The first breath burned.
It scraped its way into raw lungs, carrying with it the sour stink of river mud and cheap wine, the rot of fish guts and coal smoke. The scent of the underbelly of a great city, where the dragon's scales no longer shone.
Li Wei opened his eyes to a sky that was not the sky he had died under.
No soaring jade eaves. No crimson banners. No high execution platform ringing with the cold echo of Huo's decree. Only a sagging riverfront rooftop, its tiles broken, the night air leaking through like a thief.
He lay on his back on a pallet that had once been straw and now was mostly dust and lice. His chest heaved. His heart—new, clumsy, too fast—hammered an uneven rhythm against bone.
Alive.
He should not have been.
He remembered the blade. The weight of the ceremonial dragon sword that should have taken her head and instead entered his body at an angle he had calculated a hundred times in sleepless nights. He remembered the cold kiss of metal, the rush of heat, the shock in Huo's eyes—for Huo was not a man often surprised—and the way the world narrowed to a single figure in crimson and gold.
Lian.
Her scream had not sounded like an Empress. It had sounded like something older, something the court had not deserved to hear.
He remembered her face as he fell. Not the carefully composed porcelain mask she wore in the Hall of Radiant Harmony, not the cool strategist's gaze she turned on ministers. Raw. Broken open. Flames licking under cracked ice.
"Fly," he had mouthed, because there had been no time for everything else he wanted to say.
Then twin darknesses: the closing of his eyes, and the shadow of the blade falling toward her world.
The second breath brought pain.
It rolled through his muscles, dense and unfamiliar. This body was…wrong. Too light where he remembered weight, too cramped where he remembered breadth. His hands—he lifted them slowly—were callused in the wrong places. Fingers nicked, nails chewed and blackened with soot.
Not an emperor's hands.
He laughed, and the sound came out hoarse and edged with hysteria.
Of course.
"You're awake," a voice said nearby, dry as old paper and twice as thin.
Li Wei turned his head. The movement sent a spear of pain from the base of his skull down his spine. He bit it back and squinted through the gloom.
A boy sat cross-legged beside the pallet, stir-frying rice in a cracked pan over a brazier made from half a rusted barrel. Bare feet, patched clothes, hair tied back with a strip of dirty cloth. No older than fourteen, though his eyes had the hollow caution of someone who had counted too many winters.
"You were supposed to be dead," the boy went on conversationally, poking at the rice with a pair of mismatched chopsticks. "Jiu says anyone pulled from the river looking like that usually is. But you started thrashing and cursing like a demon as soon as we got you on the boat. Nearly knocked Old Zhang into the water."
Li Wei's throat felt like gravel. "How long," he managed. The voice that came out was rough, unfamiliar, a stranger in his mouth.
The boy shrugged. "Three days since we dragged you out. Five since the capital drums sounded for the emperor's funeral. You talked a lot while you were fevered, you know. 'Lian,' you kept saying. Over and over. Jiu told me to put a cloth in your mouth before the neighbors thought we were summoning spirits."
Five days.
The empire had already buried him.
Li Wei closed his eyes. Behind his lids, the court procession marched: white banners edged in black, drums like distant thunder, officials in mourning robes bowing in choreographed grief. Consort Mei Yin weeping prettily behind her sleeves. The Grand General standing at the right hand of an empty throne, head bowed in practiced humility, fingers already curling around invisible strings.
And in the Cold Palace—
He forced his eyes open, fighting the pull of memory. Grief was a knife he could no longer afford to fall on.
"Where is this?" he asked.
"South bank," the boy said. "Dock ten, house three. Don't bother trying to remember it; folks like us don't get names that stick. You're in our loft above the net shop. Jiu said we could keep you until you stop scaring away customers with your dying noises."
He spoke of Jiu the way peasants spoke of the weather—constant, inescapable, and mostly unstoppable. Li Wei turned his head the other way.
The room was a single narrow strip of space under the sloping roof, its beams black with smoke. Nets hung from hooks, mended and re-mended, smelling of fish oil and damp. A low table. A chipped cup. A rusted sword, too short and poorly balanced, leaning against the wall like a drunk who had forgotten his purpose.
He found himself staring at the sword.
His fingers twitched.
"Want some?" the boy asked, thrusting a dented bowl of rice into his line of sight.
Li Wei's stomach lurched. He had not been hungry when the blade went in—shock numbed many things—but now his body clamored like a mob. He took the bowl. The first mouthful was ash, but the second had taste.
"I am…?" He let the question trail. He did not know what to ask: who he was now, what name to answer to, whether the world still remembered the one he had died with.
The boy scratched his ear. "We were calling you 'Corpse' for a while, but Jiu says that's bad luck once someone starts breathing again. She picked a new name for you." He straightened, mimicking an older woman's raspy authority. "'From the mud, something stubborn grows. Call him Wei. Maybe he won't die so easily next time.'"
Wei.
The syllable slid into him like a blade into a familiar sheath. Once, there had been a different title before it—Emperor, Son of Heaven, Dragon of the Eastern Sky. Now it stood alone, stripped of gilding, as bare and sharp as bone.
He smiled, slow and humorless. "Wei, then," he said. "Fine."
"Good," the boy grunted, apparently satisfied. "I'm Chen Yu. Don't call me Little One. I'll spill your porridge."
He gestured with his chin toward the ladder hatch. "Jiu said when you woke, I was to drag you down to her before you do something stupid. She said—what were her words—ah, 'Men clawing back from hell always think they can run before they can stand.'"
Wise woman.
Li Wei set the bowl aside. Slowly, he moved his legs. They responded, but clumsily, joints stiff, muscles trembling with effort. He pushed himself upright. The world swayed. Chen Yu's hand shot out, surprisingly steady, and braced his shoulder.
"Careful," the boy muttered. "If you fall, I'm not hauling you back up. You're heavier than you look."
Once, an entire retinue would have rushed forward at his smallest stagger, imperial physicians hovering like anxious ghosts. Now a boy in patched trousers was all that stood between him and the floor.
It was…liberating.
He swallowed a laugh and let Chen Yu help him to the ladder.
The descent felt like stepping down from a mountain he had never climbed. Each rung pressed splinters into his palms. The smell of the river grew stronger, mixed with frying oil and the sharp tang of fermented bean paste.
The ground floor was a chaos of nets, ropes, and barrels. A woman sat behind a counter fashioned from an old door laid over crates. Her hair was more gray than black, tied in a tight knot, her sleeves rolled to her elbows, revealing wiry forearms marked with scars and fish scales. Her eyes, when she looked up, were clear and unforgiving.
"So." Jiu wiped her hands on her apron. "Hell decided to spit you back, did it?"
Li Wei bowed his head, partly in respect, partly because his neck ached. "Seems so."
"Ungrateful of it," she snorted. "Hell is quieter than this world." Her gaze raked him from head to toe, weighing, measuring, finding him lacking on several axes. "How much do you remember?"
"Enough," he said.
He remembered a palace of snow and jade, a courtyard full of silent watchers, a woman with a phoenix sleeping in her bones. He remembered whispering a command he had never intended to be obeyed.
Forget me and fly.
He doubted she had obeyed. Lian did not know how to abandon anything she had once wrapped her hands around.
"Do you?" Jiu's voice sharpened, cutting through his thoughts. "I've seen men pulled from the river before. Some wake with nothing but water in their heads. You, you woke with a curse on your tongue and murder in your eyes. Who do you want dead so badly you tore your way back across the veil for it?"
The net shop fell quiet. Even the river seemed to hush outside, the slap of waves against the pilings dimming.
Chen Yu shifted beside him, curious. Li Wei looked at Jiu.
"Grand General Huo," he said.
Saying the name was like pressing on a bruise. Iron Architect. Master of the Southern Campaigns. The blade that had, for a time, served the throne. His blade.
"Huo Kejian," Jiu repeated, tasting the name as if it were something bitter between her teeth. "Ambitious choice. Plenty want him dead, boy. None have succeeded."
"He holds the keys to a prison he built," Li Wei said. "He wields the empire as if it were his own sword. He believes he can cage fire and chain the sky." He drew in a breath that stung. "He is wrong."
Jiu watched him for a long, heavy moment.
"And what are you to him?" she asked softly. "Some gutter rat from the river? Some nameless Wei who thinks himself a storm?"
Li Wei's mouth twisted. "Once, I was his heaven."
The words fell between them, absurd and impossible. But Jiu, whose eyes had seen more tides than his last three ministers combined, did not laugh.
Instead, she leaned back and reached under the counter. When her hand emerged, it held a folded scrap of coarse paper, stained dark at one corner. She flipped it onto the counter with two fingers.
"Chen Yu pretends he can't read," she said. "Thinks I don't notice him sneaking glances at the broadsheets stuck to every wall between here and the northern gate. A man learns a lot from secrets left in the open."
Li Wei stepped forward, fingers tingling as he unfolded the scrap.
It was a street-copy of a court proclamation, the calligraphy clumsy but legible. The top bore the imperial seal, replicate but distorted—the dragon's head a little too long, the claws a bit too blunt.
Edict of Mourning, it began. On the sudden passing of His August Majesty…
His eyes skimmed down. Words leapt out like embers.
…fell to an assassin's blade…
…faithful Grand General Huo Kejian administered justice on site…
…former Empress Feng Lian removed to the Cold Palace for her own safety…
…her Phoenix blood deemed unstable and dangerous…
His hand tightened on the paper until it crumpled.
They had named her. Not as Empress. As weapon. As threat.
Huo had moved faster than he'd anticipated, even in his darkest calculations.
"Phoenix," Chen Yu murmured, craning his neck to see. "Like in the tales?"
"In the tales," Jiu said sharply, "phoenixes are distant and beautiful, not locked in ice at the edge of the imperial grounds with no light and no fire."
Li Wei's head snapped up.
"You know of the Cold Palace?" he asked.
Jiu snorted. "Anyone with ears knows of it. Anyone with sense stays away. They say the last Empress the late emperor kept there went mad and walked into the snow one night. Never came back."
"Lian won't walk into the snow," Li Wei said, voice flat. "She will walk out of it. If Huo doesn't break her first."
If Mei Yin didn't poison her slowly, spoon by spoon, with some innocuous dust smiled over by fawning physicians.
His fists shook.
He had died to keep Lian's core secret, to prevent the court from turning her into either idol or abomination. And still, Huo had named her Phoenix. Still, they had locked her away.
He should not have been surprised. Huo never wasted a weapon. And Lian—whether she believed it or not—was the most dangerous blade in the empire.
"You cannot storm the Cold Palace with river muck still under your nails," Jiu said. "You cannot walk into the General's estate and demand his head while you wheeze after six steps."
"No," Li Wei agreed.
The admission tasted like blood.
"But you will try," Jiu said.
"Yes."
She sighed, long and slow. "I had a husband like you once. Thought destiny was a thing a man could wrestle into submission." She tapped the counter. "He died on a field no one remembers now. The empire shifted half an inch and forgot his name. The cost is never paid by the one whose portrait hangs in the Hall of Heroes."
Li Wei's gaze did not waver. "I don't want my portrait on any wall."
"What do you want, then?"
He saw Lian as he had left her: neck bared to a blade that had meant for her. Core fractured. Fire screaming. The raw terror in her eyes not for herself, but for him.
Forget me and fly.
She had never let him command her heart. He would not obey his own foolishness now.
"I want," he said quietly, "to see the man who touched her burn."
Silence settled in the net shop.
Then, unexpectedly, Jiu chuckled. It was not a gentle sound. It had edges, like broken seashells.
"Good," she said. "I was afraid you'd say something noble." She jerked her chin toward the sword leaning by the wall upstairs. "That piece of scrap is yours now. You were reaching for it in your sleep. Your hands remember a blade, even if your body doesn't."
Li Wei glanced toward the ceiling as if he could see the sword through wood and dust. For a heartbeat, his fingers tingled again with phantom weight—not the clumsy iron tooth upstairs, but the well-balanced length of steel he had once drawn in palace courtyards, under cherry blossoms, with Lian watching from a balcony.
"Eat," Jiu went on. "Sleep. In three days, you start hauling nets and running messages for the dock guards. I have no use for vengeful ghosts cluttering up my loft. If you want vengeance, you'll need coin, strength, allies. The river gives all those, if you know how to ask."
Chen Yu's face lit up. "So he stays?"
"For now." Jiu waved a hand. "Until Huo's men come poking around for a corpse that remembered how to breathe."
Li Wei's jaw tightened. "They don't know."
"Not yet," Jiu agreed. "But men like Huo don't like loose ends. And you—" her gaze pinned him again "—you leak purpose like blood. Learn to hide it, Wei. Or you'll be back in the river with a rock tied to your ankles."
He inclined his head. "Teach me."
Jiu studied him a heartbeat longer, then nodded once, as if closing a bargain with the tide.
"Very well, river-born. We'll see if you can learn to be small."
He almost smiled. "I have been small before."
Never like this, whispered the memory of silk and gold. Never so invisible that your death does not bend the sky.
He crushed the thought. He needed to be small now. A single fish in a sea of scales. A nameless blade among many, waiting.
The empire's great game played out in palaces of jade and marble, under painted ceilings and embroidered banners. But its blood—its true pulse—ran through places like this: dock ten, house three, where men and women cursed and bargained and dreamed in the shadow of ships.
From here, he would climb.
From here, he would gather threads: rumors of Cold Palace whispers, movements of Huo's troops, the quiet comings and goings of physicians with stained sleeves and ministers with guilty eyes.
Somewhere within those threads was the path back to her.
Li Wei lifted the crumpled proclamation again, smoothing it with careful fingers. His eyes caught on the last line, added in smaller script:
All loyal subjects are enjoined to maintain peace and trust in the wisdom of the Regent Council. Disturbances will be met with swift correction.
He smiled, slow and cold.
The funeral was over.
Let them trust in their wisdom.
He had returned for their correction.