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I ran my hands over the ink, the swooping brushstrokes. I’d thought my father’s story was over, but here I was discovering more of him. “Have you translated any of this?” I asked.

“Kind of,” Wenshu said. “He seemed to be working together with the Moon Alchemist, so the topics of their notes overlap, which makes it easier to translate. It looks like they thought the elixir can break the most fundamental rule of alchemy.”

You cannot create good without also creating evil.Without that rule, you could create infinite goodness without paying a price. “Alchemy with no limits?” I whispered.

“Well, it’s an elixir ofimmortality,” Wenshu said, “so it probably has to do with life.”

I swallowed, my mind spinning with a thousand possibilities of what I could do with that kind of power. I closed my eyes, cutting off that train of thought. “What are you saying?” I asked. It was all well and good to fantasize about dreams, but saying them out loud made them real.

He crossed his arms. “I’m saying I want to get my body back, and you can return your ugly boyfriend’s soul to this one.”

I couldn’t help but tackle Wenshu into a hug, ignoring when he complained that we were squishing scrolls and squirmed around like a mealworm.

We all knew that Yufei had to stay in Chang’an for now. Uprooting the country’s way of life and then fleeing would completely destabilize her authority.

When I told Yufei we might be able to get her body back, she averted her gaze, tearing apart a piece of bread distractedly.

“Don’t you want your old body?” I said.

Her hands slowed. “I never wished to be anyone but myself,” she said, “but as the Empress, I can do so much more than Fan Yufei.”

“You’re still you,” I said. “Fan Yufei abolished life gold, not the Empress.”

Yufei popped a piece of bread into her mouth and turned back to the window. “You’re sure we can really hand the kingdom over to your boyfriend once he returns? He can handle it?”

“I know he can,” I said. “Besides, I can’t leave him out there.”

“You mean you can’t leave Wenshu Ge in his body,” Yufei said, smirking.

I groaned, collapsing onto the bed. “Don’t forget that you’re technically his mother now, which is arguably even weirder.”

“That just means I can boss him around,” she said.

“When have you evernotbossed him around?”

By the end of the week, Wenshu had gotten us two horses and enough rations to make it to the next province. I eyed my horse nervously as Wenshu tightened its saddlebags. He noticed my hesitation and rolled his eyes.

“Get over it,” he said.

He’s definitely not Li Hong anymore, I thought.

“A horse has literally killed me before,” I said. “You could be more understanding.”

“You defeated death twice,” he said. “You can ride a horse.”

And that was how I ended up on horseback for the second trip of my second life. We rode through the streets, past the five arches that had once been my first memory, past the gates of the city that had once been my greatest dream.

The first time we came here, we were only allowed to walk on foot within the city walls because horses were for the rich. Now the faces of the poor merchants and barefoot children and foreign traders turned as we rode past, squinting up at us through the sharp sunlight, not knowing that we were just children in costumes, muddy míngqì merchants wrapped in gold and silk.

Some nobles in blue robes glared and spit as we rode past. Soon, the wrinkles in their faces would deepen, their skin would grow loose around their bones, their teeth would fall out, and they would die like they deserved, like all of us deserved someday. Their lives locked away eating gold and throwing parties in their mansions weren’t worth the blood they’d cost.

The Moon Alchemist probably would have liked me to learn that resurrection is evil, that we can’t question the ways of the universe. But, as always, I was a disappointment.

The evil wasn’t in the alchemy, but in the world that let children in rice fields die of thirst in the summer, that made people desperate enough to sell off their family’s corpses for money, that let some people eat handfuls of gold while others starved.Alchemists need to break themselves into pieces, to want to rebuild the world around them so desperately that they would give their blood, or body, or soul, the Moon Alchemist had said. She had wanted to rebuild the world in her own way, but I wanted to crack it wide open, raze the fields, and start again.

What I didn’t tell Wenshu was that I would bring them all back.

Not just Hong and our family, but all the alchemists, all of Hong’s murdered siblings, the princess whose soul I’d left trapped in the void. Fans don’t leave anyone behind.

The river of my soul was filled with the blood of my mistakes, the bones of everyone who had saved me. I could feel it inside me, roaring so loudly with the cries of wandering souls. In my sleep, I waded deeper and deeper until I was swimming into open waters and woke up with the taste of blood in my mouth.

We don’t know for a fact that any of this is possible, Wenshu had told me over and over again, ever the pragmatist. I sensed that this trip was more for me than any true objections he had about being in the prince’s body, which was much taller than Wenshu’s.If we get to the coast and there are no leads, we need to turn back and help Yufei. I’m not going to become a vagabond looking for a mythical elixir for the rest of my life.

But I believed in the elixir in a way that Wenshu never could. He’d been dragged through his fair share of miracles, but I was always the one who sought them out. Besides, my father had believed in it, and he had a good track record for discovering the impossible.

Durian quacked inside my satchel, poking his head out to peer across the streets. He was growing alarmingly fast, and soon he would need an enclosure of some sort. But for now, it was best to keep my potentially evil alchemy duck within arm’s reach rather than inflict him on a palace without alchemists.

Leaving Chang’an was a new start that felt somehow more significant than dying and being reborn, because this was my choice. As the sun sank and the sky cracked open to bright red across the horizon, we rode toward the bleeding sunset of our new kingdom, no longer trying to escape death but charging straight toward it, calling its name.