Xiao Nanhui was roused by the pain in her shoulder and neck.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Some heavy yet powerful sound reached her from nearby, warming her cheek with a steady heat. The air flowing through her nostrils was warm and dry, though it also carried a faint trace of something cool and slightly bitter.

That familiar scent now clung to the layer of clothing pressed against her skin, had seeped into the strands of her hair, and wound through her every breath.

She blinked, and Xiao Nanhui heard the sound of her own eyelashes brushing against silver-thread embroidered brocade.

She suddenly realized she was not lying face down on a bed — she was lying face down on a person.

The sound she had been hearing all along was that person’s heartbeat, and the warmth beneath her cheek came from that person’s chest.

Xiao Nanhui suddenly felt as though her whole body had caught fire. She shifted uncomfortably, and a voice came from above her head.

“If you are awake, do not fidget.”

His voice had returned to its usual evenness — it even carried something of the manner he had used as “Zhong Li Jing.”

“You fell into the datura flower bed. You inhaled too much of the pollen — that is why you fell unconscious.”

Her gaze settled on the soft, draping bed curtain before her. Flowers bloomed and twined among silver-thread vines, spiraling open, their centers a pitch-black color.

She was finally beginning to understand what flower it was that appeared so frequently around the Emperor.

In the past, while stationed at the southern border, Xiao Nanhui had heard wandering monks there speak of the legends surrounding datura.

The pure white datura blossom was said to symbolize a holy, sacred deity. The legend held that when the Buddha attained enlightenment, the sky would rain white datura blossoms — the flower represented the impartiality, selflessness, and divine nature of the heavenly gods, capable of cleansing all delusion, tribulation, and attachment to life and death.

Yet there existed another variety of datura whose petals were entirely black. The legend said that when a deity fell from grace, it would push up through the earth along the road that led to the gates of hell. It symbolized boundless desire and suffering — malice intertwined with love, hatred, and the bitter fruit of vengeance. Even if one came into contact with only the faintest trace of its pollen, that scorching fragrance would stir the demons within the heart.

Black and white — pure yet dangerous. Just like the person before her.

Xiao Nanhui curled her fingers inward. Her mind was now fully clear, but her body was too frightened to move in the slightest.

Her robe had been slipped off one shoulder, and she could feel his fingers, lightly coated with cool medicinal ointment, moving gently across her back and shoulder.

He applied it very slowly. His fingertips moved as though tracing fine brushwork on paper, and only after the temperature of the ointment had grown nearly as heated as her flushed skin did they finally withdraw.

“Done.”

She immediately tried to push herself upright, but the sharp pain in her shoulder made it impossible to bear any weight. In her clumsy haste, Xiao Nanhui nearly tumbled off the man entirely.

She scrambled to her feet in a flurry, her gaze landing on the small table beside the couch. The dagger resting there looked extremely familiar.

The image from just before she lost consciousness crashed into her mind. Xiao Nanhui blurted out almost reflexively: “What happened to that palace attendant?”

“Dead.”

“Dead?” She could not conceal her shock. “How can that be? I clearly saw—”

“Yes. Weixiang only severed his right hand. But somehow the man’s breath ceased almost at that very instant.”

Xiao Nanhui was still trying to surface from this string of bizarre events when, without warning, the man’s voice drew nearer.

“Do you have nothing else to say to me?”

Seeing him approach, Xiao Nanhui instinctively shrank back. The wound on her shoulder flared with a burning pain upon being pulled, though it no longer carried the bone-deep agony from just after the punishment.

But her still-trembling right hand continued to remind her of what had happened not long ago — she might never be able to draw a bow again.

She steadied herself with her arm and slowly bowed in salute.

“Your Majesty’s medicinal ointment — this subject cannot accept such a thing.”

He did not bid her rise. His voice, as ever, was unhurried. “But the medicine has already been used on you. What do you intend to do?”

The man on the soft couch had half-risen to sit against the railing. He had only removed that heavy cloak. His ivory-white formal robe bore not a single crease, save for the slight dishevelment at his chest where she had been lying.

Even in his languid posture, he remained imperiously aloof, untouched by the slightest impurity. Even his emotions seemed utterly undisturbed — as though the events of a moment ago had been nothing but a fleeting cloud of smoke, leaving not the faintest trace upon him.

You like him.

Bai Yun’s words suddenly rang in her mind without any warning.

No, she did not. How could she like a person like this? How could she have allowed herself to end up in this state for someone like him—

All the grief, humiliation, despair, and fury she had endured in the main hall came surging up at once, and for an instant she forgot entirely where she was, or who stood before her.

“If Your Majesty wished to punish this subject, why waste such things on me? Or perhaps Your Majesty simply derives pleasure from this — from tormenting someone until they are half dead, then offering comfort, thinking that people will feel grateful and indebted—”

“Silence!”

Her words were cut off by the other’s cold, sharp voice.

She could almost feel the terrifying surge of rage that erupted in that instant — an emotion that seemed absolutely impossible to exist in the person before her.

The next second, she was hauled up off the floor in a single grip.

Had she not felt that force with her own arm, she would have scarcely believed that someone who appeared so frail could possess such fearsome strength.

“Xiao Nanhui — even now, do you still not understand where you have truly gone wrong?”

She stared at that pale face. The eyes that had once been calm as still water now harbored blizzards and howling wind within their depths, and in that darkness she could see her own face reflected back, equally distorted.

“This subject brought it upon myself. This subject has already confessed and accepted the punishment. What further grievance does Your Majesty have? If there is anything else, better to settle it all today — this subject is ready to receive it, and it saves the trouble of going back to the punishment grounds on another day—”

Her voice was almost without strength, carrying the deadness of someone utterly spent.

But the next second, the words that man spoke truly struck like a blade directly into her heart.

“Do you know what your appearance right now calls to mind? The hunter who keeps a dog. On ordinary days, he throws it a few scraps of leftover food — yet at a critical moment, the dog will lay down its life for him. Is that not exactly how Xiao Zhun has treated you? Such a favorable arrangement — why is it that I have never been so fortunate?”

Xiao Nanhui felt her whole body shaking with rage, her words coming out with difficulty: “Your Majesty desires this subject’s arm — take it and be done with it. Why humiliate this subject like this?”

Her hand balled tightly inside her sleeve. If the person before her were not the Son of Heaven, she might have made his blood spill right then and there.

“Was it I who crippled your arm?” Su Wei’s long, narrow eyes narrowed, the mockery in them unconcealed. “No — it was Xiao Zhun. The moment he placed you on the edge of the blade and did not choose you first, he had already abandoned you. Xiao Nanhui, you are nothing but a target he cultivated with his own hands — a target to take the knife for Bai Yun at the critical moment!”

The humiliation that had been pent up for so long in her chest burst forth like a flood. Xiao Nanhui felt a wave of fury rush up to her head. She abruptly shoved the person before her aside, seized the military cap from her head, and ripped it off with one fierce pull.

The official cap with its fourth-rank feather plume was flung hard to the ground. The red coral beads that had been tied at the neck scattered with the impact, bouncing and rolling between them at their feet.

When she spoke again, only then did she realize how hoarse her voice had become: “Your Majesty’s subjects are difficult to be. Xiao Nanhui respectfully petitions to lay down her armor and return to the fields.”

Su Wei’s eyes fixed on Xiao Nanhui with a stare that seemed to say he would tear her apart in the most brutal way possible at any moment.

For a time, the air held nothing but the heavy breathing of two people.

And then, in only the span of a moment, the fury on his face dissipated.

He had resumed that face — the face of a millennium-old mountain, immovable and unfathomable. A faint trace of a smile even touched the corner of his mouth, but it never reached his eyes, and it sent a chill rising from the very bottom of one’s heart. “Oh? You wish to spite me?”

Xiao Nanhui clenched her jaw and did not make a sound.

Never in all her life had she felt this way — the person before her was completely no match for her physically, yet she had no way to escape him, and even felt fear.

“No one has ever won a battle of spite against me.”

The Emperor’s cold hand touched her palm. Xiao Nanhui shuddered.

The next second, something cold and hard was pressed into her hand, and his low, slightly hoarse voice sounded from above her head.

“If you harbor resentment over this, I will return it to you.”

Before Xiao Nanhui could react, the force covering her hand suddenly tightened. A flash of silver light, and something warm and wet splashed onto her face.

Her gaze moved downward stiffly and saw a dagger bearing an exquisite cloud pattern had been driven clean through into the small table beside them — and her own hand was gripping that dagger.

He had taken her hand and forced it hard to the side. The grinding creak of tendons and bone rang out, and the thin, swift blade tore a long, deep gash across those slender, pale hands.

Xiao Nanhui came back to herself, flung Su Wei’s hand away as though in a frenzy, and wrenched the dagger out.

Blood welled forth. His face went slightly pale, and cold sweat beaded thickly on his brow. Yet he clenched his jaw and did not make a single sound.

“Xiao Nanhui — we are even.”

Xiao Nanhui’s mind rang with a deafening explosion, followed by a stretch of blank, white emptiness. Only fragments of words flashed through — wild, absurd snatches.

They seemed to be the verses that the children of Bijiang had recited before her, or perhaps a few scattered lines she had read by lamplight in Yaoyi’s back courtyard.

At not yet five years of age he could recite; at seven, compose poetry; at nine, his zither already carried the sound of an empty valley with no equal, and no court musician could match him. Today, having at last heard him perform “Laying Down a Straw Sandal on the Bridge” at the Shangsi banquet — the tones transparent, the spirit lofty, otherworldly and self-contained — I felt such shame at having presumed to bear the title of Zither Sage upon myself that I severed my own finger and left the feast, swearing never again to speak of the zither or the se…

Her gaze drifted, and those hands — those hands that could play such ancient, transcendent music — were now bloody before her. Drops of red blood spattered onto his ivory-white robe hem, like a malevolent flower blooming upon it.

In a daze, she seemed to hear Dan Jiangfei come crashing in, crying out in alarm as he rushed toward the Emperor.

Someone put a blade to her neck, shouting at her, then moments later shoved her away roughly, barring her outside the hall doors.

She walked out of the side hall as though her soul had left her body, and followed the night-watch attendant numbly until she passed through the gates of the traveling palace.

Dawn was breaking. Inside and outside the traveling palace, the guards were changing shifts. The Emperor was about to depart.

At the first quarter of the chen hour, palace attendants carried out the last basin of bloody water from the side hall. Dan Jiangfei dismissed everyone and cleaned up the last remaining traces on the floor himself.

A plain silk cloth wiped away the last trace of blood. The entire side hall looked once again as though nothing had happened.

Dan Jiangfei carried out a set of dark everyday robes and helped the Emperor change into them. His gaze fell on the man’s left hand — beneath layers of gauze and medicinal dressings, the raw, mangled flesh hidden beneath was still faintly visible. He sighed, almost involuntarily.

“Why put yourself through this, Your Majesty? After this, let alone playing the zither — even picking up a brush may well prove difficult.”

The Emperor one-handedly adjusted the hook of his newly changed belt with his usual elegant composure. “I can use my left hand just as well.”

The person most directly affected was entirely serene, as though the one who had self-inflicted this injury in a fit of temper had been someone else entirely.

Dan Jiangfei could not keep the corners of his mouth from drooping. “The Black Feather troops still need to receive Your Majesty’s musical commands — does Your Majesty intend to use only one hand for that as well?”

“If I no longer play in the future, there is still you.”

Dan Jiangfei froze. “This servant’s skill is rough and crude — how could it compare to Your Majesty—”

“When I had someone teach you to play the zither, I never intended to hide that craft from you. You have always been a person of many thoughts — your musical understanding falls somewhat short, but your technique is sound. Those musical patterns used to command the Black Feather troops should be no great challenge for you.”

The young chamberlain’s face flashed with a momentary panic. He promptly knelt. “Your Majesty—”

“What is there to be alarmed about? I am only stating a fact.”

The hall doors were thrown wide open, facing east. Palace attendants had already taken their places in two respectful rows outside the hall.

The Emperor turned to meet the pale morning light of dawn.

“In the end, it is only a pair of hands for playing the zither. If it can move her heart, then it is a more than worthwhile exchange.”

He raised his hand slightly, and his wide sleeve fell back, revealing slender fingers with pronounced knuckles. A gash deep enough to see bone cut clean through this sense of beauty, making one feel a sudden, involuntary pang of regret.

“She carries marks I have left upon her, and I carry marks she has left upon me. Even if for this lifetime we can no longer draw close — I mean for these to be inseparable, impossible to part.”