Master Chu had not gone far.

With his level of cultivation, suppressing his own presence so completely that the monk could not detect him was no great effort.

What Master Chu practiced now had long since moved beyond the limits of ordinary martial arts. There was an ancient saying: when body technique reaches its peak, you begin to cultivate *qi*; when *qi* cultivation reaches its peak, you transcend the mundane. That had always been the claim. But in practice, throughout all of martial history, the number of people who had reached even the beginning of *qi* cultivation was vanishingly small. Master Ye’s Flowing Cloud Sleeve was no more than the first step of *qi* cultivation. And yet by ancient standards, his achievement already approached the outermost limit of human possibility.

Master Chu was a once-in-two-centuries genius. Among all who had walked this path before or since him, his like had not been seen.

Master Ye’s weakness was that his body technique had not yet reached its peak when he began to sense the *qi* — so his strength had a ceiling. He compensated through *qi* cultivation for what his form and body lacked, but that same compensation had arrested his development.

Azure Dragon was stronger than Master Ye in raw terms, though in *qi* cultivation, Azure Dragon was actually slightly behind him. What Azure Dragon had was near-total mastery of a single weapon and a single martial discipline.

Above them all: Master Chu, alone at the summit, looking down on the world below.

Technique, power, battle-mind, adaptability — in every dimension, he had reached as far as a human being could reach. Which was precisely the limit: *human capability has its utmost boundary.* There was no further to go because there were no gods in this world.

So even Zangjie, for all his confidence, had never imagined such a person existed. Master Chu was watching him from a distance — and even if he had been standing at the door, as long as he did not move and made no sound, Zangjie would have felt nothing. Master Chu had learned to make his presence indistinguishable from the natural world: still, breathless, like a stone, like a shadow, like the air itself.

Master Chu looked at Zangjie and felt a faint sympathy. Not deep — he was still a human being, and he had not forgotten where he came from. He had only let it go. Letting go and forgetting are two entirely different things, and the claim that forgetting is the truest form of letting go is, in the end, just self-deception.

If Master Chu had truly forgotten — if he had emptied himself of the seven emotions and six desires and achieved perfect detachment — he would not have become anything close to enlightened. He would have been only a shell that looked transcendent.

He had not acted yet because the Emperor had said: *wait — see whether this monk has anyone else working with him.* Looking at the man now, it seemed he was utterly alone.

And so Master Chu considered whether to bring him back.

There are so many lonely people in this world, but among them, monks are a particular kind of suffering. This one neither forgets nor lets go. The Chan schools speak of greed, hatred, and delusion as the roots of all harm — and this obsession was precisely a form of delusion, of clinging.

He watched for a long time. Then, without acting, he turned and left.

In the moment Master Chu departed, Zangjie turned toward the door and looked out. Something had almost reached him — a faint sound, like a sigh. He moved to the door, looked in every direction, found nothing.

He decided his old suspicious nature was acting up again and went back inside.

—

That night, in the Eastern Warm Chamber of Weiyang Palace, Li Chi looked at Ye Celeng kneeling before him and said nothing critical. From his expression, it was clear he was not even angry. This had all unfolded exactly as he expected it would. Ye Celeng was not a man of treacherous heart.

He was just, in the end, another soul to be pitied.

“I remember,” Li Chi said, “when I had barely established myself in Jizhou — not yet firmly, barely at all — General Wang recommended you to me.”

“I was uncertain then. Master Ye was already the most eminent scholar in the realm, and I worried I couldn’t get him to come. So I wrote him a letter — more than three thousand words — telling him what I wanted to build and what kind of future I was trying to create. And Master Ye, after reading it, set aside every obstacle and every obstacle-maker and crossed thousands of li from Yanzhou to come to me. That loyalty — I will never forget it.”

Ye Celeng knelt there. His eyes were full.

“Your Majesty — I am guilty. Guilty of a serious crime. What a man intends matters to the hearing, but it cannot determine the verdict. The verdict must be determined by the act.” His voice steadied. “I did not stop it. I knew and did not report it. Under the Da Ning Code, which I helped draft along with the Court President and others, and which was ratified by Your Majesty — that is a crime punishable by the extermination of the entire household.”

“Your Majesty, I have accumulated some merit in the past, but Your Majesty has already rewarded me beyond what that merit warranted. Merit is the past. The crime is now.”

Li Chi shook his head. “What you say is correct. But this matter cannot be handled according to Da Ning law.”

Ye Celeng looked up, uncomprehending.

He had no fear of death at this moment. He only wanted it over. He felt a double guilt: he had betrayed the Emperor’s trust, and he had failed his wife. The Emperor had once written him a letter of three thousand words — a letter that described a vast and earnest vision, expressed with genuine feeling. That was why he had come. And now he himself had become one of its destroyers. That was a barrier he did not know how to cross.

“If you want a reason,” Li Chi said, “I cannot give you a clean one. Only this: I believe in what you are in your heart.”

Ye Celeng began to speak again. Li Chi stopped him with a look.

“Go to the Western Frontier.”

Ye Celeng blinked.

“The new He-xi Circuit in the west still needs a Circuit Governor. Go — work alongside Grand General Wang and Dantai Yajing to help win the western campaign.”

Ye Celeng’s forehead pressed to the floor. “I cannot accept such grace, Your Majesty. I am a criminal. A criminal must face judgment —”

“The judgment will come eventually. Right now I need men. Go west as a convict serving under reduced sentence, and I will address your crimes here in due time.”

Silence stretched out. Then Ye Celeng pressed his head to the floor once more.

“By Your Majesty’s command.”

He rose and walked toward the door, then turned back and knelt again. “I know — this parting may be our last… I bow in gratitude for Your Majesty’s immeasurable grace. I pray for Your Majesty’s eternal health and long life. I pray for the ten thousand years of Great Ning.”

Li Chi breathed out slowly, walked over, and lifted him to his feet. “If we meet again, we’ll drink until neither of us can stand.”

He said the words. But in his heart, he had already decided Ye Celeng would not return to Chang’an.

Ye Celeng was smart enough to understand. The Emperor was protecting him — using this moment, before the affair with Xu Ji exploded fully, to move him somewhere far from the capital. With him gone, there would be no reason to prosecute his wife either. The two of them would simply be distant from Xu Ji.

In the He-xi Circuit, Ye Celeng would serve as Circuit Governor for as long as his health allowed. A Circuit Governor, under Da Ning law, could not leave his territory without an imperial decree. He would never return. The Emperor would never summon him. Whatever Xu Ji did next, however he was dealt with, none of it would touch Ye Celeng.

The Emperor had to protect him, maintain the court’s confidence, and keep the mouths of the ministers shut — all at the same time. How difficult that must be.

Ye Celeng returned home to find his wife kneeling on the floor waiting for him. He went to her at once.

“It is I who ruined you,” she said.

He helped her up and shook his head. “You still don’t understand. Compared to you — what does any of the rest of it matter?”

“Earlier, when I said I wouldn’t help your brother, you thought it was because I was afraid of losing my position. That hurt me deeply. I didn’t help him because I was trying to protect you — I didn’t want you to be dragged down by him.”

He let out a long breath.

“His Majesty in his grace has chosen not to punish us. He is sending us to the western frontier.”

Lady Ye stared. She had not expected such generosity.

In truth, she had come to her senses not long after she had sent those men out — when she was calm enough to think about her husband, she understood just how wrong she had been.

“Pack your things. We leave at first light tomorrow.”

He took her hand. “If you can’t bear to leave Chang’an, I’ll walk through it with you tonight, one last time.”

She shook her head. “After all of this, I finally know — sometimes I let myself be too swayed by feeling. In this world, there are two people I can’t bear to leave: you and my brother. But there is only one place I cannot bear to leave, and that is wherever you are. There’s nothing to see in Chang’an. As long as I can see you — that is where I am home.”

Ye Celeng held her close and held her tightly.

—

The following morning, an imperial decree was issued: Ye Celeng was appointed Circuit Governor of He-xi, at the senior second rank with first-rank double salary.

After the morning court session, Li Chi personally led the assembled civil and military officials to escort Ye Celeng to the city gates, accompanying him ten li outside Chang’an.

Though it was a transfer away from the center of power, not one official in the court believed Ye Celeng had been demoted or punished. A Circuit Governor was first among all officials within the circuit — real authority, deep roots, room to breathe. And He-xi was a new circuit, just established; serving as its first governor was genuine distinction.

If anything seemed slightly unusual, it was only that relocating a senior court official to a regional post was normally considered a promotion. But everyone knew the Emperor intended to fight a campaign in the west — so no one thought to question it.

With this, Li Chi had settled the affairs of court well enough for now. He kept Xu Ji in place because, frankly, he still needed someone like him.

With Ye Celeng gone, Xu Ji was truly alone — no right hand, no left hand, no one at all to lean on.

And the more important reason for sending Ye Celeng west was the campaign itself. Lu Chonglou would not be in the Western Frontier much longer. Someone with real weight needed to be there to hold things together.

—

Back in the Eastern Warm Chamber, Li Chi told Ding Qing’an to tell him a joke. The last two days had been heavy, and the room felt like it.

Ding Qing’an thought for a while, then said with a smile:

“When I was young, our family was very poor. One winter, during the slow season when there was no work in the fields, my father went to the river to try to catch some fish. From dawn to dusk — not a single bite. By the time it was almost completely dark, he finally felt something on the line. He was overjoyed. He told me this was a big fish — he could barely pull the line — and that when a man hooks something this big, you don’t let go no matter how tired you get. A fish like this could feed the whole family for days.”

“So my father got into a battle of wills with whatever was on the other end. It went on all night. By dawn, he was exhausted — barely able to stand. He hauled himself up, grabbed the rod, and said, *Let’s see how much longer you can last.*”

Ding Qing’an grinned. “Right at that moment, an old man on the opposite bank of that little river also got up with a groan, grabbed his own rod with the same determined look on his face.”

Li Chi paused.

Then he burst out laughing. “The fishhook — it had snagged the other man’s line?”