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Something paradoxical happened within him the longer he stared at the image: his heart became more tumultuous, yet his higher thoughts began to settle.

A knee-jerk—if reasonable—reaction would be to panic at the anachronistic existence that was a portrait of oneself dated from at least fifteen years before their birth. However, further examination of said portrait revealed the truth: This was definitely not Zhu Li.

Their eye shape, brow curve, facial structure, hair texture, and so on and so forth were remarkably identical, but ghosts haunted the details.

The way the man sat beneath a maple was far too relaxed—Zhu Li’s back would have been straight as a brush. The way he laid his unfamiliar sword across his lap, his hands clasped on top of it, was wrong—Zhu Li would have propped Dusha against his chair. The tight fit of his uniform around his arms was unacceptable—Zhu Li preferred the flowing type, as they were less constricting and easier to tie away. The crown sitting atop his head, binding all of his hair back, was utterly bizarre—Zhu Li would always choose to let his hair fly free.

To top it off, he was smiling for the painter, and Zhu Li would never. Holding a smile for hours was not something he was willing to suffer through.

Other than that, though… ugh, the resemblance was borderline creepy. They were similar down to even the shade of brown in their eyes.

“Who… who is that?” his sister asked. She’d definitely noticed the inconsistencies, too.

Zhu Li snapped out of his stupor to open the scroll as wide as it would go, his eyes scanning it for characters. He found them, just out of the painting’s range:

Zhu Sun, signed by one Zhu Chenfang.

His sister repeated the name, her tone just as confused as she felt. “Zhu Sun? I don’t know anyone named that. I don’t know anyone named Chenfang, either. One of the branch families painted it?”

Maybe. But that wasn’t what was on Zhu Li’s mind. He stared at the name.

And stared.

And stared.

Finally, he remarked, “His Dao name isn’t here.”

“Huh? Oh, hey, you’re right,” she said. He could see her getting closer to the paper. “There’s no such thing as a single-character Dao name, and he’s clearly old enough to have one, so why wouldn’t they…”

She trailed off. There was a pregnant pause for far, far too long.

She quickly whipped around to look at him. He blankly met her gaze, which was drawn up with silent horror. “Gege,” she whispered, her voice slightly strained, “do you think he… that he also wasn’t…”

She didn’t need to finish. He knew already.

He let the scroll re-furl itself, tossed it back into the trunk, and all but slammed its lid shut.

“Take these back to the Zhu Estate, please,” he told the disciples, then stalked off on his own through the trees, towards where the horses had been posted.

He couldn’t say that he felt numb; that was too dramatic. He wasn’t really shocked, either. Well, no, he was pretty shocked, but he mostly just felt… weird. Like his mind didn’t know how to process seeing his duplicate, and his body therefore didn’t know how to react.

In the middle of his walk, he registered footsteps following after him far behind. Whose they were, he didn’t turn to check.

When he came upon the area where the horses were left, he was greeted with Guhui, who whinnied mournfully at him. Her reins had been firmly wrapped around a tree trunk.

This was a lesson learned from just a few hours ago, when he and Chu Ran had come back to the clearing to discover three things: that there were still three horses, that there was a lot of disturbed snow, and that Guhui had snapped the branch she’d been tied to and was now dragging it along the ground, making grooves in the snow. It’d been a wonder as to how she didn’t trip.

A true mystery, that was.

His fingers moved on their own to untie the reins. Once free, Guhui flicked her chin up and chuffed, and he began to slowly pet her nose, his mind wandering off to parts unknown.

Those footsteps were getting pretty close, now. When he looked over his shoulder in their direction, he caught sight of Chu Ran coming down the slope towards him.

As soon as he was caught in his range, the other stopped in his tracks for a moment. Clear indecision was written all across his face as he stood there, as frozen as the withered trees around him.

Eventually, he said, “Miss Canxi explained what that piece of paper meant. I wasn’t quite sure what you two were so flustered about until she did, and now that I know, I… well, I have no real advice, but I will certainly help in any way I can. Which may not be too much, if we’ll be reading.”

A pang of guilt went through Zhu Li’s gut. His hand paused in its petting motion. He’d forgotten all about Chu Ran in his own astonishment.

“Oh? What’s with that reaction?” Chu Ran asked, coming in a little closer. His hand—as it always did—found its way to Zhu Li’s arm.

“I… didn’t mean to leave you behind,” the latter mumbled out. He averted his eyes on reflex, electing to stare at the patterns on Guhui’s coat instead.

“‘Leave me behind?’ Goodness, Doctor, that’s quite an exaggeration. There were more pressing matters afoot than my personal comfort, wouldn’t you say?”

He patted Zhu Li’s arm, then moved away for his own horse. “I have the feeling that we’re close to the truth, Doctor,” he threw over his shoulder. “Perhaps it will finally put your heart at ease.”

Wouldn’t that be nice.

Unfortunately, that ease was taking its time getting to him. Some time later, they came to be seated in a random hall of the Estate’s, the four trunks arranged it against one of the walls.

Neither of the Zhu siblings had yet moved to open them. They’d sent missives to Ren Nidan and their other two siblings, but so far, both the eldest and their father happened to be too busy to join in on the ‘fun.’

As it was, the two of them were drinking tea, saying nothing, and staring at various spots like they either held the secrets of the universe or had killed their dog. Technically, they could start investigating before everyone else arrived, but they both seemed content to delay the inevitable.

Chu Ran wasn’t being pushy, either. He drank tea and zoned out, basking in the temporary quiet.

Soon, however, a disciple dropped by to inform them that Zhu Junhe was also unable to make it.

Figured. There was no more reason to delay, then.

With a sigh, Zhu Li pushed up to his feet. “Let’s get this over with.”

The heavy trunk with all the papers was set to one side for the seeing people to read through. The contents of the others, however, came as a bit of a shock.

The lightest one was literally packed to the brim with brown-and-scarlet uniforms—they practically exploded out of the trunk once the seal was broken. The other two were filled with what could only be described as a mishmosh of personal effects, from musical instruments to calligraphic materials to bedsheets, of all things.

“My, my, how auspicious,” Chu Ran tittered. “This, at least, is something I’m able to help with. A full inventory is in order, before anything else…”

Mumbling to himself all the while, he shooed them both away from the physical items and over to the atrociously large pile of papers in the trunk.

Zhu Canxi stared at it in apprehension. “Why is there so much?” she mumbled, mostly to herself.

“No idea,” Zhu Li said. He made the first move, grabbing a disordered stack of papers—some felt like books, actually—and returning to the long table. “Let’s get this over with. Share if you find anything weird.”

For a full half-shichen, there was nothing but the sound of papers shuffling, objects being moved around, and the occasional piece of conversation. Halfway through the stack of papers, though, Zhu Li noticed a disquieting pattern.

The papers could be divided up into three basic categories: letters, picture scrolls, and book manuscripts.

The scrolls weren’t limited to marriage ones, but all of them depicted the same man. They were otherwise uninteresting.

The book manuscripts were many, contributing to about eighty-percent of the trunk’s bulk. From the way this day had been going, it would have been reasonable to assume that the books were of a dark subject matter or something, but they were nothing of the sort. The exact opposite, in fact—and that subversion made them all the more upsetting.

These were just… stories.

Some were about love, some adventures, some mysticalities, some contemporaries. Some were short, and others were novels. While there wasn’t exactly time to read them in-depth right now, they seemed to be generally happy stories.

All of them were in the same handwriting. All of them had been written by Zhu Sun. There were so many stories, this collection had to be his life’s work.

And it’d been buried away so no one could read it.

Why?

The letters didn’t give much enlightenment on the matter. Their contents came in four different variants.

‘Your latest work was a delight. Could I suggest that you add some more scenes with Duke Hu? In my opinion, he’s an underrated character…’

There were a lot of lengthy, dry messages like this from people assumed to be Zhu Sun’s friends—who else would he have sent his manuscripts to? They never spoke of anything pressing.

‘Sweetheart, must you be sent off to fight yao so often? That’s what the elders are for. I know you do a good job with it, but I can’t help but worry something will happen to you. I know you can do little about it, so I won’t lecture you further. I just wish we had more time together, and…’

Such love letters all came from someone named Ruan Yinglao, who was explicitly confirmed to have been Zhu Sun’s fiancee. Reading them felt, uh… invasive. Yeah, that summed it nicely.

In this one letter, she was also right. While rare exceptions did exist, older members of the sect were pretty much always sent out to fight yao over younger generations. Good cultivators only grew stronger with age, so it made sense to send them out over their weaker and less experienced brethren.

It also seemed like this wasn’t a voluntary act on Zhu Sun’s part. Weird.

‘Ah-Sun, I’m going to stay with the second Zhu branch for a half-month. Last night was too much. I’ll bring something back for you.’

These types of letters were all from Zhu Longmai. Despite their brevity, an odd sense of care wafted off of them; she would often speak of getting things for him or doing things for him, and in her letters, it was basically confirmed that Zhu Sun was supposed to have taken over as Sect Head. They’d clearly been close.

Reading between the very few lines, home life had not been good to her; although she never mentioned a hint of her mother at any point, it didn’t take a genius to see why. She’d often go off to other parts of the sect for days, even months at a time.

A common destination was the other Zhu branches, something that struck Zhu Li as odd; he struggled to describe anyone as his mother’s friend, yet she had been close enough to people to stay at their homes? She used to go over to those homes instead of stay in the Estate all day? That didn’t sound like her at all.

Then again, he barely knew his mother to begin with, didn’t he?

Regardless, the oddest category of letter by far was the letters from Zhu Sun himself.

Somehow, letters the man had sent out himself were mixed up with those he’d kept. There was no chance of them simply being unsent, either, because the conversation threads lined up with other letters. In response to Zhu Longmai saying that she was going to go on her own yao hunts, he’d rather passionately told her not to. When Ruan Yinglao had said that she wanted to move their wedding date up, he’d regretfully told her that there was nothing to be done about that. If his friends had offered critiques, he would comment directly on them. He was polite and personable in all of them.

And they offered exactly zero incriminating or helpful details within them.

Personal letters rarely held anything confidential, unfortunately, so this was hardly a surprise, just a disappointment. It would be great if any of them held substance beyond the banalities of day-to-day life, but they weren’t so lucky to have such clues fall into their lap.

What else was new.

“Ah, phew. I’m done over here,” Chu Ran called to them. He wiped excess sweat off of his brow, clearly proud of his work.

Zhu Canxi rubbed her eyes with the heel of her palm. “Good. I’m tired of reading this stuff; it’s bringing my mood down.”

Zhu Li silently agreed, standing up to come over to Chu Ran’s side.

On the left end of the table was a fully organized spread of what had been in the trunks. Everything was in its own designated pile: uniforms, jade pendants, writing tools, musical instruments, random rocks, actual books, what looked like old childhood toys, sheets, symbolic figurines of brass, and random decorations.

“Oh… this is kind of just as depressing,” Canxi thought out loud, very much disappointed.

Again, Zhu Li agreed. Looking at this stuff made him feel weirdly morose.

“Isn’t it?” Chu Ran said lightly. His fingers ran over the bedsheets. “A whole man’s life, meant to be forgotten under the dirt, now laid out for us to go over. What have you two found on your end?”

Zhu Li recounted their collective findings, which earned an inquisitive hum. “A fiancee… a list of everyone mentioned should be compiled and looked into. You said that there were also messages from this Zhu Sun?”

After receiving a nod, Chu Ran’s eyes narrowed. “I believe at least some of the items on this table might not be his, then.”

“Huh? Which ones, then?” Zhu Canxi asked. Her eyes went over the many items, brows furrowed.

“It’s hard to say. However, the presence of letters and marriage scrolls that clearly belonged to others suggests that everything related to Zhu Sun was deliberately gathered up, even the gifts he might have given to others. As I recall, an Emperor past once successfully erased almost all mention of his own brother by collecting every single accurate depiction of him and burning them. It wasn’t entirely successful due to undiscovered personal records of nobles. Perhaps dear Madam Meng had the same idea, just not the time or means to burn them—albeit, the official records were a resounding success of hers.”

“She was trying to complete erase him? That’s…”

Evil, she didn’t say. It was just evil.

Nothing they’d found indicated that he’d remotely deserved such a fate, which begged the ultimate question: Why?

What was Meng Ruoxue’s problem, and why had she done this? What could be gained from burying a dead man away?

“Indeed,” Chu Ran answered. “I regret to say that what I found has been nearly useless, in terms of what we’re looking for. The only really odd thing was that I found rocks in several of the uniforms’ pockets; is that a custom in your sect? Rocks for good fortune, or some such?”

“No,” Zhu Li said. He eyed the pile of rocks, but didn’t see anything unusual about them aside from some luster or unique patterns. “Maybe he just liked collecting rocks.”

“Ah, that makes as much sense as anything else. Regardless, it’s not too relevant. Could either of you look at the books and these jade pendants? I felt what I believe is writing on the stone, but it’s too ambiguous for me to make it out.”

Zhu Li exchanged a look with his sister. She nodded, moving to the books, and he took up the pendants.

There were seven ring-shaped pendants in total. The first one he picked up was black blue-green jade had Zhu Sun’s name on it, which all but confirmed that he genuinely had no Dao name, which was still freaky to think about. As was the whole ‘dead man looks way too much like me, what the hell’ thing. As was the creeping idea that his mother’s treatment of him might have been born from that very similarity.

No, no. He could have silent mental breakdown about that later. Right now, he needed to focus.

The name pendant was set aside. The next eye-catching one—white jade in the form of Mandarin ducks touching beaks—held the inscription of a poem on the back: My heart is cast to a shore opposite, basking in the jadeite tree’s shade.

A lover’s gift. Adorable, but not helpful.

The next one that drew his eyes was made of cow’s blood jade and in the form of two pixiu, an eternal knot hanging off of its bottom. When he flipped it over, he saw an unexpected name: Zhu Ya.

Shit. Chu Ran had been right—some of this stuff wasn’t Zhu Sun’s.

Had Zhu Longmai willingly given this up, or had it been coerced from her somehow?

Zhu Li stared at the complex annulus. It was high-quality, with red-dyed silk making up its threads. Had this been a gift for her?

He wavered. Putting it back into the pile didn’t seem right. He did have plans to lock this hall up and ban anyone from entering until this mystery was solved, but…

The pendant was quietly tucked away into his sleeve.

The remaining four held nothing of value. According to his sister, the books didn’t, either.

Great.

“All this, and there’s barely anything here?” Zhu Canxi mumbled. “That’s so discouraging. Not even the letters say much.”

“It is disappointing that people are woefully unlikely to dump every single aspect of their existence into permanent form, but this is often how things go,” Chu Ran said. “Since I’m out of things to do, how about I run that list of potential friends over to Archivist Bao while you all continue to research? We may get something out of that, if nothing else.”

“Sure. I’ll make it,” Zhu Li said.

One list later, and Chu Ran was out of the door. Zhu Li and his sister were left behind.

“Well, let’s get this over with,” she said as she moved back to take her seat, sighing.

“You don’t have to suffer through this if you don’t want to,” he said, taking his own seat across the table. “You’ve helped a lot today.”

Though I’m not sure why you did, he mentally tacked on. Whether she’d been here or not, the process would have been the same, if a little longer.

However, she pursed her lips at the comment and glared at the papers in front of her. “I’m fine with suffering through it. I just… want to know.”

“Why?”

Her gaze raised up to meet his. Evident difficulty was etched deep into her eyes while she debated what to say.

She finally settled on, “Mom wasn’t that nice to me, either.”

That gave him pause.

She wasn’t wrong. He’d long noticed that their mother had been noticeably colder to Zhu Canxi than the rest of them. There was no nastiness involved, from what he could tell, but an overwhelming indifference.

Although he felt like he was on the verge of a breakthrough, the reason Zhu Longmai had been cold to her youngest child was still shrouded in mystery. As far as he could tell, she didn’t have a lookalike to be the possible catalyst for it.

“I can… try to ask her about it,” he offered. It was all he could offer, honestly.

Zhu Canxi snorted derisively. “I’ll ask our ancestors to give you luck.”

She didn’t say anything more, but it felt weird to leave it at that. “Did you want to talk about it?” he asked cautiously.

A sigh. “No.”

“…Alright.”

No one could say he hadn’t tried.

The letters were read through soon enough. No other clues made themselves known.

Zhu Canxi placed the last of the stationery back into the trunk with a heavy sigh. “That wasn’t as enlightening as I thought it’d be,” she grumbled.

“At least you don’t have a double,” he commented. Chu Ran wasn’t back yet for some reason, so he was preparing to lock up behind her and head for Zhu Wuji’s place.

“I guess there’s that.” She stood up with a pat on the trunk, then left the hall, throwing over her shoulder, “I’ll be leaving first, gege. And, seriously, be careful with that poison you have.”

He tied the door shut with ‘keep out’ ropes. They weren’t inscribed or anything, they were just symbolic. “I know.”

Maybe he should secretly dump the poison somewhere. It was terrible manners to throw away gifts, but that protocol could probably be overlooked when said gift could kill.

Travel to Zhu Wuji’s courtyard was uneventful. When he knocked on the front gate, Bao Chishan came to open it. “Ah, hello, brother-in-law,” the man greeted, beaming at him. “Your beau is inside. Do come in.”

That caught Zhu Li so off-guard, he coughed. And then had had to clear his throat to cover it up. “Right,” he very simply answered.

Chu Ran was seated at the front room’s chestnut table, a tea set arranged before him. He was rather peacefully sipping on it, huddled beneath his fur coat.

“Ah, finished already, Doctor?” he asked, a smile curving his eyes. “The Archivist here was going through his genealogy ledger. As it comes to be, when people are not expunged from existence, finding their records is quite a bit easier.”

“I did look through this same ledger for one Zhu Sun, but I didn’t find any,” Bao Chishan added as he and Zhu Li both took their seats, “which is concerning in and of itself. I’ll have to notify the new archivists that the records have been tampered with; it could reveal other flaws in the records that need fixed. I can’t believe someone would do this…”

Shaking his head, he passed the list Zhu Li had made right back to him. “I’m on the final name. I have to say that the track record of the people you’re looking for isn’t too good.”

Zhu Li furrowed his brows at his statement, then looked down at the page.

Wen Gunran: Exiled for embezzlement.

Yan Rentan: Deposed from Elder position and banned from high-ranking positions for misappropriation of funds. Eventually exiled for further embezzlement charges.

Zhao Fangrui: Exiled for conspiracy.

Qiu Hanzhen: Exiled for conspiracy.

Ping Andun: Exiled for conspiracy…

The list went on and on like that. All of Zhu Sun’s friends—Zhu Longmai excluded, obviously—had been exiled, or at best deposed and forced to live in shame until exiled for something else or their untimely death via yao attack. Most of them had been charged with conspiracy or embezzlement.

There was no way this was a coincidence. However, the real question was: Had these charges been justified, or exaggerated and fabricated?

Then, when he got to a certain name on the list, his breath stopped in his throat.

Ruan Yinglao: Exiled for conspiracy, lethal spousal neglect.

“Lethal spousal neglect?” he repeated.

“It’s a bizarre charge,” Bao Chishan answered. “I’ve personally never seen it before. Without context, I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean.”

Right. Cultivators couldn’t kill cultivators without due cause, nor could they get away with deliberate sabotage that led to death, nor could they order death by proxy; the Dao was standoffish, not stupid. It couldn’t be fooled. If Ruan Yinglao had tried to do something to Zhu Sun, she would have been too dead to be exiled.

And, if Zhu Sun had been murdered, the victim shouldn’t have been the one to be erased from existence.

This had to be a lie. It wasn’t even a very convincing one.

Zhu Li automatically looked to Chu Ran.

“‘Conspiracy’ is quite the loaded term,” the man helpfully supplied, his smile peeking over the rim of his cup. “Those who rule decide both what it constitutes and who can commit it. Its subjective definitions run from ‘someone who wishes to sow public discord’ to ‘someone who dares to criticize the nobility.’ But what if those nobles deserve the criticism and the chaos and the usurping of their ill-held titles? Well, then they try to stomp out the dissenters all the harder. It’s how things go.

“As for the embezzlement, it’s one of the easier things to prosecute. Simply plant some money in someone’s home or catch them in a financial mistake, and it can be blown out of proportion until a punishment is viewed as deserved. You know, I’ve always believed that civilian society cares far too much about material goods; they have harsher punishments for stealing from those that already have too much than they do for nobles committing murder. Ah, but I’m not saying anything new… although it is quite odd that such priorities are in a cultivation sect.”

They were values more in line with someone that had grown up in civilian society—and for that reason, they had probably come from the lone outsider.

Meng Ruoxue had gotten rid of anyone associated with Zhu Sun. Why?

“Ah, another exile for embezzlement,” Bao Chishan said. He closed his ledger with a thump. “I’m sorry, you two. None of these people are still in the sect.”

And if they weren’t, there would be no delving into the truth anytime soon.

A dreaded dead end.

Zhu Li’s stomach clenched. After all of this, they’d run out of threads to chase?

Chu Ran sighed. “That’s quite the conundrum. With this, we seem to be out of leads… perhaps we can get more information out of Ling…”

While he mumbled to himself, thoughts whizzed past in Zhu Li’s head, his eyes trained on the table in front of him. He was quickly sorting through everything they’d learned today. There had to be something they’d missed, something they could use…

And then, he grasped onto something and said it aloud.

“The painter?”

“Oh? What painter?” Chu Ran asked, his lips quirked into a small frown.

“The one who painted all of the marriage scrolls. Zhu Chenfeng.”

“Zhu Chenfeng? Really?” Bao Chishan asked, brows aloft in astonishment.

“You know her?”

“Not personally. How old are the paintings you have, though? She hasn’t taken up the brush in two decades.”

Zhu Li sat up straighter. “They’re even older. Where does she live?”

“On the clear other end of the sect. I don’t know the exact address, but that Estate holds the oldest and biggest ancestral shrine. It’s difficult to miss.”

A new thread came into view.

Zhu Li looked over at Chu Ran. The man smiled deviously, then nodded.

“How fortunate, Doctor,” he said in a breezy tone. “It seems that a little trip is in order for us.”

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The author says: “these letters don’t make any sense because my mom doesn’t have any friends,” said zhu li
(i don’t know if I said this before—i probably didn’t because birdbrain(tm)—but I switched mention of “cultivational” names to “Dao” names for brevity’s sake. why have five syllable when one do trick)

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