Leng Xuan’s Story

I am Leng Xuan, and in the frost patterns on my left hand lies the curse of the Split-Sky Cauldron.

When I was dragged into Chiyan Fort on iron chains at the age of six, the moment the Red Scale Blood Pact burned itself into my spine, Su Lixue was using her ice ribbon to strangle a covert guard to death. The sight of blood beads splashing on her eyelashes was exactly like the scarlet ice crystals that had formed on the walls of Bingyuan City three hundred years later when Chu Liyue thrust the Heart-Burning Curse into my chest.

“Hostages are meant to learn how to live on their knees.” On the night the young master of Chiyan Fort tore open my clothes, the ice patterns suddenly began to burn. The core of the cauldron trembled in the seams of my bones, and the black tortoise, carrying nine lifetimes’ worth of memories, crashed through the walls of Bingyuan City. Only then did I realize that Su Lixue had frozen not only time — hidden within her Ice Heart Technique were remnants of the ancient Canglan laws, while within Chu Liyue’s Red Flame illusion burned the spark of civilization from before the Burning-Book Calamity.

When the black tortoise spat out purified ice crystals in the sea of sand, I discovered that I was carving law itself into a new set of shackles. Power stabbed through my palm like an ice spike, and the Split-Sky Cauldron whispered in my ear, “Use absolute control to end the chaos of the age.” Until that day, when Chu Liyue burned through my crown with the Heart-Burning Curse and Su Lixue wrapped her ice ribbon around her own neck: “Leng Xuan, the look in your eyes when you suppress a tyrant is exactly the same as the abusers in the dungeon of Chiyan Fort back then.”

At the moment the cauldron’s core shattered, I saw three hundred cycles of moons shining upon the Canglan Code. When the last two clusters of ice flame entered their brows, I smiled and crushed my own emperor’s bones — Lixue’s ice veins turned into golden legal patterns in the code, and Liyue’s fire seed burned into the sound of a bell of freedom. Now my tombstone lies soaked in dawn, and the inscription, written by the two of them in entwined ice and fire, reads:

“Here lies one who once made the crown the final burial offering of the Canglan Continent.”