Faced with Lu Songping’s question, Xiao Nanhui had absolutely no intention of responding.

At a standoff this clearly hostile, who in their right mind would waste words on pleasantries? Ridiculous!

She drew a deep breath, did not turn around, and hurled herself straight at the disheveled, filthy Deputy Superintendent Lan.

The unfortunate fellow surnamed Lan was badly startled, assuming she intended to drag him down with her before dying, and scrambled frantically to dodge aside — but his leg irons were heavy and cumbersome, and he essentially only managed to writhe in place.

The very next second, a rush of wind swept past him, followed by a heavy crash. The floor beside him cracked open — the wooden panel normally used only for passing food through had been kicked entirely loose by someone.

Xiao Nanhui slipped out through the bottom of Shunxin Pavilion and tried to use the moonlight to get a rough sense of direction. But Lu Songping had absolutely no intention of giving her that chance, and came after her almost in the same breath.

Xiao Nanhui spun around and sent a wooden board flying with a kick, putting every ounce of strength in her legs into it.

A thread of silver light flashed like a needle’s tip, and the board fell apart in two pieces without a sound. She looked up just in time to see a razor’s edge driving straight for her eyes.

Swift as a streak of light, with the whistling sound of air being cut.

Xiao Nanhui dared not be careless, yet her body had already retreated as far as it could go. She called up every ounce of strength to twist her neck and shoulders aside.

A cold, biting edge swept past her jaw, past her ear, through her hair.

She saw it clearly now — it was a long, narrow sword, nothing like the forthright bearing of a gentleman’s blade. Instead it carried a certain sinuous, insidious quality that complemented its wielder perfectly.

It brought to mind an ancient legend from eastern Ling: it was said that when the heavenly gods descended to the mortal realm, they had imparted enlightenment upon several living creatures — and among these were serpents.

The sword in Lu Songping’s hand was exactly like a serpent.

A silver serpent that had attained sentience.

Its first strike having missed, it retracted swiftly and, when it darted out again, came from an entirely different direction.

Xiao Nanhui had no desire to fight — her sole aim was to escape. She kept to pure defense, hurling everything within reach at her opponent, and seized every opening to try to widen the gap between them.

The silver serpent seemed to grow irritated. It suddenly bent, the blade reversing into an impossible angle, and snapped viciously toward Xiao Nanhui.

Such a narrow blade — and yet it was a soft sword as well.

Xiao Nanhui swore inwardly, her instincts telling her she was about to sustain a wound.

This should have been a killing blow by any measure, yet the one wielding the sword deliberately eased off several degrees of force, allowing the blade’s trajectory to veer ever so slightly, its momentum gentled just enough. And so what ought to have been a devastating strike of consummate precision was reduced instead to the petty maneuver of a rogue tearing someone’s clothing.

Xiao Nanhui looked down at the slash across her garment at the waist and recognized that her opponent was arrogant and self-satisfied — this was the posture of a cat toying with a mouse. Somehow, that realization settled her nerves a little.

If Lu Songping were fighting with the intent to kill her, even at full force she might only have a fifty-fifty chance of survival. But if he was unwilling to exert his full strength against her — that was an entirely different situation.

In the time it took to catch one breath, Lu Songping’s sword came lunging at her back shoulder again from a tricky angle.

This time, Xiao Nanhui did not dodge.

The silver serpent’s gleam reached her in the blink of an eye. Xiao Nanhui reached her hand back toward her spine, and with a burst of focused force yanked out the cloth-wrapped bundle she had kept strapped there.

Clang.

Steel met steel; sparks scattered in all directions.

Xiao Nanhui gripped Ping Xian in her hand, and without giving Lu Songping a moment to react, executed a move — Moon Fishing from the Lake Bottom — that slammed his sword away with full force. Using the recoil, she launched herself upward onto the rooftop and, with a mid-air roll, opened the distance between them.

A longer weapon holds one advantage; a shorter one holds one danger.

Now that she had drawn her weapon, while it didn’t put Lu Songping in any great peril, it was more than enough to let her make her escape.

She didn’t overthink it. She turned and ran.

Several zhang away, the surprise in Lu Songping’s eyes gradually transformed into a competitive drive kindled by the provocation. Like a jackal that had been kicked in the chin by a rabbit, he gave chase at even greater speed.

To avoid drawing more pursuers, Xiao Nanhui was forced to abandon the path toward the outer wall and ran deeper into the seldom-visited reaches of the detached palace.

Branches and trailing vines, some slender and some broad, swept past her ears in rapid succession. When Xiao Nanhui stepped free of that overgrown, secluded path, she lifted her eyes and saw in the darkness the silhouette of a massive palace hall.

The sheer scale of this hall’s construction seemed to hint at something, yet the entire structure was devoid of a single candle’s light — silent as the grave.

Beyond the hall was the main courtyard road, and she could be certain that would be thick with pursuers. But behind this hall appeared to be the detached palace’s rear garden, and beyond the garden was the outer wall — it should not be too difficult to find a way out.

A swift assessment made, Xiao Nanhui flew up the stone steps ahead and headed toward the pitch-dark gates of the hall.

Almost at that same instant, the ominous wind that had been hounding her steps suddenly fell still.

Xiao Nanhui turned back gasping to look. In the moonlight, Lu Songping’s shadow stood at the very first step at the base of this great hall’s entrance — and refused to advance so much as half a step further.

Strange.

Was he tired of giving chase?

There was no time to think further. Xiao Nanhui stepped quickly toward the darkness ahead.

The scorching night wind stopped dead at the threshold of this great hall.

The moment Xiao Nanhui crossed into the darkness, she felt something cool brush lightly across her cheek.

She had taken it for a piece of very large, very thin gossamer silk, and raised her hand to brush it away — but whatever it was that floated in the air was impossible to grasp.

The air was cold and utterly still, like stepping inside a sealed mountain cavern. Xiao Nanhui slowed her pace, and once her eyes had adjusted to the light, she quietly took in her surroundings.

The vast hall was entirely empty of people. Enormous decorative porcelain vases taller than a man lay toppled this way and that. Overturned low tables lay strewn together with shattered porcelain plates and glass cups. Here and there across the floor lay a withered fruit or two, blanketed in a layer of gray-green mold.

She knew now what this place was.

According to rumor, the hall within which King Kang had received his guests was called “Snow Confusion” — a place reserved only for honored visitors. Inside the hall, the air remained cool as early autumn throughout all four seasons, which in perpetually sweltering Tongcheng was a miraculous thing. Many who came to call upon King Kang had heard of it and wished to see it, yet few had ever actually set foot inside.

The most recent occasion King Kang had hosted guests here had been just over a month ago.

Time seemed frozen at that banquet night, and everything here remained exactly as it had been when the assassination took place — apart from the bodies that had been dragged away, even the tables and chairs blocking the paths had not been moved.

Lu Songping’s people work rather hastily, it seemed.

Lost in thought, Xiao Nanhui forgot to watch where she was stepping, and suddenly felt half her leg go cold — she had stepped directly into a pool of water.

The water was shallow, only rising to her lower calves, but the temperature was bone-chilling. She was about to withdraw when something in that pool caught her eye, and she went still.

In the extremely dim light, something in the water was reflecting the faint moonlight.

Xiao Nanhui bent down and reached her hand into the water to feel around. When she opened her palm a moment later, there lay two translucent white jade pendants.

No — she turned them over and examined them again. They were not two pieces. They were one.

A thumb-ring jade pendant, severed into two halves.

Thumb-ring jade pendants could only be worn by the Emperor himself, or given as gifts by the Emperor. Under the present circumstances, the owner of this pendant could only be King Kang.

She picked up one of the pieces and brought it close to examine it carefully.

The ice-white, lustrous pendant had been cut cleanly through the middle, the cut so smooth it might almost have been made that way. It had apparently sustained the cut during the assault on King Kang.

But — what kind of weapon could leave a cut like this? Jade was both hard and brittle. Even if an ordinary sword or blade were to strike such a small object in midair, the jade would typically shatter in place.

Something flickered through her mind.

Slender. Tenacious. Fast and ruthless, a strangling cut—

A flying wire.

It was at the old Xiong family estate in the depths of the Mu Er He swamp. The group of assassins they had encountered there — they had used flying wires.

Could this really be a coincidence? Or had her own reasoning gone astray?

Xiao Nanhui stood motionless in the ice-cold pool, and suddenly felt that King Kang’s death might be nothing more than a patch of duckweed floating on the surface. No one could know what the true depths beneath that surface concealed.

The hard jade pressed firmly in her grip, digging painfully into her palm.

The matter of Mu Er He was not finished. The matter of the secret seal was not finished either.

Everything had only just begun.

She clasped the jade and walked out of the pool. Whether it was because her feet were wet, or something else, she felt the air around her grow colder still — cold enough that she could faintly see her own breath.

Was this not the height of summer? How could there be such a heavy presence of cold and shadow in this detached palace?

Xiao Nanhui directed her gaze toward the throne deeper in the hall — King Kang’s seat during his banquets, which had now been split diagonally in two. Like the jade pendant, it had a quality of clean, precise decisiveness about it.

Dense royal hardwood, cut in two like a block of soft bean curd.

She felt it was necessary to go forward and examine it more closely — perhaps she might discover some clues. But the moment she took a step forward, her legs gave way.

She assumed it was because she had stood too long in the cold water and her legs had gone numb. She shifted to the other leg — and it gave way as well.

The numbing sensation spread gradually from her limbs toward her torso. Her head grew heavy and her feet light, and she stumbled forward several more unsteady steps before collapsing to her knees on the floor, just a few steps short of that throne split in two.

Xiao Nanhui shook her head forcefully, struggling to remain conscious.

This feeling was very strange — it was not like the sensation of being drugged.

Her senses were still functioning, but functioning in a wildly confused manner. Her eardrums felt as if they had been coated in a layer of wax, and only the beat of her own heart came through clearly — yet her sense of smell seemed to have been amplified several times over, and she began slowly to distinguish an unusual floral scent drifting through the air.

How could there be a floral scent in this hall?

Without her noticing, she had already fallen back flat on the ground. She tried to raise her hand and wave it before her eyes; her mildly dilated pupils could not focus on the five fingers right before her face — but she could see the luminous plants hanging inverted from the ceiling of the great hall.

It was a vast expanse of enormous orchids casting a blue luminescence, faintly radiating cold, their roots and tendrils intertwined in dense abundance — in full bloom. From the center of each flower, tiny powdery dust fell in a constant drift, scattering in all directions. The particles were so fine they formed a translucent haze of floating dust, too slight to notice without deliberate attention.

She finally understood what had swept across her face the moment she crossed the threshold.

No wonder that wretch Lu Songping refused to enter. Snow Confusion Hall had something very wrong about it. King Kang had loved rare and exotic flowers and plants, and had cultivated some species that could lower the air temperature. But this type of plant was toxic in itself. Without regular pruning, it grew rampant, and anyone who stayed inside for even a brief while would suffer confusion of the mind.

Judging by the way Lu Songping had retreated so completely, one more breath of this might well be lethal.

At this thought, Xiao Nanhui struggled desperately to prop herself upright, intending to crawl toward the direction of the hall gates. But the moment she rose, the scene before her began to spin violently. The light of the moon filtering through looked like a hurtling streak of brightness, careening through her field of vision in every direction — left, right, up, down — impossible to seize hold of no matter how she tried.

The spinning scene made her crawl a few paces before she collapsed again, struggling where she lay.

She could hear her own labored breathing, like air escaping through a broken, drafty door.

The cold around her seemed to deepen, and her struggles grew ever more sluggish.

A soft rustling.

Xiao Nanhui’s pupils stirred.

It was the sound of shoes brushing against the floor — someone appeared to be walking toward her.

She could not tell if it was a hallucination. Until, in the very next moment, a low, hoarse voice pushed through her thickened eardrums and reached her with a dragging delay.

“Xiao Nanhui. Close your eyes.”

That voice — she had heard it somewhere before.

She could not take in what the person was saying, and instead forced her eyes as wide open as they would go, struggling to make out the face of the one approaching. In the end, all she could perceive was a blur of white.

A faintly cold white — the same as tonight’s moon.

The white drew closer, and Xiao Nanhui felt her unsteady body make contact with something that finally steadied her. Beneath her cheek and arm was the sensation that only the finest silk could give — and it was quietly, faintly warm.

Why did this white look cold, and yet feel warm to the touch?

“Stop that — take your hand away.”

Ah, truly so familiar. Where had she heard it before?

Her mind, unable to turn, struggled to think. But her hand refused to let go, and she clung with the stubborn abandon of a drunk, sinking with unbudging fixation into that warm expanse of moon-white.

After a long while, something like a sigh seemed to drift past her ear.

And then her body seemed to leave the ground and rise, enveloped more tightly in that moon-white, like a pool of warm spring water.

A faint, cool fragrance drifted through her senses. That vision which had been spinning endlessly seemed, at last, to gradually calm and settle.

The drowsiness continued to erode Xiao Nanhui’s consciousness.

In the final moment before her eyes fell shut, she seemed to see those cascading motes of falling dust transform — into snow, drifting softly down from the sky in all directions.