Chapter Text
The mission had been marked green-tier: low risk, light surveillance, return before dusk.
Yuanzhi never liked missions labeled low risk. Red cloaks of danger could be met head-on, cut through with blade and wit. It was the ones dressed in jade and silk - soft, quiet, polite - that hid the most poison.
The moment the wind shifted, he knew. A faint, sickly-sweet scent drifted into the air - bloodroot, rare and out of season.
His steps faltered, pupils narrowing, instincts clawing to the surface. But the blade had already nicked him.
Barely a whisper of steel. A line across his arm so small it shouldn’t have mattered.
He fired the whistling arrow. A flare of red streaking into the clouds - the only thing his gege would ever need to come running.
Then the world turned sideways. And everything disappeared.
When Gong Yuanzhi opened his eyes, he was standing in the Gong Palace courtyard.
No pain. No weight. No dizziness.
The air was wrong. It was crystalline, too sharp, every breath like glass. Osmanthus blossoms perfumed the night with sweetness so heavy it clung to his throat. Lanterns swayed though there was no wind. The marble beneath his feet shimmered as if freshly polished, not a single crack, not a trace of time.
The world felt whole. But too whole.
And then he heard it.
Laughter.
His breath caught.
It wasn’t a sound he was used to. Not from him. Gong Shangjue never laughed like that anymore - free, warm, unguarded. It was the sound of a boy who had not buried his brother. The sound of a man who had not grown hard from grief.
Yuanzhi turned toward it, slow and quiet, like approaching a fire he didn’t want to wake.
There, in the main courtyard, stood his gege. Hair untied, posture loose, sleeves rolled as he sparred playfully with a boy half his size.
Yuanzhi froze. He knew that face. Knew it better than his own.
Langjue.
Alive.
The air fled from his lungs like it had been knocked out of him.
He stepped back, staggering slightly, unnoticed. The name screamed inside him but never left his lips. His lungs seized. His hands trembled. It was as if something inside him, brittle and barely held together, had cracked down the center.
A green jade guardian passed near him, eyes scanning the courtyard.
They didn’t pause. Didn’t even flinch.
Yuanzhi wasn’t seen.
No one turned. No one called his name.
And then Langjue ran straight past him - through him - laughing.
No contact. No acknowledgment.
Nothing.
He passed the same pillars twice, or perhaps they were different ones wearing the same face. Every corridor gleamed as though freshly polished, every lantern burned steady without smoke, every surface scrubbed of fingerprints. The perfection sickened him. It was like walking through a painting where someone else had decided which fragments of memory deserved to exist, and which should be erased.
When he reached the Zhi Lineage Hall, his chest tightened. The air should have smelled of earth and herbs, dust clinging to parchment, acrid venom steeping in sealed jars. Instead there was nothing. Just silence, clean and polished, sterile as a shrine.
No crates of dried herbs stacked in crooked towers. No wax-sealed vials he had labeled in his own jagged hand. No dark corner where a boy had hunched over mortar and pestle, bruising his fingers as he taught himself to distill toxins the world had forgotten.
He searched anyway, hands trembling as he pulled open cupboards, slid his fingers along stone grooves, touched the empty racks. But every space gaped hollow. His childhood, scraped away. His existence, unacknowledged.
Even his reflection, in the still water basin, felt unfamiliar. For an instant, his own face stared back: sharp eyes, the tight mouth of someone who had taught himself to bite before being bitten. Then the image rippled, and a stranger appeared.
His hands trembled as he touched the surface. A boy stared back. Younger. Eyes full of confusion and something raw.
Not him.
Not the boy who survived.
Not the boy who stayed.
He wasn’t here.
He had never been here.
The realization sank talons into his chest, cold and merciless. His chest tightened, breath catching as if the air itself refused to acknowledge him. The thought came sudden and cruel, rooting itself deep before he could tear it out: What if this was how it should have been?
Panic pressed against his ribs.
He staggered from the hall. The palace itself seemed to close in on him, walls narrowing, shadows deepening. The floors gleamed with such perfection that his footsteps left no trace. Even the sound of his breathing seemed swallowed whole. He existed less with every step.
At the edge of the pond, he collapsed. The stone rim dug into his spine as he curled inward, knees to chest, arms wrapped tight like bindings.
Yuanzhi sat by the empty pond long after the moon had risen.
He could hear Langjue’s voice echoing faintly in the distance. Training. Talking. Laughing. Then Shangjue’s, warm and steady, teaching, correcting, praising.
Every sound was a blade.
Yuanzhi’s nails dug crescents into his skin. Each laugh carved him thinner. Each word proved what he already knew: Shangjue had everything he needed here. A brother. A reason. A world whole without Yuanzhi’s shadow.
It was everything Yuanzhi had tried to be, everything he had broken himself into becoming - for Shangjue.
A replacement.
A shadow of the boy who should have lived.
He tried to summon anger, pride, even his usual sharp-edged indignation. But the silence hollowed him out. This world didn’t need him.
And worse - neither did gege.
He remembered the tunnel. The blood. The moment Langjue slipped away.
He remembered being too late.
He remembered Shangjue’s eyes after. Hollowed, sharpened by grief into something that never quite softened again.
That was when Gong Yuanzhi had begun. The desperate need to earn back something he could never name. The way he had brewed poisons faster, spoken sharper, honed himself into a weapon Langjue would never grow to be.
And still, even now, it wasn’t enough.
Now faced with a world where Langjue lived and he was erased, Yuanzhi’s body shook with the truth of it: maybe this was justice.
Later, as the dream frayed at its edges, he curled up beneath the empty eaves of the armory.
The cold seeped into his limbs, but he didn’t move. No one came to find him. Not even gege.
Not this version of him.
Only the faint whisper of poison threading his veins reminded him he still existed somewhere. That outside this false world, someone might be searching.
And in his last moment of consciousness, he thought he heard it - faint, distant: “Yuanzhi.”
Shangjue’s voice.
Calling him.
Desperate.
Terrified.
But not fast enough.
Never fast enough.