The young monk who had been meditating snapped his eyes open.

Not far away, the white-robed physician who had gotten up in the night was stealthily counting the silver coins in a small box. When he looked up suddenly, he was so startled he nearly choked — he thought his little scheme had been exposed, and for a moment he was at a loss for words.

The night was dark and the wind fierce, in a desolate ruined temple. The two of them stared at each other for a long time until Hao Bai was the first to back down.

“As a fellow traveler, in addition to showing you the way, I also bear the responsibility of keeping an eye on you. This silver was given by Chancellor Bai, who got his instructions from Attendant Dan, who naturally received them from His Majesty. When you get right down to it, this is not your silver — it is His Majesty’s silver…”

Yikong said nothing. He simply rose, put out the fire that still held a little warmth, and began to pack up the few belongings they had.

Hao Bai startled at this and immediately crowded in closer.

“We haven’t even reached the destination yet, and you’re already divvying things up? Or do you fancy this ruined temple and want to build a monastery here? I’ll warn you — don’t bring those tricks you use to drum up incense money here. Wancheng is overrun with Taoists and monks. Be careful someone comes to settle accounts with you…”

“Not dividing anything. Getting ready to set out.”

“Set out? At this hour in the middle of the night — you’re not sleeping anymore?”

Yikong gave a rare sigh and pushed past Hao Bai, who was blocking his way.

“There will be plenty of time to sleep later. Right now there is no leisure for it.”

Hao Bai looked utterly bewildered, trailing around behind the monk in circles.

“The city gates won’t open for at least two more hours. Even if you head over early, you won’t be able to get in…”

“We are not going into the city.”

“Not into the city — then where?”

Yikong finally stopped what he was doing, looked up and gave him a brief glance. In his clear eyes there was a barely perceptible trace of cunning.

“Is Hao Benefactor not curious? If I only wished to go to Wancheng, why would I need to bring you along as a guide?”

Hao Bai faltered — and then understood. His expression shifted in a way impossible to conceal.

“You schemed against me?!”

More than scheming — this was being thoroughly used and cast aside.

From the moment he was dragged to the temple to refine medicine, to Lv Songping’s appearance, to his accompanying and escorting the imperial seal the whole way — every step of it must have been within this black-hearted monk’s calculations. And he had thought they were fellow travelers on the same road. It turned out he was only a paying passenger on that boat, waiting to be fleeced.

Arms crossed and fists on hips, he gave a cold snort from his nose.

“Where you want to go, I may not even know how to get there. More to the point — do I have to take you wherever you want to go?”

Yikong was unhurried and unruffled, his face showing a gentle smile.

“I haven’t even said where we’re going yet. What are you worried about?”

Hao Bai knew he was no match for the monk in an argument. He simply threw the cards on the table.

“The only place known only to me and no one else — what is it besides the Buxu Valley?”

“I have heard that the Qu Family has not entered the Buxu Valley in many years. There must be some scruple holding them back. But with your clan’s elders currently in the capital as guests, I imagine that if you were compelled by necessity to do something, you would not encounter much obstruction.”

Hao Bai was so furious he started laughing.

“Right now there’s nothing stopping me — but that doesn’t mean there won’t be anything later! I help you today, you pat your behind and leave, and for years afterward I’ll be facing clan punishment and unable to go out to practice medicine.”

Yikong looked at him with sincerity.

“This humble monk is willing to go out on Senior Hao Benefactor’s behalf for five years — to travel and practice medicine for the benefit of all. If five years is not enough, ten years is no trouble at all. This humble monk is still young, and still in very good health…”

Hao Bai was so enraged that his face cycled through green and red.

“Yikong! You — you — how do you have absolutely no shame?!”

Hao Bai’s shout tangled and echoed in the empty rafters of the ruined temple. After a long moment, Yikong suddenly put away that guileless manner and knelt gently on the ground, bowing with full weight.

“This humble monk earnestly implores Benefactor Qu to extend mercy and compassion to the people of the world, and help me in this one matter. For this kindness, this humble monk is willing to spend the rest of his life in repayment — at your complete disposal, through fire and flood, through the depths of hell, without regret.”

Hao Bai was completely dumbfounded. He truly had not expected the other party to play this emotional card, and for a moment he could not tell if there was something genuinely sincere in the gesture, or if this was simply shamelessness taken to another level.

After a moment of silence, he said through gritted teeth:

“If you want me to take you to the Buxu Valley, at least tell me why.”

Yikong looked toward the fire that had just been put out. His expression was calm.

“I just had a dream.”

“What kind of dream?”

“A bad dream.”

He briskly placed the sutras one by one into the carriage, then took out a sheepskin case that had been in there since the beginning and had never been opened.

Hao Bai leaned in closer. His tone was no longer as agitated as before, though the distaste in it remained.

“Don’t you call yourself an enlightened monk? You believe in this sort of thing? I dream every night and don’t make such a fuss about it. I don’t see what’s so different.”

“Since ancient times, the continent of Chizhou has had a saying about divination entering through dreams. For those who practice the Way, a dream is often a sign of things to come.” Yikong paused, then laughed lightly and added one more line: “Though naturally, the dreams Hao Benefactor has and the kind of dreams I am speaking of are not quite the same thing.”

Hao Bai was at a loss for words. He was about to say something when his attention was caught by the opened sheepskin case.

That old, plain case held only two things.

One was a sutra scroll wrapped in white silk. The other was a demon-subduing pestle wrapped in black cloth.

“What is this—”

Hao Bai had barely spoken when he noticed that Yikong’s eyes had shifted in that instant.

It was an expression seldom seen on an ordinary person’s face — detached to the point of indifference, like the half-crumbled deity statue in that ruined temple.

“May the Buddha be merciful, to save and liberate all sentient beings. If sentient beings cannot be saved — then we will meet in hell.”

Xiao Nanhui woke in a warm embrace.

The dim oil lamp had not yet gone out — only a flame the size of a bean was still flickering.

Fine droplets of rain drifted down like dust through the small window above and gathered a shallow layer of water in the small courtyard well-pool at the center of the floor.

It was raining.

She had actually fallen asleep — and slept deeply and sweetly at that. She seemed to have had a dream, but the contents had dissolved in the very instant she woke.

“Awake?”

She raised her head and looked at the face close before her. Something flashed past in a daze.

“I just had a dream.”

The “just now” she meant was during that deep, rich dream in the night.

She hadn’t said it outright, but he understood.

His forehead rested lightly against the side of her neck. His eyelashes drifted shut, and there was a faint smile in his voice.

“What did you dream?”

Xiao Nanhui concentrated hard, trying to grasp the last thread of memory.

“I dreamed you were sitting alone in a great hall, wearing a white robe…”

A white robe? Apart from that moon-white everyday garment of his, he rarely wore pale colors.

And then? Then he had seemed to say something more to her. But memory was like sand — the more she tried to hold it, the more everything slipped away. In no more than a moment, she could recall nothing at all.

A look of faint confusion appeared on her face — a vivid, lively kind of confusion that one could see through almost without effort.

A long silence. Then the man opened his eyes and quietly looked at her. After a moment, he reached up and gently removed the hairpin from her hair.

Her hair knot had long since come loose. The supple strands were scattered across the stone floor. He used his fingers to gather them up gently.

She came to herself, reflexively reaching to take over — only to be gently held back.

“Don’t move around. Your skill at pinning up your own hair — I’ve seen it.”

Xiao Nanhui withdrew her hand with embarrassment and submitted somewhat awkwardly to being fussed over, making conversation to fill the silence.

“When you were living here, was it really nothing but reading sutras every day?”

He was focused on smoothing out the slightly damp ends of her hair and did not notice the finer details of what she had said.

“There were other things to read as well. Most of it was arranged by the palace tutors — wide in category, vast in quantity. But compared to the sutras, it was really nothing at all.”

“Why sutras? Just because you have an affinity with Buddhist teachings, and Master Wu Mian once took you as a disciple?”

She felt the gentle movement of his hands pause for an instant.

“I have no affinity with Buddhism. Becoming a Buddha or becoming a demon is only a single thought apart. The scripture and the relic are both restraints. As for Wu Mian — he simply grew weary of driving away demons and exorcising evil, and wanted to try a different method of redeeming me. Whether I lived or died, he probably never much cared.”

Great Master Wu Mian — a figure revered throughout the world of Buddhist monks and Taoists — and yet in this man’s telling, he was an indifferent wretch who cared nothing for whether one lived or died?

The murals in the Shen Family cavern flashed before her eyes, and she suddenly felt that the world’s understanding of gods and Buddhas might not be entirely accurate — and that what was called legend might not be entirely without foundation.

“Without sorrow or joy, without love or hate — does that keep a person from becoming a demon? And yet who in this life can guarantee a heart still as water, never rippling?”

She blew at the stray strands in front of her face. He was quick to notice and gathered them one by one back into place.

“Before I met you, the impossibility you speak of was my entire life.”

He gently brought her hair ends together and raised the hairpin between his fingertips, inserting it into her hair with steady precision — not a fraction too much, not a fraction too little.

“When we first met, I only felt you had one or two points of interest. After seeing you again, I felt you had three or four points of foolishness. After that again, I felt you had seven or eight points of pitifulness. I was without intention. It was you who insisted on barging in and causing trouble. In you I found the suffering I had set aside for over a decade — of love’s parting, of hateful meetings, of unfulfilled longing, of the burning of the five aggregates. Half a lifetime of cultivation — destroyed by you. Xiao Nanhui, how do you intend to repay me?”

Xiao Nanhui listened to this declaration that was half indictment and half confession, and felt it far more impossible to withstand than any passionate declaration in any storybook.

She had underestimated him. She had assumed that after last night, he would have been more or less restrained.

She pretended to feel for the hairpin he had put in her hair and lowered her head to hide her burning face.

“You brought me to this tower — was it really only to tell me these things?”

“I assumed that after last night, you would understand in your heart why I brought you here.”

His voice drifted past her ear — clear and even, yet stirring up a memory of some fragment of last night that had been the most intoxicating and consuming.

She felt blood rushing from her head outward to her limbs and every extremity. In the next instant his cool hand enclosed her palm, and with it wrapped around her, he drew her to her feet.

“But besides that, there is indeed one other matter. Luo He says this place may hold a journal my mother left behind.”

She had always known he did things for a reason. And yet for some reason, even a casual remark was something she could not take lightly. What was to become of her from now on?

Su Wei suppressed the smile at the corner of his mouth, pretended not to see the anxiety written on her face, and, holding the oil lamp with one hand, began feeling along the stone tiles on the wall one by one.

By the light of that lamp, she could finally see clearly the uneven walls all around.

The stone blocks of the pagoda had been quarried from Minzhou’s hardest Songjiang rock, laced with meteorite iron throughout. Even a sword and blade could barely cut into it. It could only be quarried piece by piece with a Songjiang rock chisel.

Yet in the firelight, the walls were covered in cuts and grooves of varying depths — as fine as threads pressed into stone, as rough and deep as the stroke of a heavy axe. These marks crisscrossed each other and spread across the entire interior of the pagoda — as though at some point in the past, a desperate, brutal, blade-shattering battle had taken place within these walls.

In the past, she too would have been at a complete loss. But now, she was not far from understanding. If someone were to go back to that cave on Seqiu where they had been confined, they would probably find the same kinds of marks all around.

“How long did you stay here?”

His tone was still mild, as if speaking of someone else’s affairs.

“I can’t remember exactly. Perhaps seven or eight years.”

She was startled. She had expected it to be a long time — but not that long.

“Seven or eight years? You never once went out?”

“Mm.”

“Not even half a step away?”

“Mm.”

She looked at his composed profile, and for some reason felt a sudden sting of sorrow.

“Did your mother ever come looking for you?”

“She would not come back here. Those who have stayed in this place do not want to come back.” His expression did not change, but his fingers tightened around her palm. “In ancient times, the three ancient kingdoms of Huo, Chi, and Min all had records of this hollow, and the descriptions were largely the same. They all said that when the gods and demons decided to bring this world to an end, they would choose a remote and desolate place to descend, and this hidden location was said to be within this mountain. So from antiquity, this place was known as Zhongtian — the land where heaven ends. Zhongtian was the collective name for one mountain, one pagoda, and one piece of ground. The mountain was called Zhongtian Taozhi Mountain. The pagoda was called Zhongtian Lihen Pagoda. The ground was called Zhongtian Maigu Ground.”

Taozhi — peach-stopped. Lihen — buried resentment. Maigu — burying bones. None of them sounded particularly auspicious. The road was difficult to travel as well — no wonder no one had ever wanted to pass through here.

“I’ve been through the mountain, and I’ve seen the pagoda. As for this ground…”

She stopped mid-sentence, suddenly realized something, and her voice cut off.

But he had already heard, and made no effort to avoid the subject.

“That’s right. The Burying Bones Ground — it is where the bones of my mother’s people are buried.” His hands did not stop moving, continuing carefully to search the cracks between stone tiles. “Earlier you asked me about Luo He and my mother’s family. Let me tell you about it now, if you’re willing to listen.”

She was silent for a moment, genuinely uncertain how to comfort him, and could only retreat a little in her words.

“If you don’t want to speak of it, I can choose not to hear.”

If speaking of those things would cause him sorrow and pain, she would rather find the answers through her own efforts.

She did not say this aloud, but he already knew what was in her heart.

“Most of them are no longer in this world. Even if I were to speak of it a hundred times now, no one would reproach me or stop me. You and Xiao Zhun have no blood relation, yet you grew up in the Xiao Family, and his obsessions have long since seeped into your heart. I am willing to lay open my chest and expose my bones, telling you everything I know, only hoping you can let go of some of it — and stop bearing vengeance and resentments on behalf of others.”

Xiao Nanhui froze, momentarily speechless.

This was the first time he had spoken of her relationship with Xiao Zhun in her presence. Yao Yi had also urged her before not to become too entangled with the Xiao Family — had said she was, after all, only a stranger to them. But that had never convinced her. How could feelings built over more than a decade be set down in a day? And yet his few simple words now had identified the root of all her suffering.

In truth, Xiao Zhun had never asked anything of her. It was only her own desire — weaving the bonds herself, refusing to walk out of the Xiao Family shelter that had shielded her from wind and rain. It was her own doing.

Over the years, she had picked up too many things. She had put them on one by one, unwilling to discard a single one — as if stacking them up could build an armor of her own. In the end, it was precisely this weight that had dragged her into an abyss with no way out.

“Speak, then. I’m listening.”

The turmoil in her heart slowly stilled, and Su Wei’s voice rose in the ancient pagoda.

“Long ago, in a stone city on the northern frontier, there lived three households. Each possessed abilities that reached into the heavens. They lived lives of quiet simplicity, supporting one another, content in their modest but comfortable existence. Then the tide of dynasty shifted. A crumbling kingdom was on the verge of collapse. A princess, fleeing in defeat, gave birth to a child as she passed through the stone city. Knowing she would not long survive, yet unwilling to let the child die with her, she took a desperate risk and knocked on the doors of those three households one by one.”

“Enemy soldiers were closing in on the city. Everyone feared for themselves. The first three households did not open their doors. Only when she reached the very last household — whose master had just welcomed his own newborn child into the world and could not harden his heart — did she find shelter. Her child was taken in. The next day, the princess fled into the marshland outside the city with the fallen kingdom’s imperial seal, drawing the soldiers away. That household then gathered its whole family and left the city, seeking a new home.”

“During their migration they encountered a drought the likes of which had not been seen in a hundred years. The journey was hard, and many perished along the way. Fortunately, their people had the gift of entering the realm of dreams and working their arts there. In a prophetic dream they saw a small mountain hollow, lush with rain and filled with flowering pear trees. After countless hardships they finally found that place, changed their surname to Zhongli, and settled there. From that day on, they lived hidden from the world through every generation.”

“The princess’s child grew up and fell in love with the daughter of the Zhongli family. Yet none knew that the child carried the bloodline of the front dynasty’s divine spirits. Though he grew up like any ordinary person, married and had children like any ordinary person, none of those children could be born safely — nearly all died in infancy. He had long since given up hope. But in his forty-eighth year, a daughter was born to him.”

“That girl was born with a pair of clear, bright eyes — eyes so limpid they could reflect all things in the world. She was named Mirror, or Jing. Her beauty was extraordinary. She grew up cherished and indulged by her several older brothers and sisters in the family, yet because she had lived deep in the mountains all her life, she was guileless and forthright, born with a bold and reckless temperament. Though she was past the age of sixteen, for a radius of a hundred li not a single man dared come to ask for her hand.”

“One day, Jing went to the village to buy wine. She was there by chance when the new Emperor, returning from an eastern inspection tour, passed through. Jing had simply, out of kindness, offered a bowl of water to the young emperor. Yet because of this, she caught his eye, and he forcibly took her back as a consort. She had once had a chance to escape all of this, but at the last moment she relented — to protect her last remaining elder brother, she gave up her resistance. She submitted to her fate and entered the walls of the deep compound, confined to a square tower that rose high above. From the moment she stepped into that tower, she was already thinking of throwing herself from it.”

Xiao Nanhui’s heart clenched. The smooth, mirror-still water before the Jingbo Pavilion flashed in her mind.

“My father, the prince, was born with a cool and indifferent nature — the complete opposite of my mother’s fierce and extreme temperament. Ice and fire mingled, and in the end my mother lost — she paid for it with her life, and met a wretched end. My father loved my mother, but his love, weighed against her life, was worth nothing.”

“The punishment my father imposed on the Zhongli clan was what was known as the extermination of the ancestral rites — not only killing every member of the bloodline, but forbidding descendants from offering sacrifices, forbidding history books from recording so much as a single stroke. At first I thought my father was so ruthless because of the terrifying force inside my mother that could not be controlled. But I did not understand what that force signified, until this time when we went to the Shen Family.”

“My mother carried the bloodlines of the front dynasty and the Zhongli family. And the front-dynasty remnant my father feared and guarded against all his life was none other than the woman he had loved — and the child she bore him.”

His words reached this point, and finally stopped.

In the next instant, a faint, subtle sound came from the stone tile beneath his fingertips.

He applied a slight pressure, and that loosened tile was drawn out from the mottled wall, exposing a gap the size of half a palm.

He looked instinctively toward the woman beside him. The woman looked up toward him at the same moment. Their eyes met. After a brief pause, they laughed at the same time, without prior agreement.

His smile was because he saw the worry in her expression relax into relief. Her smile was precisely because she saw his relief.

He hesitated no longer, reached in, and took out what was inside the gap between the stone tiles.

It was an old notebook, rolled up. On its cover, four characters were written in a deep, blue-gray pigment: “Mengtan Zalu” — Miscellaneous Records of Dream Conversations. The handwriting was bold and forceful — nothing like the small, delicate script one would expect from an ordinary woman’s private diary.

And in the next instant, when that notebook was opened, Xiao Nanhui was truly stunned.

There was not a single character in those pages that she recognized. All she could see were horizontal lines, vertical lines, and ink dots, floating on white paper, with no apparent pattern or rule to any of it.

“What… what is this?”

Su Wei did not answer right away. He compared the contents of every page carefully one more time, and only then spoke slowly.

“A prophetic text written by weaving the patterns of heaven and earth. Only those of the clan can decode it. This may be the method the weaving clan uses to record their prophesies — the one Shen Shi’an described as the woven brocade.”

“You mean — does this record dreams that haven’t yet been woven into a brocade, or prophesies that have already been decoded?” Xiao Nanhui’s curiosity burned, yet she could make absolutely nothing of it. “But there’s not a single character anyone can understand — what does any of this actually say?”

The man thought for a moment, then took something out from his sleeve.

“Right now we cannot understand it. But with this notebook, perhaps we can find the pattern within and decode the information in this brocade strip.”

Anyone else saying this, Xiao Nanhui would have flatly disbelieved. But when the person before her said it, she felt as though she could already see the day when that brocade would be decoded.

Su Wei carefully inserted the last remaining brocade strip into the notebook. He was just about to close it when a gust of wind carrying fine rain blew through, turning the pages of the notebook to the very last one.

“Wait!”

Xiao Nanhui was quick. She reached out and seized that fluttering page, then turned back to that last page with its few ink marks.

It was an ink portrait — a few sparse strokes, clearly drawn in great haste, yet surprisingly lifelike.

She studied the portrait for a while, and at last voiced the question in her heart.

“Do you think the person in this portrait looks a little like me?”

He looked toward the portrait too, though his expression, compared to hers, was exceedingly calm.

“Where do you see the resemblance?”

“Here, here, and here too!”

She traced over the portrait somewhat anxiously. But in truth the details of the drawing were very limited. The more closely one examined it, the more it seemed to look like many people, rather than any specific one.

Xiao Nanhui noticed this too and felt a little deflated. But she still believed her first instinct when she had seen this portrait.

“Don’t not believe me. Back then, it was me who first spotted something off about Zou Sifang’s portrait…”

She was still absorbed in her own thoughts. He, however, had noticed something else.

“Still, there is something genuinely strange.”

“What’s strange?”

She asked absently, her attention still on the portrait.

In her estimation, nothing at this moment could be stranger than this portrait.

“As I recall, although my mother wrote well, her painting was dreadful. Yet this portrait…”

Su Wei stopped there, and his gaze fell back to the drawing.

The handwriting on the cover of this notebook was unmistakably his mother’s. The contents recorded within were also of a deeply private nature — it was unlikely to have easily fallen into a stranger’s hands.

But if this portrait was not his mother’s work — then whose hand had painted it?

Half a flask of cold wine down, Luo He got up three times before the third hour of the night.

The wine from Baishi Village truly was hard to get down, but he actually did not much care about that. Some people drink for the taste of the wine. Some drink simply to get drunk.

He was the latter of the latter.

In front of the stone house, there were still traces of the stone-paved road laid long ago. He had no wish to walk that road. So he went around to the back of the house, only to find that the back of the house was covered in pear trees planted long ago that now filled the whole hillside.

For no apparent reason, a sudden surge of irritation rose within him. Luo He gave a fierce kick to a chicken pen beside the path.

Li Yuanyuan’s fence looked ugly but was solidly built. His kick landed and the fence didn’t budge — he himself went flying and landed flat on the ground.

He just sat there in the middle of the path, looking at the few hens flapping inside the fence, breathing indignantly. As he breathed, another hiccup of wine vapor came up.

A burning, scorching feeling in the stomach — as though tears that should have fallen had all been swallowed back down, repeatedly fermenting and brewing within.

If it hadn’t been for that person asking him to come, he truly had no wish to return to this place. The thing about being placed within a scene is that if you are not in it, you are fine however you look at it. But once you are within it, you cannot help but be moved.

In waking hours, sorrow wound around him like threads. In drunken sleep, nightmares invaded. The wine was clearly not working very well anymore.

He had once not understood: if the heavens judged the one who had lived on in shame to be the guilty one, why had they not taken him away instead, and why had they taken his loved ones? But now he understood — perhaps this was the punishment heaven gave him. For a person with sins to bear, death is a release. Being alive is the endless hell with no way out.

He sat for another while, and at last decided to stand.

In the very instant he rose, he seemed to sense something and snapped his head up.

Moonlight passed through the mountain gate and fell on the stone-paved road covered in moss. Faintly, dimly — a woman’s figure was walking through the fine curtain of rain, coming slowly from beneath the pear trees heavy with white blossoms, her black hair dark as distant mountains.

That slender silhouette was so familiar. In a trance he was transported back to the days of many years ago. He had stood just like this at the roadside, waiting for that pair of younger sisters of his to return with the wine.

The wine pouch dropped from his hand and hit the ground. Luo He’s eyes filled with disbelief. His voice was hoarse and trembling.

“A’Zhu?”

His voice dissolved into the rain and mist. A gust of wind blew past, and the woman’s silhouette was concealed again.

He frantically rubbed his eyes, and involuntarily took a few steps forward, searching in every direction.

“A’Zhu? Is it you…”

The wind stopped. The rain mist that had been veiling his sight suddenly parted.

The woman was standing seven or eight paces in front of him, looking at him expressionlessly.

The wind lifted the long hair that had been covering half of her face, revealing a jarring, heart-stopping scar.

“I’ve found you.”