Chapter 10

Chapter 10

The secret chamber of Zhaoming Palace was hidden behind a Buddhist shrine.

As the bronze key turned, the stone door let out a dull, heavy groan. I supported Xiao Lingyi as we entered, closing the door behind us. Outside, the clashing of blades, the sounds of weeping, and the Empress’s curses were muffled into a blur by the stone walls.

There were no Buddhas in this chamber, only paintings.

From the floor to the vaulted ceiling, the walls were covered with the original drafts of the funerary portraits I had painted. Every single one was connected by threads of cinnabar, the lines converging toward a bronze mirror in the center of the room. The mirror stood half as tall as a man, its surface pitch-black. It did not reflect shadows; it only reflected the faces that had been borrowed.

Xiao Lingyi slumped against the wall, gasping for breath. “This is the array set by the Empress and Wuxiang Tower. All the original drafts are gathered here. During tomorrow’s ancestral rites, the faces and the lives attached to them will pass through the gates of the Imperial Ancestral Temple together.”

I walked to the mirror.

Xie Wanning appeared first in the reflection, followed by the Daughter of the Minister of Rites, the Legitimate Daughter of Marquis Jingnan, the Granddaughter of the Grand Tutor… They all had their eyes closed, as if trapped beneath the surface of deep water.

“How do I break it?” I asked in a low voice.

Xiao Lingyi looked at the portrait of my mother in my hands. “Finish painting your mother.”

I whipped my head around to look at her.

“Your mother’s portrait was never finished back then, so her fate has remained half-locked within you. Wuxiang Tower can use you to open The Door only because that lock hasn’t been fully bolted yet. Finish her portrait. Either she becomes herself and you become yourself, or you, this Empty Vessel, will shatter.”

I unfurled the funerary portrait of my mother.

In the painting, Shen Yuan’s lips were colorless, as if she had been waiting for twenty-six years-waiting for me to add that final stroke.

Suddenly, I hesitated.

I had painted so many dead people without a moment’s doubt. But facing my mother, I finally understood why relatives would beg me to “keep her here.” It wasn’t that people couldn’t bear to lose a face; it was that they couldn’t bear to admit that the face would never open its eyes again.

Xiao Lingyi said softly, “Shen Yan, she gave her life for yours. It wasn’t so you could spend your whole life opening doors for others.”

I picked up the brush.

As the tip of the brush dipped into the cinnabar, another face suddenly surfaced within the bronze mirror.

It was my own.

Yet it was younger than I was now, perhaps sixteen or seventeen. The eyes were clear, and there was no old scar on the brow. He stood inside the mirror, looking at me through the dark, water-like surface, his lips moving.

I couldn’t hear him.

But I recognized that face.

Not because I looked in the mirror every day, but because many years ago, I had painted him.

A headache split my skull like an axe. A fragment of forgotten memory surged to the surface.

Sixteen years old. The Northern Prison. Midwinter.

My master, Qin Lao, had taken me to paint the funerary portrait of a young death-row prisoner. The youth was thin, but his face was strikingly beautiful. He didn’t cry before he died; he only asked me, “After the painting is done, will I be able to go home?”

That was the first time I had ever put brush to paper alone. My heart had softened, and I wrote a line on the back of the portrait: “Send Gu Huaibi home.”

Gu Huaibi.

I remembered now.

The man I had personally “sent away.”