Ji Pingxuan's world was coming apart at the seams.
He stood before the door for a moment, then stepped inside.
Two bowls sat on the cracked wooden table. Two sets of clothing soaked in a bucket in the corner. Windows shut. Everything exactly as it had been three years ago. He sat down, lifted a bowl, and let his mind drift back.
He had been adopted at six. By nine, the whispers of strangers had begun to teach him his own history. He learned the shape of the disaster that had taken his family before he was old enough to understand what disaster meant. His faith shattered. From that day, a slow and methodical self-destruction began.
Late at night, thinking of his parents buried in a mass grave wrapped in straw mats, he felt something murderous move through him. But daylight always came. He stepped outside, looked across the street at the man who had taken him in, and understood that deep hatred collapses under the weight of incompetence. The feeling had nowhere to go.
So it became resentment. Not toward the men who destroyed his family, but toward the man feeding him.
At some point he stopped speaking to his adoptive father entirely. He did his own laundry. Cooked his own food. Trained alone. He treated silence like revenge, the way a child does when he has no other weapon.
They shared a roof and a profound distance. Two people wrapped in fog, pretending the other was a stranger.
In the late autumn of his eleventh year, a cold snap arrived without warning. Rain in the morning. Sleet by noon. By evening the wind came with teeth. The kind that cuts to the bone.
Panping's weather had always been like that.
He was lying on a damp wooden bed when his adoptive father stumbled through the door and whispered his name. The man had called him different things at different times. Now he called him Ji Pingxuan.
Ji Pingxuan lay still, cloth pulled over his head, unmoved.
Then the door crashed open. Someone lifted his blanket. Cold air rushed in.
He opened his eyes. His adoptive father was on the floor in front of the bed, arm hanging over the edge, blood spreading from wounds Ji Pingxuan hadn't seen yet. The man had knife marks all over his body. His clothes were soaked through. Ji Pingxuan still didn't understand how he had made it home.
"Run." The voice was barely there. "Run."
Ji Pingxuan sat up on his knees and pressed his hands over the wounds. Confusion and helplessness filled his face entirely.
"There's a horse outside. Go west when you leave the city. Don't look back."
"Where am I going?"
The man was fading. He came back from the edge long enough to raise his left hand and point to his sleeve.
Ji Pingxuan found a letter sewn into the lining.
He couldn't read. But he understood, vaguely, that it was something that could get a man killed. It was stained with blood already. He felt the heat of it.
The man's voice came apart like thread: "If you want to avenge your parents, take the evidence and go. If you stay, you die with me. That's a fine father-son ending, but probably not the one you want."
Ji Pingxuan felt the full weight of everything at once. He pressed the letter to his chest, pulled on his shoes, and ran.
He fled the city in a panic, stumbling through darkness. But he had never left Panping before. The night gave him nothing to work with. He couldn't tell which direction was west. Every sound behind him became a pursuer. Every shadow, a blade.
The road outside the city had iced over. The horse slipped. He was thrown, and when he got up to take back the reins, the old horse bolted and disappeared into the dark.
He walked on, limping, until the land ran out at a river.
He looked back. Torchlight curved along the hillside like a red snake, cutting off any retreat.
He made his peace with it and jumped in.
The water hit him like a wall. Ice in the current. He nearly lost consciousness before he surfaced.
He managed two strokes and realized the real danger wasn't drowning. It was cold. His limbs locked up. It would have been easy to let the water carry him anywhere it wanted.
He sank. Surfaced. Sank again.
Then he thought of the letter, still unopened, pressed against his chest.
Something flooded through him. He clawed back to the surface, threw his head back, and breathed through lungs that felt like open cuts. He made it to the far bank on will alone, hauled himself out, and kept moving on shaking legs. He watched the sky go from black to pale grey to white. Dew on the grass froze around him as he walked.
He moved from town to town like a rat in the walls. Afraid to speak to anyone. Barely surviving.
His target was the capital. But the road there was long, and everywhere he stopped, he heard the same things from travelers and wanderers and merchants: the world was in chaos, the roads were dangerous, justice was a distant rumor. Nobody could help him. Nobody was going to.
When the fire of his desperation burned down to embers, Ji Pingxuan understood: he was a boy with a letter he couldn't read in a world that had already moved on. He huddled under a teahouse awning and waited to rot.
Then, at another autumn solstice, he heard a name repeated by the quack doctors and wanderers heading north. Song Huiya.
He stood up, washed his face with river water, and started walking again.
He had been calling her name in his sleep.
Song Huiya sat in a chair beside the bed, chin resting on her hand, looking down at him with an unreadable expression.
"You've been calling my name," she said pleasantly. "I feel implicated. What exactly are you planning to do with me?"
Ji Pingxuan tried to sit up. Liang Xi pressed him back down with one hand on each shoulder.
He had waited years for this moment. His chest heaved. He hadn't planned to cry, but the tears were already moving before he understood what was happening. He reached into the lining of his clothes and pulled out the letter with trembling hands.
Song Huiya took it with a raised eyebrow. "What is this?"
"My father." His throat closed. He forced the words through. "Evidence. Injustice."
Liang Xi said drily, "If you have evidence, Song Huiya is the wrong person. She's been charged with half the crimes in the region herself. Come to me instead."
Ji Pingxuan wasn't listening to anyone else. He looked only at Song Huiya. "Please."
She opened it carefully. She had braced herself. She was still caught off guard.
She read it top to bottom. Then bottom to top. Then she looked at him with something complicated moving behind her eyes.
"Have you shown this to anyone?"
"No."
"'Ping Xuan, my son.'" She smoothed a crease at the corner of the paper with her thumb. "This isn't evidence. It's a letter from your father."
Ji Pingxuan's face went rigid. "That's impossible."
He grabbed the paper back. His grip was too hard. His fingers punched through the already fragile surface. He pointed, shaking, at the words he had taught himself to recognize over years of careful study:
"Ping Xuan. Revenge. Return. Panping. And here, three, below the east wall—"
Song Huiya didn't rush him. She waited until he ran out of words, then spoke quietly.
"He asked you to leave Panping. To go somewhere safe. To marry, have children, study, learn to read, stop thinking about revenge." She paused. "He didn't know where your parents were buried, but he found out and quietly marked a grave for them outside the city. He left you money under the water tank on the east wall. If you come back, be careful. If you can't come back, don't."
Ji Pingxuan sat up on his own this time. Liang Xi didn't stop him.
He stared at the letter. His eyes moved over characters he couldn't read, as if looking hard enough would change what they said.
Song Huiya picked up the second page.
"He says he helped the man you hold responsible for your family. When he left home to make his way in the martial world, he wanted to be someone worth admiring. Instead he ended up bending for money like everyone else. He says you were smart, that you should have been educated, but Panping wasn't safe enough to send you to school. He had reasons to stay close. He had many things he wanted to say to you. He knew you didn't want to hear them, so he didn't say them."
Ji Pingxuan stared at nothing. He looked like a man who had walked into a room and forgotten what he came for.
Song Huiya held the third page for a moment. She gave him time.
"Do you want me to continue?"
He may have nodded. He wasn't certain.
"The court sent a supervising censor to investigate the case. Too young, too inexperienced, didn't understand the dangers. Most of the people sent for this kind of thing don't come back. He doesn't know what evidence the censor found, but the censor came to him for an escort. He doesn't expect to survive the journey. He wrote this letter to say goodbye. If the chaos ever ends and the world becomes something livable, and if you find that you no longer hate him, burn some paper money for him so he can rest easy. If you can't let go, burn the letter and consider it deserved. Either way."
She placed all three pages back in his hands.
Ji Pingxuan laid them on the quilt and bent over them. His face was hidden.
Tears fell one at a time onto the back of his hand, soaking into paper he had guarded across rivers and frozen roads and years of hunger.
He wiped at them quickly. The paper blurred anyway.
Liang Xi, for once, said nothing. When he finally spoke, his voice was quieter than usual. "So the evidence?"
"Maybe he never had it. Maybe it never existed. There's no way to know now." Song Huiya's voice was dry. She looked at Ji Pingxuan. "He lied. He used that letter to make you believe there was something worth running for. Something that would keep you moving."
She had considered telling him the rest. That the letter also confessed the man's own role in what had happened to his parents. She decided against it.
Some things don't require resolution. Not everything in the world needs to be pulled apart until it's clear.
Yan Heyi, who had been standing quietly behind them, frowned. "But you said the men chasing him were looking for something he had."
"I don't know what they thought he had. People with guilty consciences hear a sound in the night and decide it's someone coming for them. You can tell them otherwise. They won't believe you."
She had one more truth she chose not to say aloud: that even if there had never been any evidence, the powerful families who had decided he was a loose end would never have let him live long enough to use it.
Ji Pingxuan pressed the pages back against his chest and held them there. His face opened and broke at the same time. He laughed and wept simultaneously, the sound of someone who has spent years walking toward a door that was never there.
The room held the sound without comment.
After a long moment, Song Huiya spoke.
"Whether he had evidence or not, it wouldn't have brought those men down. Might have cost them something. Not enough." She paused. "Can ten thousand ants overturn a great carriage? Can a towering building stay upright when its foundation is hollow wood?"
Liang Xi squinted at her. "What does that mean?"
"It means he found the right person."
Liang Xi looked at her with something close to reverence. "You can do something about this?"
Yan Heyi thought she was listening to a street storyteller. A good one wouldn't have the nerve to say it with a straight face.
Song Huiya answered without expression: "I can't. Kill my way through a city of ghosts? No."
Liang Xi's enthusiasm collapsed.
"But my good junior brother," she said, "perhaps he can. I haven't yet seen with my own eyes what he's capable of."