The assignment was simple.
Trace your lineage. Record what came before you.
That was how the master phrased it, his voice flat as he swept his gaze across the class. Most of the disciples groaned quietly. Some laughed. Others exchanged glances, already thinking of elders to bother, family records to borrow, names to copy down and embellish.
He did none of that.
At sixteen, Shen Liang had already learned that the truth of a family was never found in the living.
It was buried.
The tomb lay beneath the western slope of the estate, half-swallowed by earth and roots, its stone entrance sealed with a slab engraved in characters so worn they were barely legible. Incense ash stained the ground. Generations of kneeling had smoothed the stone into something almost soft.
Shen Liang pushed the slab aside with a quiet grunt and descended.
The air inside was cold and dry, heavy with dust and the faint metallic scent of age. Rows of stone boxes lined the walls, each carved with names, dates, brief accomplishments—pathetic summaries of entire lives reduced to neat lines.
He had trained here before.
Not because it was sacred, but because it was empty.
No eyes. No voices. No expectations.
His breathing slowed as he moved deeper, fingers brushing the rough stone. He searched methodically, ignoring the familiar boxes, seeking anything unusual—loose lids, mismatched carvings, signs of disturbance.
He found it near the back.
One box lacked inscriptions entirely.
No name. No dates. Just bare stone.
That alone was wrong.
He pried it open.
Inside, there were no bones.
Only three stiff, rectangular sheets.
Shen Liang frowned.
He lifted them into the dim light.
They were black and white. Smooth. Glossy. Unlike paper, yet thinner than wood. The surface reflected the torchlight faintly, as though sealed beneath a layer of hardened oil.
Drawings, he decided at first.
But the longer he looked, the more that explanation collapsed.
The first image depicted three figures standing in what appeared to be a barren desert. Flat land. Endless sky. No landmarks.
A man. A woman. A child.
They stood straight, facing forward, as if posing.
The details were absurdly precise—the folds in their clothes, the shadows beneath their feet, the subtle gradation of light across the ground. No brushstroke. No carving marks. No medium he recognized.
The child stood between the adults.
He had no face.
Not blurred. Not damaged.
Just… absent. Smooth skin where eyes and mouth should have been, as if the image had been carefully erased.
Shen Liang's fingers tightened slightly.
He picked up the second image.
It was almost the same.
Same desert. Same arrangement.
But the woman's face was blacked out entirely—ink-dark, uneven at the edges. The child now wore a different shirt. The man remained unchanged.
The boy still had no face.
The third image was worse.
Both adults' faces were blacked out.
The child stood alone between them, unchanged in posture, unchanged in height, unchanged in that unsettling absence of features.
A progression.
Or a deletion.
Shen Liang felt a faint tightening in his chest—not fear, but irritation. He disliked things that resisted logic. Artifacts that did not belong. Objects that implied a context he lacked.
"These are not paintings," he murmured.
He did not know the word photograph.
He slid the images back into the box, hesitated, then removed them again and tucked them into his robes.
Whatever they were, they did not belong among the dead.
The house was silent when he returned.
Too silent.
The door was ajar.
Shen Liang stepped inside and froze.
His mother lay just beyond the threshold.
Her body was twisted unnaturally, one arm bent beneath her, fingers clawed into the floor as if she had tried to crawl. Her eyes were open, glassy, fixed on nothing.
Her throat—
He swallowed.
The cut was deep. Too deep.
The flesh was parted cleanly, the edges dark and wet. Beneath the torn muscle, pale bone gleamed faintly. The smell reached him a moment later—iron and warmth and something sickeningly human.
Blood pooled beneath her head, already beginning to congeal.
Shen Liang did not scream.
His mind worked instead, sharp and merciless.
No signs of forced entry.The cut was precise.She had no defensive wounds.
His hands began to shake anyway.
Not from grief.
From understanding.
The world tilted.
The floor rushed up to meet him.
He fell into black.
Not darkness.
Nothing.
No ground. No sky. No body.
Just an endless void without sensation or direction.
Then—
A voice.
Neither loud nor soft. Neither male nor female.
It did not echo.
It simply was.
"You have seen what should not exist."
Shen Liang could not respond.
He did not even know if he still had a mouth.
"Three images. Three erasures. A lineage severed, then rewritten."
A pause.
"Do you wish to understand why your family was never meant to remember itself?"
The void waited.
And somewhere, very far away, something watched him think.