The Sun Mansion, which had stood immovable as a mountain less than an hour ago, had by now been thrown into utter chaos.

The ring of metal on metal and the whistle of arrows cleaving the air were incessant. At intervals, a few stray arrows flew into the courtyard, sending the fleeing family members and servants into screaming, wailing panic.

The cavalry guards had been dispatched long ago, though whether they were fighting Tiancheng’s army, had been killed, or had simply fled for their own lives, no one could say — not a single one of them was anywhere to be seen.

The Sun Family, which had never known anything but inflicting hardship on others, had never imagined that one day such hardship would fall upon their own heads.

Sun Taishou ran out of the underground cell, looked left and right, and made straight for the back courtyard.

He had long anticipated this day would come. His most valuable possessions had already been packed and ready to go; he needed only to grab them and flee for his life. As long as he had gold, it didn’t matter whether he fell into the hands of Tiancheng or the Bai Family — he refused to believe there would be no way to survive.

However, Sun Taishou, who had been far removed from the sight of weapons and fighting for years, had clearly underestimated how brutal a battlefield could be. Even the short distance from the back courtyard to the back gate was agonizing to traverse. The western wall of the Sun Mansion hadn’t been built high enough, and stray arrows flew in at irregular intervals.

Relying on his familiarity with the layout, he dodged and weaved his way through, and had just exhaled in relief when he suddenly sensed someone standing behind him.

He spun around on instinct, swinging wildly — but his fist found nothing but air, not even a scrap of clothing to grasp.

He opened his mouth to call for help, but the cry died in his throat the moment he saw the person’s face.

Resplendent violet robes — it was Yanfu.

“So it’s Senior Official Yan — Tiancheng’s army has come, quickly come with me and we’ll—”

Yanfu’s expression remained unchanged, as though the sounds of fighting and killing all around had nothing whatsoever to do with him. He produced that sheepskin scroll again and pointed to the place for a signature and seal.

“Today is already the second day. Has Lord Sun sobered up?”

The veins at Sun Taishou’s temples were pulsing. This blockheaded fool — at a moment like this, still thinking about getting him to sign some worthless agreement.

If not for the unfathomable martial skill of the man before him, he truly would have kicked him aside and trampled over him.

Taking a deep breath, Sun Taishou internally repeated the word: patience.

“If Senior Official Yan is willing to get me out of here alive, I will offer all the sentry posts in the Sanmu Pass region to Lord Bai with both hands.”

Yanfu’s brow furrowed faintly: “Lord Bai gave me no instructions about escorting anyone.”

“If you refuse, I will certainly not sign and seal.”

“Then I will simply take the blank sheepskin scroll back.”

In desperation, Sun Taishou blurted out: “If you won’t save my life, I’ll sign an agreement with the Tiancheng people and cede the entire Sanmu Pass region to them!”

Those words seemed to freeze the other man in place like a spell. After a long moment, the young man slowly turned his head.

“What did you say?”

“I said, I will make an agreement with the Tiancheng—”

Sun Taishou never finished that sentence. Because halfway through it, his head was no longer attached to his neck.

Yanfu returned the sword in his hand to its scabbard at an unhurried pace. Not a drop of blood had touched the blade.

He looked down with a slight frown, seemingly troubled, at the headless remains on the ground. After a moment’s thought, he crouched down, took Sun Taishou’s still-warm fingers, dipped them in the thick blood seeping across the ground, and pressed a fingerprint onto the sheepskin scroll.

Having done all this, a look of satisfaction spread across his face. He put away the scroll and, as though utterly alone, leaped out of the Sun Mansion and was gone.

When Xiao Nanhui stumbled and lurched her way out of the underground cell, the sounds of fighting outside had already diminished considerably. But the sensation of the ground having trembled just moments ago still lingered over this stretch of land, and an unease permeated the air all around.

Whoever had stirred up the chaos seemed to have already withdrawn from the Sun Mansion’s courtyard. All along her path she saw nothing but corpses on the ground, and barely a single living person.

In the underground cell, she had not been mistaken — the guard had indeed shouted the name of Tiancheng’s army.

Strange. Why would Tiancheng’s people be so hasty?

Did they already know that Bijiang was reaching for the territory around Sanmu Pass?

Her role as an advance spy had been somewhat of a failure. The information hadn’t even been sent out yet, and other people already knew.

Who had come? Could it be Xiao Zhun?

Could Xiao Zhun have come — to save her?

Xiao Nanhui’s heart began to pound — pound — pound. She couldn’t tell whether it was from blood loss or from agitation. Even knowing it was almost impossible for Xiao Zhun to appear here, she still let that small, humble hope rouse her body back into motion.

The flat-bow spear scraped against the ground with a grating sound as she used it as a crutch. She forced herself not to look at the white bone protruding from her own ankles, simply fixed her eyes on the direction of the exit, and dragged herself forward with all her remaining strength.

Occasional stray arrows flew past. She didn’t even bother dodging them, treating each near-miss as luck of the draw, pushing through until she finally reached the vicinity of the Gobi desert.

From here the road split in two. The right fork was the way she had come — travel it for an hour or so and she would be back at Sanmu Pass. The left fork led deeper into Bijiang. She didn’t know what lay at the end of that road, nor whether she would be able to follow it back.

Her mouth had gone completely dry, yet cold sweat poured even faster.

The choice grew harder and harder to make. Her mind grew murkier and murkier. She could only hope that when she looked back on this day, she would have no regrets.

Of course, that assumed there would be a day to look back from.

Xiao Nanhui turned her body to the side and moved with great difficulty toward the left fork.

She had taken only three steps before she regretted it.

From behind a cluster of boulders ahead, a figure emerged and removed the cloth covering his face. It was Ke Sang, the caravan leader from before.

“Woman — we meet again.”

Xiao Nanhui raised one hand and waved it half-heartedly: “What a pleasure. Sun Taishou is still in the back — if you go now, you should still be in time.”

Ke Sang smiled, a sound like an old crow’s croak: “I’m not here for him. I’m here for you.”

Xiao Nanhui pretended not to hear and continued limping forward. Her head was going numb; the figure before her seemed to loom like a towering demon-subduing pagoda that she could not get around no matter which way she turned.

She looked down — and Ke Sang’s foot was already pinning down the hem of her already nearly-disintegrated clothing.

She gave a sharp yank. The hem tore into two pieces. And this time what greeted her was a cudgel coming straight down at her head.

Xiao Nanhui barely managed to tilt her head to one side. The cudgel fell squarely on her shoulder, hammering her so hard she could almost hear her own collarbone crack.

Not a problem in sight, and then all the problems come at once. How could she be this unlucky?

Xiao Nanhui spat out a mouthful of blood in indignation: “Why do you keep making trouble for me?!”

“Woman — I told you before: I remember your face.” Ke Sang’s gaze shifted and came to rest on the flat-bow spear, and a gleam of excited greed gradually lit his eyes. “Such a fine thing, wasted in a woman’s hands. Why not give it to me.”

Left with no way to avoid this confrontation, Xiao Nanhui instead burst out laughing with cheerful recklessness.

“You have good taste, I’ll grant you that. But I have no intention of giving it away. As long as it’s in my hands — even if I’m only using it as a walking stick — it has nothing to do with you.”

Ke Sang said nothing. He slowly raised one foot, reached into the boot, and pulled something out, screwing it onto the long staff in his hand with a creaking, grinding noise.

That sound was exactly like something being screwed into her own bones.

Both her legs had been trembling steadily. The wounds on her ankles had gone numb. Which was perhaps just as well — at least it spared her the distraction. Whatever else happened, as long as the hand that held the spear didn’t tremble, that was all that mattered.

The sound of steel dragging across coarse gravel came rushing toward her, carrying with it a crushing surge of wind — like an enraged bull charging straight at her.

This was the sound of heavy weapons clashing against each other.

In the past, Yaoyi had always used this to mock her, saying it was a sheep bleating and an ox heaving — nothing like the clear, crane-like ring of a famous sword being drawn from its scabbard. She hadn’t agreed with him before, and had argued back.

But now she found she was beginning to come around to his point.

A sword’s killing aura was less oppressive. It didn’t press down on you like a spear, smothering the breath out of you. And sword techniques left more room for maneuver. Once a spear was thrust out, it almost always carried the unstoppable force of thunder — no retreat for either party. Calculated this way, the spear truly wasn’t something that made people like it.

The thought lasted only an instant, and by the time she returned her focus, Ke Sang’s iron spear was already coming straight at her face.

Blood loss made her heart pound like a drum. There were no thousands of troops around her and no soldiers, yet this was no different from a real battlefield.

She lost count of how many exchanges had passed. Her reactions grew slower and slower; his movements grew blurrier and blurrier in her eyes. She felt a flash of frustration — and by the time she registered it, both legs had collapsed to their knees on the Gobi ground.

“Woman. Finish yourself off. Don’t waste your effort.”

Xiao Nanhui seemed not to hear. She slowly rubbed both hands alternately on her clothing.

Too much blood had soaked into them, making them slippery and difficult to grip. She had nearly lost hold of the spear shaft.

Ke Sang watched in silence for a moment, then gave a cold laugh. He gripped his spear in one hand and began walking slowly toward Xiao Nanhui.

A weapon taken from a living person’s hands was far more interesting than one taken from a corpse.

The elegant and ancient pattern on the spear was soaked through with its owner’s blood by now, but it remained bright as snow.

A truly fine spear.

His hand reached out carelessly toward it, when the woman who had been kneeling motionless on the ground suddenly raised her eyes. Her elbow shifted with the smallest motion, and a tricky, horizontal sweep flew out, aimed straight at his throat.

The sharp side-edge of the flat-bow spear sliced open Ke Sang’s jaw, leaving a line of blood.

The strike missed its mark. Xiao Nanhui swiftly drew the flat-bow spear back and held it flat in her hand, doing her best to conceal her ragged, chaotic breathing.

“I began training with the spear at seven years old. The first technique they taught me was how to grip a spear. As long as I have a single breath left in me, no one can take this spear from my hand.”

It was a pity, she thought — if she weren’t already at the very end of her strength, that strike might well have taken his life.

The expression on Ke Sang’s face finally showed a flicker of shame-turning-to-rage. She recognized that look well.

A powerful gust wrapped in blowing sand struck her full in the face. Xiao Nanhui closed her eyes.

The world darkened before her in that brief instant — but a clear, resonant note lit up her ears.

It was the sound of a zither. The note of high-pitched urgency.

In the next instant, that lingering note seemed to transform into the sound of something cutting through the air, passing from far away to very close — and landing hard beside her ear.

Xiao Nanhui opened her eyes. Something like a dot of crimson seemed to fall from her lashes.

Ke Sang’s face was no more than a palm’s width away — but the lacquered black arrowhead that had drilled out from between his two eyebrows was nearly pressing against her forehead.

The body, already robbed of life, knelt to the ground. The heavy mass raised a cloud of dust, and only the spear in his hand still leaned crookedly against the earth.

The wind seemed to pick up around them.

The wind carried that strange zither sound again.

This time it was the note of the tonic — the palace tone.

Before it even faded, a small dark cloud of arrows descended, transforming Ke Sang’s corpse into a sieve in an instant.

The arrow shafts, their momentum not yet spent, trembled before her eyes like a crow dipping its head to feed on carrion.

Xiao Nanhui looked past those arrow shafts toward the distant cliff face behind her. Between the red rocks, something square and black was embedded — and looking closely, she could see scales of light glinting: sunlight reflected off dark armor.

Three ranks of dark-armored warriors fanned out in sequence. The first rank held repeating crossbows with high tension. The second rank held iron-tipped grand bows. The third rank held long sunset bows taller than a man. The one thing they shared was that every arrow shaft in every hand was lacquered black as ink.

Ten thousand arrows released at once — like a murder of crows sweeping past in formation. Thus they were called: the Black Feather Division.

Now she finally understood why the Sun Mansion’s guards had been shouting “Tiancheng’s people are coming,” yet all along her path she had seen almost no Tiancheng soldiers at all — only a ground covered in corpses and arrow shafts.

The Black Feather Division — Tiancheng’s most elite unit — why had they appeared at Sanmu Pass?

Xiao Nanhui’s mind was like a mass of paste, countless thoughts churning through it — yet she could not grasp a single thread of any of them.

Not far away, from behind a toppled wall, a grey-shrouded figure came stumbling and lurching out sideways — it was Wu Xiaoliu.

Xiao Nanhui had no time to think further. She let out a sharp cry.

“Don’t move!”

Wu Xiaoliu’s round, stout body came to an abrupt halt, freezing in place just a few steps from Ke Sang’s corpse.

He too sensed something was wrong. A faint, subtle sound hung suspended in the air.

It was the sound of tens of thousands of bowstrings drawn taut all at once — like a great beast opening its mouth wide, with no way of knowing when its sharp fangs would suddenly snap shut.

After what felt like an age, a long, drawn-out zither note rose again — low and gentle, like a feather slowly drifting downward.

Only then did the tension in those taut bowstrings ease. The formation shifted from attack to defense. The sound of armor rubbing against armor echoed back and forth through the valley, so perfectly uniform that not a single discordant note could be detected.

Only then did she turn to look at Wu Xiaoliu, exasperated: “What are you following me for? Are you looking to die? Don’t think I wouldn’t dare kill you—”

“Didn’t you say you wanted to go and have a look at Fortress Chief Pan’s stronghold?”

“I have legs.”

“Your legs aren’t working well.”

“What does my not working well have to do with you?”

Xiao Nanhui’s voice was cold and hard, deliberately trying to cut the conversation off at its root.

In the next instant, Wu Xiaoliu walked toward her without the slightest regard for her words. Before she could react, he hoisted her up onto his back.

“You can’t walk. I’ll carry you.”

Xiao Nanhui froze, then struggled against the fat man’s back for several seconds. But with blood pouring from her legs and her whole body going rigid, she felt like a fish that had been whacked on the head and left on a cutting board.

She hadn’t entirely calmed the anger in her heart, but this was not the moment to calm it. In the state she was in right now, whether she had another breath in her at all was questionable.

Wu Xiaoliu’s stout body turned in a circle and began taking slow, laborious steps toward the road leading west.

Xiao Nanhui’s head was pointing directly back at the cliff face behind them. Jostled along in the motion of being carried, she forced herself to look up — and unexpectedly caught sight of that ominous dark mass parting to the left and right, revealing a faint shimmer of brightness.

It was a person, unarmored, robes billowing in the wind.

He stood in the wind, his figure slender yet upright, standing tall on the stone cliff above — like the massive divine statue at Sanmu Pass, looking down upon the living beings struggling in the yellow sand below.

Though the person’s face was too blurred to make out, that bearing was undimmed even across a thousand li.

A familiar coldness and haughtiness — exactly as on the day he sat atop the Lingxiao Tower, watching the slaughter at the altar below as a bystander.

If there truly were gods in this world, they must look down upon all living things precisely like this.

Who was he?

Xiao Nanhui stared at him for a moment, lips trembling, then suddenly realized the jostling had long since stopped. She gave Wu Xiaoliu a sharp smack on the back of the head.

“Stop staring. Let’s go.”

Wu Xiaoliu turned his head back with a resentful look at the woman on his back, undisguised displeasure on his face. She had clearly been the one staring first.

Wu Xiaoliu labored to move his feet forward, while Xiao Nanhui lay across his back, thoughts drifting in and out of clarity.

Hmph. Regardless of who this person surnamed Zhong Li was — he certainly had nerve. First he dared steal the Prime Minister’s Mansion’s tablet, and now he had actually gone and stolen the Black Feather Division’s authority! Of all things! Could he be anything less than a trusted guest of some powerful house? He must be some dissolute young master from a great family. With the Black Feather Division involved in an incident this size, once she returned to Chizhou she would surely hear something of it. Should she pull him out of trouble then?

After all, counting the incident in Huozhou, this lingering ghost had already saved her twice now.

Xiao Nanhui’s thoughts swam and drifted for a while longer before sinking completely into the depths. She entrusted her life into Wu Xiaoliu’s hands, as though none of the unpleasantness between them had ever happened.

The seven-stringed zither was narrow and lean, its surface deep in color like burnt sienna, the fine crackle lines running through it delicate as hairs — just like spring rain and a gentle wind.

A zither worth a thousand gold pieces, and yet here it lay on the coarse, gritty ground without the slightest care, its player nowhere to be seen.

Watching the silhouette of those two figures, stacked one atop the other, slowly disappear into the distance, the man’s upright figure still had not moved by so much as a fraction.

A dark shadow landed soundlessly behind him. One knee touched the ground. The scabbard touched the earth. A blade-bearer’s most respectful salute was performed.

The man at the cliff’s edge turned his face slightly to the side, exposing half a profile of composed indifference.

“Any trace of Yanfu?”

“None, I ask the master’s forgiveness. This person’s martial skill is beyond measuring — this subordinate underestimated him.”

The man said nothing, his gaze still resting on the far distance.

Ding Weixiang dared not rise. A worry he could not shake spread through his eyes. They should not have come here at all.

“Master — though the Sun Family’s remnants have been cleared from this area, there is still danger around Sanmu Pass. If the Bai Family catches wind of this, they will certainly come to investigate. This is not a place to linger.”

The figure in the distance still had not moved, as though he had not heard a word.

“Master?”

The man finally drew his gaze back in. His tone was so light it carried no color at all.

“So be it. There will be a time to meet again.”

The figure turned away from the edge of the cliff. Only then was Ding Weixiang able to see clearly the direction in which that person had been looking — and all he could find was a faint grey silhouette, which in a moment had also vanished into the dust.

“Who did the master mean?”

The cool profile swept past his eyes like a breath of wind, offering no intention of replying.

Ding Weixiang fell into silence, then turned and followed.