The snow never melted atop Mount Jueyan. Not even during the Fire Moon, when twin suns scorched the eastern skies. It was said that long ago, a tyrant had cursed the peak with his dying breath, freezing its heart for ten thousand years.
Yue Lian didn't believe in curses. She believed in bones, in relics, and in the silent truths etched by time. As she stood near the jagged mouth of a collapsed cavern halfway up the mountain, her breath fogging in the frigid air, she knew she was standing on the edge of a forbidden history.
The tomb had called to her in dreams—whispers through jade slips, fragments of prophecy buried in old texts, and the inexplicable pull of intuition. A forgotten name echoed across her spirit sea for months: Yan Zhuo.
The Crimson Tyrant. The Flame Butcher. The Devil of Yue.
Every tale she'd ever heard painted him in the same shade—red with rage, crimson with cruelty. But legends were often written by the victors. And Yue Lian was tired of reading lies.
Behind her, her spirit beast Shuang—an ice-furred qilin with glassy blue eyes—gave a low growl. The mouth of the cavern pulsed with a faint red glow, almost imperceptible beneath the frost. Array wards still flickered like dying fireflies, remnants of ancient seal scripts far beyond anything modern sects could produce.
"This is it," Yue Lian whispered, placing a gloved hand on the rock. "The Tomb of Crimson Silence."
She activated her Qi Vision. Instantly, the world shifted. The snow became a map of residual spirit energy. The wards—each one containing symbols that hadn't been spoken aloud in over a millennium—glowed with the defiant hum of a cultivator who had refused to be forgotten.
She placed the silver talisman given to her by her master—a former artifact appraiser from the fallen Gu Clan—into the center of the seal ring.
A deep groan echoed through the mountain. Snow fell in sheets. The entrance cracked open like a yawning maw.
Yue Lian took a breath. "If I die, let it be for the truth."
She stepped into the darkness.
The tomb was a paradox.
Instead of a grand mausoleum for a tyrant, she found a narrow corridor lined with scriptures—not of dominance or bloodshed, but of cultivation techniques focused on protection, energy diffusion, and warding.
There were no statues of himself, no golden relics. Just jade slips, laid carefully in rows, each etched with a name.
Hundreds, she thought, fingertips tracing one of the slips. "These are… names of civilians."
A crackling sound drew her attention. One of the jade slips pulsed with crimson light. Yue Lian held her breath as it lifted into the air.
A voice spilled out—deep, exhausted, but not cruel.
"I don't expect forgiveness. I only hoped one day someone would listen. If you have found this place… then perhaps my death was not in vain."
The voice of Yan Zhuo.
Yue Lian fell to her knees, stunned. The voice wasn't monstrous. It wasn't the rasp of a tyrant. It was the voice of a man who had lost everything.
Shuang pressed its muzzle to her side, sensing her trembling.
"Maybe you were never a villain," she whispered.
The jade slip fell into her palm. One of many. And with it came a memory—not hers, but his. A burning village. Screaming children. And a cultivator in blood-red robes, hurling himself into the fire—not to kill, but to carry them out.
Outside, the blizzard howled as though the heavens themselves were weeping.
And Yue Lian realized: this tomb wasn't a prison. It was a confession.