Inheritance

The summons came without warning.

One moment Wei Changming was standing in a crowded cultivation hall, listening to an elder drone on about the seventy-two pathways of spiritual refinement. The next, the floor dropped away, the noise of the hall became a distant hum, and he was falling through something that was not quite darkness — more like the memory of light, old and very cold.

He landed on stone. Or something that felt like stone. The ground was smooth and faintly warm beneath his palms, and when he opened his eyes, he found himself kneeling in a hall so vast that its ceiling dissolved into shadow before he could find it. Lanterns hung at intervals along the walls, burning with a pale flame that gave off no warmth. Between the lanterns, murals depicted scenes he did not immediately recognise: great rivers choked with mist, a procession of faceless figures, and at the centre of each image, a throne occupied by someone whose face had been deliberately worn away.

“You’ve arrived.”

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Wei Changming rose slowly to his feet and turned in a full circle, finding no one.

“The previous Master waited three hundred years for a successor,” the voice continued, tone pleasantly neutral, the way a record-keeper’s voice is neutral. “You are only twenty-two. This is, admittedly, inconvenient.”

“Inconvenient for whom?” Wei Changming asked. He considered himself a reasonable man. He was also, under the circumstances, terrified, though he saw no benefit in showing it.

A pause. Then something that might have been amusement. “For the underworld, largely. The administrative backlog is considerable.”

A scroll materialised in the air before him — long, dense with ink, and sealed with a mark that sent a cold shock up his arm even before he touched it. He recognised the sensation. He had felt something similar once, when he had accidentally pressed his hand to a binding contract at his uncle’s estate. That contract had been for a grain shipment. This one, he suspected, was not.

“The seal of succession,” the voice said. “You are, as it happens, the last living descendant of the Ninth Hell’s founding lineage. The inheritance is not optional.”

Wei Changming looked at the scroll. He looked at the empty, vast hall. He looked at the lanterns burning cold and patient in the dark.

“I suppose,” he said slowly, “that someone had better show me where the throne is.”