Chapter 1

Chapter 1

I have spent my entire life painting the dead, never imagining that the living could be far more terrifying.

Three months ago, the Prime Minister’s Daughter died suddenly, and I was commissioned to capture her final likeness. Today, I saw that very face on the street, belonging to another woman.

She stood before a lantern stall, draped in a pristine white fox-fur cloak. There was a tiny mole at the end of her eyebrow, and when she smiled, her left cheek dimpled first. It was the face of Xie Wanning.

I could not be mistaken.

When she died, I kept watch in the west wing of the Prime Minister’s Mansion for an entire night. Outside the window, rain lashed against the plantain leaves; inside, the silver charcoal burned too fiercely, yet the corpse remained as cold as a piece of jade freshly pulled from water. Xie Wanning’s mother fainted from grief three times, while the Prime Minister, Xie Huaizhou, asked me only one thing: “Mr. Shen, can you keep her here?”

I replied, “A painting can preserve a form, but it cannot preserve a life.”

He looked at me, his eyes devoid of sorrow, containing only a suppressed, burning urgency. “Preserving the form is enough.”

I didn’t understand him then.

Now, that face I had personally painted onto silk paper offered me a sweet, captivating smile from across the bustling crowd.

She opened her mouth and called to me, “Mr. Shen, we meet again.”

The stick of pine-soot ink in my hand hit the ground, snapping in half.

No one in the market found it strange. The old man selling lanterns continued his cries, children chased after sugar-syrup dolls, and the Jinwu Guards on patrol passed behind her without so much as a second glance.

Only I knew that Xie Wanning’s remains had long since been interred in the Xie Family Ancestral Tomb. On the day of the funeral, I watched with my own eyes as the coffin lid was nailed shut and eight servants carried it out of the city. It was impossible for her to be standing here.

The woman walked toward me. With every step she took, her demeanor shifted to resemble Xie Wanning even more closely. It wasn’t just a simple likeness; even that touch of haughtiness when she lowered her eyes and the slight impatience in the way she pursed her lips seemed to have been plucked from the very same body.

I took a half-step back, bumping into my painting kit.

“Shen Yan,” she said my name, but the voice was not Xie Wanning’s. Xie Wanning’s voice had been cool and clear; this woman’s voice was lower, like something hauled up from the bottom of a well. “You paint so well. If not for your brush, I wouldn’t be able to wear this face so securely.”

I stared at her. “Who are you?”

Her smile faded slightly. “You are a painter of faces, sir. Why ask who is beneath the face instead?”

I reached out to grab her wrist.

Just as my fingertips brushed her sleeve, a thin blade slid from her cuff, the edge grazing my palm as it passed. I caught a familiar scent-the scent of Soul-Returning Incense that had burned in the west wing of the Prime Minister’s Mansion.

Someone in the crowd shrieked, but she used the momentum to retreat into a small, green-curtained sedan chair waiting at the mouth of an alley.

The porters lifted the chair and hurried away.

I gave chase for three streets, but in the end, I only found a single scrap of paper in the snow, blown down by the wind.

On the paper, a face without features was drawn in cinnabar. Beneath it were four small characters: Faceless Life-Borrowing.