Chapter 4 The Painter of Ghosts🌺

-Li Zeyan's Point of View-

The manor was silent, as it always was after midnight.

The guards had long since finished their rounds. The servants were locked in their quarters, lights snuffed. Only the wind moved through the bamboo eaves, soft and cold like breath across bare skin.

And yet, one wing of Hei'an Manor still flickered with life.

Behind seven locked doors, beneath the eastern library, past a panel that responded not to touch but blood, there was a room that no one knew existed.

It was the Sanctum.

A space carved out of obsession. A shrine. A madness.

Lit only by oil lamps and moonlight, the walls of the room were lined in crimson brocade. The scent of ink, paint, and dried blood clung to the air like memory.

And on the walls...

Paintings.

Hundreds of them.

Of her.

---

Yue Lin.

But not the woman the world now called Duchess. No-the girl from before. The one she used to be. The one she had forgotten.

Small, sharp-eyed, quick-footed. A child who ran barefoot through glass alleyways in the slums of a future that hadn't yet been born. The orphan who took knives to bed, who gave half her food to a boy with broken hands, who never cried-not even when her collarbone snapped from a mission gone wrong.

He had been there.

Always watching. Always near.

Even when she didn't see him.

Even when she never looked back.

---

Li Zeyan stood in the center of the Sanctum, ink staining his fingers, brush still dripping in red pigment-not vermilion. A special mixture he made himself. Crushed cinnabar, dried poppy petals... and a drop of blood.

His own.

> "To paint her, one must bleed."

He dipped the brush again and stroked across the canvas-her smile this time. Not a real one. One he imagined. One he'd only seen when she thought no one was watching. The corner of her lip tugged up slightly, eyes still flat and hollow. The assassin's almost-smile.

He had memorized it.

He had chased it through lifetimes.

And when she died that night-betrayed by the very guild she built with her own hands-he had burned the world.

---

Flashback – One Year After Her Death

He remembered the silence in the chamber when he arrived too late.

Her body had already been taken. Her killers already celebrating.

He slit the first one's throat in the banquet hall.

Poisoned the second with their own wine.

Dismembered the third slowly, over three days.

He hunted the rest, one by one, until the Glass Lotus was nothing but ash.

And then, drenched in her blood and his vengeance, he made a vow in a forgotten temple beneath the Earth.

> "Let my soul rot. Let my name be cursed. But let me find her again. And this time... she will be mine."

The gods-cruel things that they are-listened.

---

He found himself reborn in an empire not his own, in a world shaped by silk and swords, not smoke and steel.

He waited.

He built power.

He rose through the battlefield like a storm dressed in bone.

And still, every night, he returned here-to this room. To her memory.

---

Tonight, she slept just five doors away.

He knew she wouldn't run. Not yet.

But she was still resisting. Still watching him like a caged wolf.

That was fine.

He had waited through centuries.

He could wait a little longer.

---

He moved to the center of the Sanctum where a life-sized portrait stood, half-finished. Her new face. Her new body. Mo Ran-no, Yue Lin, returned.

He'd painted her just as she looked on the scaffold. Blood dripping down her throat. Shoulders squared. Chin raised.

Unbreakable.

Perfect.

He traced the line of her cheek with a brushstroke, the gesture too gentle for the madness behind it.

> "They called you Red Ghost," he murmured. "But you were never a ghost to me. You were everything else that haunted me."

---

On the table beside the easel sat his book of poetry-handwritten, never shared.

He opened to the latest page and read aloud, voice low and thick with ache.

> "If I must become godless to love you,

Let heaven forsake me.

If I must slit the throats of fate,

Let karma drown in blood.

I will drag time into ruin

And remake it in your name."

He closed the book, a rare emotion flickering through his chest like a dying candle.

> "You won't remember me, Yue'er," he said softly, "but your body will.

The way your fingers curl when I'm near.

The way your silence hums like recognition.

You belong to no one. I know.

But I will become the one thing you cannot kill."

---

He stepped back, admiring the wall of faces-the girl she was, the woman she's becoming, the expressions he imagined, fabricated, fed with longing.

A line from an older poem came to mind. One he wrote the night she died:

> "I let the world burn, let the world burn-for you.

And if it rebuilds, I will burn it again."

---

His eyes slid to the far wall, where a small dagger hung-curved, silver, unmistakable.

Her old blade.

The one he took from her dead hand before the fire consumed her.

He ran his thumb across the hilt.

> "You killed with silence," he whispered. "But I loved you louder than war."

---

A knock startled the stillness.

It was barely a sound, but enough to drag him back.

"Your Grace," came the muffled voice of the steward. "The Emperor's summons has arrived."

He didn't look away from her portrait.

"Let him wait."

A pause. The servant dared not argue.

Li Zeyan reached forward and pressed his forehead gently to the canvas-just for a moment.

> "One day," he breathed, "you'll remember everything.

And you'll hate me.

And still, you will stay."

He extinguished the lamps one by one.

The final flame flickered beside her painted face, then died.

And the Duke of Hei'an left the room in silence, locking the shrine to his obsession once more.

---