The house was quiet as he stared at the fallen hairpin inches from his toes. His chest heaved, his mind roiling with thoughts that weren't his. He brought his hands to his face, examining the lines they contained for the longest time. It's unbelievable how much he had forgotten.

Kai-Se. It was his name, that much he was sure of. Questions remained at the back of his head as he searched through his memories. Why was he here? Who was Han-Xi and why was Kai-Se with him inside the house?

Moreover, who was that voice who stopped the hairpin from plunging into his skin? And why did the force stop?

He closed his hands and opened them again. His nerves and bones followed his command without any hitches. Control was back. More or less. The images stopped harassing his head now that he had regained some sort of agency over them. As he staggered up, he pushed the bloody faces and puddles of blood at the deepest part of his gut. Later. There's always a best time to deal with them. Probably when he understood what was happening around him and when he's not running for his life.

His fingers twitched by his side, stopping him on his way out of the door. A feeling lingered in his limbs, telling him to snatch the hairpin from the ground and finish the deed. He squeezed his eyes shut and stepped closer towards the door. His chest tightened, causing a wince to twist his features. When he took a breath, it came off a wheeze.

Don't!—that's what the voice told him. Kai-Se couldn't remember who it belonged to, but his instincts told him they were someone who knew him. Maybe all to well. Maybe not. But the desperation and fear in their tone had done it. Whoever it was, they couldn't bear the sight of him ending everything.

Warmth bloomed in his chest, soothing the tightness in it a fraction. Perhaps, there was still someone out there who cared for him. Someone who was still looking for him despite him being...well, him. What was this warmth called? Maybe it's relief. Or something that has a name but he had no idea felt like this.

Maybe it was hope.

Whatever it was, it kept the force at bay. Kai-Se could move freely and with Han-Xi not in the house, off doing who-knows-what, there's no way Kai-Se would sit still and wait for the doors to this cage to click shut for all eternity.

He reached the door and slid it open with a yank. A sharp pang throbbed at the side of his head, throwing him against the sliding panel. His fingers gripped the jab, his knuckles turning white in an attempt to steady himself. Along with the pain came snippets of visions, showing him with another man who had a sword and a nonexistent sense of humor. It had irked Kai-Se before, but something happened and he found it endearing enough to keep making it the butt of the joke. A thick veil blurred the man's face, preventing Kai-Se from fully finding out who he was. His mind, which pulsed with remnants of headaches and stress, was of little to no help.

He stumbled out of the room, staggering towards the opposite wall of the corridor. Sweat beaded down the side of his face and he wiped it away with his tight sleeves. Memories. Those must be the memories he had as Kai-Se. The man...he must be the owner of the voice. If so...how come he could reach Kai-Se as easily as blowing into a horn?

Which lead him to the question of who was Najizaki Kai-Se and what did Han-Xi wanted with him.

His fractured memories and throbbing head offered no solace. Kai-Se pursed his lips. Jin-Fei's recent memories blared at the front of his mind. Somehow, Kai-Se could still sense Jin-Fei's presence beside his thoughts and movements. He was still there, just like Kai-Se had been. Maybe the voice had managed to bring out Kai-Se and switch the order of him and Jin-Fei's manifestation?

How in the heavens' stars was he even capable of thinking those concepts?

Kai-Se leafed through Jin-Fei's equally-problematic recollection. He settled on a brief conversation with Han-Xi after the blood-soaked visions interrupted them. The dragon had prevented Jin-Fei from going somewhere inside this house, and when asked why, didn't provide any cohesive or comprehensive answers. It wouldn't take the foolest of the fools much to realize the presence of something intriguing and useful inside a place the owner seemed adamant keeping him out of. So, that's where Kai-Se would go.

That was, if he could figure out where it was first.

Jin-Fei's internal familiarity with this place was the only thing guiding Kai-Se as he tromped deeper into the corridor and turned corners. There was no way he would be able to nagivate this place on his own. Not when he used to get lost inside the Imperial Palace grounds all the time, even as an adult. There's simply an abundance of untackled paths and darkened corners for him to remember everything.

His steps screeched to a halt when he turned a corner and three hallways bled from it. Jin-Fei's memory offered no clues about where each one led. Like Kai-Se, he hadn't been in this part of the house. He craned his neck to the ceiling, noting the flames dancing inside red lanterns nailed against the planks. The corridors' lattice walls weren't helping either. For the last two rights or more, the hallway's layout started looking the same.

Kai-Se cursed. Whatever. He'd take the middle path, spirits be damned.

His legs pumped back to action, sending him sprinting deeper north. The corridor stretched on to forever, but with it just a straight line, going back to the junction wouldn't be that hard. A door containing no paper-thin lattice for its panes appeared in the horizon, spelling the end of the hallway. Could that be...?

He was huffing when he stopped in front of the door. It wasn't much—just two planks of wood equipped with strange cranks meant to either be locks or knobs. Festoons and patterns of flowers and vines crumpled the dark brown expanse, carved either by hand or by something inconceivable, like magic.

A lump lodged deep in Kai-Se's throat. As he raised his hand towards the knob, a thousand alarm bells overtook his senses, making him unable to think of anything else other than getting far away from this door and the room beyond it.

Shivers ran down his spine. That's it. Han-Xi must have done all he could to keep Kai-Se from wandering inside should he decide to defy Han-Xi's orders. A spell, maybe. Kai-Se swallowed against the growing lump in his throat. This wasn't going to fly by now. Han-Xi was hiding something. The dragon was up to something, and Kai-Se wanted to know how he was connected to it.

The blaring in his ears heightened the more steps he took towards the door. He gritted his teeth and never brought his hand down. Closer. Go closer. Wrap the fingers around the crank and push down. Kai-Se kept the image of the man in his memory, with his muddled face and the silent words spilling out of his lips. Closer. He's closer now.

Cold zipped through his fingertips as his skin touched the door's handle. Kai-Se exhaled through the squeezes around his gut and cranked the knob down. The least he could do to the voice who saved him was to know who they were. And if there was anything who could help him, it was this room.

The ringing stopped the moment the hinges whined upon the door being freed from its lock. The silence that replaced it was nothing short of comforting. Kai-Se ducked his head inside, noting the void-like expanse bleeding out before the light from the lanterns. It's as if the outside brightness chased the darkness inside like a cornered animal.

His steps thumped in heavy footfalls the moment he shut the library's door before him. He couldn't remember if he had been in a place where there was not a sliver of light, but the black wasn't as suffocating as he had grown to believe. It's fine. Familiar, even.

His sole hit a certain spot on the floor, eliciting a booming metallic sound. Kai-Se yelped and scrambled backward. He waited for growls or angry dragon beings charging from the darkness. Instead, lights flashed to life, drowing the shadows into nothing. They stung Kai-Se's eyeballs, making him throw his arms over his eyes to nurse the stabbing pain and the dark splotches dancing in his vision.

A breath in. Out. Again.

When his arms fell back to his side, the scenery greeted him in its glory. It was a library, alright. Kai-Se trudged ahead, his soles tapping against polished marble floor. The sound was foreign in his ears since all he heard for the past few days were wooden creaks of the floorboards,

He raised his gaze up, and his jaw dropped. Thousands of sheleves lined the huge hall, each one rising so high up he couldn't even see the top even if he stood on his tip-toes. Inside each shelf were rows upon rows of books. Just endless tirades of their rectangular spines peppering the empty spaces between niches. And glinting in contrast to the brightness in the room, were curtains of dark chains dripping from the niches' rims.

Why...would someone go through hell and back just to chain books like this?

Kai-Se strode towards the nearest shelf and tugged a book out. The chains clinked. Thankfully, the covers weren't locked. Otherwise, he would be forced to resort in a method he considered unsightly. He flipped to the middle and instead of words, painted images greeted him. It was of a woman who was drawing water from the stream. It's...

He knew who she was.

The pages crinkled and rustled as Kai-Se continued leafing. The woman was depicted again and again, being stuck in the lowest rungs of society. She had a family she needed to care for and without enough to get help with the local apothecaries, she grew more and more hopeless in healing her sick mother. Kai-Se turned the next page. It's showed him a drawing of a crane.

Something clicked inside his brain. This scene...wasn't it familiar? Hadn't he seen this play out in ways more than one? He flipped to the next painting. As he guessed, the crane had transformed into a yellow-haired man. A man who looked so much like Han-Xi. And with the sight of the dragon's entitled smirk painted on some kind of enchanted paper that neither foxed or accumulated dust, another memory connected with a click.

He studied the woman's pale skin, wide eyes, thin lips, and hair flowing to the back of her knees. It couldn't be. Let him believe this woman wasn't Mei-Ran. But with more pages and paintings he saw, the more his mind flared with assurance and association at what he was seeing. This book...

It contained the record of what Xi Mei-Ran's life had become.

He passed by images of Han-Xi moving around and meeting men in colored robes meant only for nobles. Some, the dragon killed, others, he let go. What was Han-Xi doing? The pages started thinning when he came across a painting of Mei-Ran standing underneath a parasol, staring up at a man who had the kindest smile.

A few more pages forward, Han-Xi was seen driving an empire's king insane and used it as a reason to start a war he had been meticulously building a few pages before. The man with the parasol had donned armor and fought on the front lines, where he was eventually killed. Mei-Ran had spent most of her life wasting away back in her cottage beside the stream. Han-Xi would visit, but she was too consumed by grief that she shunned him. Completely.

The book ended with Mei-Ran passing in her sleep, a golden hairpin enclosed in her delicate fingers.

Kai-Se's eyebrows. That wasn't how he remembered it ended. What about the next life? Cui-San? He scrambled deeper into the room and grabbed a random book. When he flipped it open, it detailed a life of a bug. What in the world? He snatched another. A child who didn't live past six.

Another. Cui-San's face popped into view. It was leagues grander than the sketches he had seen made by the scholars. A budding poetess in a world cruel to uneducated people, especially women. She met Han-Xi and formed a pact to get him to help her gain notoreity in the literature sphere. Then, she enounctered a server in her favorite tea shop. A couple of pages down, the neighboring clan invaded the empire, slaughtering a ton of people, the server included. Cui-San retreated into a house, writing her poems until the day she keeled over and the townsfolk discovered her corpse through the stench.

She never did seek out her benefactor, as the scholarly accounts of her life went, and it chilled Kai-Se to the bone to find it had been Han-Xi all along.

How many people had Han-Xi touched and how did it all connected to Kai-Se? He leafed through more books. A lot of death and misery greeted him. Shinjien was an old continent and has underwent a lot of wars and conflicts before it became what it was now. But underneath all that meaningless blood shed and senseless violence was a single being, pulling at the strings and making sure the life of whoever the book was about never got what they wanted the most.

That's when it hit him. With all of the stories spanning the same thread and ending in the same way, he couldn't erase the inkling that maybe all these lives had been...his. Despite what the scholars said about reincarnation being a bunch of horsecrap, there's no denying it now. One couldn't live a life that wasn't theirs, so if Kai-Se was able to look into all these, then it's safe to say he's all these people. Across lifetimes.

Across worlds.

He reached the last shelf, tucked in the end of the library, and pulled the last book in the lowest shelf. When he yanked it open, his own face pressed into parchment laid bare before him. Then, his mind flared in pain once more, and this time, a barrage of images invaded it until he was pressing his forehead against the niches and gripping the ledges so tightly his knuckles hurt. He peeled off the shelf and turned his attention back to the book. When he flipped it to the end, to see if his story was already written, he found blank page after blank page.

Relief washed over him, but before it could settle in his nerves fully, he started back up. That latest flare of images, those weren't of other lives. They were his. Which meant...

He stuck his focus inside his mind, reordering the jumbled instances flitting around. He saw himself travel to the land of the gods, then to Shaoryeong, the realm of the spirits. He saw himself succumb to an illness, watch the empire fall, and plan to get his family out of the Imperial City. he was Najizaki Kai-Se—a son, a friend, a prince.

A piper.

And one person had been with him through it all, past harship and quiet moments in the shade of the stars. The man who had been with him that night in Dansarun, that time in a secluded temple, and finally, those precious snippets in the mountains, feeling like there was no one in the world but them.

His name...

His name was Nao-Zai.

And if he had learned anything through all of the lives he had seen, it was that once Han-Xi had began moving, nothing could stop him from ending it in bloodshed. Kai-Se whirled back to the books and had one disturbing thought.

Han-Xi had said over and over again that some things weren't what he thought would happen. This isn't how it's supposed to be. Those words nipped at the back of his mind. It's true. The books and the lives Kai-Se had witnessed first-hand didn't have the same ending. Which could only mean that whatever Han-Xi was, he did something to attempt to rewrite all of his previous lives' fates. And they all didn't work.

How much of a prize Han-Xi—and in turn, Kai-Se—was paying?

A gasp hitched in Kai-Se's throat. It's not just him and Han-Xi who were constant in the story. There was another. The lover. The owner of the faces Kai-Se had seen countless times bathed in blood.

Hurry, the voice spoke in his head again. Clearer, this time. Find me, Kai-Se.

That's enough to send him taking off, leaving the library of his tragic lives behind. He dashed through the corridors, not caring if he wasn't taking the usual way back to his room. It didn't matter now. Not when innocent blood might be shed again. Because if his past lives proved to be useful, they told him what would happen now that Han-Xi had started meddling once again, first in Dansarun, then in Shaoryeong, and finally, in Xuijae. Kai-Se had seen what Han-Xi could do, how he twisted the minds and actions of people to get what he wanted. That's how the dragon started chaos, wars, and conflicts. All to get rid of the person who managed to have his past lives' hearts first.

And if Kai-Se didn't make it out of this house, Nao-Zai would die.

Kai-Se, Nao-Zai called again. Find me.

Another curse flitted out of Kai-Se's lips. He swerved another corner and came across the wide hall leading to the house's front gate. The town Jin-Fei had wanted so badly to visit spread like a rug in the blurry horizon. That's not what Kai-Se aimed for though. He reached inside himself, missing the sensations it brought. Then, he tapped into the single thread connecting his heart to another and burst into a run.

The lattices blended in his periphery, speeding and whizzing past him. His feet wasn't touching the floorboards, but stopping wasn't part of his plan. When he pivoted around a corner, a single door stopped him. His fingers gripped the knob and twisted it.

I'm coming, Nao-Zai, he thought back to the bond leading him back to his anchor. With chest heaving and breaths coming out as heavy huffs, he said aloud, "I'm here."

He swung the door open and fell into a different kind of chaos.