A’Zhu still remembered the day she and A’Jing first met.

The Zhongli clan practiced the art of weaving fate, and among their number it was the women who possessed the greatest natural gift. The elder who wrote the fate scripts in the clan judged her to be of the highest natural endowment — but warned that her year luck pressed upon her day pillar, and she would likely be caught in the cycle of the trapped self. In the end, she was given the name Zhu, meaning the shuttle of a loom — one who weaves back and forth, one who weaves the future. The girl of one year older who had been tested alongside her was named Jing — Mirror — meaning an existence placed beneath the eaves, before the dressing table, untouched by dust.

In that moment, she understood that the clan’s hopes for the two of them were different. Perhaps she was destined to carry responsibility, to grow in toil and exertion, while Jing would live carefree and peacefully to old age.

Yet the outcome written in a fate script rarely bends to what people hope for. This she came to understand many years later.

At the time, the clan’s population was sparse. In their generation, the boys outnumbered the girls — she and Jing were the only two girls of the same age. From her earliest memories, she and A’Jing were the closest, always together. Jing was open and warm, given to both tears and laughter. She herself was always inward, seemingly born without temper — even when she reprimanded others, her tone remained gentle. She and Jing became the closest of friends because they were the only ones in the clan who could share each other’s secrets.

Secrets — secrets about dreams.

They would often gather at night and, by lamplight, write down each other’s dreams in a notebook. A’Jing liked to call that notebook the “Dream Conversations.”

She and A’Jing were not alike. Even their dreams were worlds apart. Yet wine was the one shared love. In their girlhood, before sunset each evening, they would meet and go out of the mountain together to sneak wine. As they grew, they would link arms and go to buy wine together. Come rain or shine, year after year, it never changed.

But this kind of life finally reached its end.

It all began with that terrible dream.

To call it a dream was an understatement — it was more a vision of hell, the termination of all things. In the dream, mountain fires howled, seas boiled, the earth was scorched and waste, plague ran rampant, men and women old and young were all reduced to slaves, while a devil enthroned on high drank blood and devoured flesh without ceasing, shrieking without end.

She could not move, could not wake. She could only cry out in endless despair until the dream began to sink. She passed through shattered mountains and rivers, through layer after layer of time, and finally landed in a courtyard.

She opened her eyes and found herself standing in the desolate rear courtyard of a general’s mansion. A woman dressed in black, her hair pulled high, was walking slowly toward her in the moonlight.

Her gaze fell on the brocade strip in the woman’s hand. Suddenly she understood something. She threw herself toward her with all her strength, trying to stop what was about to happen. But the woman vanished in an instant.

She woke again — seven days later.

She did not know what had happened during those seven days. She only felt that everyone in the clan was living in fear, and A’Jing was nowhere to be found.

The most respected elder aunt in the clan sat watch at her bedside herself, asking about the contents of her dream, and then told her: she was to represent the clan and travel to Huozhou, bringing that brocade strip along with the prophesied matters to the Shen clan, to seek out a so-called method of salvation.

Young A’Zhu was not willing to do this. She could not understand why such a heavy duty should fall upon a clan of fewer than a hundred households — and upon her, a girl barely past her teens. But her elder aunt told her: only by doing this could she reunite with her clanspeople in future, and only thus could she see A’Jing again. In the end, she secretly drew a portrait of the woman in the dream on the last page of the Dream Conversations notebook, hoping that one day she might share it with A’Jing. Then she accepted her elder aunt’s charge, and set out alone with the brocade strip, heading for the northern lands to seek the help of old allies.

But neither she nor the Zhongli clan knew: over the preceding decades, the Shen clan had already established its sole dominance over Huozhou and beyond. In their expansion, they had tasted the sweetness of power and discovered the secret of the divine. A frightening ambition had grown within them — an ambition beyond what ordinary people could conceive.

Shen Shi’an, the head of the Shen clan, told her the story of the different history sharing one truth, and expressed hope that she would share with him every detail of the prophesied individual. He also hinted that the so-called evil deity need not be beyond harnessing — that an alliance could earn the reward of eternal life, allowing them to replace the deity that the people of Chizhou had worshipped for hundreds of years and become the true sovereign of this land.

Even though the clan had changed its surname to Zhongli, she had never forgotten the belief her people had passed down, and had never forgotten the hope their elders had placed in her name when it was given to her. Young as she was, she had no knowledge of what power and desire meant. She acted only from the sincerity of her heart. She refused Shen Shi’an, and from that moment, the key that unlocked the nightmare began to turn.

Shen Shi’an feigned acceptance while secretly resolving that he could not permit any source of danger to survive. He quietly reported the matter of the prophecy to the imperial family. He repeatedly probed her for the prophecy’s details, and eventually she was put on her guard. At the very moment before Mu Er He sealed the city gates, she fled through a secret passage in the ancestral home, slipped past the Shen family’s watchers, and escaped from Huozhou alone.

She desperately longed to return home, to return to the shelter of her clan. All the way, she endured hunger, carefully concealed her trail, and only dared ask for a cup of tea at a roadside station when she reached the border of Chizhou. But just as she finished that bowl of hot tea, she heard the idle talk of passing soldiers before they dismissed.

In the name of demonstrating loyalty, the Shen clan had completely betrayed their old friend. Emperor Su Yin, who had heeded a diviner’s warning and deeply feared all matters related to the former dynasty, could not tolerate the existence of something that besmirched the righteousness of the king. In order to erase that nebulous prophecy, the Zhongli clan was slaughtered to the last. The hidden village that had once withdrawn from the world became, from that day on, a burying ground that even passersby refused to approach.

She could not bring herself to believe it. Without seeing it with her own eyes, she could not convince herself it was settled. At the risk of death she attempted to return to Zhongli, but exhausted herself and tumbled down a cliff, where she was found and saved by a passing general. Only then did she understand: it was for a reason that her elder aunt had chosen the youngest among them, herself, to go to Huozhou. Perhaps from that time, her family had already seen the endpoint of their own fates. She had not seen all of this clearly until this very moment.

No one knew who the black-clad woman with her hair bound high and a brocade strip in her hand might be. Nor did anyone know the connection between her and that world-ending prophecy. But she could wait. Wait for the day when someone could give her the answers.

She was certain: as long as she kept watch in that place, the woman in the prophecy would eventually appear.

She went alone to Prince Shuo’s mansion, burying her clan’s secrets deep in her heart. She hoped that one day the person in the prophecy would appear early, and she could be freed from this endless curse, could lift from her shoulders the empty duty of saving the world.

Perhaps heaven pitied her circumstances, or perhaps her fate script had always contained this measure of good fortune. A’Zhu had not expected that her days in the general’s mansion would become the happiest time of her life. Her brothers treated her as a true younger sister. The old general and his wife regarded her as a daughter of their own flesh and blood. They tended and protected her as they would any ordinary girl, arranged for teachers to instruct her in music, painting, horsemanship, and archery, scoured the land from afar to find her a match, and when the time came personally sewed a gorgeous wedding dress and sent her into a bridal palanquin that carried her toward a bright and beautiful future.

Gradually, everything from her younger years receded like a retreating tide. Bathed in the daylight, she often forgot her history of blood and suffering, her family’s vendetta, and would drift into a daze, thinking she had been born and raised in this warm, tranquil compound, with loving parents and gentle elder brothers, and endless unhurried years ahead. But when the moonlight came through the window at night, she would remember the clan members who had wailed and screamed in the darkness, her elder aunt’s final words to her that were soaked in blood, and the borrowed life she had bought with a hidden name.

Her heart was torn apart for so long. She could only talk herself into it, again and again: perhaps the life she lived with the general’s family was her real life, and those inerasable dark memories were only a long, long nightmare.

But she had not foreseen that the Shen clan had not let her go — had not forgotten the old prophecy. The old nightmare came back again, and Yu’an drew her once more into a dream she could not wake from. In the dream, she stood alone guarding an empty courtyard, and in a daze she saw a thin, sallow-faced girl walk into it and timidly offer her a pear to eat. She watched that girl grow a little older each day, her face gradually becoming familiar. But she could no longer tell whether this familiarity was from the years of living side by side, day after day, or because she had met her once before in another distant dream.

Now, as the dream ended, the white fog that had clouded her vision finally lifted. She realized at last: the woman in the prophecy had appeared long ago — had even lived under the same roof as her for all those many years.

Fate is pitiable, lamentable, laughable, in that one cannot see its full shape from within. In illness one does not know prosperity; in happiness one does not know worry.

When she had left home, she had been only a girl of sixteen or seventeen, troubled by her elder aunt’s charge, thinking she would be back within a month or so — the farewell had been so hurried she had not even said it properly.

Now, at last, she had returned to this place — but she was a weathered woman past forty, having endured torments beyond any ordinary imagination in a hell of chaos and confusion, with nothing left in her heart but pain and hatred.

Fuyin, fuyin — crying in repetition, crying without cease.

This was how heaven had written her fate script: forcing her to feel the agony of bones sundered from flesh, of blood kin torn apart, twice over. She had once thought she had escaped her own fate, but in the end she had only been standing in the middle of it all along, without knowing it.

From the stone house not far away, lamplight shone through. The wary blade-master and sword adept had already stirred awake, as though sensing something.

The bloated and worn face of her elder brother was just ten paces away. In his eyes were joy, confusion, and a kind of weakness that disgusted her.

“A’Zhu…”

He called her by her former name and could say nothing else. He had no standing to say anything, and no right even to call her name.

Xiao Dai looked at Luo He, and slowly raised her left hand.

The small flame wavered. The last oil lamp inside the ancient pagoda went out. The smoke rose in one long thin line, curling and twisting in the air heavy with water mist.

Su Wei set the notebook aside and pressed his fingers lightly against his brow.

Xiao Nanhui leaned in, eyes alight with anticipation.

“Well? Were you able to decode it?”

The man opened his eyes and met her gaze with an expression of ambiguous intent.

“In your eyes, do I rank below an old notebook and a strip of tattered brocade?”

She was taken aback. A look of panic and embarrassment she couldn’t conceal crossed her face — vivid and unguarded, the sort that made whoever saw it feel a pleasant amusement.

“I — that’s not what I meant. I could just see that you’d been studying it for so long, and the sky is nearly light already—”

He seemed not to want her to continue, and reached up to brush the stray strands of hair from her temple.

She did indeed stop. Yet that hand did not stop. Having gathered the strands to her ear, it lingered at the side of her face, lightly stroking.

There was no expression on his face. The movement of his hand was all tenderness. That hand, which had been leaning on the stone platform just now, carried a trace of coolness — yet as it passed across her cheek, it seemed to catch fire.

“What’s this? Why so sudden—”

The more softly controlled the gesture, the more it moves. Facing this kind of tenderness, she became even more flustered. This was her failing: always holding herself back at a distance from anything too intimately beautiful, her heart unsettled and uneasy.

He withdrew his hand but not his gaze. His expression was very calm. His voice was gentle.

“Nothing. I just wanted to look at you.”

Though it was already daytime outside, rain had been falling continuously. The pagoda within was still pitch dark. Xiao Nanhui could not even tell whether the person before her could see her face clearly.

But she could still feel that gaze on her face. He seemed to be looking at her — and yet also seemed to be looking through the long passage of years, tracing her likeness in memory.

He parted his lips as though about to say something. Suddenly an unusual sound came from outside the tower.

A muffled sound — at first hearing it seemed like a clap of thunder in the distance, but listening more closely, a difference became apparent.

This sound seemed to come from the ground.

Xiao Nanhui sprang to her feet and moved toward the tower’s entrance.

The fine rain struck her face and dampened her clothes. The wind carried a hint of early autumn chill. The gray-green earth had returned to stillness. As far as the eye could see, the open wilderness looked no different from the day before.

Could it truly have been only thunder?

Footsteps sounded behind her. The man had also come out of the tower.

Xiao Nanhui turned her head instinctively and said reassuringly:

“Perhaps I misheard. Thunder in these mountain valleys does sound more muffled than on the plains—”

She was still speaking when she saw two points of light rise in the pupils of the person before her.

She turned belatedly, and seeing the glow in the distance, her expression grew uncertain.

“Why is Li Yuanyuan starting her stove so early today…” Her words cut off as she realized something was wrong. “No — that’s a fire! The house is on fire!”

Li Yuanyuan had lived here for decades. She would never make a careless mistake like knocking over a candle. Not to mention both she and Ding Weixiang were sharp and alert — how could they have failed to notice anything and let the fire burn this fiercely? Something must have happened.

Was it people from the Shen clan? Or Pu Huna? Or—

Her heart sank lower and lower. Her throat tightened. After a long moment she turned to him urgently.

“Something may have gone wrong at Li Yuanyuan’s side. You must not be left alone. Come back with me to see what’s happening. Ding Weixiang has already alerted the nearest Black Feather Camp garrison. They’ll arrive in another hour or two once it’s light. Even if things are urgent, as long as we’re careful and hold on for a little while—”

He interrupted her stream of words and reached up to smooth the furrow between her brows.

“Taking you along with me would not be very convenient.”

Xiao Nanhui grew more anxious.

“But I can’t just leave you here alone either! What if someone traces their way in—”

“I trust you.” Su Wei lowered his gaze, and there was in his voice the same quality of persuasion he always carried. “Besides — I said before that this tower is the safest place. No one can find me here. I’ll stay in the tower. Go, look around, and come back to find me.”

She looked at him with considerable doubt, as if trying to determine whether this reasoning of his had some other purpose behind it.

But he was not like her. He was a polished, warm jade disc — no matter how one looked at him, there was no flaw or crack to be found.

Xiao Nanhui gave up. She truly did not have much time or energy to be conflicted further.

“Then stay inside the tower and wait for me. Don’t go anywhere.” She had already walked out a few steps when she turned back to urge him once more. “Wait for me.”

He nodded, and gave his wrist a slight wave. She turned away at last and left quickly.

He stood quietly before the tower, watching the young woman’s figure pass through the flower sea and be swallowed by the half-person-high grass, until not the slightest trace of her remained.

The rain still fell, soft and unceasing. In the fine-as-silk-carpet grass, it tapped out a dense, intricate pattern — the most harmonious music this heaven and earth had to offer.

After some time, a dissonant note entered that sound.

The man lowered his head and lightly brushed the layer of water that had gathered on his sleeve.

In the moment each droplet fell and hit the ground, a pair of feet clad in rusted greaves stepped out from the grass.

He had not come on horseback. He had chosen to bring a dozen elite fighters on foot in light gear — clearly having fought his way here, prepared and ready.

Rain soaked his armored garments and slid down the shaft of his spear. The spear tip rested against the ground, and as he walked toward him, it dragged a long line in the earth, letting out a grating, jarring sound.

Dragging the spear on level ground — this was no spear technique. It was a means of intimidation.

A distant memory rose in his mind. He looked at the person before him and could not help but smile.

“This scene, this moment — it truly feels like we have lived another age.”

“You knew I was coming, so you deliberately sent her away?” The expression on Xiao Zhun’s face was as cold and hard as stone. In only these past few months, silver had already appeared at his temples. At an age that should have been full of vigor, there was already a bleak, desolate look in his eyes. “That’s good. She truly could not stop me. With her gone, you and I will save ourselves a great deal of trouble.”

“Trouble?” The man in the rain had an expression whose depths were harder to fathom than the far mountains, and his voice carried a penetrating chill. “I am not like the Qinghuai Marquis — putting up the banner of family and nation, yet in the critical moment of life and death, expecting her to stand in front of you and take the blow. She has been hurt by you so deeply, yet she still remembers old ties. You have never once considered her feelings — not even a little. I do not want her to see you again. Not ever, in any time or place.”

Xiao Zhun said nothing.

Every accusation concerning her — there was not a single one he could refute. He too had hoped for an outcome that could satisfy all parties. But from the moment she reached out and took that person’s hand in the Xuanyuan Duke’s mansion, he had no other choice left.

From far within the mountain valley came another dull, resonant sound. Xiao Zhun composed his expression and slowly raised his spear head.

“I have a great many things that require my attention. There is no time to exchange pleasantries with Your Majesty. Your Majesty has a keen and perceptive mind — you must know why I have come. Let us not waste time. Will you come with us of your own accord, or shall I come and escort you?”

The man stepped forward three paces and met Xiao Zhun’s eyes directly.

“I once made a promise to the late king of three things I must accomplish. Now only this last one remains to be settled. You have your family vengeance to avenge. I have my oath to fulfill. We each take what we need. Simple as that.”

His form was naturally slender. Before the armored general, he looked even thinner and more worn. The proprieties of sovereign and subject seemed to have inverted and collapsed in this moment. Yet with only a single glance, he moved the throne in Yuanming Hall to this wilderness.

“Bring me to it.”

The moment Xiao Nanhui stepped into the valley, she finally understood what that sound had been.

The small farmhouse that had once been filled with the warmth of cooking smoke and the crowing of chickens was now a ruin. Half a stretch of pear trees had become charred timber in the conflagration. The hillside behind, which she had leaned against, now had an entire face sheared off. Shattered white stone and sand and thorns had buried half the valley. Everything in their path was shattered and swept clean — not a blade of grass remained.

What on earth had happened here? Had the earth shaken?

She was so stunned that for a moment she could not move her feet. Until a familiar sound of something cutting through the air came from not far away, from behind a prominent rock at the center of the space.

She had heard this sound first when she was leaving the Bijiang settlement. An-Lu had received the same blood as that Shen Shi’an, and could in an instant manipulate a massive invisible force.

Was it Shen Shi’an himself who had tracked them down? Or was it that legendary “it”…

But when she made out the person’s silhouette, she was startled again.

It was a woman. Her long hair was half-undone. Her back carried no killing intent — rather, something warm and gentle came through.

She pressed down that strange feeling in her chest and forced herself to focus on the battlefield at hand, trying to find the key to turning things around.

Not far away, Li Yuanyuan wielded a sword in each hand, locked in battle against more than a dozen of Pu Huna’s fighters. Ding Weixiang was attempting to close in on the one manipulating the force, only to be driven back again and again.

He was engaging that woman head-on, absorbing her assault. And controlling that force seemed to demand her full attention — she could not spare any focus beyond it. This was Xiao Nanhui’s best opening.

She hid herself in silence, chose her position, and stepped into place. Slowly she drew the arm crossbow from her sleeve and aimed its head at that person’s heart. The bowstring was taut, the killing intent ready to release.

This was a killing strike. She had one chance. If it missed, the other party would know where she was hiding. Trying to kill her after that would be nearly impossible — the location of her position would be exposed, inviting a counterattack. And the weapons in her hand held no advantage in close combat and direct confrontation.

She had resolved in her heart to kill with one shot.

Yet she never could have anticipated that at the very critical moment before release, the woman standing on the rock turned her face sideways by half.

In truth they were already a hundred paces apart, but there are kinds of familiarity that accumulate over years of daily life and sink to the bone. Xiao Nanhui recognized that person at a single glance. Her hand faltered involuntarily.

Only one instant of hesitation — and in the next instant the loosed short bolt lost its aim, grazing the woman’s temple and flying past.

The other party also became aware of her presence and slowly turned around.

The arm crossbow lowered. Xiao Nanhui stared at the person across from her, and after a long moment murmured:

“Auntie Dai?”

Xiao Dai’s expression showed some surprise too, as though she had not expected to meet her in circumstances like these. But she quickly recovered to the manner in Xiao Nanhui’s memory — still those gentle, soft eyes.

Xiao Nanhui walked involuntarily toward the figure, heart hammering, thoughts in turmoil.

Why had Auntie Dai appeared here? Had she not been taken away by Yan Zi? Had Xiao Zhun failed to protect her, and she had gotten away? Or was it—

In that moment of distraction, Ding Weixiang had already brought his blade slashing through. It was the first time Xiao Nanhui had seen him use his full strength. That long blade was so fast it left no shadow, forcing a gap through the rain.

Yet Xiao Dai only stood there, swinging out her left arm without even turning her head. A wind blade materialized out of nothing and met the blade-master’s killing strike head-on, driving him several steps back.

One wind blade shrieked past. Another followed on its heels, pinning Ding Weixiang to where he stood, unable to advance so much as a single step.

Xiao Nanhui’s first instinct was that Auntie Dai had taken some unknown poison like Zou Sifang and had her mind taken from her.

“Auntie Dai! Wake up — it’s me, Nanhui—”

The wind blades besieging Ding Weixiang did not stop. The woman’s eyes were still gentle — but within the gentleness was a foreign exhaustion and coldness.

“Nanhui. It has been a long time. The brocade strip I wove — do you still have it?”

All the things Xiao Nanhui had meant to say — a thousand words, ten thousand words — suddenly could not be spoken.

Over the past decade and more, Auntie Dai had woven countless brocade strips. Some had been given to Bolao to tie up her hair. Most had been quietly put away by Xiao Nanhui. This was something even Xiao Zhun did not know about, let alone the Shen clan or Pu Huna’s people.

The person before her was not some “it” inhabiting Auntie Dai’s body. She was Auntie Dai herself.

“Why…”

Why accept that person’s blood, why join Pu Huna, why stand there killing and destroying without restraint?

From not far away in the mountain, a soft tinkling of bells was carried on the air. The sound of something cutting through the sky followed in quick succession. Two of Pu Huna’s fighters reached Xiao Dai’s side before her. Three figures then rose together with the pull of flying lines, soaring up through the rain mist toward the mountainside.

Xiao Nanhui looked up, and saw with astonishment that the previously smooth cliff face had a hole broken in it. Several soldiers in armor stood at the opening. One of them held a long spear — it was Xiao Zhun. And beside Xiao Zhun, that slender silhouette was the person she had just parted from with a word of farewell.

She looked at those drifting figures in the rain mist and in a trance was carried back to that night of torrential rain on the Dou Chen Ridge.

So many of the people she had loved walked into her life — and then left this same way, in such a hurry. She always wanted to hold onto something, to keep something. And yet in the end she was always alone.

Her eyes burned red. A choked, suppressed sound came from her throat.

“I asked you to wait — why didn’t you wait?!”

Her voice circled in the grinding roar of sliding stone and rock. Su Wei looked at the figure in the rubble of the valley, and his toe moved forward a barely perceptible half-step — only to stop in the end.

He had waited for her.

He had waited for her for over a decade, and she had finally walked through all those long years and come to stand before him.

He wished for nothing more than to stay at her side. But as his mother had said: in this life, there is nothing but one parting after another.

He had once grown weary of living, and was so urgently longing for all of it to end. Urgently enough that from the day he knelt before his mother’s grave and swore his oath, there had not been a single moment when he had not prayed for this day to come.

But because of her appearance, he was now so unwilling to accept what was called an ending.

Unwilling enough that from the very first moment he laid eyes on her, he had been silently willing in his heart that the day of this parting would come a little later. Unwilling enough that with only a single look at her, he felt the resolve he had held firm for so long crumble in an instant.

If he were only Zhongli Jing, he would leap from this mountainside right now — only to reach her side sooner.

But he was not only himself.

“This is my fate. I must end it with my own hand.”

His voice was not loud. He did not know if he was saying it to her, or only to himself.

But Xiao Nanhui heard.

The rain and sand and stone swept away half the mountainside. That opening was about to vanish in the rumbling. She struggled upward through the cascading mud, wanting only to be closer to him — a little closer, and a little closer still.

She had made a vow not to leave him. And yet now it was he who was about to leave first?

No. That was not allowed.

Perhaps this was her fate.

But she had two hands, two feet, and a heart that had never stopped burning. As long as her life had not come to its end, she would not yield to fate so easily.

“A’Wei!”

Her voice passed through layer after layer of rain mist and countless ranges of mountain forest, and finally fell she knew not where. But she had no mind left for anything else.

“Fate comes to claim you, and you just accept it?!” Her shout circled amidst the thundering crash of sliding stone. “Don’t accept it! As long as you refuse to accept it, fate will come to you instead! Wait for me — you must wait for me!”