On New Year’s Eve of the 17th year of Tianming, panic gripped everyone in the Guan family at the Minister’s Residence.
The Family Head, Minister Guan, sat high in the main hall. For three consecutive days, he had opened the family treasury, dismissed his concubines, scattered his servants, and hid his offspring.
Five days earlier, on the Winter Solstice, the old Emperor had died, leaving an edict that his eldest daughter should take the throne while his other children would become princes assisting her. If the edict had been proclaimed to the world, Changluo would, at most, be facing a surge of undercurrents.
But the Late Emperor’s Edict was suppressed and not proclaimed.
Overnight, Noble Consort Su and her daughter, the Fourth Princess, were confined and imprisoned. Imperial Noble Consort Guan was strangled to death in the palace. Her son, the Second Prince, Gao Mingqian, was forced to raise troops and fight his way out of the palace gates. Changluo spiraled into open, violent chaos.
Minister Guan, who had muddled through life indulging in lust to feign peace, could only watch helplessly as his own sister died and his nephew rebelled.
A new sovereign brings a new court. During the old Emperor’s nearly thirty-year reign, the Guan family had always been treated with deep suspicion. Their military power had been stripped for twenty years, leaving them with only civil officials and scholars. In times of peace, they could compete with the brush; in times of war and rebellion, they could only pray for self-preservation.
Because Minister Guan had many beautiful concubines, he had many beautiful children. As these children bloomed into adulthood, the Guan family sent them out to other noble houses as wives and concubines, weaving a vast web of marriage alliances. They had cultivated this beauty for a thousand days just for a moment like this. But three days ago, a cavalry unit of the Gu Clan from an Outer State entered Changluo and began slaughtering Guan clan members, house by house.
The leader, Gu Jinyu, declared that Gao Mingqian’s whereabouts were unknown, meaning he must still be hiding within Changluo.
The heads of Guan clan members who lived outside the residence were placed in boxes and delivered in an endless stream into the besieged Guan Residence.
The entire city was silenced by fear; the entire Guan household was trapped like cornered, terrified beasts.
Minister Guan tried to write letters to the new Empress, pledging weakness and submission, and to Prince Zhenbei Gu Yan, begging for help. The Empress ignored him. The Gu family’s reply was an old, secretly kept letter of false accusation, titled: “Guan’s Accusation Against the An Family for the Illicit Trafficking of Tobacco.”
The slanderous document was yellowed and wrinkled. Pinned to its back was a stack of death warrants, a full sixteen pages listing the names of all the An family members who had died innocently back then. Every name was written in vermilion ink, surging with murderous intent and resentment. The signature was the single name: “An Ruoyi.”
Minister Guan knew then that this long-standing feud would not end well today.
At the end of the road, there was only death.
Today was New Year’s Eve, and noon was approaching. Minister Guan had just dismissed a batch of old servants in the main hall and was burning secret records from over thirty years of officialdom when the door was suddenly pushed open.
Minister Guan turned his head, and the flames licked his dry, wrinkled hand.
“Yunji! Why are you back? Didn’t I tell you to leave the city with the Ge family’s army?”
His sole legitimate son, Guan Yunji—who had once strutted with such arrogance, looking down on the entire capital—now stood there, his hair disheveled, clothes dusty, and his steps unsteady.
“Father,” Guan Yunji hadn’t addressed his biological father this way in a long time. “The Ge family surrendered. The Empress has protected them.”
A blood blister from the burn quickly formed on Minister Guan’s hand.
Guan Yunji staggered over. “The Empress protects them, but not the Guan family. The executioner is the Gu family… Gu Jinyu. What do we do? Are we just waiting to be exterminated?”
Minister Guan silently continued to burn his official records and account books. Inside the main hall, only this estranged father and son remained—men who, for years, had not understood each other. Only their ragged, overlapping breaths and the choking smell of burning ashes filled the space.
Guan Yunji was the first to break under the suffocating terror of impermanence closing in. His knees buckled, and he knelt beneath the large plaque hanging high in the main hall, inscribed with the words: “Righteous Heart, Moral Trust.”
Weeping uncontrollably, he apologized to the Guan family dead and living: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry… If I could have stopped Cousin that night, if I could have protected Gu Xiaodeng… Gu Jinyu wouldn’t be so crazed as to not let us go…”
He collapsed, kowtowing amidst the drifting ashes: “It’s all my fault, it’s all my fault!”
Minister Guan’s hands trembled. He might not understand what Guan Yunji meant by “Gu Xiaodeng,” but he could feel the overwhelming guilt and grief radiating from his son.
Minister Guan wanted to tell him that the one truly responsible for the Guan family’s destruction was himself, his father. It was the evil fruit of his own youthful pursuit of fame and fortune, his factionalism, twenty years of accumulated sins.
And you, Guan Yunji, are just an eighteen-year-old noble young master. How much of the Jin Kingdom’s wealth could you have taken to bless the entire family? And how much bad karma could you have accumulated to bring disaster upon nine generations of your clan?
The words of a dying man are kind. This absurd father, who had spent a lifetime doing evil, wanted to ease the immense, self-imposed guilt in his son’s heart and desperately salvage a shred of father-son affection. But ultimately, over a decade of mutual loathing stood between them.
Minister Guan only managed a stiff call of “Son—” before the half-closed door of the main hall was kicked in by a blood-soaked military boot.
Guan Yunji whipped his head around. The door had shattered into pieces. Outside, there wasn’t an army of thousands, just Gu Jinyu, emerging from a rain of blood.
“Yunji, why run so fast?” Gu Jinyu held a freshly replaced long saber. Its bright, spotless tip scraped against the ground, a grating sound that clawed at one’s skull. “Jinyu still has many questions for you, and many old times to reminisce about.”
Guan Yunji had witnessed Gu Jinyu killing from horseback just this morning. Seeing him now, his taut nerves, torn between the instinct to flee and the moral duty to protect his father, chose the latter. He scrambled pathetically on his knees to shield his father and, trembling, drew the Butterfly Wing Blade hidden in his sleeve. With this three-inch blade, he vainly tried to confront Gu Jinyu’s three-foot long saber.
Gu Jinyu sighed softly as he approached, step by step, wearing an expression of seeming pity. “How could you possibly stop me? You, a civil official’s son, a pampered young master warming wine and reciting poetry at Vast Marsh Academy, a parasite who looks down on everyone and took pleasure in trampling my Xiaodeng…”
His words were calm, but his blade was ruthless, so fast it left afterimages. Before Guan Yunji could react, he felt a fiery, stinging pain on his face. Blood from his forehead gushed down into his eyes, instantly dyeing the world blood-red.
Without effort, Gu Jinyu kicked him aside, stomping on the delicate, fragile Butterfly Wing Blade, and grabbed the weak, resigned Minister Guan by the collar.
“Yunji, watch carefully.”
Right in front of Guan Yunji, Gu Jinyu drove his saber through Yunji’s father’s body.
His own face splattered with blood, he still smiled gently at Guan Yunji. Blossom Ashes flew in from outside, landing on his shoulder and tilting its head.
Clutching the saber scar that now stretched across half his face, Guan Yunji stared, his vision a bloody haze.
He stared at the top-tier warrior he had once admired and envied in his youth, and the majestic gyrfalcon, both now covered in his family’s blood, looking at him with such sinister terror.
“Yunji… I’m truly sorry. Your cousin committed treason, your Guan family are rebels. I have no choice but to execute all nine generations.” Gu Jinyu pulled out his saber and kicked the not-yet-dead Minister Guan down at Guan Yunji’s stiffened feet. “Me? I’m here to kill your whole family. Fortune’s wheel always turns. When your Guan family falsely accused the An family back then and had their nine generations slaughtered, did you ever think the karma of extermination would come back to you?”
Guan Yunji lowered his trembling eyes to meet his father’s cloudy, dead, unseeing fish-eyes.
“Your parents must die. But… I might not be unable to spare you. And that worthless half-brother of yours—I’ll spare him as a free bonus.” Gu Jinyu crouched in front of him and, right before Guan Yunji’s eyes, used his saber to prod his father’s corpse. “If you want your half-brother to live, tell me clearly: What did you do to Xiaodeng that night?”
He asked several times before Guan Yunji finally raised his blood-red eyes, trembling. The blood on his face trickled to the corner of his lips as he asked hoarsely, “Gu Jinyu… you exterminate my entire clan. What about you? Have you ever thought about your own karma?”
“My karma…” Gu Jinyu chuckled, a cold, desolate, listless sound. He lifted his eyelids to glance at the sky outside. “Old man Heaven, then watch closely. Let any karma come straight at me.”
“Gu Xiaodeng… did you bring a plague curse on him? Your karmic retribution struck Gu Xiaodeng instead! Heaven took him away—no, Heaven drowned him in the water! Your retribution hit him instead—!”
Guan Yunji’s eyes were bloodshot as he babbled incoherently. It was just the ravings of a madman; anyone else would have just scoffed and moved on.
But, as it happened, Gu Jinyu was mad too.
Gu Jinyu plunged his blade into Guan Yunji’s left abdomen, viciously pinning him to the ground. The force was so great that the blade shattered into two pieces in an instant.
He trembled all over. “You’re lying. Xiaodeng isn’t dead. He’s nowhere in the city. I want to see him alive… Where have you hidden him? Speak! Tell me clearly, or I’ll dig up the white bones from your family’s ancestral graves and chop them to pieces!”
As if beyond feeling any pain, Guan Yunji roared back insanely, “The waters of Changluo are all dyed red with blood! Gu Xiaodeng is in the water, and he’s been dirtied by you!”
The two scarred madmen screamed at each other at cross-purposes. Disturbed by the noise, Blossom Ashes flapped its wings and flew outside. Shortly after, Zhu Mi’s younger brother, Zhu Liu, followed the eagle and rushed in. Without a second word, he stepped forward to restrain the unstable Gu Jinyu.
“Master, calm down!” Zhu Liu, prone to alarm as ever for the past decade, had solid martial arts skills. Judging the situation precisely, he landed a direct palm strike on Gu Jinyu’s back.
A mouthful of stagnant blood that had been clogging Gu Jinyu’s heart and veins suddenly surged up and was vomited out. The intense light in his eyes gradually dimmed, leaving only a demonic, dazed bewilderment rising from his soul.
He pushed Zhu Liu away and stumbled out of the Guan family’s main hall. He missed a step on the stairs and tumbled, falling to the ground, unable to get up, muttering only to himself.
“What do I do, what do I do… the water’s all red. Xiaodeng will be dirtied by them. He’ll be unhappy in the water… No, he isn’t in the water. It’s me who’s in the water. It’s me who has been sinking in that stinking, filthy water for five years. I’m the one who’s dirty.”
“Xiaodeng would never be dirtied. He is forever flawless…”
