◎True Heart◎

Hearing him speak this way, Qu You instinctively took a step toward the door — but Bo Ying reached out and gripped her wrist with an iron hold. She had never realized just how much strength was in his hands.

The young men of the Bai family in Jinling were all born striking. Zhou Tan aside, even Bai Shating had gotten by in the pleasure quarters back in the day thanks in part to his good looks.

Bo Ying usually wore nothing but plain grayish-white ramie robes, and had only recently taken to wearing silvered satin. Lightning flashed and reflected off the smooth fabric into his eyes, but no light reached the eyes themselves.

Bo Ying gazed at her quietly, and asked, with perfect calm, “Why did you have to be so clever?”

His grip tightened, pressing a little too hard, and happened to fall right on Qu You’s injured arm; she winced faintly at the pain, and he seemed to notice, loosening his hold slightly.

Li Yuanjun said quietly, “…Brother, Zhou Yan followed Zhou Tan out of the city, and surely wouldn’t have dared bring many troops with him. This place is far from the outskirts encampment — why not finish the two of them off here, before the emperor even leaves the city?”

Bo Ying said nothing.

Li Yuanjun went on, “The day I lured them up to Ting Mountain, I had the Xishao people trade uniforms with the Li family’s troops. Our forces here today number three hundred; there are five thousand in the city, and if we call in reinforcements along Jiwang River, we could gather ten thousand more. The moment Zhou Yan is dead, we spread word that the emperor killed him — the outskirts encampment won’t be able to mobilize troops, and the imperial city will be ours for the taking!”

Qu You stared fixedly at him, and to her surprise, saw an unusual weariness settle over Bo Ying’s face. “Have I told you that you’re being too impatient?”

Li Yuanjun startled, explaining hastily, “Luo Jiangting has already succeeded — the two of them are already estranged from each other. Last time I sent word… Zhou Yan is someone Zhou Tan personally promoted up from the border, how loyal could he possibly be to Song Shixuan? If we wait any longer, we won’t get another chance this good — as long as Zhou Tan and Zhou Yan live, another twenty years of waiting will still get us nowhere!”

The sky was beginning to lighten faintly; lightning flashed and thunder rolled, but no rain had yet fallen. After Li Yuanjun finished speaking, she fell silent a moment, then turned her gaze to Qu You. “You shouldn’t have come today. You were supposed to stay in the imperial city, wait for me to succeed, and then work with me from the inside. You knew you shouldn’t, and you came anyway — Brother, are you afraid I’ll kill her?”

Bo Ying shook his head, a faint smile crossing his face, though he offered no explanation. “I came because I was afraid you’d die here without anyone understanding why. After the conversation I just had with her, I felt even more strongly that I needed to come. Even if it all falls apart in the end, I’d rather be honest — face this head-on. Anything less wouldn’t do it justice.”

Li Yuanjun looked at him, stunned. “Brother, what do you mean by that…”

“Go,” Bo Ying said. “Go down the mountain. Bring Zhou Tan up here. I’ll wait for you both.”

Li Yuanjun looked as though she wanted to ask more, but Bo Ying said nothing further. Once she’d turned and left, Qu You suddenly said, “So you didn’t know she was the one who had me taken.”

Bo Ying said, “I told you — she’s too impatient. And look, she’s already walked right into your trap, hasn’t she?”

“Then why send Zhou Tan up here?”

Bo Ying was silent for a moment, then said simply, “At a time like this, one ought to face one’s opponent honestly, at least once.”

“Everything Li Yuanjun just said to you was based on the belief that Ziqian and Zhou Tan really are at odds — but I already told you that was just a smokescreen, and yet you still want him brought up here…” Qu You stared hard at him, feeling her throat tighten. “What plan do you have left?”

Bo Ying lowered his lashes, offering neither an answer nor a denial.

Qu You wanted to say something more, but Bo Ying reached out and pressed a hand to the back of her neck. She didn’t even feel the slightest pain before she collapsed straight into his arms.

Once Qu You lost consciousness, everything went dark.

In her dream, she seemed to return to the very first life in which she and Zhou Tan had first met — back when she was still an unwed, innocent girl who knew nothing of sorrow, and he was still far from the calculating strategist he would later become.

At a spring banquet, a sixteen-year-old girl in pink stood beneath an apricot tree, light scattering endlessly around her.

“Water flows past the hall, carrying blossoms away…”

He had sent over two jars of apricot blossom wine.

Beside her, light after light kindled in succession. During those years in the palace when she had forgotten even her own name, she often sat on the steps gazing off toward the distant Candle-Lighting Tower, watching its candles lit one by one, then quietly extinguished again.

He asked through the door, “Miss Qu, is our marriage still to stand?”

She answered, “The young lady is already dead. There’s no need for you to come again.”

Qu You walked slowly through a long snowy night beneath red palace walls, remembering the days behind those walls when Song Shiyan had tormented her.

She gripped tightly the white jade ring — in the Ministry of Justice, she had never once bowed her head no matter what they did to her; it was only when they tried to take that ring from her that she’d thrown herself at them like a madwoman, biting and clawing.

“Give it back, give it back — I have nothing left. Give him back to me, give him back, please!!”

The warm white jade was stained red with blood; she thought she would die there too, in that lightless place.

Until the physician’s slender fingers slowly pried open her clenched fist.

Bo Ying wrapped her wound in white gauze, his voice carrying something like pity. “The people at the Ministry of Justice had no restraint — you’re hurt badly. As for bearing children in the future… I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

Half-dead, she lay collapsed on the ground, unable to make sense of what this physician sent by the crown prince was saying.

Bo Ying knelt on the scattered straw, brushing back the tangled hair stuck to her cheek. For some reason, she felt his hand trembling slightly.

“If there’s a next life… get to know me sooner. I owe you — I owe your husband…”

In the cell, day and night blurred together. He treated her wound and didn’t hurry to leave.

“I often think — if only I could be a purely good person, or a purely wicked one. As things are now…”

She still couldn’t understand what he was saying.

From down the corridor came the sound of boots crossing the straw. Song Shiyan hurried over and called out to him: “Jing’an, they’re… they’re about to enter the city.”

And so the young physician gathered his medicine box and left the dim cell. The blood had been wiped from her face; she forced her blood-crusted eyes open, but caught only a glimpse of a hem of fabric, gleaming silver, disappearing from view.

Someone, somewhere, was humming a tune, faint and indistinct.

“…I drift upon the river’s flowing waters, by day I climb to the capital, through nine-layered luan mountains… The immortal grants me the Song of Eternal Peace, sending me a lone cold star to guide my way.”

The river’s waters — three.

By day, to the capital — jing.

This was the verse Bai Shating had written back when he’d come to the capital to search for his elder brother.

But Bo Ying was clearly not Bai Sanjing.

Bai Sanjing had died many years before; he had stolen the man’s identity, taking the alias “Jing’an” to serve as an advisor in the crown prince’s household. Seeing that verse, though it had nothing to do with him, he couldn’t help reciting it over and over.

Perhaps he, too, had been unable to resist the pure, uncomplicated warmth of being missed by someone that way.

Li Yuanjun must have told Song Shiyan, back on the city wall, that the empress’s true son hadn’t died — which was why his expression had changed so drastically.

Later, he had gone laughingly to his death, humming that very verse. Had he, in the end, finally understood the true identity of the advisor he had trusted most, all those years?

A tangled, hopeless mess of an account.

History fills page after page across a thousand ages, and countless people are swallowed into the cracks between them, so that even the blaze of their mutual ruin never reaches the eyes of those who peer back at it from later times.

She realized, then, that she had never truly been someone looking down from above — she had always been a person caught within the story itself.

Across four lifetimes, spanning centuries, the face of the physician who had once treated her in prison — a face she could never quite remember back then — gradually came into focus.

The final image of the dream was of her and Zhou Tan, pouring libations before a solitary grave.

A tear fell from her eyes. Zhou Tan didn’t ask why — he simply reached out and wiped it away.

Qu You’s gaze fell on the name carved into the gravestone.

Both she and he knew that Bo Ying was, in the end, only someone who could never make peace with what had happened to him.

And even before they had ever known him, he had already chosen the path he would walk — a road ten years long, with no chance left to turn back.

“Heaven and earth, mortal world — neither one of them ever knew…”

Across so many lives, so many ages, he still waited in that black night for them to come and keep their final promise.

Just as he always had.

“BOOM—”

What truly woke her was a deafening, earth-shattering roar.

Debris flew past her ears; she caught the scent of still-water fragrance just ahead of her, and Zhou Tan, holding her tightly, fell with her from the straw, tumbling for a long while down a corridor thick with that strange perfume before finally coming to a stop.

His voice, hoarse and strained with tension, asked, “Are you hurt?”

Qu You shook her head, instinctively reaching out to stroke his back. “What about you? Did you fall just now?”

“It’s nothing,” Zhou Tan answered simply, glancing around before explaining to her, “Li Yuanjun let me up the mountain. I found you unconscious in that ruined temple, and before I could say much of anything, we were trapped inside — and not long after, someone set fire to the oil around the temple, and the floor collapsed beneath us.”

Mixed in with the strange fragrance was another peculiar smell, and Qu You suddenly remembered — it was the same pungent scent of lamp oil she’d once caught at Xiuqing Temple.

She looked up and saw an eternal flame lit on the wall ahead. “Then where are we now…”

Zhou Tan gave a bitter laugh. “In the Chang Mausoleum.”

Qu You startled. Zhou Tan continued, “That ruined temple was probably once part of the mausoleum itself — a weak point in its sealing, disguised with a temple built over it precisely to keep grave robbers from noticing. Over the years it fell into disrepair and was swallowed up by the forest. Li Yuanjun chose this place specifically to bring us here — and besides, the passage we fell down is long and deep. Once the temple collapses, it will seal that route completely. Even if Xiao Yan manages to avoid the Li family’s troops and make it up the mountain, he won’t find us anytime soon.”

“But…”

He didn’t finish the thought. Qu You, unable to spare much more thought for it, gripped his hand. “He… he must want to burn this whole mausoleum to the ground, drawing us here — he means to die together with us… Didn’t Li Yuanjun come down with you?”

Zhou Tan shook his head, falling briefly silent. “You… already know who he is?”

A bitter ache rose in Qu You’s chest, but she nodded anyway. “He is…”

“I guessed,” Zhou Tan cut her off, sighing. “He’s been clever and cautious for over a decade — he shouldn’t have followed you here… But perhaps it’s fitting, in its own way. His father, his mother, his brothers and sisters, are all buried on Fenghua Mountain. He’s hated the imperial family so deeply — for it all to end here, there’s a kind of completeness to it.”

No sooner had he finished than Qu You saw a figure standing in the doorway of the burial chamber, holding a lamp, blocking her view of the eternal flame beyond.

Backlit as he was, neither of them could make out his face — only his voice reached them, both familiar and strange.

“You’ve come.”

Zhou Tan held Qu You closer. His arm, injured in the fall just now, combined with his already weakened state these days, meant it took him a long moment to steady his breath.

“Do you truly not regret this?”

“…You didn’t have to choose this path. You had so many other options, weren’t left with nothing to choose from… in fact, if none of what happened today had happened, someone as clever as you would never have been found out at all.”

In the darkness, the figure holding the lamp took a step back, his voice still soft. “I have no choice but to do this… otherwise, I’d be betraying my own fate.”

“So be it, then… Grass and trees have their own nature — why should they seek a beauty’s favor? Today, let’s bring this to an end.”