Xi Yun had lived in glory for half her life. To fall so suddenly from that height plunged her mind into something warped and broken. She hated everyone. She hated the husband who was hers in name only — cold and indifferent, feeling nothing. She hated the Rong clan head for being heartless enough to discard even his own daughter without a second thought, no matter how many years he had raised her, without so much as preserving her dignity as First Young Lady.

She hated Rong Huanxuan for being a useless failure. When other girls her age had already reached Foundation Establishment, here was this one — her cultivation foundation utterly destroyed. All the effort and devotion Xi Yun had poured into her, wasted.

She hated the small-minded people of the Rong Family — those who attached themselves to the powerful and kicked the fallen, those who shifted with the wind. On the days they had knelt and flattered her, they had brought the finest things to her door, only hoping that Xuan’er would draw them a useful talisman for good fortune. Now that Xuan’er was no longer of use, they laughed at her coldly, made cutting remarks, and the clan head did nothing to stop them.

“Useless, all of them. Useless, petty, small people.” Xi Yun hissed through her teeth, her voice a shrill rasp. Unaware of what she was doing, she clutched the back of her own hand and dug in until dark bruises bloomed beneath the skin.

But beyond the humiliation she faced in plain sight, there was something deeper — a dread that clung to her like a marrow-deep affliction, gnawing at her day and night, exactly like the nightmare she had just jolted awake from.

She had dreamed of Ren Yao again — that woman who had occupied every corner of her husband’s heart.

Since Xuan’er had been destroyed, she had felt increasingly restless and unsettled, as though countless unseen eyes watched her from the shadows, eyes dripping with malice, waiting for her miserable end.

And Ren Yao had begun appearing in her dreams with regularity. At first the visits were quiet — she would simply look at Xi Yun with eyes that saw through everything, calm and without expression.

That calm was not peace. It was a declaration of silent war. A wordless mockery.

She was laughing at her — for a lifetime of schemes that amounted to nothing in the end.

Tonight’s dream had been monstrous. She had seen Ren Yao seem to emerge from a wall of flame, reaching out with ghostly claws, dragging her toward the raging fire.

On what grounds? It hadn’t been her who killed her.

Xi Yun muttered and cursed in a daze until the sky outside had gone entirely dark, her mind unraveling further with the howling wind outside the window — like the wailing of ten thousand ghosts — setting her nerves even more on edge.

She rose to her feet, only to find that Nanny had slipped away at some point. The window stood wide open. A cold, yin-suffused wind blew through and sent a shiver through her body. She hurried to shut the window.

Suddenly, the hand she had laid on the window frame froze. Her pupils shook.

A blood mist so thick it could not be dispersed came surging in from all directions on the yin wind. The bone-piercing cold rooted Xi Yun where she stood. Eyes wide, she watched as countless twisted, incomplete ghost shadows flickered in and out of visibility within the blood mist, their harrowing, mournful wails cutting closer and closer, growing louder and louder.

Xi Yun’s entire body trembled uncontrollably. She blinked — and saw the woman she hated with every fiber of her being. Ren Yao. She had come. She had come again.

She was dressed in white, her hair loose and disheveled, her face deathly pale, her mouth full of blood — yet she smiled at Xi Yun, a smile that made the skin crawl, drifting closer through the blood mist with slow, floating steps.

“No — don’t come near me!” Xi Yun wrenched herself backward with great effort, stumbling in retreat, screaming, “Get back! You wraith, you filthy thing, get away from me!”

“Look carefully — who am I?”

Xi Yun’s eyes focused, and Ren Yao transformed into a half-grown child — a quiet child, a simple and pure girl. When she smiled, she had two faint dimples, and her eyes were extraordinarily clear — clear enough to mirror the ugliness of another person’s soul right back at them.

“Why did you kill me?” The child stared at her without moving. Those clear eyes — then suddenly something dug them out, and they became two hollow craters of blood, gaping and empty, no longer able to reflect her own twisted, contorted face.

That was right. It had been Xi Yun herself who had pulled those clean, beautiful eyes out with her own hands, and tossed them to the wild dogs that had been waiting hungrily nearby. A dog had snatched them up and carried them away.

The child turned a smile toward her that made every hair stand on end. “Hehe… I can’t see anymore. It hurts so much. Do you know what pain feels like?”

The voice, icy and poisonous, twined together with the eerie laughter and bored into her ears like a demon’s chant.

“Shut up, be quiet!” Xi Yun covered her ears and collapsed to the floor — only to find those two hollow, bleeding craters right in front of her face. She screamed at the top of her lungs. “Get away from me!”

“My eyes are gone. Give them back.” The demon chant and the snarling laughter drilled into her eardrums.

Xi Yun stared — and saw a long, pale skeletal claw reaching toward her eyes. “No — no — no—!“

The cold ghostly claw, sharp as a blade, plunged into her eyeball and began to forcibly gouge the eye out. The excruciating pain sent violent convulsions through her body. In her frenzy she tried to swing her hands up to stop it — but her limbs were pinned by ghostly claws, bone-cold yin energy crawling in through every tendon, freezing her through and through.

Xi Yun felt with horrible clarity her eyeball being wrenched from its socket. The extremity of terror and pain locked her screaming in her throat. Not a single sound escaped.

She wanted to flee. She tried to flee. But her legs were gripped fast and could not move.

Then she felt something placed in her hand. With her remaining eye, she looked down — it was the eye that had just been gouged out, now laid into her palm. And her hand was already beginning to close.

“No — no—!” Xi Yun watched in horror as her hand closed over what it held without her will, tightening, squeezing, growing harder and harder, right before her eyes.

Crack.

“Aaaaaah—!” Xi Yun screamed, the bursting pulp of her own eye splattering her face. She broke apart completely, shrieking without end.

This was a dream. A nightmare. Wake up — wake up!

Xi Yun twisted and writhed, forcing herself again and again to surface — and yet she could only watch as the hand that had crushed her own eyeball was, without knowing when, made to hold a small dagger. It was now pressing the blade toward her other wrist.

“Heh… heh…” She wanted to throw the dagger away, but instead it sank deeper, without her control, finding that tendon in her wrist and flicking it apart. Blood sprayed outward and splashed across her head and face.

Then the dagger moved toward her ankle.

The same. Precisely the same sequence — every motion identical to the ones she had once ordered two elders to use when torturing that child to death. Only now the one being tortured was herself.

Pain grew numb. But the despair that remained was like a cresting flood, crashing over her in a great surge, swallowing her whole.

So this was what that child had felt.

She watched herself sever the tendons in her own hands and feet. Blood pooled into rivers. Then it was gathered into jars.

Then she watched the dagger reverse and drive toward her dantian.

Xi Yun’s remaining eye nearly sprang from its socket. She tilted her head back to look at the child hovering there like a specter. The child stood quietly, watching her with innocent eyes — the same expression, perhaps, her mother had once used to look at her.

The blood mist surged up like a great wave and rolled over everything. Every act of evil she had committed came back without mercy to consume her.

Xi Yun felt herself suffocating. She closed her eyes in utter despair. “No—!”

She erupted in a scream unlike any human sound, and her eyes flew open.

She was still in her room. Both her eyes were intact.

Xi Yun’s cold sweat had soaked through her underclothes. Her hair clung in wet strands to her face. But she broke into a smile — the smile of someone who had narrowly escaped death, the relief of a burden lifted.

After all — only a nightmare.

Yet the smile froze at the corners of her mouth almost immediately. Because she saw a man who could not possibly be there.

Rong Qingcang. Her husband.

He was wiping his hands with a handkerchief at a leisurely pace, then tossed it aside as though discarding something filthy.

He looked at her — cold. His mouth curved into a cold, cruel arc.

“So that’s how it was.”

He let the silence breathe for a moment.

“Well then — this time, it’s real.”