For three days, I moved through the world like a ghost. I cooked the rice from the Emperor's blood-money wagon. I spooned broth past Papa's lips, meeting his vacant gaze with one I carefully emptied of all feeling. I mended a tear in his jacket, my stitches as neat and unfeeling as a surgeon's sutures. The wooden box sat untouched under my cot, a coffin for the life we should have had.
On the fourth day, the village headman came. His face was long with a fresh, communal grief. "The eastern front has collapsed," he said, his voice low at our doorway, as if Papa, lost in his bed, could hear. "The Sky-Fire Kingdom advances. They'll be at the capital in a month, maybe less. The Emperor calls for… for any able body." He couldn't even look at me, a young woman in a house of ghosts. He left a new proclamation, this one desperate and smeared, urging village militias to form.
That was the spark on the tinder of my rage.
That night, after Papa's ragged breathing settled into the rhythm of sleep, I pulled the box from its hiding place. The lid opened with a sigh of reluctance. Inside, folded with a soldier's tidiness, was Jingming's spare uniform—the rough, dun-colored tunic and trousers of an imperial foot soldier. Beneath it, a leather pouch, heavy with coins. His hazard pay. His blood price. My fingers brushed cold metal—his identification tags, and the small, carved wooden rabbit he'd whittled for me when I was twelve.
And there, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, was his knife. Not the kitchen blade, but a real soldier's dagger, its leather-wrapped hilt worn smooth from his grip, its blade a冷酷 (lěng kù - cold, cruel) sliver of steel in the moonlight. I picked it up. Its weight was a shock, both foreign and terrifyingly familiar. This was the weight Jingming had carried. This was the instrument of the Emperor's will that had failed to protect him.
The decision, once it came, was not a storm of emotion, but the settling of a cold, clear frost. I would go. Not as a mourning sister. Not as a village girl. I would take his place. I would walk into the belly of the beast that had consumed my brother and my mother's peaceful world. And I would look it in the eye.
I stood before the cracked sliver of mirror we used. My brown hair, always kept long and simple in honor of no one but habit, fell past my shoulders. I took Jingming's knife. The first lock severed with a sharp, decisive snick. It fell to the dirt floor, a dark comma against the earth. I didn't hesitate. I sawed and cut, my jaw set, until my head was covered in a short, ragged cap of hair. In the dim light, with my strong jaw and the new hardness in my blue eyes, the reflection was of a stranger. A young man, haunted and determined.
I changed into his clothes. The tunic swam on me, but belting it tight and rolling the sleeves helped. The trousers I had to cuff. I stared at the result. I was not imposing, but I was plausible. A lean, hungry-looking youth, aged by hardship.
Then, I went to the small table and took a piece of cheap paper and charcoal. The words came slowly, each one a stone I had to lift and set in place.
"Papa,
The war comes too close. I must go to the capital to find safer work and better medicine. Do not worry. I have taken Jingming's things for luck. I will send money. I will come back when it is safe.
Be well. Eat the food in the cupboard.
Your daughter,
Yu Hui."
A lie. A necessary, merciful lie. He would believe it. He lived in a world of gentle fictions now.
I shouldered a small pack with a few necessities and the pouch of coins. I slid Jingming's dagger into my belt. It felt like a betrayal and a promise all at once. I crept to the door, the letter in my hand.
"Yu Hui."
The sound was a dry leaf scraping stone. I froze, my blood turning to ice. Papa was sitting up in his bed, his form a frail silhouette against the moonlit window. I thought he'd been asleep.
He pushed back his thin blanket and stood, moving with a fragile, deliberate slowness I hadn't seen in months. He crossed the room, his bare feet whispering on the packed earth floor. He didn't ask about my hair. He didn't question the clothes. His clouded eyes seemed to see straight through the disguise to the resolve beneath.
He reached into the collar of his own sleeping robe and fumbled with a cord. He drew it over his head. Dangling from it was a pendant. Even in the weak light, it gleamed—a disc of polished silver, no larger than a large coin. On its face was an intricate carving of interlocking waves, flames, mountain peaks, and swirling winds. The Four Dragons, their essences woven into a single, harmonious whole. And at the very center, set into a tiny claw-like setting, was a gem. It was murky, like a drop of seawater caught in twilight.
"Your mother's," he said, his voice a threadbare echo. "From… from her family. Long ago." He didn't elaborate. He never spoke of her family. He lifted the cord over my head. The pendant settled cold against my sternum, a secret weight. "Take this. For luck."
The simple words shattered the icy casing around my heart. I dropped my pack. The tears I had forbidden for three days finally came, hot and silent. I wrapped my arms around him, feeling how frighteningly thin he had become. He felt like old parchment and bird bones. But his arms came around me too, a faint, returning pressure.
"I love you, Papa," I choked out.
He patted my back, the way he used to when I was small and had scraped my knee. "Be clever, my blossom," he murmured into my cropped hair, using the old endearment for the last time. "Be clever, and come home."
I held on for one more second, memorizing the smell of old wool and sorrow. Then I let go. I picked up my pack, my letter left on the table. I did not look back. Looking back would have meant crumbling.
The night swallowed me. I walked for hours, guided by the sliver of moon and a burning in my chest that was part grief, part fury, part the strange, cool pulse of the pendant against my skin. By the time the first dirty pink of dawn smudged the horizon, the silhouette of the capital's walls and the soaring, arrogant peaks of the Imperial Palace rose before me.
At the main gate, chaos reigned. A makeshift mustering yard had been established. Men—boys, really, and old men—shuffled in ragged lines. Harried sergeants barked names, their voices hoarse with disdain and desperation. The air stank of unwashed bodies, fear, and forge-smoke.
I joined a line, my heart hammering against the silver disc. When it was my turn, the recruiting sergeant, a man with a scar bisecting his eyebrow, didn't even look up from his scroll.
"Name?"
The name that left my lips was not my own. It was my brother's, my father's, a name for a son. It was a shield and a weapon.
"Ling Jingming," I said, my voice low, roughened by the road and purpose.
He scrawled it. "Age?"
"Twenty-four." Jingming's true age. Now mine.
"Next! To the quartermaster for kit! You lot are for the palace garrison. Move!"
I was shoved along in the river of doomed humanity. In my hand, they pressed a coarse uniform, a thin blanket, a dented mess tin. In my heart, I carried a dragon's pact broken, a brother lost, and a father's final touch. I was no longer Yu Hui, the daughter, the sister. I was Ling Jingming, a soldier of the empire. And I was walking straight into the gilded cage of the monster who had started it all.
As I passed through the towering inner gate of the palace, the shadow of its walls falling over me like a sentence, my fingers found the pendant beneath my tunic. The gem at its center, for just a fleeting second, felt warm.
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