Governor Sun was taking a new wife.

News like this could be heard in Yanxi once every month or so. After so many times, nobody could any longer say how many concubines the Governor had taken, or who his principal wife even was.

After all, the Sun estate was large enough. A few more women made no difference.

Yet this time, Governor Sun intended to make a grand occasion of the wedding feast — setting the banquet inside the Biemeng Cave, the grotto beside the estate.

The Biemeng Cave had been carved out from a natural cavern. The murals inside were of unknown age and unknown authorship. The largest chamber could accommodate several hundred people at a banquet, while the smaller chambers were too numerous to count, all intricately interconnected — a place of genuine wonder.

But the Tian family was no great household. There was no need for such an extravagant display.

The only explanation was: the wine was a pretense, the guests were the point.

The banquet was a pretense; the meeting was the real purpose.

As for who was being met — even without it being spelled out, everyone knew. Nine chances in ten, it was someone from Bai Shi.

Yanxi’s western regions had in truth long since been Bai Shi’s territory — it was simply that no one from Bai Shi had been sent openly to assert that claim in all these years. Governor Sun had been waiting too — waiting for the right moment to negotiate his price.

Now that Tiancheng was moving to take Bijiang by force, the opportunity he had been waiting for had finally arrived.

From early morning onward, the entire Sun estate was in an uproar — chickens flying and dogs barking everywhere — servants and attendants rushing about in every direction, drenched in sweat. Cartloads of fruits, melons, and fine spirits flowed in a steady stream toward the Biemeng Cave. The serving girls who would attend the guests had begun bathing, dressing, and applying powder and rouge since dawn, filling the air with clouds of fragrant steam that displaced the usual smell of sand and grit, and the scent of luxury pervaded everything.

The entire Sun household seemed to have thrown itself into preparations for this evening’s banquet. Yet Tian Weiér’s courtyard remained dead quiet — half the day gone by, and not a single person had come to inform her of anything.

Xiao Nanhui concluded that Governor Sun, while hosting his own wedding feast, had probably already forgotten all about his bride.

Tian Weiér was more than glad that no one came looking for her. Wu Xiaoliu was equally pleased to enjoy the idleness. Xiao Nanhui alone was scratching at her ears and sitting on thorns, restless with impatience. She had a mission to accomplish — had she traveled this great distance to this desolate wilderness just to eat the turtle Sun’s steamed buns?

She said a few words to account for herself and slipped out of the courtyard alone.

At first, out of wariness about the estate’s informants, Xiao Nanhui had been quite cautious in how she felt things out. She soon discovered, however, that her worry was mostly unnecessary. Everyone was too busy to bother with their feet touching the ground, and no one had a thought to spare for a single woman from an inner courtyard. Even so, the guests all had rosters, and in this she was glad of the decision she had made the night before — had she not managed to slip inside the estate, getting into the banquet now would truly have been harder than climbing to heaven.

She found the place where the serving girls were changing their clothes, and decided to find herself a proper costume. The chaotic changing room contained three styles of dress; she could not tell what kind of duties each corresponded to, and after some thought chose the one that came with a headdress. That headdress had a hat with a curtain of beads hanging from its brim — useful for covering the face, and in a pinch, it would serve as an extra layer of protection.

Dressed and adorned, she was alone in the changing room. Outside the window, a blazing red sunset lay across the Gobi like a blood-soaked sash. Such vivid colors, dropped into the wilderness, had long since lost any claim to beauty — they only lent the scene an eerie, ominous feeling.

Xiao Nanhui checked the dried ginger-juice mask on her face one more time, lowered her head, and set off toward the Biemeng Cave.

In all the world, there is such a view — henceforth, of other places I only dream.

Though she had done her best beforehand to imagine how beautiful this stone grotto might be, when she actually stepped inside, she was still struck by a genuine inward gasp of wonder.

Outside, the sky had already deepened to a blue-violet dusk. Inside, candle flames burned bright as noon.

The rock of the cavern walls shimmered in a splendid purple and red, layer upon layer, twisting and flowing across the ceiling and floor.

The walls and pillars were covered in murals painted in gold pigment, their subjects largely coarse and licentious, the brushwork bold and careless. The figures’ eyes were inlaid with blood-red, ink-blue, and jade-green gemstones — gaudy and arresting.

At the center of the banquet hall, a water channel was laid out in the shape of the character for “return” — a square within a square. The water was only just deep enough to cover one’s ankles, yet the bottom was paved with a layer of fine crushed gold. When the surface was still, the gold dust sank to the channel floor; whenever something stirred the water, the gold mist billowed and spread through it, reflecting countless points of golden light — quite beautiful.

Given all this opulent decoration, once the candles were lit for the evening, the entire banquet hall was bathed in a golden radiance — like a demon king’s treasure cave from some tale of myth.

The banquet had already begun. All around, the unbroken sound of strings and woodwinds was woven through with the laughter and conversation of guests, reverberating against the stone walls.

Xiao Nanhui was still hovering uncertainly at the entrance when a man who appeared to be a steward snapped at her with notable impatience: “Why are you so slow?! Go — that side still needs someone to serve the wine. Move fast!”

Receiving her orders, Xiao Nanhui headed briskly toward the seats on the side of the hall.

The seats to the left and right were already seven or eight parts full, the guests deep in enjoyment of the banquet’s most alluring opening moments.

Dancing girls and singing performers moved among them — and among them were even male entertainers, each similarly draped and corseted, with a seductive manner. If one thought about it for a moment, one could fairly guess why: this was likely to suit the tastes of the various settlement chiefs. They said that in the Southern Qiang region, women held power — and seeing this now, it was apparently true.

Xiao Nanhui carefully made her way to the empty seat and looked: it belonged to a portly gentleman with two drooping mustache wisps. She made apologetic noises in a low, submissive voice, but the man was easy-going — he was absorbed in watching the performances and had no time to pay her any attention.

This had all gone more smoothly than expected.

Xiao Nanhui began diligently refilling the portly gentleman’s cup and passing him dishes, while seizing moments to survey the guests at the banquet.

She had never been in the habit of peering and prying through indirect glances before, but in only a few days she had already mastered the art of covert observation with beady, darting eyes.

Unfortunately the headdress on her head began to obstruct her. A circle of multi-colored beads swayed constantly in front of her face, and she could endure it no longer. Looking left and right, she saw that no one was paying attention to her, this inconsequential serving girl. She quietly extended a finger, swept the few hanging bead strings up, and tucked them into her hair. Her field of vision cleared considerably.

And the moment it cleared, one figure leaped immediately to her eye.

Seated diagonally across the room, not far away, was a young gentleman she had seen only recently — none other than the Jia gentleman she had been handsomely paid to escort into Tong City.

Xiao Nanhui’s internal alarm went off at once. How could this person’s route be identical to hers? Could it be that Bai Shi had caught wind of her, and had sent him to test her?

But thinking back carefully over the interactions they had had back in Tong City, she felt that the other party didn’t seem like a person of deep cunning — he even seemed a little ignorant of worldly affairs and foolishly blunt. Otherwise, why would anyone venture alone into the most chaotic part of Lingxi without even a single close attendant to accompany them?

Even now it was the same. The Jia gentleman was not particularly good at socializing left and right. He kept his head down, drinking whatever his serving girl behind him poured, cup after cup — the moment one was empty, another was filled. He drank however many cups were given, as if he had no idea what was in them, his eyes drifting constantly across the guests and toward the entrance, as though searching for someone’s figure.

In truth, he was not the only guest whose gaze was wandering. This was quite a crowded and varied gathering, and most of those attending had come with the mentality of watching a spectacle — wanting to see what sort of deal Bai Shi and the Sun clan would end up striking, and whether they could manage to skim some profit from it in the process.

Gold and splendor, fine spirits, and the fragrance of beautiful guests — all of it a facade.

This was a feast in the wilderness, and the guests who had come to sit at it were all tigers and wolves.

At first glance, the Jia gentleman appeared no different from anyone else at the banquet — but studying the emotions at the bottom of his eyes, one could see that there was almost none of the gloating and the maneuvering that filled every other face. Instead, there was a thread of anxiety that was unmistakably out of place with his posture of feigned ease on all sides.

Something was off about this man.

But exactly what was off, Xiao Nanhui couldn’t quite pin down in the moment. She made a mental note to keep watching, and decided to wait for the formal banquet to begin before observing further.

Just as she was mulling this over, a commotion broke out near the entrance. From the scale of the stir, it seemed another important personage had arrived — the commotion was large enough that the noise reached the hall before the person did.

“Chief Pan has arrived!”

Ah — so this was the famous female bandit queen of Bijiang, Pan Meiér.

Xiao Nanhui had taken note of this person when Wu Xiaoliu had mentioned her earlier. Do not be fooled by the name Pan Meiér — it sounded like something a flower-house girl might be called, but the real person was an out-and-out, kill-without-blinking female demon.

It was said that Pan Meiér had originally been the daughter of a wealthy landowner somewhere in the Suyan region. But years of drought and total crop failure had ruined her family’s fortunes. On top of that, wandering refugees had swept in and ransacked them, scattering her family in all directions and leaving most of them dead. Only Pan Meiér and an elder brother had survived. Following her brother, Pan Meiér had become an outlaw, and the sight of her family’s destruction had changed her character completely. Day after day of raiding and killing gradually shaped her into the ferocious creature she was today.

A few years earlier, her brother had been struck by a stray arrow during a suppression campaign and struggled for half a month before finally dying. This set off undercurrents within the settlement, as people jockeyed for the position of chief. Pan Meiér was extraordinarily suspicious by nature — she would rather kill ten innocent people than let a guilty one go free. But the ringleaders of the challenge never even found their moment to make their move before Pan Meiér had their tendons cut in their hands and feet, and left them in the desert to be devoured alive by wolves.

From that time on, Pan Meiér’s authority was established. The people around her trembled before her, their fear far outweighing their respect. Pan Meiér also had her methods — somehow she had managed to form a connection with the Bai clan, and in recent years her influence had been growing steadily stronger.

Two rows of big men lined up and bowed their heads respectfully. A moment later, footsteps sounded at the entry to the inner chamber, and a woman of rather seductive build entered slowly.

The moment Xiao Nanhui saw that woman’s face, she froze — and then finally understood: back at the Sanmu Pass, why the riders had all given her such strange looks when they saw her face.

Pan Meiér’s features bore a fifty or sixty percent resemblance to her own.

If she had removed the disguise from her face, it might have been seventy or eighty percent.

Pan Meiér’s eyes and brows were more alluring, her lips somewhat thinner, her facial contours less rounded than Xiao Nanhui’s. Her hair, after years of exposure to wind and scorching sun, had turned a tea-brown, streaked with a few threads of silver. Though she was still no older than thirty, she already carried an air of weathered experience — which she made no attempt to conceal. This gave her, even standing in a crowd of men, a certain quality of not being easily trifled with.

“Governor Sun, it has been a while.”

Pan Meiér smiled as she walked toward the man seated in the place of honor — Governor Sun. Her voice carried precisely the right degree of playful softness, the kind of tone women habitually use to manage men: not quite clear, but touched with a faint huskiness that made a listener’s heartstrings quietly twitch.

Governor Sun’s face wore an expression of distinct gratification. He rose to greet her and helped himself to a feel of the beauty’s arm in the process. Xiao Nanhui watched without comment, understanding somewhat better now how this woman had managed to keep her footing among so many factions without being toppled.

Pan Meiér had brought more than twenty or thirty people with her, and after they were seated, only a few spaces in the hall remained empty. Just as Xiao Nanhui was thinking that no one else was coming, another figure appeared quietly in the entrance to the hall.

This was a man, and his footsteps were lighter than those of the most light-footed dancer performing in the room.

Among all the people Xiao Nanhui knew, only Xiao Zhun and Ding Weixiang were people whose footsteps she could not hear. Lü Songping barely qualified as a third. As for this person — not only could she not hear footsteps, she could barely detect even the sound of breathing. What level of martial mastery did that represent? The mere thought of it sent a chill through her.

The man was dressed in a deep purple robe. He walked in as if no one else existed, found an empty seat at random, and sat down. Throughout this, he did not say a single word, did not glance at a single person present, as if in this banquet hall of more than a hundred people, he had always been its only occupant.

Quite the arrogant specimen.

Governor Sun, seasoned old schemer that he was, showed not a trace of surprise or displeasure — he merely exchanged a glance with his attendants, and soon a lightly dressed, graceful serving girl sidled up to the man, attempting to draw out his identity.

“Why does the gentleman sit there with such a cold face? This servant is frightened — I barely dare come near you…”

The man had a face women tended to find appealing — yet without the dissipated air of someone who had spent his days indulging in pleasure. The expression in his eyes was deeply proud yet, at the same time, utterly guileless.

He looked toward that powdered and rouged face with mild puzzlement. “Who are you? Why do you call me ‘gentleman’?”

The serving girl’s expression froze for a moment before she bloomed into a smile again. “The gentleman must be teasing this servant — are you implying I’ve not been attentive enough? Perhaps you should let me serve you properly later, and then you’ll know how good your servant can be…”

As she spoke, the serving girl leaned in toward the man’s ear, sending a sweet, cloying breath straight to his face. Such an approach, one would think, would set even the most self-possessed of men to stirring inwardly — yet this man only frowned slightly and was just about to say something when another voice cut across the room.

“Wench. Get your dirty hands off him.”

The speaker was Pan Meiér, but her voice now contained not a trace of allure — only cold, cutting malice, like a sharp nail being dragged across an iron plate.

The serving girl, backed by the authority of being Governor Sun’s personal attendant, held her ground for a moment and even glanced back at Pan Meiér with a faint look of provocation.

What she had not anticipated was that this one glance would be her last glimpse of the world. The next instant, between her two eyes, a crimson steel spike inlaid with a peony blossom appeared, sunk three inches deep into flesh.

A dark vapor seeped along the entry wound of that spike, spreading outward with visible speed. The serving girl stiffened like a stone statue and could no longer move. From her face, with the spike as the center, black veins branched out in all directions — seen from a distance, it looked as if a black flower had bloomed across her features, eerie and horrifying.

The scent of death spread through the banquet hall. The good show was apparently about to begin.