Rain were sharp blades stinging his skin as he tore through the mud-slicked road. His heart pounded against his chest, flooding his brain with blood enough to make his vision sharp and his head light. The day started out so well. How come it got to this?

Did he doom someone just by making a slip of the tongue?

Earlier this morning, after concealing the fact that he had just dreamed of Han-Xi's blood-stricken face widening into a manic smile and tearing him to shreds, Jin-Fei sat with the golden-haired man while he brought tea to where Jin-Fei slept. It's the same thing every day, and it's the same conversation over and over.

He should have been clued in at how different this day just from their interaction a few hours ago. The sky outside had dimmed into a depressing gray, reflecting the glum mood he had woken up in. When he looked out of the window, it's safe to say he felt more bad for stepping out of his unhealthily gory dreams.

A headache pulsed at the base of his neck but he ignored it. Today, he promised himself, he'd try and engage Han-Xi when the man tries to make conversation. After seeing him last night with a murderous look in his face, Jin-Fei figured he'd better play it nice, or his blood might decorate the man next.

So, he figured he'd shake things up today. "How's my family?" he asked, despite the images threatening to weaken him coming up at the back of his mind. He clenched his jaw and tamped them deep, deep down. "I hope you haven't forgotten your oath."

If Han-Xi was offended by that, he didn't show it. He took a small sip from his still-steaming cup. "They're on their way to become a ruling clan," he replied without missing a beat. "I've guided them into useful allies, lucrative industries to dabble in, and taught your youngest sister how to play the damga-hye. That should make her pleasing to the eyes of any powerful clan. Which do you prefer? The Xianzhu or the Wonzaki clan? I'm sure I can pull some strings within their ranks."

"What are you?" Jin-Fei knitted his eyebrows. Not anyone could talk about messing with these clans who had the might and the will to trample over someone who slanders them as casually and confidently as Han-Xi. He couldn't be a merchant as he claimed to be. Was he the Emperor? If so, how in Shaoryeong's rear did he have the time or the interest in a nobody such as Jin-Fei and his ordinary family? That day by the poind, when a crane transformed into a man with yellow hair, why would he promise to make Jin-Fei and his family the greatest in Xuijae?

And was he that blinded by his ambition and desire for the best things for his family he hadn't foreseen this confounding situation he's going to end up in? Because no matter how he turned it around his head, there was no way what Han-Xi was saying corresponded to what was happening. He might be keeping his other half of the oath but everything ended there. It scared Jin-Fei to admit that for the sake of a temporary benefit, he might have thrown something more important—his freedom.

What's worse was that he had no idea how to get out or escape. After seeing Han-Xi last night, it became clear Jin-Fei would never had the chance.

That's why he felt the need to ask. Because if he's going to plot something behind Han-Xi's back, might as well know everything he could about his enemy. Because there was no way Jin-Fei would want to stay another day with a person who could walk around the house trailing blood and acting like nothing happened the next morning. Han-Xi wasn't someone he would love. Ever.

Han-Xi's eyes studied him all that time, his brain no doubt working out what was going on in Jin-Fei's. Then, when he reached his conclusion, he crossed his arms and slouched, his shoulders slumping. "I'm someone with a deeper understanding of how mortals govern and uphold their culture," he said. "It wasn't because I'm some powerful, omniscient being. I just use my knowledge and connections to my advantage, and now that you've agreed to be with me, your advantage too."

"We're a team, Jin," Han-Xi continued. "I'll always be for you and with you."

Jin-Fei leveled his gaze at Han-Xi. His nightmares and memories flashed in and out of his mind, but he got around them and forced himself to focus on this moment. "Then, whose blood is that?" he asked. "Where did you go yesterday?"

Han-Xi's features hardened, as if the steam from his tea had somehow stretched his skin until it's close to snapping. "Your tea is getting cold," he jerked his chin on the untouched cup on Jin-Fei's side of the table. "Drink up."

"Answer my question, Han-Xi," he took hold of the cup, noting how he barely flinched even when the heat still rolled over the skin of his palms. "Where were you yesterday? Did you hurt someone?"

"Tell me something, Jin," Han-Xi shifted, tucking his legs underneath him so that he sat cross-legged. "Why are you so keen on knowing where I go?"

Jin-Fei shook his head. "Because you're so adamant about where I've been," he reasoned. "Shouldn't I get the same freedom to ask you where you're going? Spirits, I tell you what I did the whole day, what sights I saw outside the window, who I've met in the forest—"

"Forest?" Han-Xi interjected.

A stark curse poked from the back of Jin-Fei's mind. It's his turn to use Han-Xi's card back at him. "My point is that I have the right to know and ask about where you're going," he said. "You won't tell me why I can't go outside but I stayed put. The least you can do as courtesy is to answer my questions. Properly."

Han-Xi shot up. As if on cue, thunder rumbled outside. "Who did you meet?" he asked.

An image hurtled to the back of Jin-Fei's eyelids. It's of a woman he met in the forest. Her head was dunked into the pool of her own blood. It was too dark to see her other injuries, but, for some reason, he knew.

She was dead.

Jin-Fei averted his eyes from Han-Xi's piercing stare. "No one," he insisted. Let him see how good he was at lying now. "I didn't step out of the house."

That's the story and he should stick by it.

"Is her name Zun-Xiao?" The question was innocent, gentle. Jin-Fei's head snapped up and found Han-Xi's triumphant gaze looming over him.

Han-Xi crossed his arms. "Thought I didn't know? Here's a secret, my dear mortal," he leaned closer, putting his face inches from Jin-Fei's, making him scramble backwards. Last night's memory of Han-Xi's dark red eyes peeled out from his memory and into real life. "I know everything in this town and about you. Do you want to know why?"

He grinned, the same manic smile Jin-Fei had seen numerous times in his nightmares. It's all coming true. He had lied. Those weren't just dreams.

They were reality.

"Because you're my world, Jin. And you will be here forever," Han-Xi chuckled. "That's what you promised, right?"

Jin-Fei's gut twisted, but he forced himself to meet Han-Xi's terrifying eyes. "Who are you?" he hissed. "What do you want from me?"

"I am Han-Xi, the Pillar of the Northern Quadrant, the Divine Sun Beast, the Amber Dragon, the Face of the Sun," he answered in a tone that could somewhere be between gloating and reminding Jin-Fei of where he stood. "And I want you. All of you."

Han-Xi stood up and strode towards the door. "Where are you going?" Jin-Fei demanded. "We're not finished talking."

At that, Han-Xi smiled. "That's right. We will have forever to talk," he said. "And I'm going to get rid of pests."

Han-Xi had left then. Jin-Fei had spent the first five minutes giving the man a headstart, chewing on his nails and pacing around his room whose walls had started closing in on him. This wasn't a huge, empty house. It was a cage without rails and with unseen curses. And he's done fearing it.

So, he took off, tackling the hazy trail through the forest. He had to find Zun-Xiao, had to know what Han-Xi had done or would have done to her. It was up to him to stop Fate in its tracks because nobody would.

That's how he found himself tripping, skidding, and scrambling down the forest trail, swerving around trees and slapping protruding branches out of the way. At some point in the journey, it had started to rain, pelting him with sharp droplets as if to mock him.

His breaths came in hitching gasps. He cursed under his breath. If not for his poor constitution, he wouldn't have had this problem now. But, then again, he had spent most of his life working in the fishing grounds. Why hasn't he fallen apart then?

The answer leaped out to him as he pivoted around a bend when he spied tufts of patched dry leaves peeking past the healthy undergrowth. It's because he wasn't Ryeon Jin-Fei. He was someone else, but...who? Why couldn't he remember?

And what did Han-Xi mean about him being inside Han-Xi's world?

His footsteps crunched against the pebbles carpeting the clearing he had just ended up in. A village. Thatched houses with flimsy bamboo stalks as pillars and walls peppered the expanse, rimming a small pit dug into the ground. Jin-Fei dashed past it, noting the ashes and the burning embers still settling at the pit's bottom. Branches bunched by woven twine sat in the pit's rim, waiting for their turn inside the fiery hell.

Jin-Fei stopped when a flash of yellow hair and metallic gray fenhai flashed in his periphery. He swiveled, coming in front of a hazy alley. Han-Xi stood with his back to the alley's entrance. On his feet...was a sea of red.

Just like in the nightmares.

Han-Xi turned, as if sensing Jin-Fei's presence. That gave Jin-Fei a better angle of what lay at the man's feet.

A woman. She fell first into the puddle of her own blood. Standing up close, Jin-Fei finally saw what was wrong. A huge gash ran down the side of her neck and blood hasn't quite finished pouring from it.

"Jin," Han-Xi breathed. It drew his attention to the man with golden hair, the one who called himself a dragon despite their nonexistence. And attached to his hand, past the blood dripping from his fingers and into the mud-stained pebbles, were claws. Curved, sharp, and deadly.

Then, an invisible force snaked around Jin-Fei. He squirmed against it, fear deeping its pit in his gut. His own limbs didn't budge. They're on their way to somewhere in his waist. His fingers closed around a hilt. They drew a knife from his belt—ones he was sure weren't there when he left the house.

What was he doing? Why couldn't he stop himself?

The knife flashed in the air, catching the faint sunlight streaming from the clouds. Zun-Xiao's corpse, whose face he couldn't even see but knew to be her nonetheless, brought back the sequence of his nightmares, all in surprising detail. They became part of his knowledge, his memories. It was them. They're all the people Han-Xi had led to their demise.

And as his hand gripped the knife tighter and began raising it to the side of his head, another image floated above all the rest. It was his face, one he didn't really recognize. The knife sailed down. He understood why he saw his own fate.

Because it's happening now.

The blade bit his skin. A blur of gold zipped in his vision. An eternal black swallowed the rest of the world.

He opened his eyes and the familiar landscape of his room greeted him. Unlike the images his nightmares showed him, this one had a continuation. This one let him see Han-Xi sitting cross-legged across him. It allowed him to study the patterns in the folding screens standing next to the mattress he lay in like a watchguard. The eyes of the cranes painted with watercolor in their parchment-like panes seemed to follow him and his every movement.

The room's ceiling of interwined planks joined in the greeting, as well as the latticed windows and doors he had come to be familiar with. The mats lining the wooden floorboards and the blanket thrown over his legs and tucked underneath his arms did nothing to warm the oncoming wave of frost in his veins.

He shifted, his arms not quite working the way they should. When he checked, he realized why. Twine bit against his wrists, tied in complicated knots which would take forever to unravel. The skin underneath it were scratched red that any movement brought a pang of pain into his skin and bones. Was he...struggling against it even in his sleep?

Also, who did this to him and why?

His answer lay right in front of him. Han-Xi stared back at him as he sipped from his steaming cup. Watching. Waiting. For what?

A force seized Jin-Fei's limbs, making them quiver and shooting newfound pain in his muscles. He was reduced to witnessing as his arms tugged against the bounds, searching for something—anything—sharp to hold. His brain played his nightmares over and over, telling him this was the norm, that this was the path he must take eventually. Nothing could hold it back.

Because it wasn't just a dream. It was Fate. If he wasn't sure then, he could vouch for it with his life now.

Han-Xi set his cup down quickly enough to drive a wave of tea past the rim. It splashed into the table as he dashed towards Jin-Fei. On his face wasn't a look of concern. Anger twisted his features as he stared down at Jin-Fei. "This isn't how it's supposed to be," he muttered under his breath. "Why wasn't it working?"

Jin-Fei opened his mouth to ask what wasn't working but Han-Xi clamped a hand on the twine. His eyes flashed white as warmth wrapped around Jin-Fei's body, starting from his scabbing wrists down to his heavy legs. When the warmth faded, the weight pressing against his side and bearing down on his mind and memories returned with a vengeance. A small whimper escaped between his lips. Nothing followed.

He felt nothing. Thought nothing. His cheek rested against the soft pillow, but even that didn't register in his senses. He was nothing.

Han-Xi ran a hand down his back. It was meant to comfort him, but it did nothing. When he didn't respond more than a flick of his hazy gaze at Han-Xi, the man blew a breath and stood up. Within seconds, he was out of the room, leaving Jin-Fei on his own.

He would be back later, to flush more warmth into Jin-Fei's system, to keep the forces at bay—the mysterious forces which seemed adamant on making him kill himself. But...what if he sought those forces instead? It's not like he wanted to continue living in this world, where nightmares of blood and the faces of the people he killed flood in every night.

Whether he liked it or not, he was the one to blame for all of this. It's because of his existence, his entanglement with the dead back when they're still living, and his oath to Han-Xi that all of this bloodshed took place. If he only stayed on his lane, if only he didn't let his ambitions blind him, if only he had ignored the man who arose from a crane's form that day—then those souls wouldn't meet him. And if they didn't meet him, they would still be alive.

They'd be safe and happy without him.

So, he focused on the knots around his wrists and, slowly, he began untangling it. The force guided him. Whatever it was, they had the same goal now. If he ended things here, would he wake up in another world, living another life, and having a different face? How would things end there for him then?

It shouldn't matter. None of it should. If he was gone, everything would be fine. Everything would be okay.

The twine fell into a harmless pile beside his pillow. He was free. As if by magic, his limbs regained their strength and they brought him up. Towards the set of drawers lining the foot of the mattress. The eyes of the cranes in the painting dug into his back but he didn't care. Nothing mattered. And nothing would begin to.

His fingers went for a specific drawer. A set of hairpins glinted gold and silver inside. They weren't entirely new. He had seen all of these before. And if he looked hard enough, he could still see flecks of dried blood in some of them.

The force made him grab the sharpest one he could find. Then, he moved to stab it deep into his throat.

Don't!

The tip paused, millimeters from his skin. That voice. He knew who it belonged to. He had known that voice to its core. But why did it feel like it belonged to another era, to another world?

Please. The voice pleaded. It made the force gripping his limbs loosen. Don't.

That's when his gaze landed on a mirror propped on the desk. He must have missed it when he was blindly groping around. But now...

The mirror reflected back a man bearing a sharp, metal stick close to his throat. But it wasn't Jin-Fei's face. It was the face he couldn't believe he forgot. And he was holding a deadly object to it, with the intent to end the light dancing in the dark eyes belonging to it.

A gasp flitted out of his lips. With great difficulty, he forced his fingers to follow and open. The hairpin made a metallic clang against the mats and the floorboards underneath them. His chest heaved and drew lungfuls of breath as he watched the hairpin roll into a stop.

He dragged his eyes back to the mirror once more. A new face stared back at him. It was someone he knew, someone the nightmares couldn't show him because his fate hasn't happened yet.

And there, a name popped into his memory. It might have been brought about by the interjecting voice, it might have been his own mind finally clicking into place, but he remembered it now. His name wasn't Jin-Fei.

Kai-Se.

His name was Najizaki Kai-Se.