Jared withdrew his hand. A bead of gray light clung to his palm, winked out, and was gone. He stayed still. His spiritual sense fanned across the room like a silent radar sweep, tasting for loose threads, alarms, or anything that remembered Miles’ existence. Two breaths—that was all the span between arrival, strike, and erasure. Fast, precise, merciless, carried out beneath the threshold of sound.
Jared moved to the window, tilted his head, and let the night breathe against his ear. The Executioners’ Quarters remained hushed. Far off, voices drifted from the Duty Room, and beyond them the measured crunch of patrol boots passed by and faded. Nothing from the cottage leaked outward; the silence lay intact.
Still, he did not step away. His gaze dropped to the cushion where Miles had been meditating. Beside it, a dull stone slab covered a thumb-sized recess, faint sigils pulsing beneath the dust.
A flick of will unraveled the sigils. He lifted the slab and found several jade slips, a pouch of prime crystals, and a black token carved with the single, snarling word “Execution”; the reverse carried Miles’ name.
Jared gathered the slips and slipped his awareness inside them. One held execution logs. He skimmed until one line snagged him like barbed wire.
Date: Umbral Calendar year nine thousand seven hundred sixty-three, Frost Month seventeen.
Location: Soulfall Slope.
Condemned: Sidney (male), Cadence (female).
Charge: Desertion from Upper Heaven, violation of forbidden knowledge.
Overseer: Grand Chamberlain Quentin.
Executioners: Garth, Miles.
Note: Soul-Refining Crystal A11-73 employed. Souls secured and delivered to Mr. Fay.
The clinical columns sliced deeper than any blade, each word a splinter driven under the ribs. Sidney, Cadence—their names reduced to items on a butcher’s ledger. Jared’s fingers blanched around the slip, yet he forced his breath to smooth out, one slow draw after another. The other slips yielded only Punishment Hall bylaws and tattered body-training fragments, useless debris.
His attention returned to the Execution Token. The material hummed, faintly threaded into the wards that webbed this quarter of Jade Immortal Manor—a key, perhaps, or a pass deeper inside. After a moment’s thought, he pocketed the token and the incriminating log, restored every other object, then set the stone back as though it had never been touched.
He flicked the last speck of ash from his sleeve, then drifted back through the numbed warning sigils. The courtyard wall gave no protest; stone, moonlight, and shadow all stayed silent beneath his feet. A familiar throb in the outer barrier guided him to the thin seam where power traded places. He slipped through it as easily as breath leaves a lung, and the Executioners’ Quarters fell away behind him.
From the moment he had entered to the instant he emerged, every layer of Jade Immortal Manor’s vaunted defense had behaved like painted scenery—lovely to admire, useless to touch.
***
He reappeared at the Bamboo Grove Lodge scarcely half an hour after he’d left, dew still clinging to the slender leaves as though time itself had been reluctant to move. Through the lattice door, he spotted Lyza, Luther, and Panther, with Monkey pacing tight, anxious circles that never quite crossed the threshold of the low table.
The air inside felt crowded, the quiet so thick it seemed to press against his teeth; they must have been rehearsing every possible outcome of his errand. When they finally noticed him—unruffled hair, clean sleeves, not a drop of blood in sight—faces that had braced for calamity slid into a confusion halfway between relief and fear.
Lyza’s mouth worked twice before sound emerged. “Senior, you…”
Jared answered only by placing the matte-black Execution Token beside a slender jade slip on the bamboo table; the soft clack of stone on wood said more than explanations ever could.
Panther sucked in a breath so sharp it whistled. “That… That’s a Punishment Hall Executioner’s pass! Only someone like Garth or Miles is issued one!”
Lyza seized the jade slip, pressed her consciousness into it, shoulders tightening as unseen words scrolled before her mind’s eye. A heartbeat later she looked up, face drained of color. “This… This is Miles’s execution log! Senior, you…”
He met no one’s gaze. “Garth is dead… Found in the alley behind the Drunken Immortal Tavern. Miles is dead as well, in his quarters at the Executioners’ compound.”
The silence ruptured, as if a silent gong had slammed against the rafters. Despite having braced for it, every soul in the room, Luther included, went rigid, pulses hammering so hard Jared could see the skin at their throats jump.
Murder—the word crawled across their faces before any of them could speak. Understanding flickered in their eyes; he really had done it. And he had done it in less time than it took them to boil a kettle.
Sneaking into the alley was one thing, but the Executioners’ compound sat inside the city lord mansion itself. Layered wards, patrolling guards, lethal arrays—every inch designed to keep men like him out. How had he breached it? How had he tracked the target so quickly? How, in that throttled sliver of time, had he killed?
Lyza’s heartbeat stalled. The newcomer stood in the doorway again, impossibly unruffled, and the only thought she could form was the same stunned question looping inside her chest. How had he slipped back out, and back in, unseen?
She alone, after years of mapping every patrol line and blind corner inside Jade Immortal Manor, understood how absurd that was. Not a single corridor lay unwatched, not a single sigil slept—not for a heartbeat. Even if she burned every sleeper she had planted and rehearsed the approach a thousand times, she still could not imagine sliding a blade across Miles’ throat inside the Executioners’ Quarters without alarms exploding like firecrackers.
The attempt would bleed resources, friends, probably her own life, and it would still end with iron-shod boots pounding toward the crime before the body cooled. Now this quiet traveler had strolled out less than an hour ago, alone. He returned carrying two deaths, a jade slip still glimmering with proof, and the loose, satisfied air of a man who had merely gone to stretch his legs.
Beside her, Monkey’s knees folded until he balanced on trembling calves; the way he looked up at Jared reminded Lyza of a village boy gawking at a storm-god, awe knotting with raw animal fear. She saw the moment understanding rifled through him—the slight gasp, the pupils shrinking—when he realized the monster he himself had led through the warded gates.
Across the table, Luther’s usually placid face tightened, as if an invisible string had drawn his thoughts painfully taut. Even he, the man who claimed to know Jared’s measure, looked newly uncertain. His eyes lowered, a private concession that whatever scale he had used to weigh his master still came up short.
Lyza could almost taste the elegance of it: slipping into enemy marrow, cutting only what mattered, drifting away untouched. That wasn’t combat. It was choreography performed by someone who had long ago memorized every beat of power.
“S-Senior, your might is boundless!” Panther stammered, his throat so dry the words scratched out like gravel, hands pressed together in a clumsy salute that dripped reverence.
The jade slip trembled between Lyza’s fingers. She exhaled twice, then a third time, forcing the quake in her chest to settle before she nestled the fragile evidence onto the bamboo desk.
“Senior, your cultivation is beyond anything I can grasp, and I bow to it completely… With this slip, no one can deny that Elder Morse and his wife were framed…
But the brothers have died suddenly… Jade Immortal Manor, especially Quentin, will hunt for answers. He is Julian’s favorite Supervising Executioner. We need a plan before their nets tighten.”
