Fu Xuanmiao’s journey to Yangzhou this time was nothing like his previous trip, when he had set out in hasty, solitary fashion aboard a single carriage.

An enormous procession of carriages brought near-standstill to every road he passed through.

Each carriage wheel sank deep into the ground beneath its weight.

He made no effort to conceal his movements — indeed, there was no way to conceal them — and proceeded toward Yangzhou as openly as could be. Spies from every faction trailed the procession the entire way, and carrier pigeons flew back in a continuous stream to every corner of the Great Yan. Every move the foremost gentleman under heaven made in the wake of his father’s death was watched with intense scrutiny.

Some said the foremost gentleman under heaven was going to seek allies and build support.

Some scoffed at this; others felt it wise to take precautions.

Faster than the foremost gentleman under heaven himself to reach Yangzhou was an imperial edict. His Majesty had, from some unknown quarter, produced the long-missing Princess of Chu, and betrothed her to Bai Rongling, the young master of Yangzhou’s Bai Family.

The Princess of Chu had been completely without news ever since the palace coup. The very fact that she surfaced at this precise moment had ordinary commoners speculating over whether the princess was genuine or an impostor, while those with even a modicum of political shrewdness understood that the question of her authenticity was beside the point.

What mattered was that His Majesty had placed before the Bai Family a question of allegiance.

Would they side with Fu Xuanmiao, or with the Emperor?

Would they choose to live, or to die?

The Bai Family ultimately accepted the imperial edict, though they said that Bai Rongling had been away without news for a long time, and respectfully implored His Majesty to dispatch men to search for him.

Whether Bai Rongling’s disappearance was genuine or feigned, the Bai Family’s stance, at the very least, appeared to be entirely cooperative.

Everyone said that the foremost gentleman under heaven, now traveling to Yangzhou, was surely about to meet a closed door.

Yet the subject of all this discussion seemed utterly indifferent to the shifting winds outside.

After leaving Jianzhou, Fu Xuanmiao shut himself inside his carriage every day and refused to emerge. Food sent in was frequently returned untouched. When Yan Hui rode past the carriage window, he would sometimes glimpse the master’s lean silhouette sitting upright at the small table inside, holding a handwritten volume that had belonged to his late father, his face half-hidden in the shadow of the unopened half of the carriage window — his current expression impossible to read.

Everyone knew that the Chancellor’s death had dealt Fu Xuanmiao a devastating blow. But only Fu Xuanmiao knew the full weight of it — it was more than that.

It was as though he had been transported back to the time when he had first set out for Shouping Village — his heart entirely unguarded, rolling back and forth on a wavering scale, colliding until it bled.

By now the procession had already left Shouzhou; after passing through two more prefectures, they would enter Yangzhou.

The closer they drew to Yangzhou, the thicker the flawless but entirely cold armor that encased him became. The emotions that surfaced in his eyes grew fewer and fewer.

Fewer and fewer, until they vanished entirely. He became once again the perfect, flawless foremost gentleman under heaven — graceful as orchid, brilliant as jade.

“Master!” Yan Hui’s urgent voice broke through his wandering thoughts.

Fu Xuanmiao raised his eyes to look at Yan Hui, who had ridden up to the carriage window.

“Master, news from Yangzhou!” Yan Hui’s face was etched with urgency.

…

Flames of orange-red surged and leaped; green medicinal herbs curled and blackened rapidly under the licking of the fire.

A pungent, foul odor drifted through the air. Nearby soldiers fanned furiously into the pitch-black mouth of the Sky-Swallowing Cave while unable to stop themselves from pressing their hands tightly over their noses and mouths.

The smoke and fumes drifted all the way inside, seeping in under the flap of the spacious main tent.

Shen Zhuxi lay on her simple cot, and even in her sleep her brow was knitted tight, the unease and fear she refused to reveal by day gathered in the furrows of her forehead.

She seemed to be trapped in a nightmare, twisting her head in distress as though resisting something — then, with a violent start, her eyes flew open and she wrenched herself free of the dream.

Cold sweat clung to the back of her clothes. She lay perfectly still, yet could still feel the fierce rise and fall of her chest.

In front of others, she could not show the slightest weakness. But each time she closed her eyes, the fears she had forcefully suppressed rose from the depths and seized her unguarded mind.

Even Shen Zhuxi herself did not know whether staying here could bring her the answer she was searching for. She only knew she could not leave. Until she saw Li Wu’s body with her own eyes, she would not accept the news of his death.

The cliff was immeasurably high, and even she could not conceive of how Li Wu could possibly survive a fall from it.

But she refused to believe it.

However slim the hope, as long as Li Wu’s body had not been laid before her eyes, that hope had not yet been extinguished.

The smell of smoke brought to mind the results she had been waiting on before her nap. Shen Zhuxi hastily dressed and walked out of the main tent.

“How did it go?” she asked the deputy general standing not far off.

He gave her a salute, his expression solemn. “Not yet…”

Before he could finish, the sound of a horse galloping hard came from the end of the mountain path, and a brown horse carried a soldier charging toward the camp.

A moment later, the soldier knelt on one knee before Shen Zhuxi. “My lady… the plan has failed again. The miasma at the cave entrance dispersed only slightly — not enough for anyone to safely enter the cave.”

Having experienced failure too many times, Shen Zhuxi could now keep her expression steady. She steadied herself and asked, “What is the next method to try?”

The soldier hesitated, then said slowly, “Hunter Zhang says we might as well cover our faces and go straight in. Elder Chen says he will go home and look through his ancestors’ handwritten notes again…”

He went on to share the ideas of the people Shen Zhuxi had summoned from the surrounding villages and towns — and all of them, when examined honestly, amounted to no real idea at all. Over the past several days, these knowledgeable locals had exhausted every method they could think of.

The miasma stubbornly clung to the cave entrance. Even a rabbit placed at the entrance would be foaming at the mouth and dead in less than the time it takes an incense stick to burn. The miasma deep inside would be lethally concentrated beyond all reckoning. Hunter Zhang’s suggestion was plainly a futile gesture.

“Let them go home for now… Tell them to keep thinking. Whoever comes up with a workable solution first will have the reward doubled.” Shen Zhuxi said.

The soldier acknowledged the order, remounted, and rode away again.

“I want to go see the Sky-Swallowing Cave for myself.” Shen Zhuxi said.

“But… my lady, your maidservant said…” The deputy general started, his gaze falling toward her abdomen.

“I will not go near the entrance. I will be fine.” Shen Zhuxi insisted.

Taking advantage of the moment before her maidservant could notice, Shen Zhuxi asked the deputy general to bring her down to the foot of the mountain. The pitch-black Sky-Swallowing Cave lay twenty or thirty paces away. The cave entrance still bore the ash from the various miasma-repelling herbs, and the air retained a nauseating smell.

Even from this distance of twenty or thirty paces, the murky gray fog that lingered around the mouth of the Sky-Swallowing Cave and the bare, lifeless earth surrounding it were enough to make a person hesitate.

Going by Shouzhou’s past experience, the rainy season would arrive around the ninth month. But it was only the end of the seventh month now — would she have to wait until the rains came in the ninth month, and then hope that the heavens were generous enough to send several days of continuous downpour?

By that time, even a roasting duck would be fully done, let alone anyone left to rescue.

Shen Zhuxi sat down on a flat, broad stone and stared blankly at the cave entrance. Seeing that she was lost in thought, the deputy general thoughtfully stepped to one side, leaving her space to think in peace.

When it came to knowledge and learning, there was likely no one on this mountain who had read as broadly as Shen Zhuxi.

She ransacked her memory desperately, searching for a way to break through this impasse.

But even if she truly solved the problem of the miasma at the entrance, could she really find the person she was looking for in the Thousand-Blade Pit? The cliff was thousands of feet high — if Li Wu had truly fallen, it would be entirely possible that he had been shattered to pieces…

If she somehow managed to clear the miasma and all that awaited her inside the Thousand-Blade Pit was a half-rotted corpse…

Uncontrollable tears burst forth alongside her uncontrolled emotions. The very moment the tears fell, Shen Zhuxi snapped back from her spiraling imagination. She scrubbed furiously at her eyes — but her mind conjured Li Wu’s image, the way he would use his fingertips to wipe her tears whenever she cried like this, and the tears streamed down all the harder.

This was not the time to be weak. She could not cry. She could not let anyone see her break down.

Yet she kept crying and could not stop.

“My lady…” the deputy general looked on at a loss.

“Don’t — don’t mind me…” Shen Zhuxi hugged her knees to her chest and buried her tear-streaked face against them, sobbing as she said, “Just give me a moment… I want to be alone for a bit…”

In the end, she had not managed to stay strong until the last. If Li Wu were to see this, would he be disappointed in her?

But if it were Li Wu —

If it were him, he would simply pat her on the head, his warm fingertips gently brushing away her tears, and say in that unhurried, offhand way of his: “What a fool.”

Hadn’t he just gone to clear the blocked road?

Why hadn’t he come back yet?

The world before her went dark, heaven and earth dimming and sinking, drowned beneath an endless flood of tears.

A slanting veil of rain fell without a sound. The grass and trees in the mountain forest stirred and rustled at intervals. A large hand reached from behind and clamped over the deputy general’s mouth as he stood at a distance; two more pairs of arms reached out from the same direction, and in an instant he was dragged without a sound into the undergrowth.

The deputy general was firmly subdued from every direction by four powerfully built guards. His wide-open eyes stared in astonishment at the refined figure that now emerged before him.

Fu Xuanmiao stepped out from among the trees and their swaying shadows.

He walked slowly toward the slight, fragile figure huddled on the stone, his gaze fixed on her trembling back like cooling candlewax, motionless and adhering.

Far overhead, the sky grew heavier and heavier, as though beaten down by the fine rain and about to fall upon their vulnerable flesh and blood.

The cool, fine rain lightly touched the ice-silk wide-sleeved outer robe of moon-shadow white that draped his frame. The jade-dark blue long robe wrapped around his tall, slender figure stirred faintly in the gentle rain and wind — like the flash of emotion in his eyes that surfaced and was instantly concealed.

He could hide his expression, but he could not hide his body’s instinctive response. The wooden paper umbrella in his hand was gripped so tightly it was nearly misshapen. The pallor had drained from his face and flooded into the joints of his fingers.

The moment of reunion had finally arrived.

The anger and disappointment he had imagined did not rise up inside him.

“News from the Yangzhou spies: Bai Rongling never brought Princess of Yue back to Yangzhou.”

He had immediately guessed where she had gone. But he had held onto the hope that he might be wrong.

He was not.

Fu Xuanmiao came to a stop beside her. The patter of the rain hid the sound of his approach, and she still had not sensed his presence.

The last time they had met, she was still his betrothed. Now they met again, and she had already become another man’s wife.

Compared to her days in the palace, she had grown thinner, taller. The fullness particular to a young girl had faded from her, gradually giving way to a woman’s graceful figure. Her head of dark hair was the same familiar sight — thick and black — once always adorned with a profusion of pearl and jeweled hairpins and ornaments, but now bearing only a single simple gold hairpin fastened at the back of a married woman’s coiled bun. Her fine, delicate skin would redden at any fabric less than pure silk, and she had always been fastidious, wrinkling her nose in aversion at the slightest speck of dirt. Yet now she wore cloth that even a senior palace maid would disdain, sitting carelessly upon a stone thick with grime, indifferent to the cold rain soaking her skirts and disheveling her hair.

Weeping unknowingly for another man.

If, on the day of the palace coup, Yu Sha had not taken it upon herself to send her out of the palace — would this moment now look entirely different?

His slender fingers moved. He picked up the paper umbrella, gently opened it, and held it over the fragile, trembling figure before him.

All things changed; this longing had not.

The faint sound of the opening umbrella made the trembling back go still.

Shen Zhuxi raised her tear-streaked face, full of puzzlement and unguarded bewilderment.

Fu Xuanmiao looked into those tear-bright eyes — blazing as the sun — and said softly:

“…Xi’er. I have come to bring you home.”