Zhaoge rose before them like a graveyard of gods. The capital of Shang sprawled across the plain in blocks of black stone and blood-red timber. Its priests walked among slaves counted in the millions. Every festival, the sky tore open and celestial beings descended to feed.
Su Yan and the bell watched through Jin Buyi's eyes. They could not interfere. They could only witness.
The merchant's son had grown clever. He bought prisoners from the army's supply trains and sent them to the capital. He understood cultivation. His strength climbed steadily. Jin Buyi stayed at his shoulder, burning any threat to ash.
Sometimes the boy asked questions.
"Buyi, are we right to do this?" He would stand on the auction platform, watching families torn apart. "We kill people who look like us to please gods who do not. Why?"
Jin Buyi had no answer. It was a beast of fire and instinct. It knew only that the first face it had seen belonged to this boy, and that meant he was its kin. Where the boy went, it followed.
One day, the young master lifted the hair of a filthy slave child and found a delicate face beneath. Her name was Yan Bao'er. She came from a world the Shang had already devoured.
The boy fell. There was no other word for it.
"I remember you," she told him. "From some life before."
He answered, "Since I ate the spirit herb, I have seen you in memories older than memory."
But love meant nothing against the scale of Shang. On the winter solstice, the priests dragged her to the altar. The young master broke.
He carved his way into the great ceremony, blade in hand, Jin Buyi's fire scorching the sacred grounds. They escaped with Yan Bao'er, but the empire's iron cavalry took to the sky, and the heaven gods themselves roared down in wrath.
There was nowhere left to run.
For centuries they ran anyway. Jin Buyi carried them across battlefields, through dying worlds, over starfields. The boy grew into a man, then into something more. Yan Bao'er fought beside him, her blade as sharp as her laughter. The crow became a sun of war, and still it was not enough.
"We will never leave each other," they promised. "Not in this life. Not in the next."
But gods do not bargain. The chase wore on for four hundred years, then four thousand. Yan Bao'er's hair turned white. Her hands, once soft, became maps of scars. On the last night, she lay in a cave on some world without a name, and the man who still looked like a boy held her fingers against his chest.
"I will find you," he whispered. "In every world. In every life. I will find you."
She smiled. Then she was gone.
Jin Buyi and its master buried her beneath a red stone. They returned to the war. There was nothing else to do.
New enemies appeared — beings different from the heaven gods, older, stranger. Even the celestials bowed to them. In a battle on the edge of a crumbling sky, the man laughed through bloodied teeth.
"Buyi, I think I have found what seals my memory."
He sketched runes in the air — immortal runes, patterns of power he had parsed from his enemies' attacks. "These are the locks. These are what keep me from myself."
Jin Buyi could not understand them. It was the mightiest beast of its age, but the runes belonged to a wisdom beyond flesh and flame.
Su Yan — watching from outside the memory — recognized them too. The prison rune. The same symbol that held Yuan Qi in stasis.
The memory lurched forward. The man found Yan Bao'er reborn in another world, but the enemy had found her first. They used her as bait.
"Buyi, take this." He pressed a golden rune into the crow's mind. "Find me with it. Wake me. Fly. Don't stop. We will meet again."
Jin Buyi did not understand. They had promised never to part. Why flee? Why leave him to die?
"There is always hope," the man said. He waved. The crow beat its wings and soared into a sky burning with godlight.
It flew for a hundred years before the war ended. It searched. It aged. Feathers turned gray. Memory began to fray.
It found him again, of course. The boy was always a boy, unchanged. But guards stood around him, human and divine, driving the crow back with spears of light. Again and again Jin Buyi returned, bleeding, burning, refusing.
It did not lose to them. It lost to time.
One morning, high above a desert, the crow faltered. Its wings faltered. It hung in the air, lost.
Why am I flying?
It could not remember. The name it carried — Jin Buyi, never left behind — had become a sound without meaning. It flew because flying was all it knew. It called out because calling was habit.
"Jin Buyi! Never left behind! Jin Buyi!"
When the world was sealed, the crow was sealed with it. Yunmeng Marsh lay dormant for ages. Then the Fusang tree fell from the sky, and something stirred in the crow's ancient heart. It rose. It flew. It found the tree, settled among its branches, and warmed the wood with fire older than nations.
A boy stood below. The crow looked down, head tilted, trying to place a face it had loved for longer than mountains had existed.
"Strange," it said. "I feel as though I have seen you."
I am too old, it thought. Too old to remember the boy who named me.