The Ashen Phoenix Plays for the Realm

Waves of fire licked at the rotting beams, scorching the last glimmer of daylight in Xiao Mingzhao’s pupils blood-red. She knelt on the blackened palace steps, her left fingernails digging deep into the gaps between the bricks, her right hand clutching an icy earring. The tip of a Vermilion Bird’s wing, carved from frozen glass, pierced her palm. As drops of blood fell, they turned into tiny ice crystals in the flames. “Even the Grand Historian can miscalculate.” Cui Heng’s voice cut through the curtain of fire. Not a trace of soot marked his dark armor. Within a strange three-foot void around him, the flames bowed and retreated as if alive. The bronze arrowhead in his palm gleamed coldly, its tail engraved with the seal script: “Xiao Mingyu, winter of the seventh year of Yonghe.” The young emperor’s birth date seeped from the firelight in an eerie indigo. Xiao Mingzhao suddenly chuckled. The instant the arrowhead pried open her collar, a blood-red birthmark shaped like a jade seal on her collarbone blazed to life, casting a vermilion glow over the old scar between Cui Heng’s brows. “Do you truly believe...” Her bloodstained lips brushed his suddenly tense vambrace. “...that what’s written in the history books is the truth?” Time Reversal As the exploding fire oil turned Cui Heng’s pupils golden-red, Xiao Mingzhao saw seven illusions through the agony. In the first life, she knelt in the same place and received an order to take her own life. In the second, Cui Heng’s arrow pierced her throat... By the seventh, a poisoned phoenix hairpin had plunged into the young emperor’s heart. Amid countless fragments of memory, the same bronze celestial disk kept appearing. The eyes on the Vermilion Bird at its base were the very same ring-shaped mark now burning on her wrist. “This time...” She let the flames consume her fingertips as they slowly turned transparent. “I’ll rewrite the history books from the very beginning.”