At that time, his heart held no desire to live. He had never imagined he might one day escape alive.

Through his exchanges with Song Lan during those days, Song Ling at last came to understand that Song Lan had been secretly watching him from the shadows for so many years.

In the Zishantang, Song Ling had debated governance with the various tutors. Song Lan had modeled himself after him and learned to argue with Yu Qiushi.

Song Ling had overseen military campaigns, reformed tax law, and pacified the unrest in the southwest. Song Lan had trailed behind him, asking after the soldiers’ welfare, seeking out the weaknesses of the people around him.

Song Ling had selected orphans from among the refugees and personally trained the Jintian Guard. Song Lan had likewise cultivated loyalty within the Imperial Guards and gradually built up his own core followers.

No wonder he had said: “Everything I have learned was taught to me by Elder Brother.”

He had disguised himself so perfectly — through all those years, he had never allowed him to detect the slightest trace.

The Candlelit Tower already had a great number of palace servants. To avoid drawing attention, Song Lan had not added extra guards to watch over the underground chamber where he was imprisoned. After all, very few people in the palace knew there was a subterranean chamber here — even Song Lan himself had come upon it by chance. It was said that this chamber had existed even before the Candlelit Tower was built. When Emperor De built the Candlelit Tower, he had excavated this chamber but chose not to fill it in.

Song Ling had slashed his wrist. He bled heavily as his consciousness grew hazy, and just when he believed his end was near, he suddenly heard the sound of hurried footsteps drawing steadily closer. Someone then came to his side and wrapped his wrist wound.

He squinted and managed a single glance — blinding daylight poured down from above.

It was daytime!

Song Lan never came to see him during the daytime. Then who was this?

Having stayed in the darkness for so long, that one glance made his vision suddenly go black, and he fell into a brief episode of blindness.

In a daze, he heard a quiet sob near his ear.

Someone was murmuring “Your Highness, please take care of yourself.”

Song Ling recognized whose voice it was, yet could not recall his name. He could only instinctively clutch the hem of his robe and say in a faint, barely audible breath: “Don’t…”

But the person calmly pried open his hand and knelt among his bloodstains, speaking many words to him.

Those sounds drifted near and far.

“In those years, when Elder Brother was falsely accused, it was thanks to Your Highness arguing his case and preserving our entire clan’s lives. Through all these years you have devoted yourself to cultivating us and shown us great grace. I, He, should give my life in Your Highness’s service…”

“Go quickly, go now. If there is a next life, I will again thank you for the grace of recognition.”

Song Lan did not know that behind the Jintian Guard, Song Ling still had a hidden band of secret retainers.

These had been assembled in the years after Song Ling had rescued the Ye clan, when Ye He, the third son of the Ye family, came to the capital to express his gratitude. Though Song Ling had rarely been able to make use of them, they were scattered throughout the imperial city and served as a very capable arm of his power.

After the assassination plot on the night of the Lantern Festival, Ye He had never seen Song Ling’s body and had never believed the reports of his death. He led his men tracing the trail from Tinghua Terrace all the way outside the capital, nearly to where the Bianhe River converged with the Great River — and there, he encountered an inner attendant who had once served Song Zhiyu.

That night, Song Zhiyu had seen nothing, but a vague intuition had stirred in her heart. Unable to leave the residence herself, she had dispatched the inner attendants she trusted most to follow the Bianhe River out of the city, instructing them that if they encountered anyone searching the lower reaches of the river, they should exercise caution in making contact and then, if the moment was right, reveal this oblique message.

Song Zhiyu’s inner attendant had first encountered the Jintian Guard that Luowei had dispatched to search — but he dared not trust these men now, and so passed the information instead to Ye He, who arrived afterward.

Ye He immediately sought out the secret retainers hidden within the imperial city. One of those retainers had falsely pledged allegiance to Song Lan and, after conducting searches in the vicinity of the Candlelit Tower for a long time, finally confirmed that Song Ling had not died — but had been imprisoned by Song Lan in the subterranean chamber!

The imperial city was so heavily guarded — how could one possibly pull off such a substitution and bring him out?

Ye He rode post-haste to the southwest and implored Bai Sensen to disguise him to look exactly like Song Ling.

This journey took nearly a full month. After instructing Bai Sensen to make haste to the capital, Ye He seized on the opportunity created when scholars and students staged a great commotion at the Censorate over the poem “Lament for the Jintian Guard.” He deliberately inflicted injuries upon himself, and then, together with his secret retainers, took the desperate gamble of swapping the half-dead Song Ling out of the subterranean chamber.

At that moment, every advantage of timing and circumstances was on their side. It was the very period when Song Lan was preoccupied watching over the Su and Yu factions and had no attention to spare. Moreover, Song Ling had attempted suicide. Upon learning that his captive was dead, Song Lan went under cover of night to take a cursory look and dispatched people to drag the body to the small Shan’an Hill behind the palace to be cremated.

At that time, Song Lan was flush with the satisfaction of victory. He believed Song Ling had abandoned all will to live and could never possibly make a comeback — and so for one single moment, he grew careless.

They seized upon that one moment with all they had.

Had there been so much as a fraction of a fraction of an error, this most dangerous of plans could never have succeeded.

Song Ling was hidden inside a water-wheel, breathing through a wheat straw, and fought to the death to escape the palace.

At that point he could not yet leave the capital. A carriage carried him at full gallop toward Xiuqing Temple on Ting Mountain.

Along the way they passed the Censorate in the light of the setting sun. He leaned against the carriage wall and heard “the soul is summoned straight up into the azure sky,” heard “departed forever, ten thousand li, a thousand years.”

He suddenly felt the urge to laugh coldly. So he had never truly known his own docile younger brother — had never seen the savage claws concealed within, never known of his shrewd and clever schemes. Even the “death” of his elder brother had been exploited to stage a grand theatrical spectacle.

This drama was bizarre and absurd, out of tune and off-key.

Three days later, Bai Sensen arrived in haste at Xiuqing Temple, accompanied by Zhou Chuyin, who had been living in seclusion in the Jiangnan region for many years.

The two said nothing extra. One tended to his wounds; the other took stock of his secret retainers, and gravely advised him to take advantage of Ye He’s identity and take refuge in Youzhou for the time being, to plan for the future.

To ensure absolute certainty, Bai Sensen administered a powerful medicine and transformed him entirely into a different appearance.

Ye He also left a letter at Xiuqing Temple, stating that he gave his life without regret. His one and only wish was that he might someday know what had befallen his elder brother in those distant years.

Song Ling knelt before the Buddha and knocked his forehead until it bled.

That was likely the last time he prayed to the Buddha with a sincere heart — praying for the peace of a departed soul.

The night before he left the capital, Song Ling sat before the empty, quiet Buddha hall and drew a fortune stick at random.

His vision had only partially recovered and remained blurry. He stared at it for a long time in the bright moonlight and could not make out what was written on it.

Just as he was about to toss the bamboo stick back, the monk Jichen appeared at his side as if from nowhere and took it from him, reading it out slowly: “…A person’s life is like a dream upon a pillow, like flowers on a tree — flourishing in the fullness of spring, empty and gone when the joy is spent. Like bubbles and transient blossoms, it is not worth dwelling on.”

Without waiting for him to ask, Jichen explained on his own: “A dream upon a pillow is the dream of Nanke; flowers on a tree are the flowers of late spring. The Buddha tells Your Highness that even the finest of lives blooms freely in the radiance of spring and withers to nothingness when autumn arrives. In the end it is nothing but morning-born bubbles and hibiscus flowers gone by dusk — a brief illusion. Why cling to it so?”

The moon at the horizon hung hazy and indistinct. The late spring night was quiet as still water.

After a long silence, Jichen at last heard the other man’s self-mocking voice: “After the illusion ends, there is only pitch blackness. Even the Buddha does not know — if that is so, then what is the point of being born at all?”

Song Ling turned to look. The Buddhist image was half-hidden in shadow. He faced that compassionate golden figure and burst out laughing — and as the laughter continued, he even drew his sword and pointed it directly at the image. A sudden gust of wind swept up, setting the bells at the temple’s eaves ringing in chaotic chimes.

Jichen watched helplessly as his expression twisted for a moment — then petals from the courtyard blew in, drifting softly past his side.

For reasons unknown, Song Ling’s eyelashes trembled faintly. He slowly sheathed his sword, then asked abruptly: “Is the moonlight beautiful tonight?”

Jichen replied: “The moonlight is like water.”

Song Ling turned, tilted his head back, and closed his eyes.

“Yes — the moon is forever present, forever bright. Even if I cannot clearly see it now, what does it matter?”

He took the brush from before the Buddha and wrote a line on the back of the fortune stick he had drawn. Because he could not see clearly, the characters came out crooked and uneven, a shapeless mess.

Jichen took it and saw that he had written: “The bright moon shines upon the spring night through all ages.”

He smiled and placed the bamboo stick back into the fortune-stick holder.

Beneath the moon, the person had already departed. Flower petals danced in the empty air.

As he left Xiuqing Temple, Song Ling recalled how in his youth he and Luowei had climbed the steps together to pay respects to the Buddha — how they had climbed Ting Mountain where Xiuqing Temple stood and Yan Mountain where Juhua Temple stood in Xuzhou. During imperial family sacrificial ceremonies, the mountain paths had always been bustling with people. Now they were empty, with only the drifting fallen blossoms of late spring.

“Once upon a time, a feast on Ting Mountain’s heights — now the blossoms fall, and people grieve in vain…” he intoned a verse, then turned to Zhou Chuyin and Bai Sensen with a small smile: “The third young master has not yet taken a courtesy name. Allow me to draft one for myself.”

Three years in Youzhou.

Those old events had not only made his eyes unable to bear the light — they had also given him a heart ailment. When it flared up, he would hear again and again the sound of Song Lan reading letters to him beneath the Candlelit Tower. Every word about her stabbed him with pain that made him wish he were dead.

He had once drawn his sword and slashed at his desk, swearing to kill her and find relief. Yet no one knew that in the deepest reaches of his heart, he had never been willing to believe that Luowei had done what Song Lan said she had done.

Three years later, he returned to the imperial city and caught his first glimpse of her again, in the shadow of the crabapple blossoms.

But that face was now already so unfamiliar.

He had tested her again and again, with truths tangled with falsehoods. Yet Luowei was no longer the innocent, carefree girl of those early years. Her mask had not a single crack, not a drop of water could pass through. Every fragment of words and lingering evidence kept pressing him: what exactly was he persisting for?

The hidden chamber door opened.

For some reason, Song Lan had not stayed overnight today. Luowei stood in the dim amber candlelight and saw Ye Tingyan huddled in his original spot, raising his eyes to look at her. A pair of bloodshot eyes — a slight tremor, and a line of tears slid down.

Were these tears of heartbreak? Or evidence of his eye ailment?

Luowei felt a slight constriction in her chest. She leaned down, intending to help him up — but unexpectedly Ye Tingyan bent his knees and knelt before her, prostrating deeply. When he raised his head again, all the grief that had been on his face had vanished entirely, leaving only a blank and docile composure.

He looked up and saw the rose-gold hairpin nestled in her hair, glinting with the colors of blood and gold.

The warmth in his heart condensed into shards of ice, one by one. In a moment like this, he strangely felt no pain — only cold. And it was precisely that cold that kept him from losing composure as he had that time at Xiuqing Temple.

A private attachment that stood between human lives and hatred, refusing to be cast aside.

What exactly was he persisting for?

“Your Highness,” he offered a composed smile. In the dim light, Luowei did not see the shards of ice in his eyes. “Why would you need to wager yourself to test me? I would naturally choose you.”

*

A tumult of chaotic dreams descended, then departed without mercy. And so Ye Tingyan, clasping that ailing plum bonsai, fell into an unconscious sleep — and when he woke, the sun had already set in the west.

Zhou Chuyin knocked twice and pushed the door open. Seeing the room in dusty disarray, he frowned slightly, but ultimately said nothing and only remarked: “Song Lan wants Yan Lang to return to Youzhou.”

Ye Tingyan pressed his brow, took quite a while to collect himself, then asked: “Has Yan Lang agreed?”

“Yes,” Zhou Chuyin said, “Today Shu Kang entered the palace — it seems to request a favor, asking for a bestowment to leave the capital. Song Lan agreed as well.”

“Even if he agrees on the surface, he may not actually let Shu Kang leave,” Ye Tingyan forced himself to calm down and think through his reply, “There was no opportunity before, but this time when she leaves the capital, find a way to meet with her. In case Song Lan harms her along the way, we can intervene.”

“There is one more thing,” Zhou Chuyin added after nodding, “The Double Ninth Festival is approaching. The Empress today notified the Ministry of Rites — she intends to hold another royal hunt at that time.”

“Another royal hunt?” Ye Tingyan was startled and repeated, “To where?”

Zhou Chuyin answered: “Guyou Mountain.”