Rising Phoenix

No… their opposite fates were bound to clash, whatever the form.

She plucked the golden broom off the knot and tossed it aside.

The basket was layered with objects.

First, a bottle of liquor.

Poor, coarse clay pottery without even the lowliest restaurant’s distillery sigil, only found in the smallest of slum bars.

Ning Yi had sent a bottle of bad liquor a thousand miles?

Feng Zhiwei stared at the bottle in confusion, the answer to her question dancing on the rims of her mind. She uncorked the bottle and carefully sniffed.

Pungent and biting, a strong liquor suitable for laborers working in the cold of winter.

Feng Zhiwei’s hand shook.

That night by the abandoned bridge they had shared this very bottle of cheap liquor. She had listened quietly to his stories about Da Cheng, his voice light even as secrets filled his mind; she had not noticed then, her mind occupied with her own future.

So many words she had thought casual and meaningless now seemed filled with profound meaning and intent, as if just stepping onto that bridge and been part of a deliberate plan.

To think that he had actually tracked down that nameless little bar that they had passed.

Feng Zhiwei smiled quietly, lifting the bottle and tossing it back.

The alcohol poured down her throat like a cutting knife, a fiery dragon roaring straight into her heart and setting her whole body ablaze.

She coughed, her entire faze red and her eyes amaze as she stared at the empty bottle. To think that she had once drank this cheap shit so easily.

Such a disgusting liquor, and she remembered how his noble highness had not even frowned at its taste. That man… never showing even a hint of truth.

Feng Zhiwei wiped her lips, swallowing the last drops, her mouth burning with old nostalgia.

She had drank so many different excellent liquors, but this cheap swill was still the true taste of life.

The second layer held a small, strangely crafted crossbow.

A small crossbow of foreign style, its bows shaped like snakes and ending with red tassels. Beside it a small quiver of irregular arrows, each glittering faintly red.

Feng Zhiwei was once again confused, and only after examining everything carefully did familiarity gradually dawn.

The night before the Academy Exam, she had gotten drunk and stumbled upon a hidden yard, somehow managing to run right into Ning Yi’s plot against the Crown Prince.

His dark cape had fluttered in the night, golden mandala flashing, red crossbow bolts shooting towards her heart.

She had rolled and fled, only managing a glimpse of the crossbow and the dull red gleam of its bolts…

If that bolt had found her heart, perhaps her mother and brother would still live.

Feng Zhiwei’s fingers swept over the little crossbow and its short bolts.

“Ka, ka, ka.”

The crisp breaking cracks faded quietly into the dark night.

Shattered bolts fell lifelessly to the felt carpet.

The third layer — a bag of Golden Sand Crab Apples.

At the Qing Ming Academy Competition, an assassin had served Golden Sand Crab Apples to His Majesty on a special soft sword disguised as a plate.

The sword had pierced with sudden light, scattering the red apples with splattered blood, dying the ground scarlet.

A self-harming scheme and a series of chained stratagems, and exhausting string of plots to usurp the Crown Prince’s power allowing no mistake. How could he spare a pesky new National Scholar who had learned of his secrets?

That day, behind the wall-screen, he had wrapped his bloody fingers around her neck and stared down at her with killing intent.

And then he had let her go.

Feng Zhiwei trembled.

“Today you let me go, so in the future, I will also let you go one time.”

Words that seemed so casual at the time, yet afterwards seem as if long arranged by fate.

She bit into the Golden Sand Crab Apple, the famously sweet tribute fruit somehow almost bitter in her mouth.

So many memories hidden away and half-forgotten.

The next layer, a green pill.

As he lay drunk and wasted in Wei Mansion, Princess Shao Ning had given her this pill and told her to rub it into his skin. Helian Zheng would target Ning Yi the day after and the Prince would forever lose the Emperor’s affection.

She had taken his pulse and prepared a sobering soup, never using the pill.

She had not trusted that a meticulous and careful man like Ning Yi would so recklessly drink in her mansion. She could not believe that Ning Yi would trust her so completely.

And now she knew she had been right.

He had seen and controlled everything and not even Shao Ning’s pill had been hidden from his gaze.

Ning Yi.

Are you thanking me for not acting?

Or are you telling me I can never escape your palm?

The fifth layer held a transparent crystal, an irregularly shaped piece clearly part of a broken whole.

That crystal beauty at the end of the hidden tunnel deep in the Imperial Palace, a lascivious statue posed in welcoming seduction.

The prince had unsheathed his sword and destroyed the rare treasure, a piece of art that blasphemed his beloved mother.

In the abandoned palace as the rain poured outside, he whispered his secret and she had felt the scar on his chest and known the scars cutting his heart.

Now the cold crystal lay in her palm, as cold as her heart.

As her heart’s pain stirred, she gripped down on the crystal, but its edges did not cut. When she loosened her hand and looked down, she saw that all the sharp edges of the crystal piece had been smoothed down.

Who had bent over the crystal in the depths of a quiet night, grinding the crystalline edges smooth, scattering glittering dust like so many tears.

Thoughtful and caring, fearing that his love would hurt herself accidentally as she lost herself in memory.

But though he could grind down the edges of the crystal he could not smooth out the cracks in her heart, but still he continued in the cold and desolate night.

In the sixth layer, a gold-handled drum stick.

Prince Helian had beaten out a tattoo as the young madams competed.

Noble Imperial Consort Chang’s birthday banquet. She had composed poems and drank liquor, and though she had pretended to advise Hua Gongmei, she only had eyes for him.

“To seek perfection in all ten aspects is to die nine times for every life; it seems at first as awe and glory in all eight directions, but in truth it is a closing of all seven apertures; you will lose all six relations, and your five organs will be tortured until death; your four limbs will fall powerless, and your days will upend your nights as you forget your three meals; in the end, you stand on two lands sharing a gaze. How is it not better to throw away this one heart filled with love!”