CHINESE ARYA STARK meets THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.
*A Wattpad Featured story*
When everyone wears a mask, who do you trust?
In the unforgiving empire of Erden where the Imperials reign supreme, Sarna is a slave. After escaping the brothel where a m...
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"All Wukong had to do was to borrow the Plantain Fan from the Iron Princess, but he has done many wrongs. He was the one who destroyed Lord Tao's crucible and reduced a part of the world into a dessert as the flaming pieces fell from the sky. The Iron Princess refused. After all, why would she, a High Immortal, help a dirty little monkey?"
The Plantain Fan—The Ninety-Nine Scriptures
CHAPTER TEN
The morgue smelled just as I remembered.
The morgue of Jinlun was a large one. Hundreds of bodies were brought here to be exterminated every day, and its fires were said to rise so high, they touched the heavens. But to me, the size of the fire did not matter. What mattered was no one was going to miss a few bodies. Or their faces.
With a thick wad of cloth pressed over my mouth and the curved sickle in the sky lighting my way, I walked among the row of bodies awaiting the pyre in the morning, searching for the faces I needed.
The stench was overwhelming. Even as a mortal, I found the odor so offensive, I could pass out. But now, with my heightened senses as half-Immortal, the smell attacked me fervently, diffusing even through the cloth I'd sprayed with perfume before entering. The corpses Donghwa had given me to train with were odorless, preserved perfectly with his powers, but he'd refused to let me use any of those faces.
A true Facechanger harvests their own faces, he had said with a most contemptuous look. Your skills will truly be tested only when you're required to be independent.
Row after row, I pulled back the white sheet covering the bodies to look at their faces. I needed three. One to get me into the Jade City, one to get me into the Palace and the crown prince's side, and one for good measure.
I wished there was another way to obtain faces, but Donghwa had shaken his head and laughed.
There are three types of faces. The first type is the painted face. A painted face can be drawn onto any paper and then worn for one day, but it doesn't last. Painted faces wear off after sundown and you will need to paint a fresh face to use in the morning. The second type of Faces is the mortal face. To obtain a mortal face, you will need to skin the face of the person you wish to turn into and wear that. Unlike a painted face, a mortal face will never wear off. The last kind of Facechanging is the immortal face. Any Facechanger who wears the face will obtain its raw and original powers.
I stopped at the fifth row where the face of a young man caught my attention.
The dead man had a thin face and high cheekbones. He looked somewhere in his thirties, a man who could have been married and with children. Young enough to be in the army, honest-looking enough to be trusted with a military position. I wondered how he died. There were no wounds on his body, from what I could see, and he looked too well-fed to be a slave who had died from labor.
