes are portals to a hell of silent, comprehending agony.

Meicao rises, standing over her completed work. She looks down at Kexing, and for the first time, there is a flicker of something in her eyes—not pity, but a profound, terrifying sense of purpose. She brings the bloodied butterfly sword up, holding it in both hands, point downward, as if in prayer.

Her voice, when she speaks, is a chilling monotone, a sacred chant recited over a profane sacrifice. It is a Behani sutra, a benediction of salute for a soul too corrupted for any other prayer. The butterfly sword in her hand becomes a ritual blade, an instrument of karmic justice.

"By this merit, may all attain omniscience."

As the final syllable leaves her lips, the sword moves. Not a killing blow, but a precise, swift cut. The blade traces a line across Kexing's forehead, just above the brows, a shallow, bleeding circlet. The Third Eye. A brutal blessing for the clarity she so perverted. Blood wells instantly, a crimson curtain beginning to obscure the terror in Kexing's vision.

"May we be liberated from the river of sorrow."

Meicao's grip shifts. With the point of the sword, she performs a quick, brutal excision. The tip flicks into Kexing's mouth, and with a deft, horrible twist, she severs the tongue at the root. The Lie-Speaker. A permanent silence for the voice that wove webs of poison and twisted sister against sister. A gush of blood replaces the words that will never be spoken again.

"From the stormy waves of birth, old age, sickness, and death…"

Meicao takes Kexing's right hand, the one that held the hairpin, that penned poisonous missives, that pointed and accused. She stretches the fingers flat against the cold stone. The sword rises and falls, a butcher's cleaver. The hand is severed at the wrist. The Poison Hand. Then, the left, the hand that pretended to comfort, to wipe away tears it had caused. Another clean, terrible stroke. She is unmade, piece by piece, the tools of her artistry systematically destroyed.

"…guide us to the land of pure diamonds."

Now, Meicao aims for the engine of it all. She places the point of the sword over Kexing's heart. Not a thrust, but a slow, grinding pressure. She leans her weight into it, forcing the tip through silk, skin, and rib, a violation as intimate as Kexing's own psychological violences. The Black Heart. This is not a fatal strike, but a symbolic one, piercing the core of her corruption, letting the poisons of a lifetime seep into the cavity of her own body.

Kexing is now a ruin: blinded by her own blood, silenced, disarmed, her heart pierced. Yet her chest still hitches with ragged, wet breaths. The life in her, stubborn as the evil that fueled it, clings on.

Meicao stands over the horrific tableau, the sutra complete. She brings the sword up high, two-handed, point aimed downward. The final, unspoken word of the ritual hangs in the air, the only fitting conclusion to the liturgy of vengeance.

"Set us free from all evil."

On the silent, definitive thought, she drives the sword down with all her strength, through the throat, severing the spine, and nailing the head to the cobblestones.

The head rolls once, coming to a stop facing the body, the eyes still wide with a horror that is now, finally, eternal.

Silence returns to the alley, broken only by the drip of water and the distant, approaching thunder of imperial guards.

The imperial guards manifest as a single, multi-limbed entity of polished steel and emerald silk, flooding the narrow alley from both ends until the very walls seem to weep soldiers.

Just outside, Jinhuang, her leg bleeding and her body screaming with exhaustion, swings her captured shield one last time, shattering a guardsman's jaw before a weighted net envelops her. She thrashes, a furious wildcat, until a dozen hands press her down, forcing her face into the filth. Fol, his left arm hanging shattered at his side, stands over her. He breaks one man's nose with his forehead, another's ribs with a single punch from his good arm, before a forest of spear hafts slams into his legs and back, driving him to his knees. He only grunts as manacles of cold, heavy iron are locked around his wrists. San Lian, the soldier's fire in his eyes extinguished, sways on his feet. He has no strength left for clever feints or knowledge of weak points. A simple, brutal club to the back of his head sends him sprawling into unconsciousness, a pool of dark blood blossoming around his silver hair. Meibei is the last to fall. Her lance, a silver streak of defiance until the end, is finally pinned under a boot. She disarms two guards with her bare hands, moving with the relentless precision of a machine, but a third smashes the pommel of his sword into her temple. Her eyes roll back, and she collapses, the world going dark.

They are beaten, disarmed, and bound. Alive, but only because the empire's bureaucracy demands a trial before a spectacle.

Into this scene of raw, mud-and-blood carnage steps a different world. The air itself seems to part, the stench of the alley momentarily suppressed by the subtle fragrance of sandalwood and dried lotus. Emperor Yanming, a boy in a dragon robe, glides into the narrow space as if entering a slightly distasteful garden. His face, pale and perfectly composed, is a moon reflecting nothing. Beside him, Prime Minister Sima is a study in sharp angles and cold satisfaction, his hands tucked into his sleeves, observing the wreckage with the air of a mathematician reviewing a solved equation.

The entourage of courtiers that flows in behind them stops as one, a wave of silk and shock. Handkerchiefs fly to mouths; horrified gasps are stifled into silence. They behold a scene from a butcher's nightmare: the headless corpse of Kexing, mutilated beyond recognition, and the four broken forms of the troublemakers being trussed like game.

Yanming's gaze sweeps over it all—the blood, the filth, the evidence of a private war fought in his own backyard. There is no anger in his eyes, no disgust. There is only assessment. His voice, when it comes, is calm, clear, and devoid of all humanity.

"A disturbance in the Quiet Garden. The murder of a court servant. The maiming of the Imperial Guard." He looks at Sima. "Prime Minister?"

Sima's lips curve in a bloodless smile. "The law is clear, Your Majesty. Treason and murder. The sentence is public execution."

Yanming nods, a small, efficient motion. He turns to the captain of the guard. "Take these troublemakers to the deepest cell beneath the Autumn Lotus wing."

It is then, as guards roughly haul Meicao to her feet, that she moves.

Her body is a tapestry of bruises and cuts, but her will is a shard of obsidian. She shrugs off the hands holding her, not with violence, but with a sudden, unsettling stillness that makes the guards hesitate for a fatal second. Her eyes, burning with a fire that not even defeat can extinguish, are locked not on her captors, but on the boy-emperor.

She bends down. Her fingers, slick with blood, close around the hair of Kexing's severed head. She lifts it.

The courtiers recoil as one. A woman faints. The silence becomes absolute, a vacuum waiting to be filled.

Meicao's arm whips forward. The head arcs through the air, tumbling end over end, a grisly projectile. It lands directly at Yanming's feet with a soft, wet, sickening thud, coming to rest upright, the glazed eyes staring blankly at the imperial dragons embroidered on his robe.

A collective, strangled gasp ripples through the entourage. Sima's eyes narrow to slits. The guards freeze, unsure whether to seize her or prostrate themselves in apology for this desecration.

Yanming looks down. He does not flinch. He simply observes the object at his feet, his expression unchanging.

Meicao lifts her chin, her voice cutting through the horrified silence, clean and sharp as her sister's blade. It is not a shout, but a declaration that carves its way into the memory of every witness.

"From the storm of birth, old age, sickness, and death," she recites, the Behani sutra now a weapon aimed at the throne itself. Her eyes bore into Yanming's. "May this death set us free from all evil."

The pronoun is deliberate. Us. The condemned. The broken. The ones ground beneath the wheels of his perfect, merciless empire. It is a plea for karmic balance; it is a curse upon his reign.

A spark of intense, intellectual curiosity ignites in the depths of Yanming's gaze. He meets her look, and for a single, endless second, the alley holds its breath.

Then, the moment shatters.

"Seize her!" Sima barks, his voice cracking like a whip.

The guards surge forward. This time, there is no hesitation. They are a wave of violence, crashing over her. Blows rain down. Fists, boots, the hard wood of spear hafts. She does not fight back. She takes the punishment, her body buckling under the assault, but her eyes remain locked on the Emperor until the very last second, as they drag her broken form away through the filth, the challenge of her mantra hanging in the air like the coppery scent of blood—a promise of a storm yet to come.

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