Shen Zhuxi lay awake with open eyes through the entire night. When the darkness in the east began to lighten and the safety that dawn brought finally coaxed drowsiness to the surface, she was blinking and blinking, just on the verge of falling asleep, when a black rope dropping from somewhere not far away jolted her alert and snapped her eyes wide open.

A pitch-black snake, flicking its forked tongue, descended softly onto the front portion of the branch where Shen Zhuxi sat. A length of glistening tail slid out past the branch, but almost at once it coiled around the bough with neither too much slack nor too much tension.

The black snake lifted its small triangular head, its crimson eyes fixed unblinkingly on Shen Zhuxi.

Every trace of sleepiness deserted her. The snake that had dropped out of nowhere terrified her nearly out of her wits. She sat rigid, staring back at it, and without realizing it her eyes filled with tears.

The black snake gave her a single disinterested glance, then lazily stretched its body, hooked itself onto a branch overhead, and climbed away.

Shen Zhuxi felt as though she had been pardoned from execution. She scrambled down the tree in a frantic rush.

Only when both feet touched the ground did her wildly hammering heart gradually settle. Still trembling, she cast one glance at the dense canopy above, wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand as though nothing had happened, then lifted her foot and walked on, continuing her search for Li Wu’s trail.

Considering that Li Wu’s markers might have been tampered with, Shen Zhuxi changed the shape of her own marks. She discarded the pebbles she had been using and picked up a stone with a sharp edge instead, using it to leave along the way a secret sign that belonged only to her and Li Wu’s three brothers —

A round face, two pointed ears, a pair of large round eyes, and two round holes inside a circle shaped like a river stone.

A vivid, lively little pig sprang onto the bark.

This was Li Kun’s drawing style. Shen Zhuxi was certain that if Li Wu saw it, he would know she had passed through here.

Once she abandoned the vertical-line marks and the confusion they caused her, Shen Zhuxi pressed straight ahead with single-minded focus, and very quickly walked out of the place where she had been going in circles the day before.

After half a day of trekking through the forest, Shen Zhuxi was exhausted and parched and famished. Her shrunken stomach growled insistently, dragging badly at her pace. She had been thinking of stopping to search for something edible in the wild, but the fungi she found nearby were all varieties she had never seen before — not only entirely unfamiliar, but also far larger than ordinary mushrooms. Shen Zhuxi stared at the enormous caps and their gaudy, dappled patterns, and a chill of unease ran through her as Li Wu’s voice sounded in her ears:

“Do not eat wild mushrooms unless I am there with you.”

Shen Zhuxi gave up on the mushrooms and in the end settled on some green wild fruit nearby that looked modest and harmless enough.

She examined them from every angle; this variety seemed the closest to one of the edible wild fruits Li Wu had once taught her to identify. Standing on her toes, she jumped several times before she could pull a branch down, and plucked a green fruit the size of a fist.

With no way to wash it, Shen Zhuxi could only rub it repeatedly against her sleeve, then put it carefully into her mouth and bit into it with great apprehension.

No juice. The skin was astringent, and the flesh tasted as though it had been boiled in plain water — flat and flavorless, without the clean fragrance or crisp sweetness of proper fruit.

Not good, but probably not poisonous. Shen Zhuxi had no real evidence; it was simply an inexplicable feeling. The fruit was neither particularly unpleasant nor anywhere close to good — such an utterly ordinary thing, she thought, surely lacked the power to poison anyone.

To be safe, she ate only half, left the other half at the foot of the tree, then jumped to pick seven or eight more, wrapped them in her outer robe, and set off again in search of Li Wu.

As she pushed deeper into the forest, the light filtering through the canopy above grew dimmer and dimmer. She had set out at the clear break of dawn, yet the light in the depths of the forest was like that after sunset, robbing her of any sense of how much time had passed.

Shen Zhuxi reined in the anxiety stirring within her, clutched the stone in her hand — the only thing that could even loosely be called a weapon — and walked forward, pausing at every few steps to peer around.

After walking and stopping like this for the better part of a day, the already dim forest grew darker still, and Shen Zhuxi knew that nightfall had come again.

She found a broad, open clearing and stopped there, leaning against a tree so large that five people linking arms could barely encircle its trunk. She sat down, took out the green fruit from her bundle, and bit into one.

It tasted like chewing wax.

She had only just found reason to hope she might locate Li Wu — she would not give up easily. But how long could this go on? Three days? Five? Half a month?

Bai Rongling ought to have left Shouzhou by now. She hoped that once he returned to Yangzhou and her grandfather learned the whole truth, the old man would have some means of dealing with Fu Xuanmiao — otherwise the Bai Family would ultimately be dragged down because of her.

Though Fu Xuanmiao held power over everything, there were as yet no signs that he harbored ambitions to usurp the throne, so Shen Suzhan should be safe in the short term. As for what lay further ahead — that she could not predict.

She had once placed her hopes in Shen Suzhan. She had hoped he was a good elder brother who cherished the bond between siblings; hoped that after living through the destruction of their country and family, he might become a wise ruler with the world in his heart. After all the time she had spent observing him, she now understood completely — these hopes were groundless, nothing more than her own wishful fantasies.

Shen Suzhan was not fit to bear the destiny of a ruler who could restore the dynasty. The Great Yan had recovered its broken rivers and mountains, but greater dangers had already begun to emerge, and at this moment the Great Yan had no loyal ministers, no capable generals, no wise sovereign —

The Great Yan of today was nothing but a guttering candle in the wind; even without a breath to disturb it, the flame might silently die out at any moment.

Shen Zhuxi could not help feeling bleak: could it truly be that the Great Yan’s mandate of Heaven was spent?

As a princess of the Great Yan, was there truly nothing she could do?

A light breeze passed through, and the dim, pale light-patches on the ground rippled with it. Shen Zhuxi suddenly roused herself, looked up at the sky, and through the interstices of leaves and branches glimpsed a deep blue.

Night had come again.

Shen Zhuxi realized with a start that she had wasted too much time in idle thought. Annoyed with herself, she looked around in all directions, searching for somewhere suitable to pass the night.

She turned her head — and found herself staring straight into two pinpricks of eerie green light deep in the forest.

At first Shen Zhuxi wondered if she was imagining things. She looked more carefully, and the two points of green light not only did not fade — they began to multiply.

She looked more closely all around, and realized that the ghostly green glimmers were not only behind her — they appeared in every direction.

Could this be what storybooks called will-o’-the-wisps?

In the next instant Shen Zhuxi knew exactly what those green glowing things were — and if given a choice, she would have preferred them to be will-o’-the-wisps.

One after another, wild wolves emerged slowly from the depths of the forest. The one at the front stood considerably taller than the rest and was the most powerfully built among them. Its pale green eyes were fixed on the frozen Shen Zhuxi, as though sizing her up, as though deliberating.

Shen Zhuxi could not help but step back — crack — her foot snapped a dry branch beneath her.

Almost simultaneously, the pack leader moved its forelegs forward. Shen Zhuxi did not wait to look again; she spun around and bolted without a moment’s hesitation.

Immediately behind her came the sound of four feet at a full run. Shen Zhuxi’s heart hammered wildly. Not daring to look back, she poured every last ounce of strength into running forward.

She had never run this fast in her entire life.

Even when Yu Sha had dragged her by the hand and fled during the palace catastrophe, their speed had not matched what she was managing now on her own.

She knew it clearly — there was no Yu Sha here to pull her by the hand, no Li Wu to appear and protect her. If she could not outrun the wolf pack, never mind finding Li Wu; she would be reduced to bare bones before this night was over.

The hope of finding Li Wu was right before her eyes — she refused to die here as wolf fodder!

In her panicked flight, Shen Zhuxi was tripped by a root and fell to the ground. Heedless of the pain in her body, she was still trying to scramble to her feet when a rushing sound of air came from behind, and she turned her head in terror, clutching the useless stone in her hand —

Was she going to die here?

Li Wu was clearly here somewhere — was she going to become wolf fodder before she ever found him?

In utter despair, Shen Zhuxi watched the enormous, gaping jaws lunging toward her. Her entire body went rigid and would not move. The hot, rank breath from the wolf’s mouth seemed to be already hitting her face. Shen Zhuxi shut her eyes in fear and waited for the final moment.

“Whish —”

A razor-sharp sound sliced through the air. Shen Zhuxi’s eyes flew open in astonishment just in time to see an arrow — barely more than a blur of motion — drive cleanly into the pack leader’s right eye.

The pack leader let out a howl in midair and crashed heavily to the ground, raising a cloud of dust. The wolves that had been closing in to surround her all stopped dead in their tracks, drawing back warily to cluster behind the fallen leader.

The pack leader, an arrow buried in its eye, struggled back to its feet. Blood streamed down from the arrowhead lodged in its socket. It panted heavily, and the one eye that remained undamaged had turned scarlet.

“What are you standing there staring at? Come here, quickly!”

Like a thunderclap out of a clear sky. Shen Zhuxi’s eyes went wide in disbelief as she looked back — and there, separated from her by a full month’s time, the person she had begun to think she would never see again was standing before her, very much alive.

Li Wu stood on a boulder half a man’s height, still wearing the clothes he had on the day they parted — now reduced to little more than ragged strips of cloth, barely concealing the soaring phoenix tattoo that covered half his body. In his hand a longbow was drawn to a full moon, an arrow tipped with a sharpened stone leveled steadily at the panting pack leader.

Those long, narrow eyes of his were still as bright and brilliant as ever, full of confidence and courage.

The heartbeat that had frozen came back to life. Warm blood flowed once more into her cold body. In that moment, Shen Zhuxi came alive again.

She could not tell whether this was a dream or reality. When the scene she had longed for finally came to pass, she half-feared it was an illusory morning dew that would evaporate clean away once the sun rose.

Her body seemed to have separated from her soul. Her soul had not yet recovered, but her body had already risen and was stumbling, lurching, making its way to stand behind Li Wu.

The pack leader’s low, heavy, cold panting seemed to sound right in her ears, yet she was not afraid at all — Li Wu was here; with him here, she feared nothing — her only fear was that before she reached him, this vision would dissolve into smoke. She prayed, and prayed, with something close to dread and desperate pleading in her tear-blurred gaze fixed on the figure before her.

His gaze, fierce and resolute, was locked on the pack leader that had not yet given up. He did not turn to look at her. And yet his presence — so real, so familiar — the closer she drew, the more her tears refused to stop.

At last she reached him, coming to stand behind Li Wu. He stood with his bow fully drawn, facing the injured pack leader in a long, motionless standoff. In the forest there was only the sound of a breeze stirring the leaves.

Time passed — how much, she could not say. Then the pack leader turned and walked away, blood-tears dripping along its path.

Li Wu did not dare lower his bow immediately. He waited a long while longer before finally turning his concerned gaze toward Shen Zhuxi, who stood behind him: “How are you — are you hurt?”

His concern, so perfectly ordinary, so like himself, broke down every last barrier Shen Zhuxi had built against her tears.

She could no longer hold back the emotions in her heart. She threw herself forward, crashing into Li Wu’s warm and familiar arms.

“I… I finally found you…”

Shen Zhuxi wept outright, with no thought for her appearance, tears blurring her vision entirely.

A moment later, Li Wu’s hand came to rest on her back, and he began to pat it gently.

His voice was the same as it had always been — flippant and irreverent — yet Shen Zhuxi’s keen ear caught a faint catch in his throat beneath it.

He said:

“Mmm… you finally found me, little fool.”