天命五劫

The Snow Smells of Blood.

When Ling Tian crawled out of the pile of corpses, half an ear was stuck in his throat. It was from a pursuer he had torn apart three days ago. The frozen earlobe still had a jade earring attached—identical to the one his mother wore when she was buried. He reached to pull it out, but his fingertips touched something slimy—a tangle of intestines wrapped around his wrist like a dead snake.

Moonlight spilled over the mass grave, but the fresh snow couldn't hide the rotting flesh. Seven steps away, a headless corpse hung from a crooked locust tree. The silk official boots on its feet were stained with cinnabar—it was the seventh Eastern Depot officer. Ling Tian's gaze locked onto the corpse's left palm, where a burn scar the size of a copper coin marked the flesh in the shape of a soaring black bird—the same mark he had seen on the assassin chasing him three days ago.

Crack.

A dry branch snapped in the southeast. Ling Tian lowered his stance, feeling the broken tooth in his throat suddenly heat up. Over the past three years, his body had become increasingly strange: wounds healed like writhing maggots, yet the pain lingered in old scars, flaring up again and again. The arrow wound on his right shoulder was scabbing over, but the agony from three years ago—when his mother was impaled by a spear—erupted in his chest.

Ten paces away, footprints appeared in the snow.

The first step sank three inches deep—heavy, like a grown man's. The second step, however, barely left a trace, as if he was walking on air. Ling Tian narrowed his eyes. A drop of blood from his bitten tongue fell into his palm and slithered like a living thing, forming a divination sign—Heaven above, Earth below. A world in disorder.

"Come out." His voice was hoarse, like a rusted blade scraping against bone.

A figure emerged from the snowstorm, clad in blue robes. A bamboo hat obscured his face, its hanging brass bell swaying without wind—yet the chime was strangely muted, confined within a mere ten feet. When he lifted his hand to remove the hat, Ling Tian's pupils contracted.

That face—seven parts similar to the portrait of his great-uncle in the ancestral hall—was marred only by a jagged scar across the brow.

"Ling clan remnant." The blue-robed man drew a soft sword from his sleeve, talismans coiling along the blade. "Hand over the Heavenly Mechanism Codex, and I'll leave you a whole corpse."

Ling Tian laughed, licking the cracked corner of his lips, tasting the iron-sweet tang of blood. Forty-nine groups of assassins had uttered those exact words over the past three years. Their eyes now floated in glass jars at the ghost market's apothecary—twenty taels per pair.

The instant the sword thrust forward, Ling Tian didn't retreat. He advanced.

As the talisman brushed against his neck, it ignited with eerie blue flames—only to extinguish the moment it touched his skin. His heart burned with searing heat—the blood bodhi embedded in his chest suddenly blazed so fiercely that the sword's edge warped for an instant. The blue-robed man's expression froze in shock, because Ling Tian's fist had already plunged through his ribcage, clenching his still-beating heart.

"Didn't your master tell you?" Ling Tian leaned in, fingers carving a cross-shaped wound into the heart's surface. "Ling clan blood devours Yin-Yang arts."

The heart burst in a spray of blood mist—just as a silver streak burrowed into Ling Tian's palm. He flung his hand back, but his veins bulged grotesquely, something writhing beneath his skin, racing toward his heart. The agony shattered the seal on his memory—

Three years ago, on the night of the massacre, his father had shoved half a blood bodhi into his mouth. In the depths of his father's pupils, the same silver glow had slithered.

"Soul-locking Gu." The corpse of the blue-robed man suddenly spoke, silver threads pouring from its seven orifices. "By the third quarter of the night, the parasite will reach your brain… and you will be our master's puppet."

Ling Tian crushed the twitching throat in his grip. But the silver threads surged, expanding between his fingers.

The moonlight dimmed for an instant.

An arrow, feathered in white, whistled through the air—burying three inches deep into Ling Tian's palm before nailing his blood to the frozen ground. The moment the silver filaments touched his blood, they let out an infant's wailing scream and recoiled into the earth.

When the ghost market's curfew bell tolled thrice, Ling Tian stood at the pawnshop counter.

The abacus beads, carved from human bone, clicked sharply with each movement. The one-eyed shopkeeper's gaze gleamed green beneath the oil lamp. Ling Tian pulled a half-blood bodhi from his robes, its jade surface still slick with his own blood.

The pawnshop's wooden sign swayed in the night wind, its shadow cast against the wall like a strangling hand.

"Shelf A, Row 7, Slot 9." Ling Tian slammed the blood bodhi onto the counter, the stone tabletop cracking like a spiderweb. "Where's the key?"

The shopkeeper's skeletal fingers stretched three inches longer, nails glinting as they pried open Ling Tian's collar. "Blood of a virgin, born in the Year, Month, and Hour of the Boar—"

His words choked off as Ling Tian's hand seized his throat. Beneath the shopkeeper's skin, countless tiny lumps squirmed, as if thousands of eggs lay nestled within.

The hidden door creaked open with his dying gasps.

A stench of decay surged out.

The stone steps glistened with a transparent mucus, yielding underfoot like the throat of a beast. Ling Tian's fingers traced deep scratch marks along the wall—some old, some fresh. The newest still bore streaks of blood.

His own. From three days ago.

At the chamber's center, a bronze coffin trembled.

Eight chains of meteorite iron stretched taut. From the coffin's cracks, black blood oozed into the star-shaped engravings on the floor, pooling into two characters—"Jing Hong."

Ling Tian pressed the blood bodhi into the beast-headed coffin's single eye. The locking mechanism screamed like a thousand ghosts.

And then, the girl inside sat up.

Ling Tian's breath stopped.

"Brother Tian." Ling Shuang tilted her head and smiled. Her throat wound gaped open, flesh splitting with the motion. "When Father tested his medicine on me, he said the Heavenly Mechanism Codex needs a living soul as the catalyst."

Her fingers traced the coffin's engravings, and the ancient script slithered to life—golden needles stabbing into Ling Tian's eyes.

Pain ripped through his skull—

He saw the truth from three years ago.

In the secret chamber, his father carved the hearts of seventy-two people, mixing their blood with cinnabar to inscribe the Heavenly Mechanism Codex. When the final stroke fell, his mother snatched the dagger and drove it into her own throat. Her blood sprayed across Ling Shuang's forehead—forming the budding shape of a blood bodhi.

"Run!" His mother's scream rang through memory.

But Ling Shuang, standing before him now, tightened