Chapter 6

Chapter 6

The East Market Agarwood Shop sells incense by day and lives by night.

At the hour of the rat, I draped a cloak over my shoulders and exited the palace through a secret passage. Xiao Lingyi had told me about that passage ten years ago; she said every wall in the palace needed a crack, or else a person would be suffocated to death by the rules.

The agarwood shop had long since closed. A sliver of red light peeked through the gap in the door. I pushed it open, and a wave of fragrance rushed toward me.

There was no shopkeeper inside, only rows of wooden shelves. Incense boxes were arranged upon them, each bearing a small face. Some of those faces had their eyes closed, some were smiling, and some still carried the terror they felt before death.

The wooden tablet in my sleeve suddenly grew hot.

The floorboards split open silently, revealing a flight of stone steps leading downward.

I descended.

Below ground was a tower.

It wasn’t tall, but it was as deep as a well. Every floor was hung with portraits-men and women, old and young-all of them funerary images. Beneath each portrait sat a ceramic jar, its mouth sealed with a cinnabar talisman. From within, the faint sound of fingernails scratching against the clay could be heard.

A man sat on the lowest level.

He wore red robes, his hair held up by a silver hairpin, and his features were as gentle as those of an academy scholar. Had it not been for the hundreds of faceless skins hanging on the wall behind him, I might have mistaken him for a mere refined gentleman.

“Shen Yan.” He looked up. “You’ve finally come.”

I gripped the thin blade hidden in my sleeve. “The Lord of Wuxiang Tower?”

“Pei Zhaoye.” He nodded slightly. “While your mother was alive, she called me ‘Senior Brother.'”

My heart jolted.

Pei Zhaoye took out a yellowed scroll and placed it on the table.

“If you want to investigate the face-swapping, first look at where you came from.”

The scroll unfurled. The paper was aged but perfectly preserved. The woman in the painting lay on a couch, her features elegant and clear, with a faint mole between her brows. Her lip color had not been finished, as if the artist had been abruptly interrupted before the final stroke.

The inscription beside the painting read: *The remains of Shen Yuan.*

My mother’s name.

I reached out to touch the painting, my fingertips cold. “Who painted this?”

“Qin Wujiu, your master,” Pei Zhaoye said. “Twenty-six years ago, you were a stillborn. Shen Yuan sought every physician to no avail, and finally returned to Wuxiang Tower. She said the child was innocent.”

“So you took someone else’s life to save me?”

“Not us.” Pei Zhaoye looked at me. “She gave her own life in exchange for yours.”

I stared at him.

His tone was calm. “The Painted Skin Art was not originally a technique meant for harm. It can take a soul about to scatter, a life about to end, and temporarily anchor it to a painting, then use the flesh and blood of a living person to extend the journey. Your mother stripped away her own fate to pass it to you. But an infant has no face and cannot hold a fate. So, she begged for a face for you.”

“Whose face?”

Pei Zhaoye did not answer, only pushing the scroll closer to me.

“Shen Yan, you are the first finished product. Your eyes can see through bone and your brush can lock souls. This is not a gift from heaven; it is because you yourself are The Door. Without your paintings, Wuxiang Tower can only swap skins, not fates.”

I suddenly remembered Xiao Lingyi’s words: *Paint yourself.*

So she had known all along.

I gritted my teeth and asked, “What about the Grand Princess?”

Pei Zhaoye smiled. “Empress Jiang’s fate is thin; she cannot sit securely on the phoenix throne. His Majesty is terminally ill, and she intends to use the Grand Princess’s Phoenix Bone to enter the Imperial Ancestral Temple. During tomorrow’s ancestral sacrifice, the Grand Princess will wake up in the body of the Empress.”

I drew my blade.

Pei Zhaoye didn’t flinch. He simply said, “You cannot kill me. Every face here is my path of retreat.”

The portraits all around us opened their eyes simultaneously.

Countless faces I had painted with my own hands stared at me in the darkness.