Reborn with the Celestial Eye

The ancestral hall of the Shen Clan was lit by nine bronze lamps that had not been extinguished in three hundred years. Tonight, their flames trembled. Shen Qingluo knelt in the center of the hall, one hand pressed flat against the stone floor to keep herself upright. Blood dripped from the corner of her mouth, each drop striking the stone with a soft, clear sound. Drip. Drip. In the silent hall, it was louder than thunder. Half an hour ago, she had walked into this hall on her own two feet. Her younger sister had asked to share a pot of tea before tomorrow’s succession ceremony — a family farewell, Shen Ruyi had called it, smiling, to the days when we were only sisters and not clan head and subject. Shen Qingluo had gone gladly. She had even brought the osmanthus cakes Ruyi liked. The tea had been fragrant. Mountain-cloud leaves, first pick. It had gone down warm and turned to fire in her meridians by the third cup — Meridian-Rotting Poison, refined to be tasteless, worth more than some sects’ entire treasuries. Nobody bought such a thing to kill a stranger. “Why?” she asked. Her voice was hoarse. Not from fear — from the poison chewing through her spiritual veins strand by strand. She raised her head and stared at the two people standing over her. Her bloodshot eyes held anger, pain, and something worse than either: disbelief. The man in the gray robe was her father, Shen Baiwen. Second Elder of the Shen Clan, master of the Azure Lotus Sword, the most respected man of his generation. Beside him stood her half-sister, Shen Ruyi, in a snow-white dress without a single speck of dust on it. Even now, watching her elder sister kneel in her own blood, Shen Ruyi’s face was gentle. She had worn that gentle face for nineteen years. The whole clan called her the kind one, the soft one, the one who couldn’t hurt an ant. Shen Qingluo had believed it too. That was the part she could not swallow. She had fought rogue cultivators, spirit beasts, tribulation lightning — and been felled by a pot of tea poured by hands she had held when they were both children. “Why?” Shen Ruyi repeated the word softly, as if tasting it, and then laughed. “Sister, listen to yourself. You’re supposed to be a genius. Youngest master of the Azure Lotus Arts in four generations. Grandfather’s chosen heir. The pride of the Shen Clan.” She spread her hands. “And you still have to ask why?” She crouched down until their eyes were level. Up close, the gentleness in her face didn’t c***k. It simply drained away, the way warmth leaves a corpse. “The Pendant, sister. Hand over the Nine Vault Pendant, and I’ll leave you your dantian. You can live out your days as a cripple in some side courtyard. Isn’t that generous? I’m told cripples can still enjoy osmanthus cakes.” The Nine Vault Pendant. So it really was for that. Shen Qingluo almost laughed. The Pendant had come to her three months ago, on the night her grandfather died. The old clan head had dismissed every attendant, every physician, even his own sons, and pressed the small, unremarkable jade into her palm with fingers that were already going cold. Our ancestor sealed nine vaults of inheritance inside it, he had whispered. In eight generations it has opened for no one. But it warms when you walk past, child. It has been waiting for you. His grip had tightened with the last of his strength. Keep it hidden. Keep it safe. Trust no one — not even blood. She had thought those final words were the wandering of a dying mind. Not even blood. Grandfather, she thought. You knew. You knew all along, and I was the only fool in this family. “The Pendant chooses its own bearer,” Shen Qingluo said. Every word cost her; the poison had reached her chest, and she could feel her cultivation base cracking like lake ice under a hammer. Golden light flickered and guttered around her skin — her protective arts, collapsing vein by vein. “It refused Grandfather’s own sons. It refused you, Ruyi — that’s what this is really about, isn’t it? You held it at the funeral. I saw you. It went cold in your hand like a river stone. Even if you cut it from my corpse, it will never acknowledge you.” For one heartbeat, Shen Ruyi’s mask slipped, and what lived underneath was not gentle at all. “Then you’ll die,” she said pleasantly, “and we’ll spend a leisurely decade prying it open. I’m patient. I’ve been patient for nineteen years, smiling at the heir while I was handed her leftovers.” “Enough.” Shen Baiwen spoke for the first time. Her father’s voice was the same as always — deep, steady, unhurried. The voice that had corrected her sword grip in the courtyard when she was five, that had told her again ten thousand times until her palms split and her form was perfect. He looked down at his eldest daughter with no more feeling than a man regarding a broken tool. “Qingluo. Your grandfather was a stubborn old man who handed our clan’s supreme treasure to a girl out of sentiment, and shamed me before the elders by passing over my counsel. I am merely correcting his mistake.” A pause. “Don’t blame me. Blame him.” Shen Qingluo stared at him. Strange. Her heart had already been shattered once tonight, when the third cup of tea turned to fire. She had assumed there was nothing left in her chest to break. She was wrong. Hearing her father say don’t blame me — that broke something else. Something that had no name, because no one expects to need a word for it. Nineteen years. She had trained until her hands bled to make this man proud, because he was sparing with praise and she had mistaken that for high standards instead of indifference. First in every clan assessment since she was seven. At sixteen she had held the southern spirit mines alone through a long night against three rogue Core Formation cultivators, and been carried back with her sword still in her grip. Every scar on this body had been earned for the Shen Clan. Her mother had died young. Her father had remarried within the year. She had told herself for nineteen years that he was merely cold by nature, that he loved both daughters the same frozen amount. He had watched Ruyi pour the tea. He had said nothing. “The elders will ask questions,” Shen Qingluo said quietly. “The succession is tomorrow. The whole cultivation world is watching.” “They’ll be told the truth.” Shen Ruyi rose and smoothed her white dress. “That our brilliant sister grew greedy on the eve of her ascension, tried to forcibly refine the Ancestral Pendant against clan law, and suffered a catastrophic cultivation deviation. Father tried to save her. He’ll weep when he tells it — won’t you, Father? And I’ll cry at your funeral. I’ve practiced.” She smiled. “I really have practiced.” Shen Qingluo closed her eyes. So this was how it ended. Not in battle. Not defending the clan she had bled for. On the floor of her own ancestral hall, under the gaze of her ancestors’ memorial tablets, murdered by her own blood, with the lies for her tombstone already composed and rehearsed. The rage that rose in her then was not hot. Hot rage was for training yards. This was cold — colder than the poison, colder than the stones beneath her palm. It poured down into her bones and settled there like winter settling into the earth, patient and absolute. She opened her eyes. “Shen Ruyi. Father.” Her voice was barely a whisper, and yet both of them went still, because there was something in it that did not sound like a dying girl. “Listen carefully, because I only swear this once. If there is any justice in heaven — if I live, in this life or any other — I will take back everything you stole. The Pendant. The clan. Grandfather’s name. And when you kneel where I am kneeling, I will remind you of tonight, word for word.” The nine bronze lamps guttered as one, as though a wind had passed through the sealed hall. For an instant — only an instant — fear flickered across Shen Ruyi’s lovely face. Then Shen Baiwen sighed, the sigh of a man completing an unpleasant chore, and raised his palm. Azure light gathered. “Foolish child. There is no justice. There is only strength.” The torrent of qi crashed down upon his daughter’s heart. Shen Qingluo’s body struck the floor. Silence returned to the hall of the ancestors. No one saw the small jade pendant at her chest begin to glow — a deep red light, like an ember waking beneath ash, pulsing once, twice, in time with a heartbeat that was ending. No one saw it, because by the time Shen Ruyi knelt eagerly to search the body, the pendant lay gray and lifeless on its cord. An ordinary trinket. Worthless. She searched for an hour. She tore the hall apart. She found nothing that answered to her blood. And far, far away — farther than any map of that world could measure — someone opened her eyes.