Chapter 37
Bai Qian~
It wasn’t a light I followed out of the darkness. It was my daughter, Ying’er.
When I opened my eyes in Qingqiu, I did not rise from my bed. I was not needed there. No — an unseen tether, a soundless voice pulled me elsewhere, to a place where the past and present collided.
The peach blossoms were in full bloom, their petals drifting on a wind too soft to disturb the stillness of the orchard. Ten miles of trees swayed like an ocean of pale pink clouds, each branch heavy with spring’s promise.
I knew this orchard well — my second home since childhood. These trees were my first friends — the ones I whispered my secrets to. The scent of earth and nectar was my first lover; its kiss, the perfume I still carry on my skin. This place had been my refuge, where joy once rained down with the petals, and I had been delighted when Ying’er found the same joy here. But as I followed her voice, I feared we now shared something else — something darker. Another emotion. Another experience.
A pain that I believed belonged to me alone — but now this wasn’t so.
I saw her. She lay exactly where I once had — sprawled out among the fallen blossoms, plain mortal robes clinging to her, hair matted with crushed petals and dirt. The white of her sleeve was stiff with dried blood. Her green eyes — my beautiful green-eyed child — were clouded, unfocused, like jade left too long in ice.
For a moment, the orchard flickered, and she vanished. In her stead, I found myself lying there, dressed in simple white robes, the muslin clinging to my overheated skin, my hair tangled with petals and dust. My vision was blurred, and my breasts had throbbed from the milk I never fed to A-li, the child I was too scared to embrace.
I blinked, and suddenly, Ying’er was there again.
She was shattered. Someone had broken my precious daughter, yet the blame weighed heavily on my shoulders. She bore the burden of my karmic retribution. Though another’s hand had bled her but it might as well have been mine that held the blade.
A mother’s sins. The debt of my choices, collected now from my daughter’s veins. What I sowed, she bleeds.
I knelt into the petals beside her, limbs suddenly leaden. My palm pressed into the ground for balance, veins raised like blue rivulets against skin gone pale with grief. My shadow touched her, and she flinched like a startled bird, curling into herself. She rocked gently—like a reed in wind only she could feel. Her eyes stared at a place beyond this realm.
“Ying’er.” I breathed, but my body trembled as though I had screamed it. Her name shattered on my tongue. “Ying’er…” I bit the inside of my mouth until I tasted metal, holding back the sob that threatened to tear through me. “My precious girl, Mother is here. You’re safe. You’re home.”
She jolted as if struck by lightning. And then I saw it something broke. Her jagged, bloody nails caught in the weave of my skirt, twisting it, pulling until the silk puckered into cruel ropes — not like a drowning soul clutching a lifeline, but like one tightening a silken noose. Her grip was merciless. The uneven edges of her nails — cracked, splintered, stained deep with the rusty brown of old blood — bit into my thighs through layers of silk.
So many years had passed, yet my breasts tightened, aching as though she were my infant daughter searching for milk.
I gathered her against me. If I could, I would have traded every bone, every drop of blood, every scrap of flesh I had to take away all of her pain. My fingers slid into her tangled hair, but she did not weep — she never had. “Safe?” She whimpered. “Home?” I barely recognized her voice. Her breath came in short, furious panting bursts against the thin weave of my gown. The words scraped from her throat, half-believed, half-feared. Then it came—broken, desperate and manic.
Her mantra of heartbreak and abandonment.
“Mother… my baby… my baby… he didn’t keep his promise. He said he would come back for me and my baby… but he didn’t—” she chanted as if reciting a sacred text in half-delirium.
“My baby… my baby… I didn’t see her. I WENT INSIDE, BUT I DIDN’T SEE HER!” Then—a manic laugh that tore through the orchard like glass being crushed between teeth.
My heart didn’t just split—it shattered into a thousand shards that sliced through my chest. Her eyes — like an untamed mare, like a wolf pup cornered by fire, like a falcon trapped in a cage — were wild as the past and present collided in her broken mind.
“He swore to me,” she rasped, fingers digging so deep into my flesh I felt blood bloom beneath silk. “He SWORE heaven and earth, nothing—NOTHING—could keep him from us. And then—and then—THEN…”
Her pale lips pulled back splitting anew as she spoke, fresh beads of blood glistening only to be pulled into her gums and between her teeth as she swallowed back into the words. “I was so scared by myself, but I did it. I did it, and my baby… my baby…”
Her head jerked slightly against my chest, her eyes huge and wild. “I sang to her. I did, and she looked at me. She knew me..my breasts… She latched, and I nursed her… but I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I tried, but I failed…”
Something inside her collapsed with those words. Her body sagged, but her fingers only tightened, bunching my skirts until the embroidered cranes distorted into snarling, broken shapes. And when the tears finally came — when fifty-five thousand years of hardness shattered all at once — they soaked through the thin muslin of my underdress. And I felt it in my body as though the years had folded in on themselves — her heat searing into the place where I had once lain cold, her sobs replacing my silence.
My knuckles whitened against her back, my pulse hammering there as if my heart had moved outside my body. Around us, the blossoms fell harder, layering over her tangled hair and my shaking shoulders until we were buried in pale pink, two figures lost in the wreckage of something the world will never understand.
I clutched her tighter, my hand splayed over the fragile ridge of her spine, each vertebra rising like a string of prayer beads beneath my palm. Her body was weightless, but the sorrow inside her pressed down like a collapsing sky. The orchard hushed around us, as if the trees themselves held their breath. It wasn’t sudden, but a stirring — a shiver in the branches, a rustle too delicate to be wind. The peach blossoms began to move. Not fall, but lift.
One petal.
Then another. Then hundreds. Then thousands. A slow, shimmering ascent. They rose from the forest floor, from her tangled hair, from the folds of my gown, as if stirred by the ache in our bones. They spiraled lazily at first, light as breath, gathering in the surrounding air.
They swirled like snow in reverse — pink and white and pale coral — rising not from wind, but from grief, from magic, from a mother’s breaking heart both Yinger’s and mine.
Pressing my cheek to her tangled crown, I whispered, “I know. Let Mother take some of your pain.”
Forgive me, Mother. You would understand.
The silent prayer drifted skyward — to my mother, who once bore this same burden. Then I did what I had sworn never to do. I opened myself to the magic of the sacred sisterhood — the clandestine Order of Empaths. Women who willingly bore pain so that others might live. Women who knew that the cost of love was to suffer and chose it anyway.
My mother’s secret magic.
As I called on that magic, it met the Fox life force in my veins, a dangerous mingling. The air snapped like a bowstring pulled past breaking. Every nerve in my body flared like zither strings plucked too hard. The petals thickened, swirled faster, forming a cocoon around us—like the womb of the world, protecting us.
A thread of silver smoke unfurled from my chest, seeking hers. When it found her, the cord between us snapped taut—and the flood came. Her pain. My pain. And not just ours. The pain of ten thousand women. Mothers, daughters, sisters. Across realms and time.
All who had sung lullabies to silence.
All who had been left behind and forgotten.
It was grief itself. My bones couldn’t hold it. I wanted to tear open my chest bleed the agony out onto the orchard floor. The scream. The creature. Its name was Torment. Its limbs were rage, despair, regret, and desperation. That beast, dark and gnarled, clawed its way out from my throat, and the ground beneath us trembled with its coming.
“Why, Ying’er?! Why?!” My voice tore through the orchard, rattling every leaf. “She is a child! Just a child!”
My voice cracked the silence like a thunderclap against heaven’s gates. “You had no right!” I roared. “No right to break her!”
The orchard shuddered with me.
I tilted my head back and spat my fury to the vast expanse above. “Fate, you are wicked!” I shouted, teeth bared. The soft whisper of peach petals answered, rising in a swirling dance, frenzied by my despair. “DESTINY, YOU ARE CRUEL BEYOND WORDS!”
The air crackled with raw energy as the peach petals convulsed, a symphony of motion driven by spell, soul, and scream. Then, with a deafening crack, they exploded. A shattering, like constellations splitting apart in the inky black, bloomed with a vibrant array of color, magic, and long-forgotten memories. The silken petals flew not only through the orchard, brushing against my skin, but far beyond it.
Then a hush — silence. It fell like dusk, heavy and unbidden. The only sounds were the ragged breaths of my daughter and me, echoing in the stillness, as petals came to rest — in our hair, on our skin — soft as sorrow. The orchard watched. The magic was spent. We stayed that way for a long while — until our voices went hoarse, until no more tears would come, until her whisper finally broke the silence:
Her voice — a bare whisper, barely audible. “Mother… I can’t breathe. I can’t live with this pain. I’d rather die…” A sob wracked her body. “Help me forget. Please… don’t tell anyone I was this weak. Not even me. I can’t bear the shame.” Tears, like glittering diamonds spilled and traced a shimmering path down her pale cheek, leaving it slick and cold.
“You are not weak. There’s no shame. I swear… to carry our secret until the end of time.” My lips brushed her forehead in quick, desperate kisses. Ying’er had never begged for anything — not as a child. But now she clung to me as though even the air had turned against her.
“Ying’er,” I whispered, brushing her tangled hair from her brow, “this was only a dragon-tail dream — Such dreams aren’t meant to stay. You’ll forget it, my love. I promise you that.”
Behind me, Zhe Yan’s step was soft but certain. His eyes were red and glassy. His expression of sorrow wasn’t one I’d seen since the Ghost War. “Give our little girl peace, Xiao Wu. Sleep is the best medicine.” He pressed a small porcelain vial into my palm and called it ‘Mercy.’
The amnesia draught inside was the color of smoked amber tea, with faint swirls of opalescent gray — like the waters of the River of Oblivion winding through the underworld, gentle in appearance yet powerful enough to wash away lifetimes.
“Shhh, it won’t take long.” I murmured, gathering her into my lap. So slight when she folded against me with the weight of surrender — so small, so frail — her head tucked beneath my chin, her breath shallow against my collarbone. It was like cradling an infant once more. She gazed at the vial the way a newborn seeks its mother’s breast — not with recognition, but instinct, an ache for relief she could not name.
I pressed the cool porcelain to her lips. She did not flinch. She did not question. Her mind had already slipped beyond rhyme or reason, adrift in a place where neither memory nor meaning remained.
The liquid touched her tongue. She swallowed — once, twice — and for a single breath, I could feel it move through her, like a tide overtaking a quiet shoreline. Her lashes fluttered. A shiver ran the length of her spine. Her mouth moved once more, soundless now — and then stilled. A sigh, so soft it might have been mistaken for wind—though it was heavy enough to turn palaces to rubble, it slipped from her lips.
The light in her green eyes faded to mist. She nestled closer, her breath against my collarbone slowing, like ripples fading on still water. She closed her heavy eyes and murmured once more, barely audible—a single note of an unfamiliar song, sweet and tender — that was utterly heartbreaking.
To anyone passing through the orchard, we might have seemed like no more than shadows beneath the trees — a mother cradling her sleeping child. They wouldn’t see how I held her, not gently, but with the quiet desperation of someone clinging to shattered glass, trying to keep it from splintering further. They wouldn’t know that what looked like respite was anything but.
I told myself I could heal her. That love — my love — would be enough to piece her back together as if she were never damaged. Ying’er wouldn’t be a broken thing like me, but even as I whispered those lies, I knew the truth: this was no remedy. It was a mere vitamin tonic given to one already dying, offered by hands just as fevered, just as fractured. For the illness I carried — Ying’er now carried too.
Phoenix Realm~
In a realm ruled by plumes, fire and ash, the sky was clear — too clear. Yet on that still afternoon, something impossible occurred.
A single peach blossom petal drifted from the sky. It fell in silence, twirling gently like a feather through smoke, untouched by heat. Another followed. Then another. Within moments, rooftops shimmered in pink and ivory, soft layers blanketing the jade walkways, the molten spires, and the dark lacquered steps of the Eastern Palace and blanketed the soft, velvety moss at the roots of the Tree of Origins, as if grief itself had sought sanctuary there.
The petals clung to mother-of-pearl pillars, slid down crimson banners, and caught in the obsidian braid of a young imperial guard just returning from his patrol at the Eastern Palace. He paused. One delicate petal stuck to his smooth, immortal face — a face still untouched by war or grief, too young to know the scent of sorrow. Yet still, it filled him with a sudden fear and the inexplicable urge to weep.
He closed his eyes to the vision of motherless babies, maidens left abandoned at altars, mothers who covered their children in dust long before their time. The wind did not blow. It sobbed, but the petals kept falling.
He did not know it, but this was not weather. This was memory made visible, something tangible enough to hold. This was grief given wings — something that could fly from dreams and turn them into nightmares. This was a mother’s anguish growing like a twisted thorny vine long enough to reach even here. A thorny prick, he felt it and looked to see no blood, for the bleeding was happening somewhere else. And far away, unbeknownst to him, in the quietest corner of the great Phoenix God’s peach orchard, a girl slept in her mother’s arms — dreamless, at last.