Chapter 3: The Fractured Mandate

Rain drummed against the corrugated awning of a Shanghai tenement as Shen Qinghuan hunched over her father's tattered Treatise on Subduing Dragon Veins. Between the yellowed pages lay a faded Polaroid—her tenth birthday, perched on her father's shoulders before the skeletal frame of the Oriental Pearl Tower. Behind them stretched 1992 Pudong's farmland, not yet devoured by concrete.

"Remember, dragon veins thrive in urban chaos," her father had said, calloused fingers smeared with cement dust tracing phantom skylines. "Like avoiding a dragon's spine when driving piles..." The memory shattered there. Three months later, the engineer who'd protested a Bund developer's feng shui violations was found drowned in a sewage runoff.

Her phone buzzed with a WeChat voice message: "Huanhuan, Aunt Zhang knows a divorced civil servant..." Qinghuan silenced the screen, letting darkness swallow her 15-square-meter attic. Wind chimes on her peachwood sword clattered without breeze. She snatched her luopan and lunged onto the fire escape.

Midnight Lujiazui glittered like a circuit board gone sentient. Neon from the Shanghai Tower and World Financial Center now formed the Ziwei Enclosure constellation. The Jinmao Tower's lightning rod aligned perfectly with Pojun—the Seventh Star of Ruin.

"The seventh sacrifice." Her serpent mark seared. Below, the red-clad woman from Exit C bought oden at 7-Eleven, her gold-inlaid jade bangle identical to those worn by the poisoned Tang maidservants.

Suddenly, Song of Rainbow and Feather Robe blared from her phone—the Tang Dynasty melody her father used to hum. Qinghuan whirled to find the dried tangerine peels her mother mailed rearranged inside their jar: Mountain over Earth. Shan Di Bo—the Crumbling Hexagram.

The same omen her father drew before his death.

Six-year-old Qinghuan crouched in Zhabei slum floodwater. Her mother shoved her into a mildewed wardrobe as debt collectors battered their door: "Count to a thousand." Through cracks, she watched her mother paint doorframes with cinnabar sigils—not the ward against evil her father taught, but a blood curse marking prey.

Seventeen years later in her SJTU civil engineering lab, she'd deciphered the grim truth. Her father had used geomancy to protect them, becoming another casualty of Shanghai's property wars.

The alarm chimed 3 AM. Qinghuan swallowed cold shrimp dumplings, facing her triple monitors: left screen—unfinished architectural blueprints; center—a satellite reconstruction of Tang Chang'an's 108 wards; right—scans of Tui Bei Tu prophecies and Yisi Zhan star charts.

Since discovering mirrored feng shui patterns between modern Lujiazui and ancient Chang'an, she'd obsessed over this millennial-spanning Seven Stars Soul Lock. Her father's bronze gnomon rested beside the keyboard, its shadow now pointing to "Weiyue Yan"—the lunar mansion coinciding with the Shenlong Coup's historical date.

Ding! A forum DM from user "Tiangang": blurred CCTV footage showed the red-suited woman entering the World Financial Center elevator. Her jade bangle flashed three seal-script characters—Tian Ji Ge (Celestial Mechanism Pavilion).

Qinghuan's coffee cup exploded, liquid snaking into a Yellow River map. She grabbed her luopan and fled, Converse tearing through rain-puddled Lujiazui reflections. Her father's blood-scrawled warning on blueprint margins roared in her skull:

"To break the Seven Stars, first become the Player."

Chen Guodong's Porsche blocked Century Avenue, its windshield wipers keeping time with ghostly bianzhong chimes. Qinghuan's lightning-struck umbrella crackled, refracting rain into a gilded Bagua net.

"Working late, Xiao Shen?" Chen rolled down his window, reeking of burnt amulets and baijiu. The red-clad woman lay unconscious in backseat, skirt stained dark.

"That Pixiu pendant—stolen from Ciyun Temple's donation box?" Qinghuan pressed her luopan's celestial pool. "Menstrual blood offerings attract more than wealth."

Chen stomped the accelerator. She hurled Five Emperor coins—embedding in tire treads. As the Porsche careened toward guardrails, her father's face materialized in condensation:

"Go where you're meant to." The vision shattered with screeching metal, windshield cracks forming a Kun (Earth) hexagram.

The woman awoke vomiting mercury-tainted blood in Qinghuan's attic. "They feed jade with living flesh," she rasped, black ooze seeping from her bangle. "A double-pupiled old man... Shaanxi Road Antique Shop..."

Qinghuan's silver needle revealed meridians blackened identically to the Tang宫女. "Why me?"

"Double fated to bridge two Seven Stars arrays." The woman's pupils dilated into Tang-era death throes. "Like Wu Zetian balancing Buddha and Dao to usurp Li Tang..."

Concrete mixers roared. Qinghuan tackled the woman as their wall exploded. Chen stood amidst rubble wielding peachwood spikes, seven dump trucks forming Beidou (Big Dipper) behind him.

"Wang Meilin said you've been snooping." He crushed her father's Treatise. "Just like your stubborn..."

Qinghuan's luopan erupted. The serpent mark coiled around Chen's throat, suspending him midair as police sirens approached. Drivers gaped—their boss's body contorted into a twisted Beidou.

After ambulances removed the corpse, Qinghuan salvaged half a jade bangle from debris. Its inner surface etched with Chang'an's map held a meteorite fragment—identical to the star that fell over the Tang table on her timequake day.

Her mother's dawn call came: "The safe code... your birthday..." Qinghuan inhaled attic mildew—the same stench from that childhood wardrobe. The safe contained no insurance policies, but her father's life's work: Kun Yu's Subversive Treatise.

On foxed parchment, he'd written: "To my spacetime-rending daughter—When this era denies women dragons, seek one that bows to Heaven's will."

At Lujiazui pedestrian bridge, Qinghuan pasted her final anti-bowstring talisman. Morning traffic coalesced into a golden dragon vein below. Tiangang's new DM flashed:

"Zi Hour. Seven Killers Align."

The crimson skirt fluttered between financial towers—not modern fabric, but Tang-dynasty cujin embroidery: a vermilion phoenix rising from golden flames.