The golden bricks of the Hall of Supreme Harmony were coated with a layer of cold gilding by the morning light. Meng Han knelt on the cold ground. The stinging pain from his knees climbed up his spine, but it was far less burning than the surging blood and blood in his chest. The edict in his hand, which carried hundreds of lives in the Han Palace, still had the unique roughness of rice paper. His fingertips were white from exerting force, and the old wounds on his knuckles were itching faintly in the cool air - that was a memorial left by the fire in the ancestral hall, and it was also the mark of his complete separation from the Meng family.
