Eunuch Wang thought it over for a moment, then continued. “Speaking of that mute disciple, there’s another strange matter I’ve kept in mind all these years.”

Qin Yao asked at once, “What happened?”

Eunuch Wang took a leisurely sip from his cup before continuing. “When Celestial Master Li first fell ill, he was treated outside the palace at first—the Emperor specially sent court physicians to Sanqing Temple every day to take his pulse. Later, as his illness grew worse and worse, the Emperor, worried the physicians couldn’t tend him properly out there, had him moved into the palace and assigned several steady, attentive attendants to look after him. This old servant was among them. One time, I was watching a young eunuch finish brewing his medicine and was about to take it in to him, when, just outside the room, I heard Celestial Master Li berating his mute disciple, demanding to know why the mute had been rummaging through his things—was he trying to steal his book of array formations? He said never mind that he hadn’t drawn his last breath yet—even after he had, he’d never let that wretched creature steal away his life’s work. And then he cursed the mute further—”

He hesitated, glancing at Qin Yao, then forced himself to finish. “He cursed the mute, saying it was no wonder the man was born without manhood—it must be because his heart was so crooked to begin with. Cursing him on and on, Celestial Master Li suddenly coughed up a great mouthful of blood and fell unconscious. Not long after that, he succumbed to his illness. Because of this, this old servant once suspected Celestial Master Li’s death might have something to do with that mute disciple, but once the Celestial Master died, the disciple threw himself down the well as well, so the matter was never looked into any further.”

Born without manhood? Qin Yao didn’t understand—what did that mean? She glanced at Lin Xiao, but he showed no intention of explaining it to her, only fixing his attention on Eunuch Wang’s earlier words. “After Celestial Master Li passed, were the two of you among those who helped take inventory of his belongings? Did you ever come across that book of array formations he spoke of?”

Eunuch Wang hissed through his teeth and shook his head gravely. “There were books and talisman paper, sure enough, but only the sort you could buy anywhere outside—the Dao De Jing, books on feng shui, that sort of thing. Never saw any other book.”

Lin Xiao nodded, then called the stout proprietor in and had him bring out paper and a brush, setting them before Eunuch Wang. “I wonder, Eunuch Wang, do you still remember what that mute looked like? If you have any impression of him left, would you be so kind as to draw his likeness for us?”

Qin Yao found this request rather strange—even if Eunuch Wang remembered the man’s face, capturing a true likeness wouldn’t be easy. Could Eunuch Wang actually know how to paint?

Eunuch Wang shot Lin Xiao a look as if his teeth ached, clearly most reluctant to comply, but though Lin Xiao’s tone remained courteous, it carried an unmistakable note that brooked no refusal. Eunuch Wang held his gaze for a moment before conceding defeat. “Fine, fine, fine. This old servant is plenty afraid of you already.”

He picked up the brush and began to draw.

Though Qin Yao herself had no skill in painting, she had seen her brother paint often enough back home, and watching the way Eunuch Wang held the brush, it was plain he had real skill—she couldn’t help giving him another curious look.

After about the time it takes half a stick of incense to burn, Eunuch Wang set down his brush and slid the paper across to Lin Xiao.

Qin Yao leaned in to look—on the paper was a young Daoist priest in his twenties, with slanting eyebrows, triangular eyes, a perpetually sour expression, and a slightly hunched back—someone who certainly didn’t look the least bit appealing.

The drawing wasn’t elaborate, but in just a few strokes it had brought a vivid, lifelike person into being—proof enough that Eunuch Wang’s skill was no small thing.

Qin Yao stared at the portrait, quickly running through her memory, and confirmed she had never in her life seen the man in the drawing—she couldn’t help feeling a bit disheartened.

The moment he finished the drawing, Eunuch Wang lingered not a moment longer, rising and taking his leave.

Lin Xiao tucked the portrait into his robe and led Qin Yao downstairs as well.

On the way, Qin Yao went back over everything Eunuch Wang had just told them, and asked Lin Xiao, “What do you make of all this about Celestial Master Li?”

“If it weren’t for that so-called book of array formations, none of this would seem suspicious at all,” Lin Xiao said. “But right before his death, he clearly had a falling-out with his disciple over some important book. Whether that’s simply the suspicion of a man long ill, or whether the disciple really was up to something, I can’t say.”

“You mean, you think the disciple stole that book from Celestial Master Li?”

Lin Xiao said, “Celestial Master Li advised the Emperor to close Yunyin Academy back then, and fell ill not long after. And according to Eunuch Wang, while he lay ill, his disciple tried to steal his book of array formations. If that mute disciple really did steal the book, then faked his death to clear himself of suspicion—could it be that the Spirit-Concealing Array later laid in the academy was his work?”

“But if he never died, where has he been lying low all these years?” Qin Yao said, puzzled. “What’s stranger still—if that mute got hold of the book Celestial Master Li poured his whole life’s effort into compiling, he should have risen to fame in Daoist circles long ago. Why has he stayed in obscurity all this time? He could easily have changed his appearance and used it to gain fame and fortune, even become the next Celestial Master Li, all it would take is altering his face a little—after all, who could possibly remember the face of some nobody from twenty years ago—”

“Perhaps he’s already been put to someone else’s use,” Lin Xiao said. “There’s no shortage of gifted, unusual people willing to serve the powerful in this world. What’s more, this man was born without manhood—back in the previous dynasty, even entering the palace to assist some noble within it would have required him no extra procedure at all. For him, that would have been rather convenient indeed.”

As he said this, Lin Xiao suddenly thought of a possibility, and his brow furrowed.

“Weijin, what on earth does ‘born without manhood’ mean?” Qin Yao asked, utterly lost.

Lin Xiao paused, taken aback, then leaned in close to murmur a brief explanation in her ear.

Qin Yao’s face flushed at what she heard, and she quickly pushed him away, clearing her throat and steering the topic back to business. “If something’s off about this disciple, I suspect someone made contact with him not long after the academy closed, even tempting him with fame and fortune to serve their own purposes—”

The more she spoke, the more plausible it seemed to her. “Either the disciple laid the array himself, or someone behind the scenes lured him into laying it on their behalf—all with the purpose of concealing something within the academy.”

As for what exactly was being concealed, they still had no clue.

She drifted off in thought for a moment, then suddenly remembering the portrait from before, reached into Lin Xiao’s robe to feel around for it.

Her movements stirred a faint heat in Lin Xiao, and he quickly caught her hand, asking in a low voice, “What are you looking for?”

“The portrait.” Qin Yao looked up at him, eyes bright.

Lin Xiao looked at her—she was so lovely, so beautiful, that he couldn’t help himself; in the end he gave in, lowering his head to brush a light kiss against her lips.

But with so much important business still to attend to tonight, Lin Xiao didn’t dare let himself go further. He kissed her only the once, then pulled back with restraint.

The kiss was shorter and lighter than any before, light as a feather—and yet, sensing his restraint, Qin Yao felt it weigh on her heart all the more heavily for it. The instant Lin Xiao pulled away, she looped her arms around his neck and, turning the tables on him, kissed him back.

That done, she wouldn’t let him use the opportunity to push for more, only laughing and urging him to take out the portrait.

Lin Xiao gave her earlobe one more nip before slowly drawing out the portrait and unfolding it before her.

By the dim light of the carriage lamp, the two of them studied the person in the drawing closely.

After looking for a while, a strange feeling rose in both their minds—whether it was something in the expression or some particular feature, they each felt they had seen this person somewhere before, yet no face in their memory matched it.

As they discussed it in low voices, the carriage arrived at Prince Lan’s residence.

Back at Siru Studio, the two of them changed clothes and drank some hot tea to drive off the cold that had settled in their bones.

“Wang Xingzhi and the others should be arriving shortly,” Lin Xiao said to Qin Yao. “They’ve been gone nearly two months now, riding back and forth across Huainan Circuit without rest—it must have been exhausting work. I hope it went reasonably well, and that they’ve managed to dig up something of Yuan Jue’s true origins.”

Listening to the water-clock ticking away in the outer room, Qin Yao knew midnight was drawing near. She had waited so long for news of Yuan Jue that now, at the very end of the wait, instead of joy she felt an unease she couldn’t quite name.

Seeing that the young couple plainly had no intention of going to sleep, and fearing they might go hungry, Madam Wen busied herself preparing some hot porridge and pastries as a late-night snack for the two of them.

They had barely taken a few bites when a servant came in to relay word that Guard Wang and the others had returned and were waiting in the outer courtyard for the Young Master’s word.

Lin Xiao washed his hands and face, and had Cai Ping drape a cloak over Qin Yao’s shoulders, intending to take her with him to the outer study.

Qin Yao, of course, wanted nothing more.

When they reached the outer study, they could see from a distance several guards in travel-worn clothing waiting outside, every one of them covered in road dust, with Wang Xingzhi and Tan Qi leading them. On seeing Lin Xiao, they all came forward to pay their respects. “Young Master, Young Mistress.”

Lin Xiao nodded. “Come inside and report.”

Qin Yao knew the outer study was a place of importance within Prince Lan’s residence, where no one but her father-in-law and Lin Xiao could enter without invitation.

And since her father-in-law had never concerned himself with practical matters, it was Lin Xiao who now ran the affairs of Prince Lan’s household, so the outer study was, in practice, used by him alone.

Once inside, Wang Xingzhi and the others drank a few sips of the tea Chang Rong and his men had personally brought them, rested briefly, and then reported to Lin Xiao in full detail everything they had uncovered over the past month and more.

“We went first to Qingzhou, taking the official record of Yuan Jue’s apparent life history to investigate. The man on record did indeed exist—the examination records were all genuine and detailed, beyond question. Since this scholar’s parents had died early and he had no family of his own, with precious few relatives, it took us a long while before we finally found a distant cousin of his. As it happened, this cousin had left Qingzhou twenty years ago to go into business and had only moved back in recent years—out of the whole of Qingzhou, he was the only person who’d had any dealings with the scholar in his youth. Had we gone investigating just a year or two earlier, we’d truly have had no way to learn the man’s real background. We showed him a portrait we’d had drawn, based on Yuan Jue’s current appearance, of what he might have looked like as a young man, and to our surprise, he didn’t recognize the man in the picture at all—he said the scholar’s looks had been quite ordinary, very different from Yuan Jue’s, and that they couldn’t possibly be the same person. That’s how we knew this Qingzhou background of Yuan Jue’s was indeed fabricated.”

Lin Xiao and Qin Yao, hearing this, weren’t the least bit surprised.

Lin Xiao gestured for Wang Xingzhi to continue.

Wang Xingzhi said, “We had no choice but to follow the road south from Qingzhou, and at every prefecture and county we stopped at, we presented His Highness the Prince’s token and had the local officials search through records of people who had gone missing in the past twenty years. After half a month of searching, we kept running into mismatched ages or timelines, until we finally reached Yuezhou and found one man whose age matched Yuan Jue’s. His surname was Su, given name Jianfu—a man of good family, in fact, the son of a great clan in Yuezhou called the Su family. This Su family, as it happens, had held their estate there for over a century, producing generation after generation of renowned scholars, and held considerable standing in Yuezhou. Unfortunately, starting a few generations back, the family heads had repeatedly fallen prey to some strange illness, with few of them living past thirty, and so the family’s numbers had gradually dwindled. By Su Jianfu’s generation, he alone remained to carry on the household.”

At the name Su Jianfu, a flash of white light seemed to streak through Qin Yao’s mind, and she nearly couldn’t stay seated—that was it, that was exactly the name Master had blurted out that time Yuan Jue had been in his room.

This man must without a doubt be Yuan Jue. She had never imagined he came from a family with such a centuries-old pedigree—no wonder he always carried that air of a refined scholar about him.

Wang Xingzhi continued, “Twenty years ago, this Su Jianfu, for some reason unknown, abandoned his vast inheritance and left without a word to anyone. With no one left to manage the household, the Su estate fell into ruin within just two years, and the servants scattered to fend for themselves, leaving no trace behind. We searched for a long while before finally finding, in Suizhou, one of the old stewards who had once served the Su household. When we showed him Yuan Jue’s portrait, the man burst into both tears and laughter at once, saying heaven had shown mercy after all, that the young master was still alive in this world—he was beside himself, half mad with joy. Only then did we know for certain that Yuan Jue was indeed this young Master Su.”

“That steward said that the year young Master Su went out traveling, he took a fancy to a young lady of the Wang family he met out there. At the time, those around him, learning of this, had tried to dissuade him—saying that although the Wang family held official rank, this young lady was merely an illegitimate daughter being raised outside the main household, that her standing simply didn’t match his, and that he ought to seek a more fitting match elsewhere instead. But by then Su Jianfu was the only one left to head the family, and the final word on everything fell to him alone. He insisted on marrying that young lady regardless, and still sent someone to propose marriage to her family.”

“Shortly before the betrothal gifts were to be presented, a Wang family elder serving as an official abroad suddenly received a promotion, and the whole household was about to move to Chang’an by imperial order. Because this Wang girl had grown into an exceptionally beautiful young woman, the family’s old matriarch hoped to use her to secure a still better match once they reached Chang’an, and so she had it falsely announced abroad that the girl had died, rejecting young Master Su’s proposal outright. At first he believed it and was grief-stricken beyond words, but later he learned the truth—that the girl had not died at all, but had been arranged by the Wang family to take on the identity of the household’s legitimate daughter, and had traveled with the family all the way to Chang’an.”

“The Wang family? From Yuezhou?” Lin Xiao suddenly grew suspicious. “Did you ever learn this young lady’s given name?”

Wang Xingzhi shook his head. “Master Su, fearing that letting the matter spread would implicate the young lady, never mentioned it to anyone. But the steward once heard him, in a drunken slip, call out the woman’s name—it sounded like A’Ling, or maybe A’Lin. We later confirmed that the Wang household had indeed had an illegitimate daughter named A’Ling ‘die’ twenty years ago.”

Lin Xiao started slightly. Earlier that year he had been sent by imperial order to Huaiyang to help clear Consort Hui’s blood brother, Wang Xingbang, of corruption charges, and so he knew that the Wang family’s ancestral home was Yuezhou, that they had only come to Chang’an twenty years before, and that after Consort Hui’s death, the family had been posted away to Huaiyang.

By coincidence, this young lady who had so nearly become betrothed to Yuan Jue had also come to Chang’an from Yuezhou with her family twenty years ago—every detail of her history lined up perfectly with Consort Hui’s.

Though the names didn’t match, an illegitimate daughter passing herself off as the legitimate one would surely have needed a new name drawn up for her—so on the matter of names alone, it couldn’t be ruled out that this A’Ling and Consort Hui were not one and the same.

“Since quite a few of the old Wang household servants still remained in Yuezhou, looking into this A’Ling’s history was a good deal easier than looking into Yuan Jue’s,” Wang Xingzhi went on. “We heard the girl was the daughter of a concubine in the Wang household. The concubine wasn’t favored, and the principal wife couldn’t tolerate the two of them, so mother and daughter were exiled early on to a manor outside the city, when A’Ling was no more than three or four years old. We heard that concubine was a devoted believer in Daoism, and often took her daughter to burn incense at a nearby Daoist temple. The temple’s Daoist Master happened to catch sight of A’Ling there and said the girl was certain to become wealthy and prominent one day, though her fate held a calamity in store—if she would come to the temple each day to burn incense, the disaster could be averted. From then on, the concubine told everyone she met that A’Ling would one day rise above all others, and had A’Ling go regularly to the temple to help with odd chores.”

At this last line, Qin Yao’s heart began to pound violently.

“A’Ling helped out at the temple for several years, and later, at the suggestion of the head disciple, she formally took the Daoist Master as her teacher and became a lay disciple of the temple, remaining in close contact with it right up until she ‘suddenly died’ at fifteen. Afterward, when the old Daoist Master passed away, the head disciple inherited the temple’s mantle and became its new master, growing even more attentive to A’Ling and her mother than before. There was even some gossip in the village over it, but since this young Daoist Master had such formidable skill and a rather fierce temper besides, no one dared say a word of it to their faces.”

“What’s strange is that after A’Ling’s ‘sudden death,’ that young Daoist Master vanished from that point on, and the temple itself fell into disrepair. Later, some in the village said the Daoist Master had in fact long been in love with A’Ling, but bound by Daoist precepts had never dared confess his feelings—so after A’Ling died, he either went mad, or died along with her in some way. In the twenty years since, no one in the village has ever seen him again.”

Qin Yao swallowed hard, glanced at Lin Xiao whose expression had turned equally grave, and asked carefully, “Guard Wang, did you happen to have anyone who knew him back then draw a portrait of that young Daoist Master?”

Wang Xingzhi nodded and drew a portrait from inside his robe. “Quite a few people back then had seen that young Daoist Master, but very few still remember what he looked like today. We asked several people and pieced together a portrait from their accounts, though it can’t be taken as exact. You’re welcome to look it over, Young Mistress, but I’m afraid it may not be entirely accurate.”

Chang Rong brought a lamp closer.

Standing beside Lin Xiao, Qin Yao watched without blinking as the portrait unfurled before her, and the moment she made out the face, she couldn’t help clapping a hand over her mouth, a low cry of shock escaping her.

There in the portrait was a man with thick brows and long eyes, his gaze sharp and full of spirit, his face lean and severe, his features clean and well-formed—every inch a man in the full bloom of his prime.

Even though that face now bore wrinkles upon wrinkles, and the once-straight figure had grown considerably stooped, Qin Yao recognized him at a single glance—it was Master.

Something seemed to stab sharply at her heart. Thinking of Master’s gaunt, hollowed cheeks as he was now, her eyes reddened uncontrollably. Just what had he gone through over all these years, to have been worn down by time into this state?