Chapter 4

Chapter 4

As soon as day broke, Wen Jin fell into a deep slumber.

He lay in that black stone coffin like a dream that had grown too quiet. Shen Wu sat beside him, staring at the wound from the silver nail beneath his collarbone, her mind a chaotic mess, like something that had been torn apart and carelessly discarded on the floor.

Ultimately, she couldn’t help herself and made a trip back home.

The old apartment her grandmother had left behind was in the old city district. When she turned the key in the lock, the scent of dust rushed out to meet her. Shen Wu had grown up here as a child. Her grandmother always said she had a fragile fate-that she shouldn’t look in a mirror under the moon at night, and she shouldn’t let anyone see the birthmark on the back of her neck.

Back then, she had simply dismissed it as the superstitions of an old woman.

Thinking back now, every word felt like a warning.

She searched for two full hours before finally finding a locked ebony box hidden in a false layer of the wardrobe. A crescent moon pattern was carved into the lid. The moment her fingertips touched it, her birthmark began to burn again. The lock actually sprang open with a sharp click.

Inside, there was only a diary and a thin-bladed silver dagger.

The diary was written by her grandmother. The first page contained only a single sentence:

“Ah Wu, if you ever meet that man named Wen Jin again, do not trust him at first, but you can follow him to stay alive.”

Shen Wu sat on the floor, flipping through the pages one by one.

Hidden within the paper was a family truth she had never known. The Shen family was no ordinary family; they were the Oathkeepers who had been responsible for guarding the Dayborn Blood lineage in the early years. The so-called Dayborn Blood was a rare bloodline that could change the fate of a vampire on the night of a lunar eclipse. Two hundred years ago, Lu Changye wanted to use it to complete the Solar Eclipse Ritual to escape the shackles of sunlight. To stop him, her past life had tied her own fate to Wen Jin’s, binding them together.

Her grandmother’s final few pages were written in a frantic scrawl, as if left in a hurry before her death:

“Wen Jin is not a clean man, but he has never touched your blood.”

“Lu Changye is looking for the Seventeenth Life.”

“If the Crimson Moon rises again, go to the Old Bell Tower. Do not trust anyone who says they love you but refuses to let you know the truth.”

Shen Wu reached the last page, where an old photograph was tucked inside. It showed a street scene from 1937. A young woman in a qipao stood in the snow, while the man beside her held a black umbrella, his profile identical to Wen Jin’s.

A line of small characters was written on the back of the photo:

“The Ninth Life. I was so close to bringing him back into the daylight.”

The doorbell suddenly rang.

Shen Wu’s heart leaped, thinking Wen Jin had woken up, but through the peephole, she saw Song Zhilan from the hospital’s emergency department.

Yet in the next second, Song Zhilan looked up and flashed her a smile that was completely foreign.

“Miss Shen,” she spoke, but the voice belonged to a man. “Master sent me to fetch you.”