Most tents in a military camp were standard campaign tents, arranged in clear order according to their unit divisions — platoon, squad, detachment, company — with each small unit falling under the command of a different main camp, their layout during marches and encampments precisely delineated.

Right at the boundary between the Guangyao Camp and the Black Feather Camp, there was a noticeably extra small tent. At this moment, from inside that small tent came the low and melodious singing of a Southern Qiang woman — carrying a tone of easy, contented joy.

Life on campaign — what mattered most was knowing how to “seize the good moment.”

This was a truth Mo Chunhua had arrived at through her own experience. On a rare day like this, when there was no need to worry about clothes being blown away by the wind, she wanted to make the most of the opportunity and hang out everything that could be aired and dried.

Carrying the last bundle of sheepskin bedding as she walked out, she collided head-on with someone coming from the other direction.

Because she was holding something in her arms, Mo Chunhua lost her balance from the impact and sat straight down on the ground. The rough, hard sandy earth bruised her bottom painfully, and the sheepskin bedding scattered all over the ground.

She looked up — and saw Xiao Nanhui’s big face, wearing an expression of profound melancholy.

Mo Chunhua snorted through her nose: “Xiao Nanhui! Do you have your eyes stuffed full of sleep crust?!”

After a long moment, there was no response from the other side. It was only after Mo Chunhua had climbed to her feet that she discovered Xiao Nanhui had already picked up the sheepskin from the ground and carried it into the tent.

Mo Chunhua flipped up the tent flap and followed right behind. Upon seeing the back of the other woman’s head, she opened her mouth halfway and asked in a dazed tone: “Your — your hair, how did it…”

Xiao Nanhui had no time to deal with her at the moment. She tossed the sheepskin onto the couch, sat down on top of it with a thump, and wore a face full of preoccupation.

After a long moment, Mo Chunhua finally closed her mouth, though a rather knowing expression had appeared on her face.

“Oh, I know.”

The elongated tone of that “oh” made Xiao Nanhui’s ears burn.

She turned back indignantly: “You know nothing.”

Mo Chunhua paid no mind to her rebuttal, still with shining eyes. The gleam of gossip.

“So tell me then — how did you manage to get your hair undone while teaching the Emperor martial arts?”

Xiao Nanhui’s fingers turned the half jade pendant over and over in her hand, a faint bitterness in her heart.

“Let me ask you — were you previously the one attending to the Emperor’s daily needs?”

“I did for a while. Why do you ask?”

Xiao Nanhui opened and closed her five fingers, then opened and closed them again, and finally asked with difficulty: “In that case — do you happen to recall whether, among the Emperor’s everyday robes, there are any in moon-white?”

Mo Chunhua rolled her eyes toward the sky: “The Emperor has so many clothes. There is no way I can keep track of all of them.”

“Oh.” The other person sighed, “Then that means there are.”

“So what if there are, and so what if there aren’t? Just speak clearly!”

Speak clearly?

“I don’t understand it myself. How am I supposed to speak clearly to you?”

Xiao Nanhui felt a bit vexed, and beyond the vexation there was a creeping sense of apprehension. She couldn’t quite pinpoint what she was afraid of — she only knew she could not dwell too deeply on many of the things that had transpired, and was especially unwilling to face the conclusions such dwelling might lead to.

She sat up from the couch, deciding to change the subject.

“While I was away — were there any letters delivered?”

Mo Chunhua was clearly dissatisfied with her previous answer, and turned her head away: “No.”

She pressed further: “Not even a single bird?”

Mo Chunhua quietly snatched a lock of Xiao Nanhui’s hair and tied it into a vicious knot around her finger: “For that matter, you should go ask that person surnamed Lu.”

She blinked, and only then recalled previous events.

Since parting from Wu Xiaoliu and the others, the night owl had not come to find her for a very long time. She had likewise lost all news of Bolao, Su Pingchuan, and the rest.

All thanks to Lu Songping.

With the fighting at the front lines intensifying, the great army had been frequently moving out of camp these past few days, and Lu Songping had tightened the security around the royal tent. All rules and regulations were being enforced in an increasingly strict direction. Even the hawks and falcons used for delivering messages had been banned — military dispatches were carried solely by swift war horses.

Xiao Nanhui had not understood at first, but later came to grasp somewhat the reasoning behind it.

Rumor had it that a certain tribe of Southern Qiang people were descendants of the ancient Kuyi clan, who could understand the language of birds and beasts. Lu Songping was extremely suspicious by nature, and combined with the experience of the night hunt of bat swarms, he felt that any potential leak that could expose the royal tent’s location had to be eliminated at the root.

It was hardly surprising he was so careful — with the Emperor personally leading this campaign and having no heirs, should anything go wrong, Tiancheng would surely descend into great chaos.

She thought again of the group of young women in the prime of their lives she had overseen entering the palace months ago when she left Quecheng. She wondered whether the Emperor, before personally leading the campaign, had gone through each and every one of those beauties — sowing seeds widely and tending the fields diligently.

Seeing that she had remained silent for quite a while, Mo Chunhua sidled over again.

“Look at you, finished so early. With nothing to do, why not let me teach you a few more moves?”

Xiao Nanhui shot her a sideways glance and feigned laziness: “With nothing to do, I might as well lie down and sleep.”

Mo Chunhua looked at that smug face and found her temper rising. She grabbed the sheepskin felt beneath the other woman’s bottom and yanked it away with all her might: “Sleep? I say you won’t sleep a wink tonight!”

Xiao Nanhui felt a great force hit her and found herself sitting on the ground. Mo Chunhua looked at her triumphantly and turned to leave, but Xiao Nanhui lunged forward and grabbed the sheepskin felt and snatched it back.

Though Mo Chunhua had brute strength, she was no match for a trained martial artist. After a struggle, she lost out, and feeling still aggrieved on both sides, she reached out to pry at Xiao Nanhui’s wrist. The moment her palm made contact, something dug into it.

“Ow!”

She let go in pain. Xiao Nanhui belatedly raised her hand and only then remembered there was still a ring on her wrist. Mo Chunhua’s hand had been jabbed by the sharp protrusion on it.

“Are you all right?”

She felt a little apologetic, but Mo Chunhua was both annoyed and aggrieved.

“You wretched woman — you only ever bully me!”

Xiao Nanhui scratched her head, and lowered her voice to something barely above a mosquito’s hum: “The Emperor gave it to me — it’s not my fault.”

Hmm? When the Emperor gave her this thing, didn’t he say something about it being a token that allowed her to move freely about his presence?

Then what on earth had her whole ordeal earlier been about?

The expression on Xiao Nanhui’s face grew even more disgruntled. As she raised her wrist in that instant, she suddenly recalled something else.

She turned the iron ring around and, sure enough, spotted the symbol engraved on the protrusion.

She hadn’t paid it much attention before, because she simply didn’t recognize the symbol — she had assumed it might be some sort of insignia for the Emperor’s personal guards. But these past few days, she hadn’t seen this mark on anyone else, until just now—

“Mo Chunhua, do you recognize this?”

Mo Chunhua’s palm was still burning. She shot her a look, bit her lip, and said nothing.

Southern Qiang was a foreign people; some tribes still preserved writing from ancient times. Though Mo Chunhua had never attended any academy, she ought to be a little more widely knowledgeable than the average Tiancheng person.

She shamelessly inched closer and brought out the skill she had honed from all her dealings with Yao Yi: “You take a look at it for me, and I’ll teach you three sets of boxing techniques.”

Mo Chunhua made a sound and crooked her finger at her. Xiao Nanhui immediately extended her paw toward her.

Mo Chunhua turned it this way and that, examining it all around, until she grew restless.

“Do you recognize it or not?”

“Don’t rush me.” Mo Chunhua brought the iron ring in for a closer look, then declared with full confidence: “I recognize it.”

Her eyes lit up: “Really? What is it?”

“Don’t know.”

Xiao Nanhui felt the breath catch in her chest and come out as a roar: “You don’t know, yet you said you recognized it?!”

Mo Chunhua dug a finger in her ear and stared at her with two perfectly innocent wide eyes: “I’ve seen it before, so naturally I recognize it — but that doesn’t mean I know what it means.”

She calmed herself down: “Where have you seen it?”

Mo Chunhua assumed a look of deep thought: “When I was very small — before I entered service in the household — there was a time a ram from the neighboring village ran loose and frightened me. I had night terrors for three days and three nights. My grandmother called in an old shaman to perform a ritual, and I remember the bells on his instrument had this symbol.”

When she was small? And she’d had night terrors? A shaman’s bells?

“Are you sure?”

Mo Chunhua was very certain: “Yes. I’m sure. The resemblance is quite close.”

Xiao Nanhui sighed, feeling she had wasted her time. She might as well wait until returning to Quecheng and ask Yao Yi about it.

“But why did you suddenly think to ask about this? This ring has been on your wrist for quite a few days already.”

Xiao Nanhui pressed her lips together and said nothing.

What flashed through her mind was the dimly lit small tent from moments ago, and the half-unrolled scroll spread open on the table.

Could all of this be coincidence?

What on earth was the Emperor looking at?

— * — * — *—

Since the great windstorm on the training grounds that day, the wind that blew without cease across the desert in all four seasons seemed to have suddenly vanished.

The cloth hat Xiao Nanhui had used to shield herself from wind and sand had been tossed into a corner, only occasionally dug back out when she thought of it to wrap around her hair.

The jade hairpin she had carried with her all the way from Quecheng was thoroughly lost — she could not get it back. She had no choice but to braid her hair in Mo Chunhua’s fashion and tie it up haphazardly with a cloth cord and be done with it.

And the duty of teaching martial arts — after that day, it had simply fizzled out and gone nowhere. The Emperor, citing the press of military affairs, no longer summoned her, and even Lu Songping was too busy to be seen anywhere. She even had a vague sense that perhaps the Emperor’s agreement to learn martial arts had simply been a “delaying tactic” to set Ding Weixiang’s mind at ease on his journey — and that Lu Songping had known from the start, simply playing along.

Thinking about this, Xiao Nanhui felt a small, inexplicable sense of disappointment in her heart. She attributed it to regret over the Emperor’s “lack of ambition,” and channeled all her enthusiasm for instruction into Mo Chunhua, drilling her until she ached all over and cried out endlessly.

Acting on private motives, she would volunteer for patrol rounds in the camp, leading a few squads to scout the nearby hills, using these opportunities to climb the dunes and look out from a height, hoping to spot the night owl — yet ultimately she never caught sight of anything.

The Emperor had told her to remain “close at hand” as his attendant, yet he did not bring her at his side the way he had brought Ding Weixiang. She occasionally relied on the iron ring to linger for a moment near the front of the royal tent, hoping to catch news of Xiao Zhun.

Even news of Ding Weixiang would do.

Ding Weixiang had promised to accomplish the task in three days, yet for reasons unknown, the Bai Family’s forces had recently suddenly ceased their probing actions in the area around Sanmu Pass — as though they had already caught wind of something.

The brief respite in fighting along the two armies’ contact line carried an unsettling sense of calm. Bold vultures circled constantly above the gorges of the Tianmu River, flocking in droves to feed on the bodies of fallen soldiers — visible as a dark cloud even from a hundred li away.

Xiao Nanhui had slept poorly for two nights in a row — not to the point of insomnia, but she would inexplicably wake up before midnight, around the first watch of the zi hour, each time without fail.

She felt this was connected to the unusually strange weather of late.

Two days prior, the ritual officer accompanying the army had come to present himself before the Emperor and beg forgiveness. The reason for his plea was that he had failed in his duty to observe the heavens and stars each day.

Suoyan was an ancient place-name, meaning “the rock of the star lodges.” It was so called precisely because the land here had always been wide and clear, and its elevated terrain made it an excellent place for observing the stars.

And yet such a place had not seen a single star for several nights running — only a solitary moon hanging in the sky.

Mo Chunhua had forgotten to bring in the felt mats she had hung out to dry a few days ago. Several sheepskins, over the course of a single night, had ended up soaked as thoroughly as if they had been dunked in a river. In a place as arid as Suoyan — where not a drop of water could be wrung from the air — this was an utterly absurd thing.

The three-day period was drawing near.

To conserve supplies, the oil lamp inside the tent had been put out early. Xiao Nanhui lay in the darkness with her eyes open, staring blankly at the rough oilcloth above her head.

The sound of Mo Chunhua sleeping soundly had already reached her ears. She had been exhausted these past few days — the moment her head touched the pillow, she was dead to the world.

Xiao Nanhui turned over. The half jade pendant tucked under her pillow peeked out at a corner, stabbing right into her field of vision — brazenly flaunting its existence. She irritably stuffed it back under the pillow, then squeezed her eyes shut, silently chanting to herself: out of sight, out of mind.

She ought to be worrying about Xiao Zhun — yet she kept being distracted by this business with no beginning and no end.

Perhaps once Ding Weixiang succeeded, all the forces from different directions would converge at Bijiang. Then she could legitimately go see Xiao Zhun. Would their reunion be different from times past? After all, they had not seen each other for so long — he had not yet seen her in armor; would he even recognize her?

The corners of her mouth curved up slightly. It didn’t matter — as long as she could recognize him, that would be enough.

But then, when she thought of Xiao Zhun risking his life on the battlefield, life and death decided in an instant — yet she could only huddle in this cramped little tent, serving as some kind of imperial guard for an Emperor — Xiao Nanhui’s heart burned with a fierce, prickling ache. She could only hope that the turning point of the battle would come soon. Whenever it came, whatever the outcome, she was determined to request a transfer back to the Suobei Camp and fight side by side with that person once more.

Amid all these tangled, restless thoughts, Xiao Nanhui sank into a light and shallow sleep.

Fragments of memory, fine and scattered, mingled with the increasingly damp air of the tent, stirring her mind into a hazy stupor.

In a trance, she found herself back in the Prince of Kang’s detached palace on that night in Tong City.

The enormous orchid that had loomed overhead was gone. Looking out through the skylight at the center of the Snow Labyrinth Hall, she saw a great, round moon hanging there.

Drip, drip.

Something was dripping onto the floor.

She looked down at her own hand. The half jade pendant lay quietly in her palm, still dripping with water — as though it had just been fished out of a pool.

Looking all around, the overturned table and its scattered remnants had disappeared. Only a moon-white figure stood with his back to her before the shattered throne.

“Nanhui.”

Someone called her name — the most familiar voice.

Xiao Nanhui turned around in delight, and sure enough she saw Xiao Zhun’s figure, standing right at the entrance of the hall.

The moonlight poured in gently behind him, tracing out a silhouette.

She couldn’t quite make out his expression, but the tone in which he called her name was so familiar and warm.

Her feet moved of their own accord, wanting to walk toward the hall’s exit. But after a few steps, she seemed to recall something, and stopped.

She turned her head slowly around. That moon-white figure still stood before the throne — still, silent, unmoving.

A voice spoke in her heart: Xiao Nanhui, you must look at who this person really is.

As though bewitched, she reversed direction and walked toward the throne in the darkness.

“Nanhui, do not go there — it is dangerous.”

Xiao Zhun’s voice rose behind her, carrying an undercurrent of urgency.

Dangerous? She seemed to know it was dangerous too — yet surely just one look wouldn’t hurt?

Just one look, Adoptive Father. Once she had looked, she could let this matter go and never think of it again.

Ten steps, five steps, three steps.

She could already make out the pattern on the hem of that person’s robe.

Hello?

She wanted to call out to that person, yet in the next second the figure slowly began to turn around. At the same time, the sky changed: dark clouds swallowed the moon, and in an instant the entire hall plunged into total darkness.

She was startled and looked around in bewilderment, when a hand seized her wrist with an iron grip — impossible to shake.

The flash of moon-white had been swallowed by the darkness. The air was filled with an overwhelming smell of damp — like the reek of a rotting tomb — inspiring terror and trembling.

She was alarmed and wanted to pull back, but could not break free no matter what she tried. She looked back toward the hall’s entrance; Xiao Zhun’s figure was also gradually being swallowed, vanishing from her sight.

Adoptive Father!

She heard the cry from within her own heart.

No, no. This is not right. It should not be like this.

Wake up — wake up now.

Xiao Nanhui, weeping, tore her eyes open in fear and remorse.

All that greeted her was the same rough oilcloth above her head.

Her head was somewhat dizzy and muddled. She scrambled up and groped around until she had Pingxian in her arms, and only then did her mood slowly begin to settle.

She had not yet heard any sound from the camp’s time-keeper. She didn’t know what hour it was, only that the sky beyond the tent still looked overcast and dark.

The smell of damp in the air had grown even heavier — just like the scent she had smelled in her dream.

“Mo Chunhua?”

In the darkness no one answered back, only the faint sound of someone turning over in their sleep.

Under ordinary circumstances, Xiao Nanhui would have lain back down and slept for another stretch. But today for some reason — perhaps still shaken by the nightmare — she felt extremely wide awake.

She thought it over, put on her shoes and boots, and stepped outside the tent.

The moment she pushed the tent flap aside, Xiao Nanhui thought something had gone wrong with her eyes.

She waved her hand in front of her face — she could only make out two blurry shadows. She looked down at her feet — she could only see a faint grey-white rim above her boot tops.

She walked a few steps forward, and when she turned back, she could no longer see where the tent entrance was.

To her left stood the great banner of the Guangyao Camp — its face, weathered from long exposure, had developed a nap of fine fuzz. Right now not even a single thread on it stirred.

The torches throughout the encampment were like ghost-fires scattered here and there. The moonlight had vanished completely.

The silence all around was terrifying — as though everything had dissolved into this dreamlike, bewildering expanse.

Fog.

A great fog, the likes of which came once in a hundred years.

The night watchman’s voice drifted over, broken and intermittent.

“Chou hour, the first watch — the darkness before dawn. Night nears its end; a faint glimmer stirs—”

Xiao Nanhui moved toward that voice and grabbed the watchman’s shoulder.

“How long has this fog been going?”

The man was startled. After realizing it was a person and not a ghost who had come, he calmed slightly and answered: “About — about right after the third watch had just struck, it came in.”

After the third watch? Then it had already been several quarter-hours.

“What day is it today?”

“In reply to the commander — it is the twenty-sixth day of the tenth month. Heavy Snow has arrived.”