The silence in the hall was so thick you could wring water from it.
Ye Feng's foot had already crossed the threshold, half his body merging into the light outside. Behind him, the collective gaze of the crowd pricked his back like needles.
Ye Shan panted heavily, his finger trembling as he pointed at the door. The command "Seize him" was wedged in his throat—unable to be spat out, impossible to swallow. Several guards remained slumped on the ground, clutching their chests, their eyes filled with a terror as if they had seen a ghost.
No one dared to move.
Ye Qingya stood at the edge of the crowd, his face as white as paper. The mockery he had worn moments ago had been washed away by cold sweat, leaving only a lingering dread. His fingers mindlessly fiddled with his jade thumb ring, spinning it frantically.
Nalan Yan remained rooted to the spot.
She stared at the pile of pulverized jade on the floor—white dust mixed with grey impurities, looking like a patch of filthy snow. The hand hidden in her sleeve shook even more violently now. It wasn't just fear; it was the shame of being stripped bare and exposed under everyone's gaze.
The Bloodline Monitoring Talisman.
How could he...
Her mind was a chaotic mess. Her family's instructions, her father's warnings, and the meaningful look from the Ancient Clan's envoy when the engagement was set three years ago... fragments crashed together, making her temples throb.
Then, she heard the footsteps stop.
They weren't fading away.
They had stopped right outside the threshold.
Every eye in the room snapped back toward him.
Ye Feng stood there with his back to the hall, head slightly tilted as if listening to something. The sunlight sliced across his profile, leaving half in light and half in shadow, masking his expression.
Three breaths passed.
Perhaps five.
Time seemed to turn to glue.
Suddenly, he turned around.
The movement wasn't fast—it was almost slow. But that very slowness exerted a pressure that made it hard to breathe. Step by step, he walked back in.
Over the threshold.
Over the bluestone floor.
Over the debris of paper and jade dust.
The soles of his shoes caught a bit of ash, but he didn't care. His gaze swept across the room with flat indifference, passing over the livid Ye Shan and the gobsmacked crowd before finally landing on the table.
The letter of divorce was still spread open.
The ink was not yet dry.
Beside it sat the inkstone, the brush resting on its rack, and a small dish of vermillion seal paste, red and piercing.
Nalan Yan's heart tightened.
What is he doing? Signing it? Accepting it?
Impossible. Not after that display of power. But if not to sign, why come back?
Ye Feng reached the desk.
He looked at no one, his eyes fixed solely on the letter. The paper was high-quality cloud-patterned stationery, a specialty of the Nalan family, with their clan emblem faintly watermarked in the corners. The calligraphy was the work of the city's finest master—orderly, beautiful, flawless.
Yet every word was a knife.
He reached out.
Not for the brush.
Instead, he raised his own right hand. His index finger was still stained with a trace of wet blood—from when he had bitten his lip in his earlier surge of emotion.
Bright red. Viscous.
Under the stunned gaze of the crowd, he pressed his fingertip into the residual black ink in the inkstone.
The ink was black.
The blood was red.
They mixed on his fingertip, blooming into a dark, muddy hue.
Then, he lifted his finger and hovered it over the back of the divorce letter.
He began to write.
Not in the designated space for a signature.
He flipped the page and began on the blank reverse side.
Finger touched paper.
The first stroke fell.
It wasn't writing.
It was carving.
The "nib" of his finger was terrifyingly sharp. As it dragged across the paper, it made a teeth-gritting "shhh-shhh" sound. It wasn't the soft soaking of ink; it was a barbaric, raw force that seemed intent on gouging through the parchment.
The paper buckled under the pressure.
It hummed and vibrated.
Those standing closest felt the very floor beneath their feet tingle.
Ye Shan's pupils constricted.
This... this isn't Dou Qi!
At least, it wasn't any application of Dou Qi he recognized. There was no glow, no elemental fluctuations—just pure, unadulterated power channeled through a fingertip, pressing onto the paper with the weight of a mountain.
How is this possible?
The boy's Dou Qi has withered; he can barely maintain the third stage of Dou Qi!
Yet, the scene before him...
Ye Qingya was utterly dazed. His mouth hung open, emitting a ragged wheeze like a fish out of water. He forgot to spin his jade ring, clutching it so hard it bruised his palm.
Nalan Yan, being the closest, saw it most clearly.
The trajectory of his finger followed no orderly script. It was "Dragon Flying and Phoenix Dancing"—wild and aggressive. Every turn of the stroke carried a palpable aura of slaughter.
Those weren't words.
They were blades.
They were swords.
They were the blood-streaked tracks left by ten thousand iron cavalry trampling a battlefield.
The hair on the back of her neck stood on end. A chill climbed her spine, numbing her fingertips. She wanted to look away, but her eyes were pinned to the moving finger, to the words "growing" out of the paper in a blend of blood and ink.
It was over quickly.
Barely eight breaths.
Ye Feng withdrew his hand.
As his finger left the paper, there was a faint tearing sound of paper fibers snapping.
He let his arm drop. The mixture of blood and ink on his finger dripped down. One drop, two drops... hitting the bluestone floor and blooming into tiny, dark-red flowers.
Then, he performed an action that left everyone's mind blank for a moment.
He reached out and grabbed the divorce letter.
Along with the wet blood-script on the back.
Without even folding it.
He tossed it casually.
The paper traced an arc through the air and landed—thwack—right at Nalan Yan's feet. A corner even brushed the tip of her shoe.
Falling with it were the remnants of the jade pendant he had crushed earlier. The fine powder kicked up a small cloud, leaving several ugly smudges on her primrose-yellow skirt.
Ye Feng's voice finally rang out.
Calm.
Terrifyingly calm.
No anger, no hatred—not even a flicker of emotion. It was as if he were remarking that the weather was pleasant.
"The marriage."
He spat out the word.
He paused.
"I, the Emperor, grant the divorce."
One could hear a pin drop in the hall.
"I, the Emperor" (Zhen)?
He said it again?
Ye Shan's face turned from green to black, then black to purple, like an overturned dye vat. He pointed a finger at Ye Feng, stammering "You... you..." for half a minute, unable to squeeze out the rest of the sentence.
Ye Feng ignored him.
His gaze flickered to the smudge on Nalan Yan's skirt, then rose to her deathly pale face.
"This trash jade."
He added a final sentence.
"I bestow it upon you."
Bestow.
Upon you.
Three words, light as a feather.
Yet they hit Nalan Yan's ears with more weight than all the previous humiliations combined. Her body swayed; she nearly lost her footing. She dug her nails deep into her palms, the sharp pain helping her maintain a semblance of composure.
Bestow?
What right does he have to use the word "bestow"?
That jade... that talisman... it belongs to the Clan...
Countless thoughts exploded in her head, making her vision swim. Humiliation, suspicion, and a sliver of secret terror she refused to acknowledge swirled together in a tumultuous sea.
Across from her, Ye Feng didn't seem to have the slightest interest in sparing her another glance.
He turned.
With the same unhurried pace, he walked toward the door.
This time, he was truly leaving.
The crowd watched him go. No one dared to stop him; no one knew what to say. The atmosphere was eerily unsettling. Clearly, it was Ye Feng who had been divorced and humiliated, so why did it feel like everyone else in the room had been stripped naked and trampled into the mud?
Nalan Yan bit her lower lip hard.
Her left canine sank into the flesh, bringing the metallic taste of blood.
This cannot end like this.
The family mission... the divorce papers...
She took a sharp breath, like a drowning person finally breaking the surface. Purely on instinct, she leaned down and snatched the divorce letter from the floor.
The paper felt slightly damp in her hand.
The blood-ink on the back was still wet.
She gripped the paper until her knuckles turned white. Only one thought remained: Take this back to Father. The mission is accomplished. Everything else... can wait.
But as she grabbed the paper and instinctively moved to roll it up—
Her eyes caught the back.
That sprawl of blood-red characters that seemed to pierce through the parchment.
With just one look.
Her movements froze.
Her pupils.
Shrank to the size of pinheads.
Her breath hitched.
The blood in her body seemed to rush to her head and then drain away completely. Cold. A chill seeping out from the very marrow of her bones.
What was written on the paper wasn't the expected curses or pleas for reconciliation.
There were only two short lines.
The handwriting was arrogant, every stroke looking like it wanted to leap off the page and take a man's head.
"Three years from now, at the Peak of Qingyun."
"The loser shall abolish their own cultivation and crawl out of the Northern Region."
There was no signature.
No name mentioned.
But everyone knew exactly who it was addressed to.
This wasn't the end of a divorce.
This was a challenge.
A gauntlet thrown down in blood.
Nalan Yan's hand began to shake uncontrollably. The paper rustled in her grip like a withered leaf in an autumn wind. She wanted to hurl it away like a piece of red-hot coal, but her fingers wouldn't obey; they only gripped tighter.
Three years...
The Peak of Qingyun...
Abolish cultivation...
Is he mad?
A talentless waste whose Dou Qi is fading—what right does he have? What does he have to back it up?
But that scene just now... the weight of his finger on the paper... that chillingly calm "I, the Emperor, grant it"...
Questions and horrors collided in her mind, making her temples throb violently. She snapped her head up, looking at that thin, receding silhouette near the door.
She wanted to say something.
Her lips parted.
But no sound came out.
At that moment.
The silhouette swayed.
Just a slight, barely perceptible tremor.
As if he had missed a step, or his strength had finally failed him.
His footsteps stopped.
Then, before anyone could react—
Ye Feng's body, without warning, fell straight backward.
Thud.
A muffled sound.
It wasn't loud, yet it felt like a heavy hammer slamming into the dead silence of the hall.
He lay on the ground, eyes tightly shut, his face as pale as a sheet. The trace of wet blood at the corner of his mouth made his complexion look even more ghastly. There was almost no rise and fall in his chest. He was as still... as a dead man.
The suffocating pressure that had filled the room vanished like a receding tide.
Gone completely.
As if it had never existed.
Leaving only the unconscious youth on the floor and the scorching, blood-stained challenge in Nalan Yan's hand.
The hall grew even quieter.
So quiet you could hear the sound of people swallowing, hear the wind whistling past the eaves in the distance.
Ye Shan stood with his mouth open, looking from the unconscious Ye Feng to the pale, trembling Nalan Yan, then to the equally stunned clan members.
His mind was a total void.
What... what the hell just happened?
Ye Qingya's legs gave out, and he nearly collapsed. He leaned against a pillar, gasping for air, his eyes unfocused. Everything had happened too fast, too bizarrely. He still couldn't make sense of it.
As for Nalan Yan.
She stood there, clutching the challenge, motionless.
Her eyes were fixed on the unconscious Ye Feng.
As if she were trying to stare right through him.
On her elegant face, after the color had drained away, a complex tide of emotions surfaced: suspicion, humiliation, bewilderment, and a trace of something even she hadn't noticed... a tremor of the heart.
The wind blew in from the main gate.
It ruffled her primrose skirt and fluttered the corner of the blood-stained challenge in her hand.
The blood-red characters were dark.
In the sunlight, they were blindingly sharp.
She suddenly remembered what her father had told her before she left for the divorce.
"Yan'er, after this matter, the Ye family and our Nalan family shall be even."
Even?
She looked at the pale face of the boy on the floor, then down at the burning challenge in her hand.
Her lips twitched.
She pulled them into a smile that looked more painful than crying.
This won't be "even."
In fact, it might have only just begun.