The Zhao Estate was full of it.
Ancient wood creaked like whispering elders.
Curtains breathed secrets with every wind.
And behind latticed windows, the walls remembered
the weight of footsteps long since erased.
Zhao Wei walked those halls now, a child reborn in the shell of shame.
Servants bowed with stiff spines and tighter mouths.
She saw the flicker in their eyes not respect, but dismissal.
They saw her as the cursed one, born without spirit, without light, without worth.
Good.
Let them.
There was nothing more powerful than being underestimated.
At breakfast, her cousins sat in their fine robes,
embroidered with the crests of spirit beasts she could not see.
Zhao Feiyan, golden phoenix spirit, sharp tongue.
Zhao Lin, scaled tiger spirit, dull wit and duller eyes.
She watched them fight over tea cups and melon slices,
as if this table were a battlefield.
Amateurs.
"Still mute, little cousin?" Feiyan’s smile was all fangs.
"Or are you waiting for a spirit that will never come?"
Zhao Wei lowered her gaze.
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Not in submission, but calculation.
"I speak when there's something worth answering," she said softly,
voice like water slipping through fingers.
Feiyan blinked.
Lin choked on his tea.
Only the old steward at the end of the hall dared to let the corner of his lip twitch upward.
They called her spiritless.
They didn’t see the one that watched her in dreams, shrouded in smoke,
silent as snowfall, eyes like collapsing stars.
It didn’t speak.
But it waited.
Like her.
Later, Zhao Wei wandered the garden, pretending to admire the plum blossoms.
She knelt beside a koi pond, watching her reflection ripple with the breeze.
A girl stared back, small, pale, quiet.
But behind her eyes… the map of a war not yet drawn.
Two servant girls whispered beneath the eaves.
"She creeps around like a ghost," one said.
"Maybe her spirit’s just hiding," the other giggled.
"Wouldn't that be funny?"
Zhao Wei smiled.
Not the sweet kind.
The kind a fox wears before the hens realize the fence is broken.
That night, the lanterns danced again, casting shadows like spirits across the paper walls.
She sat at her desk with a brush in hand, inking poems with the same grace she once drafted troop movements.
"The plum tree sleeps beneath frost’s veil,
Roots deep, petals still.
Mock not the bud that does not bloom
It waits for winter’s kill."
She read it once.
Twice.
Then burned the page.
No need for keepsakes in this life.
Only kindling.
At midnight, a whisper stirred her from sleep.
Not a sound.
A presence.
The shadow behind her paper screen shifted and for a breathless moment,
Zhao Wei felt eyes upon her.
Not human.
Not entirely spirit either.
Something old.
Something… watching.
She sat up slowly, spine straight, heartbeat steady.
"If you’ve come to kill me," she whispered into the dark,
"you’re several lives too late."
The presence faded.
But not before a faint whisper crawled through her thoughts:
"We are not enemies… yet."
Zhao Wei lay back down, hands folded on her chest like a general in an open grave.
A smirk danced across her lips.
So.
Even the spirits were starting to notice.
Good.
Let the world sleep.
She had already begun to wake.