The brushes were wrong.
Not in quality—his father, for all his boorish merchant sensibilities, never skimped on coin for his "artistic" son's whims. The bristles were fine sable, the shafts smooth, weighted bamboo. No, the problem was their arrangement. The servants, bless their efficient hearts, insisted on sorting them by size. It was logical. It was tidy. It was infuriating.
Tang Bo plucked a medium-detail brush from the neat row and placed it between a thick wash brush and a needle-fine liner. There. The balance of texture. The *feel*. That’s what mattered. He did this every morning, a small ritual of defiant order in a life that felt increasingly, placidly, not his own. It was one of the few things that was entirely his. That, and his private opinion that the famous Plum Dew wine from his family's own brewery tasted like sweetened bilge water. Give him a cheap, fiery sorghum spirit any day.
A tremor ran through the floorboards.
It wasn’t an earthquake. He’d felt those. This was sharper, a vibration that hummed in his teeth and made the ink in his stone ripple with a faint, unnatural light. A shiver, not of the earth, but of the air itself. He stilled, head cocked. The servants hadn't noticed; their distant chatter from the courtyard continued unabated. This was for him.
Another pulse, stronger this time. It felt like a needle of ice lancing straight through the meridians he wasn't supposed to have, a ghostly architecture of a body he no longer wore. A memory of power, not the clumsy internal force the Mount Hua disciples prattled on about. This was potent. Refined. And utterly alien to this world.
Tang Bo set the brush down, his brief irritation forgotten, replaced by a cold, familiar vigilance he hadn't needed since he was a child scrounging for scraps in the street. His first instinct was not to call the guards. They were useless lumps trained to handle bandits, not… this. He scanned his desk. The heavy jade inkstone was a clumsy weapon. The scrolls were decorative. His gaze fell on a silver letter opener, a gift from a visiting official. It was long, slender, and wickedly sharp. He palmed it, the cool metal a comforting weight.
The energy was coming from his own bedchamber.
He moved silently, his slippered feet making no sound on the polished wood. He pushed the door open not with a bang, but with a slow, deliberate pressure.
The sight that met him was chaos. In the center of his room, the air still shimmered and warped, the last vestiges of a shimmering crack in reality folding in on itself. Sprawled on the floor amidst a catastrophe of overturned scrolls and a shattered vase of plum blossoms were three men.
One was dressed in scholar’s robes of an ethereal green, his hair in an elegant topknot now thoroughly askew. He was groaning, pushing himself up with a distinct lack of grace. "System, report! What fresh hell is this? Minus a thousand points for that landing! My back! My dignity!"
Clinging to his arm with the fierce devotion of a barnacle was a much younger man, impossibly handsome and dressed in opulent black and red. His eyes, wide with alarm, were fixed solely on the scholar. "Shizun! Are you alright? Did you get hurt? This disciple will kill whoever is responsible!"
The third man was already on his feet. He stood ramrod straight in stark white robes, his hand gripping the hilt of a sword that radiated a palpable killing intent. His face was a mask of cold fury and confusion. "Where are we?" he bit out, his voice low and dangerous. "The spiritual energy is wrong. Unstable."
They hadn't seen him yet. Tang Bo remained in the doorway, the letter opener held low and out of sight. His mind raced. Their clothing was all wrong—the cut, the embroidery, it was from no dynasty or region he knew. They spoke his language, but with a strange cadence. And the power radiating from them, especially the one in white… it was immense. Frightening. He was the son of the Tang family, a pillar of the merchant world, but in that moment, he was just a boy with a knife facing three nascent disasters.
Then the scholar in green finally pushed the younger man off, dusting his robes with a huff. His eyes swept the room, cataloging the damage, before they landed on Tang Bo.
And he froze.
The cheap paper fan he’d been about to open slipped from his fingers and clattered to the floor. His mouth fell slightly open. The practiced, exasperated air vanished, replaced by an expression of pure, unadulterated shock. He wasn't looking *at* Tang Bo. He was looking *through* him, at a ghost Tang Bo had spent sixteen years trying to bury.
Luo Binghe, seeing his Shizun’s distress, followed his gaze. The concern on his face curdled instantly. The soft, devoted curve of his lips tightened into a thin, venomous line. A flicker of something ancient and hateful flared in his dark eyes. His hand, which had been reaching to help his master, clenched into a fist at his side. He recognized that face. Oh, he recognized it well.
Only the man in white seemed unburdened by recognition. Liu Qingge’s glare simply intensified, taking in the newcomer as another variable in a hostile equation. He took a half-step forward, his sword humming softly in its scabbard. "Who are you?"
Tang Bo’s attention was snagged by him. The face was unfamiliar, a sculpture of ice and irritation. But the posture, the sheer, uncompromising arrogance of his spiritual presence… it struck a chord deep within him. It was a chord he’d never heard, a note from a song he’d never been taught. A name rose unbidden from the dregs of a forgotten nightmare, a life that wasn't his, a voice that was not his own whispering in the back of his skull.
*Liu-shidi.*
The thought was so alien, so invasive, he almost choked on it. His grip on the letter opener tightened until his knuckles were white. He knew that name. He knew that title. He had no idea why. His gaze flickered from the man in white to the stunned scholar in green, and a cold dread, heavier than any fear of their power, began to settle in his gut.
They weren't just strangers. They were an answer to a question he'd never dared to ask.