The incense had long since turned to cold ash by the time the corpse's fingers twitched.
In the silence of the Burial Hall, the sound of a shallow, rattling breath was like a thunderclap. Shen Luoyan opened his eyes. The first thing he felt wasn't the "spark of life"—it was the suffocating weight of the air.
Again, he thought, his mind a muddy swamp of exhaustion. Not again.
He sat up, the movement causing the shattered remains of a heavy cedar coffin to groan beneath him. Sharp splinters bit into his palms, but he didn't flinch. He looked down at his chest. The expensive silk of his funeral robes was ruined, stiff with dried, dark crimson. Directly over his heart, there was a hole the size of a fist where Wei Jianxu's blade had exited.
He touched the skin. It was smooth. New. Disgustingly perfect.
Yet the cold remained, a reminder that his body remembered death even it refused to keep it.
"You really didn't hold back, did you, Senior Brother?" Shen Luoyan's voice was a jagged rasp, unused to the vibration of vocal cords.
He looked at the shattered sealing talismans littered around the floor. They were supposed to bind his soul to the earth, to rot his spirit along with his flesh. They had failed. They always failed.
He could still hear Wei Jianxu's voice from hours—or was it days?—ago.
"Don't look at me with those eyes, Luoyan,"
Wei had whispered, his hand trembling as he twisted the cursed steel in Shen's chest. "You aren't a man. You're a glitch in the Dao. If I don't erase you, the heavens will burn us all just to get to you."
Shen Luoyan let out a low, breathless laugh that turned into a hacking cough. "A glitch... is that all I am?"
He stood up, his legs shaking. His meridians—the pathways for his magic—felt like burnt-out fuses. He tried to circulate a single drop of spiritual energy, and a white-hot flash of agony scorched his spine. He collapsed against a stone pillar, gasping.
"Useless," he hissed, clutching his stomach. "A body that won't die, and a soul that can't fight. What a pathetic joke."
The wind whistled through the cracks in the hall, carrying the scent of rain. For a moment, he closed his eyes and felt a phantom warmth on his cheek.
"Then live twice as hard," she had told him once, her laughter like silver bells in a world made of iron. "For the both of us, Luoyan."
"I tried, Yuexi," he whispered to the empty shadows. "I tried to be the person you saw. I tried to stay dead for them. I tried to be 'good'."
His expression darkened, the grief curdling into something cold and heavy—like lead settling in his gut.
"But 'good' is for people who have a place to go when they die. I have nowhere."
Outside, the faint chime of the Sect's warning bells began to ring. Clang. Clang.
Clang. They knew. Somehow, the formations had alerted them that the grave was empty once more.
Shen Luoyan didn't run. He reached down and picked up a jagged piece of the coffin lid. He looked at his reflection in a pool of stagnant water on the floor. His eyes were no longer the clear, bright eyes of a cultivation prodigy. They were dark, bottomless pits.
"You have died enough times," a voice vibrated—not in his ears, but in the marrow of his bones. It was heavy, ancient, and smelled of deep earth and forgotten things. "Now, learn what it means to endure."
Shen Luoyan didn't scream. He didn't even look surprised. He simply stared at the door of the hall as the torches of the approaching disciples flickered in the distance.
"Endure?" Shen Luoyan repeated the word, testing it on his tongue. It tasted like copper and spite.
A slow, terrifyingly calm smile spread across his face.
"No. 'Enduring' sounds like waiting. I'm done waiting for the heavens to be fair."
He stepped over the threshold of the burial hall, his blood-stained robes fluttering in the night wind. As the first disciple rounded the corner, sword drawn and eyes wide with terror, Shen Luoyan didn't raise his hands in a seal or beg for mercy.
He simply walked forward.
"Go tell Wei Jianxu," Shen Luoyan said, his voice carrying a chill that silenced the crickets in the grass. "Tell him he's going to need a much bigger grave."