Chapter 11

Chapter 11

The memory flashed for only an instant before the stone door was burst open.

Pei Zhaoye stepped into the secret chamber. A layer of skin had shifted on his face; his previously gentle features cracked, revealing a younger, more unfamiliar face beneath. Empress Jiang followed behind him, her hair disheveled and a knife gripped in her hand.

“So Qin Wujiu suppressed this memory as well.” Pei Zhaoye looked at the youth in the mirror, smiling with delight. “Shen Yan, you have finally seen your own face.”

I gripped my brush tightly. “This is not my face.”

“Of course it isn’t,” he said. “You were born without a fate and without a face. Shen Yuan gave you a life, and Qin Wujiu gave you a face. Gu Huaibi was the son of a dying criminal official in the Northern Prison; his fate had already been severed, but his face was clean. Your master used your hand to paint him so that you would personally claim that face as your own. You wrote ‘Sending Gu Huaibi back to his hometown,’ and so his face followed you home.”

My stomach churned.

All these years, I had lived with someone else’s face, yet I had painted the stolen faces of countless others.

Empress Jiang said sharply, “Enough talk! Continue the ritual!”

Pei Zhaoye ignored her, merely reaching out a hand toward me. “Give me the brush. If you are willing to surrender your body, I can spare the Grand Princess’s life, and I can let Liu Ah Ruan be herself again.”

“What guarantee do I have?”

“The guarantee that I am weary of lying.”

I laughed.

In that moment, I was actually no longer afraid.

“Pei Zhaoye, you aren’t weary of lying. You have simply deceived so many people that finally, there isn’t a single face left that will believe you.”

I turned and applied the final stroke of cinnabar to the lips of my mother’s portrait.

As the red ink touched the paper, the entire secret chamber shook violently.

A long sigh echoed from the bronze mirror.

In the painting, Shen Yuan opened her eyes.

She did not look at Pei Zhaoye, nor did she look at Xiao Lingyi. She only looked at me. Her gaze was tender yet distant, like a mother finally seeing her grown child, yet knowing she should no longer reach out to embrace him.

“Yan’er,” she called to me.

My throat felt tight. “Mother.”

She smiled. “Do not be afraid. What was borrowed must always be returned. But returning it does not mean death.”

Lines of cinnabar began to glow on all the portraits like thin, red-hot snakes. The faces trapped within the bronze mirror opened their eyes one after another. Those noble ladies, maidservants, substitutes, and vessels-all of them turned their gaze toward the center of the chamber.

Pei Zhaoye’s face turned deathly pale as he lunged forward to seize the brush.

Xiao Lingyi used the last of her strength to shove him aside, but she was stabbed in the side of her abdomen by Empress Jiang’s knife.

I heard the sound of blood hitting the floor.

That sound was clearer than any ghostly wail.

I supported her, my brush rolling through her blood, before I turned and threw myself toward the bronze mirror.

Since I am The Door, then I shall be the one to close it.

I began to paint my own complete features upon the bronze mirror.