The night her mother died, the moon did not appear.
Clouds pressed low over Lianghe, thick and swollen, as if the sky itself wished not to witness what happened below. Yin Yue had been returning from the river with a cracked clay jar when she heard the shouting—drunken laughter cutting through the dark like torn cloth.
She stopped.
Her body understood before her mind did.
The alley leading to their home was crowded with shadows. Men she recognized and men she did not. The smell of sour wine, sweat, and something rotten beneath it. Her mother's voice—once—sharp with fear.
Then nothing that sounded like a voice at all.
Yin Yue did not scream. She did not run forward. Survival had taught her when sound became a death sentence.
She watched.
She watched as men who had borrowed bowls from her mother, who had nodded to her in passing, who had prayed to the same gods, turned her home into a place unfit for gods or ghosts. The door splintered. The lamp overturned. The walls bore witness.
When the men finally staggered away, laughing and cursing and wiping their hands on their trousers, Yin Yue remained where she was until the night swallowed them whole.
Only then did she move.
Her mother lay twisted on the floor, clothes torn, body broken in ways Yin Yue did not yet have words for. Her eyes were open. They did not see.
Yin Yue knelt beside her. She touched her mother's cheek.
It was already cold.
Something inside Yin Yue sealed itself shut.
She did not cry. She did not wail. Grief, when it came, would come later—sharper, quieter, more enduring. For now, there was only the clarity of abandonment. The gods had not looked down. The city had not intervened. Kindness had proven itself useless.
By dawn, the neighbors had gathered—not to help, but to stare. Some shook their heads. Some whispered. No one met Yin Yue's eyes.
By sunset, her mother was wrapped and taken away.
By nightfall, Yin Yue had no home.
The days that followed blurred into hunger and movement. She slept under eaves, beneath carts, beside the river that carried refuse and secrets alike. She learned which stalls left scraps unattended, which merchants shouted but did not chase, which children could be shoved aside without consequence.
Stealing was not a choice. It was a continuation.
She grew thinner. Quieter. Her eyes sharpened. She learned how to disappear into crowds, how to fold herself small, how to observe without being observed. Each night, she dreamed of her mother's open eyes—and each morning, she woke more hollow than before.
It been three years barely surviving on the street,And after trying so hard to not die or sold off luck finally run against her those trafficker men found her.
They were not rough at first. They offered food. A place to sleep. Work, they said, for girls without families. Yin Yue knew better—but hunger had dulled caution, and exhaustion made liars sound like saviors.
They bound her wrists before she could run.
Along the road south, she learned the truth. She was not alone. Dozens of girls traveled with her—some crying, some silent, some already emptied of resistance. Traffickers spoke openly, counting profits, discussing appearances.
"Inner Court will take this one," one man said, gripping Yin Yue's chin and tilting her face toward the light. "Eyes are clever. Palace likes that."
The palace.
By the time the walls appeared—vast, pale, unyielding—Yin Yue no longer thought of escape. Escape was a luxury for those who still had somewhere to return to.
She had nothing.
At the gates, officials recorded her age, her height, her origins. When they asked her name, she hesitated for the first time since her mother died.
"Yin Yue," she said finally.
The scribe barely looked up.
Inside the walls, names would be stripped away, replaced with numbers and ranks and silence. Inside, girls would learn obedience—or be destroyed by it.
Yin Yue stepped forward without trembling.
Her mother was gone. Her childhood was gone. Mercy had proven itself a lie.
If this world only respected power, then power was what she would become.
And if she had to walk through blood to reach it—
She would not look away again.