The words drifted over the kneeling crowd like a divine decree, binding the fate of the survivors to his own shadow. The woman clinging to Xu Yi looked up at him, her eyes wide and glassy, seeing not a man, but a beacon of celestial light amidst a world of blood and ash. Her terror, once sharp and jagged, had been transmuted into a fanatical, dazed devotion.
"You would... you would truly take us in?" she whispered, her voice a fragile thread. "After the poison? After the daggers our kin sent for your heart?"
Shen Yu reached out, his fingers brushing her forehead with the gentlest of touches, though his internal Qi remained as sharp as a hidden needle.
"The sins of the father are not the sins of the child," he murmured, his voice carrying with a spectral clarity that ensured every rioter caught the weight of his words.
"The rivalry over the Pill was a matter of trade between the Peng and Tang clans, a burden of the heavens," he continued, a tragic shadow falling over his face.
