Seeing that Wen Yue was cooperating, Lang Jiuchuan made no reproach. She extended two fingers and rested them lightly upon the thin, pale wrist offered to her—the skin was ice-cold to the touch, with a chill that sank into the bone. Beyond the cold, there was also a thread of malevolent energy, faint but unmistakable.
Lang Jiuchuan studied Wen Yue quietly. In her calmer state, she seemed harmless enough—but her spirit was as fragile as blown glass. She could not withstand the slightest agitation. Was it truly only because of losing her child?
Perhaps not.
Lang Jiuchuan read the pulse carefully. Her liver pulse was sunken, rough, and thin—faint to the point of barely existing. The chi pulse at her wrist was especially weak, and the rhythm of the three positions was irregular, difficult to follow. This was a body that had never received proper recuperative care after childbirth—or rather, any care it had received had been rendered utterly useless by her deteriorating mental and emotional state, and the illness had only grown deeper and more entrenched.
She shifted to the other wrist. The pulse here was knotted and intermittent—what physicians called a jie-dai pulse. She withdrew her fingers and let out a quiet breath. A rough, knotted pulse indicated blood stagnation; the thin quality pointed to qi deficiency; and the interrupted, intermittent pattern signaled that both the heart’s qi and the heart’s blood had been severely depleted.
Wen Yue’s body harbored malevolent energy—cold and damp, her qi movement obstructed and stagnant. Combined with a failure to recover from childbirth, she had developed deficiency of qi and blood, exhaustion of vital energy, and prolonged emotional repression that had further damaged her liver and inflamed her spirit, clouding her mind until she had crossed over into madness. It was, in truth, a wonder she had not broken sooner.
“How is she? Can she be treated?” Lang Cailing asked anxiously the moment Lang Jiuchuan withdrew her hand.
Lang Jiuchuan looked at Wen Yue and explained quietly: “Her body has been treated very poorly. Childbirth depletes a woman of blood and vital fluids—she needs careful restoration and quiet rest. She received neither. Her body could not absorb tonics in her weakened state, and she grew weaker still. Added to that, her grief over losing the child caused prolonged overthinking—the liver qi became blocked and, over time, transformed into inner fire, which rose to disturb the heart-spirit. Phlegm then obstructed the mind’s clarity, and the spirit found no anchor—hence the madness.”
Lang Cailing’s heart was heavy. She had married well enough, and yet here she was—undone by the birth and death of a child, reduced to something between human and ghost.
But Lang Jiuchuan’s brow furrowed slightly. Wen Yue’s pulse, though serious, was not sufficient by itself to fully account for the profound, all-consuming obsession she had developed. She was still young—with proper care, there was no reason she could not carry again.
Yet her fixation on this lost child had reached the point of derangement—it was a despair that seemed to emanate from the very roots of her soul, a collapse of something foundational. It carried the signs of total exhaustion of heart-blood.
Unless—as suggested by what appeared in her facial complexion at the position governing her husband—the harmony of her marriage that Lang Cailing had mentioned was nothing more than a surface performance.
She was still turning this over when Lang Cailing tried to comfort Wen Yue beside her: “Elder Sister Yue, you’re still young—once your body heals, you and your husband can try again to conceive…”
“There will be no more children!” Wen Yue’s head snapped up with sudden violence. Her eyes blazed with a terrifying light, her voice desolate and cracked with despair. “Never again! This child—I took so much medicine for her, I prayed at so many shrines, I swallowed so much of my own pride to get her. Heaven finally took pity on me and gave me what I wanted. And now she’s gone. She’s gone. And he will never give me another child. He won’t—he won’t—”
As though struck on a raw nerve, Wen Yue began to weep and laugh at once, repeating over and over: he won’t, he won’t.
A glint surfaced in Lang Jiuchuan’s eyes.
What came with such difficulty.
So this was the true root of her illness.
Lang Jiuchuan looked more carefully at Wen Yue’s face, reading its features. Even ravaged by illness, one could make out certain things: the bridge of her nose was full and well-defined, the line of it straight—features that traditionally suggested she would bring prosperity to a husband and blessings to children. Yet at the center of her brow, a heavy, lingering grey settled like an unmoving fog, pushing directly into the region governing her marriage. This indicated a shallow affinity with her husband, and that he had brought about a profoundly negative influence in her life.
And yet this was the woman of whom it was said that the marriage was harmonious? What was displayed before the world was a performance. The dense bloodshot red of Wen Yue’s eyes and the deep bruised shadows beneath them were not the work of a few days—they spoke of long, sleepless nights and prolonged torment.
What struck Lang Jiuchuan as strange, however, was this: despite all the troubles in the marriage, there lingered at Wen Yue’s brow a trace of something faint—barely present, nearly entirely gone—that did not belong to her by any natural right. A remnant of purple energy.
A phoenix fate of the highest nobility. It seemed what had been said was true. Wen Yue had genuinely once carried within her a child of extraordinary and precious destiny.
Lang Jiuchuan’s interest sharpened. She asked Lang Cailing if she knew Wen Yue’s birth date and hour. Lang Cailing had not yet replied when Wen Yue—in her dazed, floating state—spoke one of her birth hours aloud of her own accord.
Lang Jiuchuan summoned the Panguan’s spirit brush and inscribed those characters of birth, one by one. As expected, what appeared in the karmic record belonging to Wen Yue’s previous life was a great radiance of accumulated merit and vow-fulfillment.
Those who carry great accumulated virtue through their lives often give birth to children of exceptional destiny. If the soul that comes to be born has likewise stored its share of fortune and blessing, the combination can yield a naturally noble fate—and the heavens, in bestowing such rewards, are not ungenerous. This is what the world means when it speaks of cultivating hidden virtue—of building karmic merit.
“Ah…” Lang Jiuchuan saw what the fate record showed beneath Wen Yue’s name—a single daughter listed there—and her expression shifted sharply.
If the child had truly died, there would be no living child listed in her current fate record.
Lang Jiuchuan looked again at the position governing Wen Yue’s children. It was sunken and darkened. At the right lower eyelid—the position governing daughters—there was a vertical needle-like crease cutting downward, which was classically associated with losing a child.
But something did not align.
The face did not match what the current fate record showed.
Someone had manipulated the position governing her children—a crude attempt to conceal what lay beneath.
Lang Jiuchuan’s eyes went cold.
“Ninth—Ninth Sister, what’s wrong?” Lang Cailing saw the change in her expression and felt an uneasy knot form in her chest. Something wrong had clearly been found—and the look on Lang Jiuchuan’s face was frightening.
At that precise moment, footsteps sounded outside the door. Wen Yue’s husband—Lu Ruitíng, a son of the Lu Family—had been sent for and now came striding in, guided by a maidservant.
Lang Jiuchuan raised her eyes to look at him.
He was handsome—fine-featured, with an air of refinement and gentle restraint. He entered with a look of concern and worry on his face, moving straight to the bedside. “Yue’er, what has happened—why has it flared up again?”
His voice carried every appearance of tender anxiety, yet it did not reach his eyes. What lived there was contempt, impatience—and beneath that, deeply concealed, a cold disgust and indifference.
Lang Jiuchuan read his face in a single pass and laughed inwardly. Then she looked at Wen Yue, whose body had gone even more rigid at his entrance, and she felt a quiet sorrow.
The root of the illness has been found.
What had Wen Yue done to deserve this—a daughter of a ducal household, one of the Four Beauties of Wu Jing—only to be saddled with a husband whose true inclinations lay elsewhere entirely? Had she recognized the situation for what it was, she could have gone to her family, had the marriage dissolved, and walked away. With her background and her standing, there would have been no shortage of men of genuine worth willing to take her as a wife.
Instead, she had chained herself to this rotting tree.
Lu Ruitíng’s brow ridge was prominent, his eyes given to a wandering brightness—the look of a man who wore a virtuous face over a hollow interior. His nose was tall but carried a subtle crook at its line, indicating a nature that was obstinate and self-serving at its core. Most telling of all was the position on his face governing marriage: dim and lightless, crossed with overlapping lines—indicating a marriage drained of true feeling, two people sharing a bed while lying worlds apart. For such a person to have so convincingly performed the role of the devoted husband in the eyes of outsiders—one only had to look at the smallest details to find the cracks.
What told Lang Jiuchuan of his true inclinations was the region of his face governing illness—the root of the nose—where the energy that gathered there was murky and heavy, shot through with a dull, turbid quality. This was not the kind of energy produced by relations with women. It was the mark of a man whose nature inclined toward other men—and of vital energy that had been squandered prematurely.
Lang Jiuchuan felt faintly nauseated.
She watched him now with feigned sincerity as he bowed in apology to Lang Cailing, making no mention of his wife’s madness or fault, taking the entire burden of blame upon himself—so that even Lang Cailing found herself softening and unable to hold onto her anger. She began to understand how the world had been so completely deceived.
It was because Lu Ruitíng—born into a prestigious and respected family—had nevertheless adopted a posture of such unfailing humility and accommodation. He never named a single fault in his wife. He absorbed everything. She did no wrong. Everything is my fault. That low, placating stance, combined with his manner of the perfect gentleman of an illustrious house—the mask was so thoroughly fused to his face that no one could see the grotesqueness beneath.
Lang Jiuchuan could see that Wen Yue was beginning to show the first signs of a coming breakdown. She cut across Lu Ruitíng’s performance and said: “Third Sister—the feng shui of this room is harmful to Wen Yue. If she were returned to the Duke’s household to convalesce, she would surely improve.”
Lu Ruitíng’s eyes shot toward her—and in them, a flash of cold, sharp light.