The Phoenix that devours fate

CHAPTER 4

HAOFENG

Before me stood the messenger, his silhouette stark against the clearing's edge, where civilization's reach met the wild's quiet defiance.And yet, despite the dust of travel clinging to his robes, the man exuded no fatigue. Only purpose.

His gaze flicked beyond me, toward the small dwelling that housed the last remnants of what I had stolen from the empire. His lips parted, each word measured like a blade weighed before a strike.

"Is that your child?" A pause. "The royal child?"

My jaw tightened. A simple question, yet the answer carried the weight of an ocean poised to drown me.

"Yes," I said, my voice even. "We have a child now."

The breeze stirred, a ghostly hand raking through my damp hair, as if fate itself had taken notice.

The messenger's expression did not change. Yet his next inquiry was a noose, tightening by the second.

"And late princess?"

A stone lodged in my throat.

Lumin.

The name echoed in the hollow chamber of my chest, a wound that time refused to mend. I had buried her with my own hands, felt the warmth of her life dissipate like mist before the rising sun. The woman they sought had long since passed into the embrace of the earth.

But truth was a cruel thing. A weapon that, if wielded now, would shatter the fragile lie I needed to uphold.

"She is within," I said at last.

A deception. Not born of malice, but of necessity.

The messenger's eyes flickered to the hut, as if expecting her to emerge. My fingers curled at my sides, unseen by the world but felt by the tension coiling within my blood.

Then came the sentence.

"The Emperor summons all three of you," he declared. "You, the child, and the princess. You are to return to the palace immediately. This is not a request."

The forest swallowed his words, yet they echoed through my very bones.

The edict was final. A summons not meant to be ignored, a command etched into the very fabric of order that bound the empire.

Yet they called for a ghost.

The moment the messenger had spoken, the illusion of refuge had shattered, leaving behind only the cold, unforgiving reality that I had merely been living on borrowed time. The summons was not a request—it was an iron chain, forged in the halls of power, binding me to a fate long inescapable. The emperor's will had descended, and in the face of such inevitability, even the heavens themselves would bow.

Before me, the Yu Jiao stood—a vessel of imperial majesty, yet a harbinger of confinement. Its lacquered wood gleamed like polished obsidian, dark yet regal, a beast of silk and gold waiting to devour me whole. Embroidered upon its canopied roof, golden dragons coiled in eternal slumber, their threads catching the early light, shimmering as though alive. Four bearers stood at its corners, their faces expressionless, their bodies carved from discipline, their presence an unspoken declaration that defiance would not be tolerated. The moment I stepped within, I would no longer be a man of the forests, no longer the ghost who had slipped through the cracks of history—I would once again be a fugitive caught in the jaws of empire.

Yet, it was not my fate alone that was being decided this day. Nestled in the crook of my arm, his tiny frame rising and falling with the steadiness of slumber, my son remained oblivious to the tides shifting around him. He knew nothing of the hands of power stretching toward him, of the blood in his veins that made him a commodity rather than a child.He was peace. And yet, peace was not something afforded to those who carried the weight of imperial lineage. It was not something a father, a man who had stolen a princess, could ever grant him. I had failed to save Lumin from the destiny written for her—but I would not fail him.

With slow, deliberate steps, I approached the waiting sedan chair, each movement an acceptance, a surrender laced with unspoken defiance. The wind whispered through the trees, an elegy of the life I was leaving behind. The messenger's gaze remained impassive, a man carved from duty, unshaken by the burdens he delivered. His voice, cold as the steel of an unsheathed blade, repeated the command with neither urgency nor doubt. "The three of you must come." But there were only two of us left.

My voice did not waver. "Lumin is not here." The words carried no explanation, no mourning, only the weight of an unchangeable truth.

The messenger did not blink.He had spent years standing before nobles awaiting their judgment, before warriors who had fought in vain against the will of the throne. And yet, it was never his place to acknowledge it. His duty was to deliver. His duty was to collect.

"Where is the late princess?"

It was a question, yet it was not. It was a formality, an obligation to hear the words spoken, though the outcome would not change. My fingers curled against the fabric of my robes, tightening as though grasping onto something already lost. The words hovered at the edge of my tongue, but language itself was insufficient. To speak her absence aloud would be to breathe life into something I had long refused to acknowledge, to accept a world where her laughter no longer filled the spaces between breaths, where her presence was not merely waiting just beyond the tree line, where she would not return with a teasing remark and a knowing smile.

"She is…" But what use was it to say? Would it change the sun's course, unravel the threads of destiny, rewrite the past in ink untainted by sorrow? No. Nothing would change. The heavens had already turned their back.

"She is no longer… ."

The silence that followed was not one of shock, nor sympathy. It was the silence of bureaucracy, of duty, of a world that did not stop turning for the grief of a single man. The messenger did not lower his head, did not offer false condolences. Instead, his next words came as firm as the edict itself. "Then you and the child must come." A pause, the briefest flicker of something unreadable in his gaze. "You will explain the reason in the palace."

And that was it.

Her absence did not change the decree. It did not erase the obligation. It did not lessen the weight of the empire's grasp. There was no sympathy from the throne, no understanding in the halls of power. There was only the summons, and the expectation that I would comply.

The Yu Jiao stood before me like the mouth of fate itself, waiting to swallow me whole. My son stirred in my arms, his tiny fingers twitching in sleep, unaware that with each passing moment, we were being drawn back into a world that had no place for us. But if the emperor thought he could reclaim what was mine, if he thought he could sever the bond of father and son as easily as penning an edict, then he would learn that even the weight of the throne was not enough to break the will of a man who had nothing left to lose.

I stepped forward, crossing the threshold into the sedan chair's silken confines. The scent of aged wood and incense greeted me like a specter of the past, a familiar yet foreign embrace. The doors closed behind me, and the world shifted.

With seamless precision, the bearers lifted the Yu Jiao, and the journey began.

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The roads stretched endlessly,winding through forests and fields, cutting through the land like veins leading back to the heart of the empire. The rhythmic sway of the sedan was relentless, like the beat of a funeral drum heralding the approach of judgment. Outside, the landscape blurred, the trees thinning, the rivers widening, the world reshaping itself with each passing mile. The empire did not sleep. It did not forget. And as we traveled toward Beijing, toward the Forbidden City's towering gates, I knew that with each step forward, I was walking deeper into the maw of destiny.

My son did not stir. His slumber was unbroken by the knowledge of what awaited us beyond those gilded doors. But as I gazed down at him, at the fragile life that still clung to body, I knew one thing with certainty—the emperor could summon us, he could demand explanations, he could wield the full might of the throne, but he would never take him from me.

The past had caught me. The future loomed like a storm on the horizon.

But I was not a man who bowed to fate.

Not now. Not ever.

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