Bloodline of the Forgotten Emperor

There wasn't time to think, which was probably the only reason I moved at all.

Long Jing was already falling by the time I reached the crack, the stone beneath her giving way in slow, grinding pieces, and two of the others — Long Min and a Fang I hadn't caught the name of yet — were going down with her, arms flailing for handholds that weren't there anymore. Nine thousand steps of dead god's spine, and it had picked exactly this moment, exactly this pressure threshold, to remind everyone climbing it that it had killed people before.

*System, whatever you've got, now would be good.*

*Bloodline response available. Untested. Side effects: unknown. Recommend—*

*Not helpful.*

I didn't remember deciding to jump. One second I was three steps back, calculating angles the way you calculate whether you can still catch a falling glass before it hits the floor, and the next I was in the air over the widening gap, and something under my skin had already made the decision for me.

The furnace that had been simmering since I woke up in this body didn't so much wake up as detonate. Heat rolled down both arms in a way that should have hurt and didn't, and where my hand closed around Long Jing's wrist, the air itself seemed to thicken, slow, give me half a second more than physics should have allowed.

I caught her. My other hand found Long Min's collar an instant later, more luck than skill, and the third Fang — Long Rin, I'd learn later — grabbed onto my ankle with the kind of desperate grip that told me exactly how close *not funny* this had all been.

We hit the intact stone below the break together, hard enough to knock the air out of all four of us, and for a moment nobody said anything at all. Long Jing was staring at my hand, still locked around her wrist, like she wasn't entirely sure it belonged to a person.

"You're bleeding," she said, which was such a strange first thing to say that it took me a second to realize she meant me, not herself.

I looked down. My knuckles had split open somewhere in the catch, dark blood welling up and running into faint gold lines beneath the skin that hadn't been there this morning — hadn't been there an hour ago, if I was being honest, hadn't been there for two years if Zaitian's own memories were worth anything.

*That's new,* I thought at the System, keeping my face as unbothered as I could manage.

*That's the bloodline,* the System said, and for once it didn't sound like it was enjoying itself. *Congratulations, Host. You just used something you weren't cleared to use yet.*

*Is that a problem?*

*Depends how many people saw.*

I already knew the answer before I looked up. Long Wei and Long Shen had both stopped climbing, turned back toward the commotion, and were staring down at the four of us with expressions that had nothing to do with concern and everything to do with recalculation — the same look Xuanyuan Xue had worn in the ceremony hall, except this time there was no room in the story for me to talk my way past it. Gold hadn't run under anyone's skin in this clan for longer than most of them had been alive.

"Zaitian." Long Shen's voice carried down without effort, flat, careful. "Your hands."

I closed them, too late for it to mean anything, and said the only thing I had. "Later."

Nobody argued. That, more than anything else, told me how badly I'd just given something away.

---

We didn't finish the climb that day. The Patriarch's own attendants arrived within the hour — word traveled fast when three heirs nearly died on a rite that hadn't claimed anyone in over a decade — and I found myself sitting in a private chamber that evening with my split knuckles wrapped in something that smelled like crushed pine and old copper, waiting for a summons I already knew was coming.

*You should know,* the System said, breaking a silence I'd been grateful for, *that gold-veined blood hasn't manifested in this bloodline in four generations. There's a very good chance whoever sees it next is going to have questions you don't have answers for yet.*

*I have a few questions myself. Starting with why that step cracked at all. That Spine has stood for hundreds of thousands of years — long enough that half the clan probably assumes it's always been there and always will be. It doesn't just fail. Not on its own. Not today, of all days, with three heirs standing on exactly the wrong step.*

*You're closer to right than you know,* the System said, quieter than I expected. *That Spine isn't the original. It's a prototype — old, yes, old enough to matter, but the true Spine sits sealed in the clan's forbidden grounds, and only a handful of people living even know that much. Whatever failed today wasn't ancient in the way everyone assumes. Which makes it stranger, not less, that it chose this moment to fail.*

*So either a few-hundred-thousand-year-old prototype spontaneously developed a structural flaw at the exact moment three heirs happened to be standing on it,* I thought, *or somebody wanted exactly this to happen, and knew enough about this clan's own secrets to make it look like an accident.*

*Noted,* the System said, and didn't argue the point, which told me it had already thought of the same thing and hadn't liked the shape of it either.

*Wonderful. A rigged prototype and a bloodline you can't fully explain, on the same day. I don't love how well those two things pair together.*

*Neither do I,* the System admitted. *For what it's worth — my access to the specifics of your bloodline is also restricted. Something to do with a clause in my activation contract I wasn't given the details of.*

*You're telling me there are things even you don't know.*

*I'm telling you,* the System said, *that whatever woke up under your skin on that mountain wasn't fully mine to explain, and neither was whatever cracked underneath your feet. Congratulations, again, for whatever that's worth.*

Before I could push further, the door opened without a knock — the specific rudeness of someone who outranked knocking — and Elder Long Xingchen stepped through it, small and grandmotherly and entirely unbothered by the two elders trailing a respectful distance behind her.

She looked at my bandaged hands the way you'd look at a letter you'd been expecting for a very long time.

"So," she said. "It's finally awakened."

*Excuse me — Ma, what exactly do you mean by 'finally'?* I thought, keeping my face carefully blank. *Because that word is doing a lot of work, and I don't love the sound of it. Feels like I should start preparing myself to be studied like a lab specimen.*

I said none of that out loud. I only said, "Awakened," and let the word sit there, waiting to see how much she'd give me before I had to ask for it directly.