Blood Winds Sweep the Heavens: My Beloved Paved My Path to the Throne with White Bones

## The Blood Phoenix's First Cry: A Peerless Fiend Who Crawled Out of a Mountain of Corpses

>I crawled out of a pile of corpses with rotting flesh packed beneath my fingernails.

>When a night patrol thug's filthy hands tore open my collar, the hot blood from his severed throat became the baptism of my rebirth.

>Then a bloodstained blade pried open the corpses crushing me

>The black-robed man had frost on half his mask, yet pressed his palm against my frozen bare foot. "If you want to live, remember what this mass grave feels like."

>Ten years later, amid the incense at the Zuixian Tower, the sweat of the prime minister dripped onto my collarbone. "Zhuohua, you are the apple of my eye."

>I smiled and drained the wine from his cup. The secret letter hidden in my sleeve had already been stamped with the seal of treason and collaboration with the enemy.

>A flash of steel suddenly shattered the moonlight outside the window. The ink-black-robed man stood in a pool of blood, his eyes beneath the mask pinning me in place.

>"A wild dog from a mountain of corpses thinks it deserves to wear human skin?"

The blood was warm.

It sprayed from his severed neck, splattering my head and face. Thick and slick, it reeked of iron as it ran down my brow and blurred my left eye. The scar-faced thug's ugly head rolled across the frozen earth, his eyes still wide with the leering smile that lingered on his face. Warm liquid dripped from my chin, pattering into the hollow eye socket of the half-rotted woman's corpse beneath me.

I licked the blood that had splashed onto my lips. It was salty and rank, warm with the life it had come from. So the blood of a killer tasted no different from the blood of the killed.

"A ghost... a ghost!" The three remaining thugs shrieked, their voices breaking like chickens with their throats squeezed. A lantern crashed to the ground, its flame licking at the blood-soaked, withered