3

That night, sleep eluded her.

Feng Yan sat beneath the half-open lattice of her chamber window, bathed in moonlight sharp enough to etch lines into her skin. The garden beyond was silent, the camellias asleep beneath silver dew. A single paper lantern hung near the doorway, its flame flickering faintly, casting long shadows that danced across the wooden floor. She had asked the servants not to light more.

She needed the quiet. The dark.

A thousand memories stirred behind her eyes, none of them belonging to this time. Not yet.

She had spent the day in measured silence—smiling when spoken to, nodding in all the right places, allowing her parents to mistake her stillness for the weakness of illness. In truth, her mind had never worked faster. She had reconstructed every move that had led to her downfall in her past life. The court selection. The whispered promises. Ji Rong’s kindness, rehearsed to perfection. Hua Lanyue’s rise. Her own naïve trust.

Now, she thought of what had been ignored. Forgotten. Unnoticed.

It was not Ji Rong’s betrayal that came to her mind first, nor even Lanyue’s poison.

It was a memory of a storm, ten years ago.

A blood moon rising over the capital. Screams in the eastern temple. The sudden, unexplained suicide of an imperial astrologer whose last words had been censored from the court record. She remembered seeing the imperial guards hauling his body away in silence, and hearing vague whispers of madness, of a broken mind shattered by "visions."

Back then, she had dismissed it as court gossip.

But tonight, she remembered the exact date—and the chill it had left in the palace halls for weeks.

It had been just before the Spring Selection began.

She rose from her seat and crossed the room. Her fingers traced the edge of a scroll chest. It had not been opened in years, but she knew precisely what lay within. Her childhood had been filled with reading. Her father, a general, had never encouraged superstition, but her mother had stocked the family libraries with older texts—ritual manuals, half-forgotten folktales, even banned records from the southern mountains where the old cults once ruled.

She pulled out a scroll near the bottom. The silk was frayed, the writing faded, but the emblem pressed on the binding—a phoenix surrounded by nine falling stars—was unmistakable.

The Prophecy of the Fire-Star.

A relic she had once thought nothing of, dismissed as folk myth. But she had never forgotten the symbol. It had been etched into the ruined pillars of a collapsed temple on the palace outskirts, just behind the astrologer's tower. A temple no one visited. No one spoke of.

Her hands trembled slightly as she unrolled the scroll.

The ink was old, charred around the edges. The characters bled slightly into the cloth, as though scorched rather than written. The text was a mix of archaic poetry and prophetic riddle, but the central verse leapt at her, sharper than memory, deeper than dream.

“When fire is swallowed by blood, and the phoenix devoured by kin,

The broken crown shall turn, and the Dragon kneel within.

The one who rises from ash shall not rule beside, but above.

The empire shall wear a woman's name.”

She read it again. And again. Until the lantern’s flame flickered lower, and the moon had tilted westward in the sky.

It sounded impossible. But she had already died. She had already returned.

What was impossible now?

The phoenix devoured by kin—herself, betrayed by Lanyue, who had grown up beside her as close as a sister.

The broken crown—the dynasty itself.

And the fire swallowed by blood.

She lifted her sleeve and saw, to her quiet surprise, a faint red mark along her inner wrist. A crescent shape, smooth-edged, like a burn that had never fully healed. She had not noticed it earlier. It had not been there in her last life.

The mark was cool to the touch, but the skin around it pulsed faintly. A remnant. A brand. Something left behind by her death.

A price, perhaps, for returning.

She rolled her sleeve down and stood in silence for a long time, gazing at the open scroll before her.

This time, she would not walk into the court blind.

The blood moon had returned once. It would come again. And the next time, she would be ready.

She would dig beneath the stories. She would find that ruined temple. She would unearth every truth the court had buried.

The imperial palace played its games in gold and poison.

But it had forgotten what a phoenix truly was.

Not a bird to be caged.

Not a pet to be crowned.

A creature that burned itself to death and rose again—sharper, stronger, hungrier than before.

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