In my ninth life, after Prince William killed me again, he summoned my soul with incense. He did it because I’d died for him eight times before—but this time, he wanted me to die wearing his beloved consort’s face. “Seraphina,” he murmured, “you can be reborn. It’s not true death. Haven’t you always wanted to go home? I promise, this is the last time. After this, we’ll return to the village and live together.” Tearful, I nodded. But later, as I waited for the face-swapping ritual, I overheard him speaking to a guard: “My lord, you promised the princess we’d return to her village—yet you had me slaughter everyone there. She cherishes that place. Is this wise?” William’s shadowed face was unreadable. “Those villagers refused Elara their beauty rituals. She killed them in anger, and I cleaned up the mess.” He sighed. “Seraphina lost a few relatives. I’ll make it up next life.” But, William, my love… this is my last life. For us, there is no next time. 1 “…While the villagers have been exterminated, the valley is filled with rare and valuable flora. It seems a waste to burn it all,” the guard said, still kneeling. The blood on his sword was still wet, dripping onto the stone floor and creating a crimson path that snaked to William’s feet. In this life, William was the Prince Regent, a man of immense power. He lounged in his carved throne-like chair, his dark hair cascading over his shoulders. His handsome, almost feminine eyes, usually so full of charm, were now pools of icy indifference. He toyed with my soul-incense, a small, carved stick that bound my spirit to the mortal plane, as if listening to a trivial report. He didn’t even look up. “The plants are unimportant. Every person in that village possessed a soul-incense.” His voice was smooth, detached. “As long as the incense exists, they can be reincarnated, generation after generation.” “Elara was concerned the face-swapping ritual would damage her skin. She’d heard of their legendary beauty rituals. But they not only refused her, they insulted her. In a fit of rage, she slaughtered them.” He finally looked at the guard. “But that clan can use their soul-incense to be reborn. They could seek revenge on Elara’s descendants. I cannot allow her future to be threatened.” The guard, still in his blood-soaked tunic, flinched. “But my lord, you promised the princess you would return to the village with her soon. When that time comes…” William smiled, a chilling, humorless expression. “There will be no ‘that time.’ In one month, Seraphina will die in Elara’s place. In the next life, I will simply tell her that after nine generations, her people have moved on, and the village can no longer be found. She trusts me completely. She will never doubt it. As long as you keep your mouth shut.” Eight lifetimes of power had honed William’s presence into something truly formidable. The guard prostrated himself, trembling. “My lord, you have my word. I will never breathe a word of this to the princess.” The next second, the mute assassin who shadowed William’s every move stepped forward. A flash of steel, and the guard’s tongue was sliced from his mouth. In all his lives, William had never trusted words. Only the silent could truly keep a secret. The brutality of it sent me stumbling backward. Before, even in the face of his enemies, William had never shown this side of himself to me. The man before me was a stranger, terrifying and cold. I fled back to my chambers, my body collapsing to the floor. After the initial shock, a wave of profound, bottomless despair washed over me. I had been on my way to ask for my soul-incense back. My people’s soul-incense was a finite legacy. When one of us died, our descendant inherited our stick. If a soul-incense was destroyed, not only would that soul be annihilated, but their entire bloodline—over a hundred people—would be barred from the cycle of reincarnation. This was my last life. My ninth and final turn. I had wanted to send my soul-incense back to my village, to at least preserve my family line. But the secret I had so trustingly shared with William in our first life had become the very tool of my people’s extinction. In our first life, William was a Crown Prince. On a quest for a mythical artifact, he had stumbled upon my hidden village and found me, a girl who had never seen the outside world. He became Emperor, and I, his most cherished consort. For ten years, he built me palaces, hosted lavish banquets in my honor, and laid the world’s treasures at my feet. He would wake in the night, clinging to me, weeping that it was all a dream. But empires fall. Barbarians invaded, and our kingdom crumbled. William fled with me from the capital, a desperate retreat across the country. Finally, cornered, his generals delivered an ultimatum. “The people whisper that a sorceress has bewitched the Emperor, cursing the kingdom. Your Majesty, if you do not execute the sorceress and give the army justice, morale will break. We will never reclaim our home.” The courtyard outside my chambers was filled with kneeling courtiers and commanders. William locked me in my room, his body trembling with rage. “Fools! The barbarian threat has existed since my father’s time! It has nothing to do with you! They lose their own battles, and they want a woman to take the blame? Unacceptable!” He threw the dagger they had given him to the floor, his face streaked with tears. I gently picked it up, pressing it back into his hand along with my soul-incense. “William,” I whispered, “I am of the old blood. I can be reborn with my memories intact. Take this. In the next life, it will help you remember me, and find me again.” And so, in my first life, to save his kingdom, I guided his hand and plunged the blade into my own heart. In my second life, I shielded him on the battlefield, taking a thousand arrows meant for him. In my third life, when he summoned me back, he had a wife. Her name, he said, was Elara, his childhood sweetheart, a marriage arranged by their parents. He claimed there was no love between them, but he could not simply cast her aside. I believed him. Later, when rebels stormed the city, they tied both Elara and me to the city walls. “General William,” the rebel leader had shouted, “choose one. Your wife, or your mistress.” For the first time, William hesitated. And in that moment of hesitation, Elara cut her own ropes and leaped from the wall to her death. After that, William changed. In our fourth life, he found me first, but still spent years frantically searching for Elara’s reincarnation. “Seraphina, I failed her in our last life,” he’d explained. “I just want to make it up to her. Our time together will be long.” I dismissed it as a lingering obsession, a need for closure. In our fifth life, we were married, but he rescued Elara from a life of destitution and brought her into our home. “It’s my fault she suffered,” he’d insisted, ignoring my tears. He made her his second wife, of equal rank to me, and let the entire city laugh at my humiliation. So it went, life after life, until our eighth. He was an Emperor again. He gave Elara a child. It broke my heart, but I said nothing. He had given me the title of Empress, and every honor, yet he spent every night in Elara’s palace. I remained silent, until the day he stripped me of my title and threw me in the dungeon. “Seraphina,” he’d said, his voice cold, “I never knew you were so jealous. I only wanted to give her a child to lean on, before we retired to the countryside together. I never imagined you would be so cruel as to harm it.” “I can’t let you harm anyone else.” Elara had lost the child. And he blamed me, the Empress who never even left her own palace wing. Before I could even defend myself, he sentenced me to death by a thousand cuts, three hundred agonizing slices to make me remember my “crime.” Each time I fainted from the pain, his physicians would revive me with ginseng, keeping me alive for the next cut. When it was over, he came to my broken, hollowed-out body, his sword drawn. “Don’t blame me, Seraphina. Wait for me in the next life.” The sword pierced my heart, ending the torment. I awoke in my ninth life. In this life, William had clawed his way from obscurity to become the Prince Regent, all to secure a comfortable life for Elara in the palace. But Elara, emboldened by his power, had become a tyrant, her cruelty and recklessness infamous. Now, a rebellion was rising, their banner proclaiming the need to “cleanse the court and remove the demon consort.” Elara had to die. And William wanted me to die for her. He had promised the last time was the final time. The memories were a physical pain. My first instinct was to run, to at least save the last hope of my people and give my ancestors a proper burial. But I knew that as long as William held my soul-incense, I couldn’t even leave the palace walls. If I couldn’t escape, then at least I could choose how I died. I would not die for the woman who had destroyed my entire race. My gaze fell on the Whisperbloom flowers in the courtyard, a plant I had brought from my village. The blossoms were poisonous, a powerful paralytic. Eaten in large enough quantities, they caused a painless death in one’s sleep. Compared to the agonies of my past eight deaths, it sounded like a mercy. Without hesitation, I stuffed a handful of the blossoms into my mouth. The paralysis was immediate. I tumbled from my chair, my body hitting the ground, my consciousness fading. But then, frantic footsteps from the courtyard. “Seraphina!” William swept me into his arms, his voice raw as he called my name. Through the haze, I thought I saw a flicker of the old panic in his eyes, the helplessness, the fear. I tried to smile. But his face hardened with anger. “You want to die? Seraphina, your life is mine! How dare you try to take it without my permission?” He summoned the royal physicians, forced me to vomit up every last petal, and then ordered the courtyard stripped of every single Whisperbloom. When I was finally coherent, he stood over me, his eyes filled with a deep, chilling disappointment. “You were never like this before, Seraphina. Are you so consumed with jealousy that you would kill yourself, just to force Elara to her death? When did you become so vicious?” He gripped my face, forcing me down into the bedding. With the entire household of servants just outside, he ripped my clothes. “Is it because I gave Elara a child? Is that what this is about? Fine. I’ll satisfy you. Will that be enough?” I saw the shadows of the servants moving behind the screen, and I burned with shame. But the residual poison had left me too weak to even push him away. The gentle lover of my memories was gone. The bed frame creaked violently, and I saw the servants outside freeze, listening. Two tears traced a path from the corners of my eyes. When he was finished, he looked at my tear-streaked face, paused for a fraction of a second, and then simply covered me with the blanket. “You will stay here and recover. Banish these thoughts of suicide from your mind. I have already announced that you are gravely ill. You will remain in this courtyard and entertain no other foolish ideas.” 2 William placed me under house arrest. Guards patrolled the perimeter day and night. Anything I could possibly use to harm myself was removed. I sat on a bare stone bench in the courtyard, the sun beating down on me, but I felt no warmth. A maidservant, her expression blank, draped a cloak over my shoulders and handed me a hand-warmer. “My lady,” she said, her voice monotone, “it is time for your meal.” After my suicide attempt, my stomach was ruined. Every bite of food was agony, causing me to break out in a cold sweat. But William ordered the servants to watch me, to force me to eat every last morsel prepared by the kitchen. “You’re too thin, Seraphina,” he would say. “You don’t look enough like Elara. Don’t be difficult. Eat more. It’s the only way the disguise will be convincing.” So I became a machine, letting them stuff food into my mouth, swallowing it down, enduring the fire that would burn in my gut until the early hours of the morning. Until one day, the moment the food was placed before me, a wave of nausea hit, and I threw up. The maidservant, thinking I had taken poison again, immediately called for the physician. The physician announced that I was pregnant. One month along. I did the math. It was from the day he had confined me. My hand instinctively went to my stomach. A flicker of life in the barren desert of my heart. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The last drop of my people’s blood was right here, inside me. But then, uncertainty. If William knew I was pregnant, would he spare me? Would he let me preserve this last hope? After the physician left, I expected William to come. I waited for three days. He never appeared. A servant whispered that he had left the city in search of some rare treasure. I assumed Elara had heard of some new trinket she desired. It was always the way. She wanted, and William provided. But on the morning of the fourth day, a maidservant rushed into my room. “My lady! The Prince Regent has returned with a magnificent night-glowing pearl! He says it is for your birthday! Quickly, let me help you dress!” Her words jolted me. Today was my birthday. A lifetime of rebirths had blurred the passage of time. I had forgotten. But William had remembered. I touched my stomach, a sliver of hope blooming in my chest. He must care for this child. That’s why he had gone to find my favorite gem, the night-glowing pearl, for my birthday. He stood before me, placing the impossibly large, luminous pearl in my hands. He took my hand, his touch gentle. “Seraphina. Do you like it?” I was about to speak when his tone shifted. “I thought you would like this. A final gift, to send you off happily.” I stared at him, confused. He stood up, and Elara walked in from the doorway. “The rebel army is at the city gates,” she said, her voice impatient. “They’re screaming for my death. William, hurry up.”
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