Chapter 1

I guarded the River of Oblivion for thirty thousand years, and at last my daughter's soul came to me.

She was dressed as a married woman, her eyes hollow and empty, shuffling forward a step at a time as if she could not see.

Blood ran down her back, and her tail feathers were gone without a trace.

My breath caught. I turned the Mirror of Reincarnation and saw the last thing she had seen before she died.

A man with a fine, handsome face tore her tail feathers out of her while she still lived, and pinned them into another woman's hair.

He looked down at her, disgust filling his face.

"In three days it is Julie's birthday. I only borrowed your feathers to dress her up. Who is this dying act of yours for?"

"That Julie thought your feathers worth wearing is a blessing they don't deserve. Get up now and go back to your room and reflect on yourself!"

"Oh, and one more thing. Every immortal lord across the Four Seas and Eight Realms will be at the birthday banquet. If you've nothing to do, don't come out and embarrass me."

Tail feathers are the mark of my Crimson Phoenix bloodline.

The year I left, I tore out my own tail feathers with my own hands.

Enduring a pain that bored down to the bone and ate at the marrow, I refined them into the most radiant feathers in all the world and gave them to my daughter.

How many lives did they think they had, to lay their hands on something that belonged to the Demon God?

1

Watching my daughter's hollow, sightless face, my heart felt as though a blade had cut it open.

I could not stop myself. I flew forward.

I wanted to gather her into my arms and love her the way she deserved, to hear every wrong she had swallowed over the years, but Zelda Butler seized me and held me fast.

"Have you lost your mind? She has already crossed the River of Oblivion. Everything from her past life is scattered to nothing. If you go to her now, you'll cost her her place in the cycle of rebirth!"

"I know how much you love her. Why else would you have agreed to the Emperor's terms and shut yourself willingly in this wretched place for thirty thousand years?"

The year I left, she was only three days old.

Because I carried the power of the Demon God, and only the malevolent energy of the River of Oblivion could hold it down.

So the Emperor used Ellie's life to force my hand, making me guard the River of Oblivion and seal the Demon God's power.

In exchange, he swore on his own life that he would make my daughter the most carefree woman in all the Four Seas and Eight Realms.

Day after day at the River of Oblivion I gave myself to my cultivation, thinking only of sealing the Demon God sooner, so I could be reunited with her sooner.

But I never dreamed that before I ever heard her call me Mother, she would already be a lonely, wandering ghost at the River of Oblivion.

The year she turned eight hundred and came of age, I once broke the seal and went in secret to look at her.

Back then her face was soft and innocent, and her round eyes were brighter than the stars of the galaxy.

At her coming-of-age rite she only had to cut her finger for a drop of blood, and even that left her eyes brimming with tears, sniffling for a long, long time.

I would go and ask them, ask them exactly what monstrous crime Ellie had committed.

To tear her tail feathers out of her while she lived, to make the girl who feared pain most of all die in agony!

And more than that, to weep her eyes blind while she still breathed.

I dared not imagine how much cruelty her short life had held.

My heart felt as though it were being crushed in a fist, the pain choking the breath out of me. I raised the Phoenixwood Sword and struck at the barrier.

Zelda cried out in panic.

"Stop! In ten more years the Demon God's power can be fully separated from you, and you can win back your freedom. Leave now and thirty thousand years of endurance are thrown away for nothing!"

"And besides… if the Demon God's power comes back into the world, the whole of the Four Seas and Eight Realms will be dragged down with it! Will you truly abandon every living soul?"

The corner of my mouth curved up, and in my eyes was a madness that could ruin heaven and earth.

"For the sake of every living soul, I made my body the vessel, I carried the power of the Demon God, I was forced apart from my own daughter. I gave up all of that, and this is how they repaid me?"

"My only daughter, the child I labored ten days and ten nights in agony to lay as an egg, the precious daughter I tended for ten years until she hatched!"

"She's gone. So what is it to me whether the Four Seas and Eight Realms live or die?"

I wanted nothing more than to make the Eight Realms follow her into the grave.