Floating through the depths of sleep, Xiao Nanhui felt one of her legs burning with a searing, scorching pain.

She tried to roll over and pull the leg back, but it felt as if a great boulder had been pressed down on her body — she could not move at all.

Infuriated, she let out a great shout in her dream — and abruptly woke herself up.

Above her was the blazing sun, large as a washbasin.

She blinked, wiggled her fingers, and reached out to feel around for whatever was pressing down on her.

Several enormous burlap sacks, heavy as lead. Occasionally a sandy substance trickled from them and fell on her face; she extended her tongue and licked it.

Salty. It was salt.

She had only seen this kind of coarse burlap sack once before — on a captured illegal salt trader.

Taking a deep breath, she channeled her strength and pushed. The burlap sacks fell away. Xiao Nanhui sat up on a dilapidated wooden cart, finally pulling back that leg that had nearly been roasted by the sun.

At the same moment, several large men who had been sitting in the shade of a saxaul tree not far away heard the commotion and turned their heads together, surprise evident on their weathered, dark-skinned faces.

Xiao Nanhui swallowed with difficulty, trying to moisten her parched and cracked throat.

“Excuse me — where is this?”

When these men saw her speak, their expressions turned rather peculiar. Xiao Nanhui heard a few of them muttering something in low voices, using a very thick and awkward dialect.

She spoke up again, not a little incredulous — and this time she did not use the common tongue, but rather the dialect of the Suyan region of western Ling.

“Is this Suyan?”

The one who appeared to be the leader looked at Xiao Nanhui with some surprise and nodded. “Just about to reach Suyan.” He paused, then asked: “You’re not from the eastern Ling side?”

Xiao Nanhui recognized the habitual wariness toward outsiders typical of western Ling folk, and let out an awkward laugh. “Did a few escort jobs for a bureau in Tongcheng a few days ago, and got swindled in the end.”

Hearing she was a local, the leader dropped his reserve and said frankly: “That explains it then. The man paid the silver himself and told us to get you to Suyan at all speed — we were thinking it was a funny kind of slave trader, paying out of his own pocket upfront to deliver someone. Turns out he just wanted to make sure you couldn’t double back and settle the score.”

He let out a “ha ha ha” of laughter, and the several people around him joined in with their own foolish chuckles.

Xiao Nanhui, however, could not quite find it in herself to laugh.

“Sold? Sold who?”

The laughter stopped dead.

“Sold you.”

A gust of wind swept by, and a ball of wind-dried Russian thistle tumbled merrily past.

The atmosphere turned momentarily strange.

“Could we perhaps — talk this over—”

“No.” The leader stood up, and the five or six men behind him stood up as well.

Xiao Nanhui felt a splitting headache, and instinctively reached toward her back.

Good, good — Ping Xian was still there.

She smiled at the group of them, and quietly said, “My apologies.”

Several cries of pain rang out across the Gobi. After a brief clattering and crashing of commotion, silence swiftly returned.

Half an incense stick’s worth of time later, a figure riding a camel set off in a straight line down the road, heading due west at full speed.

Xiao Nanhui had wrapped herself up like a dumpling.

The outfit she wore had been taken from those men — it reeked of sour sweat, but she had no choice and simply had to endure it.

She knew the weather of the Gobi all too well. Exposed under such blazing sun, one would grow feeble and dehydrated within an hour. Sometimes wearing more layers was the hard logic of survival.

This camel was an old one. Not only did it know to avoid areas of quicksand on its own, it also knew the way to Suyan.

Those men had actually done her a service — her next step had been to find a way to reach Suyan, and that city was right at the edge of the Bai Family’s territory. Xiao Nanhui began checking the usable supplies on her person to see whether she could make it to her destination.

On the camel’s back were two water skins, both about seven or eight tenths full. She let out a slight breath of relief. In the Gobi, the one thing that could not be conjured from nothing was water — as long as there was water, everything else was manageable.

She untied the leader’s bundle, which she had helped herself to. Inside was a dagger, a few strings of copper coins, some dried and hardened flatbread, and a small pouch of coarse salt.

Meager, but enough.

Xiao Nanhui raised an eyebrow, then reached back to feel Ping Xian, baking hot from the sun.

It was strange — all her copper coins and loose silver had been stripped from her, yet those men had left Ping Xian behind. Perhaps they hadn’t been able to tell what Ping Xian actually was?

Only then did she remember that in the moments before losing consciousness, she should have still been clutching the jade pendant — the thumb-ring jade. After waking, there was no sign of it. She didn’t know whether those salt traders had found and pocketed it, or whether—

A flash of moon-white swept through her mind, and the events of that night in Snow Confusion Hall came churning up without warning, impossible to suppress.

Because of the orchid’s effect, her memories had taken on a dreamlike quality of unreality. But somehow, she always felt that the person must have been a man — and moreover, someone faintly familiar.

Who was that person? Had he been the one who rescued her? But then, why would he turn around and have her sent to Suyan?

She recalled how she seemed to have ended up buried in that person’s arms in the end. Her face, whether from the heat or some other cause, went unexpectedly warm.

For all her years of living, apart from taking blows in a fight, she had in truth never had such intimate contact with another man.

Even Xiao Zhun had never made so much as a single improper gesture toward her.

Thinking of Xiao Zhun, Xiao Nanhui felt herself go cold all over.

She raised her eyes. Wind and sand stretched endlessly. When would she ever see him again?

~~*

Suyan, Suyan — the Rock of the Stars.

Open and austere, cloudless for ten thousand li, it had since ancient times been a sacred place for reading the heavens and observing the constellations.

Yet with the shifting of climate and the passing of ages, Suyan was now nothing more than a parched and impoverished wasteland, barren for lack of water.

If one could look down from the air, one would clearly see a rift valley cutting this ancient city in two — one side lush and green, the other rolling with yellow sand.

And for that, the Sun Family had the honor of being thanked.

The Sun Family had not been born to power — they were merely wealthy. In another place that wealth might have amounted to little, but in Suyan it was enough to shake the heavens, and enough to breed the greed that comes from insatiable desire.

Suyan’s terrain was unusual, high in the west and low in the east. The western highlands were flat and expansive, occupying the edge of the largest oasis in all the western Ling Gobi. Within the oasis were countless natural springs, and the Tianmu River — fed by snowmelt descending from Mount Gongduo — flowed straight through it, making it a richly watered and fertile stretch of land. The eastern portion, by stark contrast, sat in alkaline, rocky terrain on the southern side of a mountain range. The climate was dry, the land infertile, the water scarce — fed only by a trickle of the Tianmu River’s downstream flow.

The Sun Family, using the pretext of building water works, deceived the city’s garrison commander and constructed tall dams on the Tianmu River’s upper reaches. From that point on, not a drop of water reached the downstream eastern Suyan, and the riverbed dried up more and more with each passing year.

But that was only the beginning. The Sun Family, on one hand, rushed to enclose the oasis and erect high walls around it; on the other, they cultivated the wealthy merchants and powerful figures of the western city, maintaining long-standing ties with the Nanqiang people of central Bijiang, and plundering the merchant convoys that passed through Suyan. This ancient city that had endured for a thousand years was ultimately fractured by the Sun Family into two separate cities, east and west. Throughout the western city and for a hundred li beyond, the Sun Family’s curved-blade cavalry and the Nanqiang riders kept guard and patrolled. Any person not of the city’s own population who was encountered there was killed without question.

As for the eastern city — even if someone were to send an eight-sedan-chair invitation, no one would be willing to go in.

When Xiao Nanhui passed through that crumbling gate, she nearly doubted whether she might be the only person to have passed through it all day.

Her water skin was already empty — it needed to be replenished urgently. But after a few brief inquiries, she discovered that the actual situation in Suyan’s eastern city was even worse than she had imagined.

The city had originally relied on deep wells for its water supply. In recent years, however, even the deepest wells had stopped yielding a single drop. Many residents of the eastern city had spent their entire family fortunes on a “city entry fee” paid to the Sun Family, seeking nothing more than to move their whole household to the western city and live there. As for the poor — they were left sitting beside the sand, waiting to die.

Of the original five communal wells, four had run dry. Only one remained, and even fighting madly over it one could hardly get a single mouthful of water, to say nothing of water for washing and cooking. Every person in the city was covered in gray dust, as though the entire city had been draped in a shroud of grime.

Xiao Nanhui herself was not faring much better. She had been on the road non-stop since escaping from the salt traders, and truly had not a single silver coin on her — only a few strings of copper, and she had been roughing it the entire way. By the end she had no water left to drink. She had managed to drag herself to the city only to find that inside the walls was no different from the wilderness outside.

She had been wearing the same outfit for several days running and was thoroughly haggard and grimy. If she rubbed at the grime on her face it would roll up into little pellets.

It made her feel as though she had slipped into a daze back to the days before Xiao Zhun had taken her in. As a child, she had almost no idea what her own face looked like — the earthen hut she had lived in didn’t have so much as a dim, tarnished copper mirror. Even the occasional glimpse of her reflection when drawing water from a well had never been clear, always obscured by layers of grime.

Thinking back now, when Xiao Zhun had taken her away, he might well have assumed she was a boy.

This was not idle speculation on her part — long ago, Uncle Chen had once mentioned offhandedly: her arrival at the Marquis Mansion had been something of an accident within an accident.

That year, in the Battle of Sanmu Pass, Xiao Zhun had suffered a defeat. On the march back to the capital, a flood of the Tianmu River had forced them to take a detour back to Quecheng. Passing through the ancient city of Suyan, General Feilian had died of his severe wounds, and they had been held up for several days.

And it was just by that chance — on that one day, at that stretch of road outside the city of Suyan — that she and Xiao Zhun had met.

Before that day, she had already been drifting alone in the city for six years. The day they met had been the first day she had decided to leave Suyan.

From that day on, Xiao Nanhui had always believed: between people, there is such a thing as fate.

And her fate had always had to be bought with blessings earned.

She had spent six years of a life worse than death, and bought from it her meeting with Xiao Zhun. Now — what would she have to spend to buy the fate that lay ahead for them?

And so she had always lived with the resolution that hardship was coming. Every time she faced suffering, she told herself: this was the merit she was building toward a future with Xiao Zhun.

Only that way could she pick herself up after every fall and press forward without hesitation.

Even now, in circumstances like these — she had been through it countless times, and had always come through it the same way.