Chapter 7

Chapter 7

It was still dark when I escaped from Wuxiang Tower.

The price of my flight was a blade wound to my left shoulder and my painting kit left behind on the ground. All that remained in my sleeve was my mother’s funerary portrait, her lips still unpainted.

Pei Zhaoye did not hunt me down. He let me fly back to the palace like a bird that had finally noticed its cage.

He knew that Xiao Lingyi was there.

When I returned to Zhaoming Palace, twelve female officials had been added to the hall. They surrounded the Grand Princess’s coffin, each holding a silver tray. The trays did not contain offerings, but rather sheets of thin skin soaking in medicinal broth.

Empress Jiang sat behind a curtain, her voice gentle. “Where did Mr. Shen go last night?”

I pressed down on my wound. “To fetch a brush.”

“Did you get it?”

I looked at Xiao Lingyi in the coffin. Her eyes were still closed, and her breath was even weaker than the night before. The red line on the side of her neck had already spread to below her ear, like a boundary line meant to split her face completely open.

“I got it,” I said.

A female official handed me a new piece of silk.

This time, the Empress did not leave me to paint alone. The twelve officials stood guard at the four corners, and Liu Quan personally closed the doors. Soul-Returning Incense burned in the censer, its smoke condensing into thin red lines in the air that coiled toward Xiao Lingyi’s face.

I spread out the silk and raised my brush.

However, the first stroke did not fall between her brows, but on the corner of the silk.

I painted an eye.

It was not Xiao Lingyi’s eye, but my own.

This was the hint Xiao Lingyi had given me. “Paint yourself” was not as simple as making a self-portrait; it meant embedding my own bone structure into her funerary portrait, tricking the Life-Exchange Gate into misidentifying its target.

Empress Jiang could not understand what I was doing through the curtain. She only urged, “Mr. Shen, be quick.”

I continued to paint.

When a painter depicts a person, the first thing they memorize is not the features, but the bone. I was all too familiar with my own bone structure. My brow bone was slightly high, the bridge of my nose was straight, and there was an old scar on my jaw-the result of being struck by a spooked horse when I was sixteen, while delivering a painting for my master.

I quietly hid these lines within Xiao Lingyi’s face.

Halfway through the painting, the person in the coffin slightly twitched a fingertip.

I lowered my head to dip my brush in ink and heard her say in a breathy whisper, “Not enough.”

My heart sank.

What she wanted was not just hidden lines, but a complete version of me.

If I only hid half of myself, the ritual would backfire, yet it might not save her. To block The Door, someone more suitable than her to receive the Life-Exchange technique had to appear in the painting.

And I was that person.

I looked up at the Empress behind the curtain.

Empress Jiang suddenly asked, “Mr. Shen, why are you sweating?”

I gave a small smile. “I was reminded of an old matter.”

“What matter?”

“Ten years ago, the Grand Princess complained that my paintings of peonies were too vulgar.”

Silence fell behind the curtain for a moment.

Then, the Empress spoke. “The dead do not complain anymore.”

I lowered my head and painted my own brows onto the silk.