“Absolutely not!”
The person beside her had not yet opened his mouth before Ding Weixiang was already alarmed.
But the moment those two words came out, Xiao Nanhui knew things had gone wrong. Ding Weixiang’s protective instincts for his master ran deep, yet he hadn’t thought that by reacting this way he had just revealed to the other party exactly how great a bargaining chip those prayer beads were.
In a contest between two sides, revealing one’s position first was the gravest of tactical errors.
As expected, a flicker of understanding passed over Shen Shi’an’s face, and expressed through a child’s face, it carried an indescribable eeriness.
“In truth I was only joking. These prayer beads, while admittedly somewhat precious, are ultimately a curio with a set value but no ready market — not something one truly treasures so deeply. Or perhaps there is some reason for this that I am not aware of—”
The air held a moment of silence. Then Su Wei lowered his head and lightly stroked the bead string on his left hand. His expression carried a sorrow that was precisely calibrated.
“I won’t deceive the family head — this object truly holds extraordinary significance for me. If you were to ask me to relinquish it, I’m afraid that would be something of a hardship.”
No one had expected him to admit to it so readily. Shen Shi’an gazed quietly at the young man before her, as though weighing how much truth and how much falsehood his words contained.
After a long while, she gently closed her eyes.
“Then I’ll give the young master three days to weigh and consider. I’m feeling a little tired today — let’s leave it here for now.”
The young gentleman fell in with this graciously.
“Three days hence — we’ll see the family head again.”
That ghost-like old woman appeared once more, and as they walked blindfolded back out of the courtyard, Xiao Nanhui faintly heard a scattering of light footsteps brush past her.
The footsteps of small children.
Were those the children from last night? Were they also going to see Shen Shi’an? What exactly was Shen Shi’an keeping such a group of children for?
Xiao Nanhui’s hand, holding a porcelain spoon, stopped partway to her mouth. Her hand tilted and the half-spoonful of soup dribbled back into the bowl.
Drip.
The man sitting across from her set down his chopsticks.
“What are you thinking about?”
Xiao Nanhui came back to herself, shook her head as she looked at the food on the table.
“Nothing — nothing important.”
Compared to Pu Huna, the fugitive princess, and the prophecy hidden within the sash — what did a handful of children no taller than a tabletop amount to?
She was telling the truth, yet he could somehow still see through her.
The man’s gaze dropped to her waist, and the next instant he leaned forward and extended his hand.
Her body went rigid. She didn’t move, not knowing whether she had forgotten to move or didn’t dare to.
Then she felt his fingers slide downward through several layers of fabric from her chest to her lower abdomen, then hook open her waistband and slip inside.
“In broad — broad daylight—”
She wanted to say “in broad daylight” and “is there no rule of law?” But halfway through, she felt something was off — talking about rule of law with the person before her was genuinely too foolish.
As if in response to her half-spoken, halting words, the fingers inside the waistband traced a circle and probed downward. She immediately felt a tickle at her waist and was about to beg for mercy — but the hand withdrew. In withdrawing, it gave a light tug and drew out the small straw-woven dog from her waistband.
The man placed the object lightly on the table, his fingertip tapping the straw dog’s belly, with an air that seemed almost distracted.
“Do you like children?”
He had noticed after all.
Her thoughts had been seen through, and Xiao Nanhui felt a little deflated.
She looked at the straw dog, and shook her head again.
“No.”
She didn’t like small children. She had never liked them.
When she was small in Suyan, those thin, hollow-eyed little figures who were starving just as she was had been branded into her memory. Back then she had always thought: so this is what it means to live in this world — to endure hunger and thirst day after day. Then why had her mother brought her into it?
But her questions were never answered by anyone. Her suffering was never noticed by anyone.
In a place where everyone was struggling to survive, she was not entitled to any greater share of compassion or preference than anyone else.
And she had been too small — powerless to change any of it. If she had not walked out of that city on that day, her understanding of this world would have been frozen in that endless expanse of hunger and thirst — not much different from hell.
Even after reaching Quecheng and seeing those carefree, unblemished-smiling children, she still could not forget what her own childhood had been like.
Last night, though, had been different. The reason she had gone, without being able to help it, to look at that child was simply because she and her friend shared a resemblance she couldn’t quite put into words.
All this turned and twisted inside her, and naturally it showed on her face — but the man only glanced at her once and calmly said:
“Xiao Nanhui — Bolao is dead.”
Her body gave a violent shudder. The porcelain spoon slipped from her hand and fell into the bowl.
She had often been unable to hide from him before. He was like a mirror — flat, smooth, and ice-cold to the touch — always unfailingly reflecting her weaknesses and fragility. And as their relationship had grown more intimate, that feeling had become ever stronger. When he chose not to paper over things, the sharpness beneath his coolness and calm would break through the surface and cut her deeply.
Xiao Nanhui clenched her fist.
“I know—”
“She died right in front of you. You need to hold that firmly in your mind.”
“I said I know!”
She suddenly erupted, lurching upright. The cups and chopsticks beside her were knocked over and went spinning across the tabletop.
Yet however angry she appeared, the gaze he turned on her remained steady and calm.
“You don’t know. If you had already clearly and fully accepted this fact, you wouldn’t be wasting time and attention on people and things that don’t matter.”
Meaningless entanglement? She was only mourning her friend — was even that not permitted?
“She is dead, but my feelings remain.” Her voice carried an anguish she could not suppress — nearly an accusation, though she didn’t know what she was actually accusing. “Have you no one you want to mourn — no one you want to see again? Or perhaps you truly don’t. Because you don’t, you’re able to say something like this so easily!”
She finished and collapsed back into the chair.
A sense of powerlessness and revulsion washed over her. Though she had spoken loudly and with great intensity, she knew, on the contrary, that her display was a weak one.
It was only in this moment that she truly understood — she had never walked out of that night.
She might have already let go of Xiao Zhun. But what she had lost — was it ever only Xiao Zhun? She was not yet ready to bid farewell to the things she had lost.
The soup in the bowl had gone completely cold. The broth had turned murky, and the few slices of green onion had sunk to the bottom.
After a long while, he reached out and moved the cold bowl of soup to one side, then picked up a clean bowl and ladled fresh soup into it.
“I have. The things you’ve lost — I have also once possessed them.”
Xiao Nanhui continued her silence. Su Wei continued ladling soup.
“That day, at sunset, my mother jumped from the Jingbo Tower. I thought she would fall into the lake, but she didn’t. She fell on the decorative viewing stones at the lake’s edge, and was instantly beyond saving.”
She kept using silence to resist that voice, but the blood-red sunset and the silhouette of the unfamiliar woman from the dream surged up uncontrolled, overlapping with the figure of the man before her in his moon-white robes — like the fusion of scorching sun and cold moonlight, eerie yet somehow harmonious.
“I too once thought of using the power of spirits and gods to see her one more time. I didn’t ask for much — the time of one cup of tea would have been enough. The time of one cup of tea — perhaps enough for me to ask her a few questions. Such as: why did she choose to leave on that particular day? Why did she choose to leave again on the very day of being reunited with her child? Was it because her child had not done well enough — because he could not hold her? If he had tried harder, been stronger, just a little more — would his mother have been willing to stay with him?”
He rose from his seat, carrying the freshly poured bowl of soup, and walked slowly to her side.
The bowl was set gently on the table. Steam drifted around the rim, and her vision blurred over.
“Yet I have searched through Buddhist sutras and scriptures, through palm-leaf scrolls and manuscripts, and I found no such method as returning from the dead. Finally, one day, I came to understand all of it. Reincarnation and rebirth are merely pretenses — pretenses created to encourage the living and give vent to regret.” He took her tightly clenched fist, and pried open her fingers one by one, placing the slightly warmed fresh spoon in her hand. “The dead do not return. From the moment of death, they disappear utterly and completely from this world. Everything you afterward perceive as familiar, as though from another lifetime — it is no more than lies left behind by the divine.”
His words were cruel, yet his gestures were boundlessly gentle.
She could dodge a force of a thousand pounds intent on killing her, yet she somehow could not dodge the force of gentleness.
She stared at the new spoon in her hand. In its smooth white porcelain she could faintly make out her own face, suppressing grief.
The meaning of death extends far beyond the pain of that single moment — it is understood much later, whenever you think again of what was taken by it: that those lost people or things will never come back.
She sat there with her head lowered, her spine still straight, as though maintaining that posture could let strength hold everything at bay.
“I’m sorry—”
Sorry. She hadn’t meant to lose her temper at him.
She was only disappointed in herself, and confused.
Her voice was very low. It was a long moment before she felt his arms circle around her from behind. His breath drew close from behind, settling on her shoulder, behind her ear, beside her beating pulse.
“Xiao Nanhui — I don’t want you to say sorry. I want you, even when you are deep in darkness, to find a way to go on living well. Only by living can you fulfill the promises you’ve made.”
She couldn’t see his face, but she felt as though she could see the emotions burning in the depths of those dark pupils.
“Something I have already lost once — I will not let it slip away again. Remember this: if the day ever comes that you choose to leave me behind, to abandon me and go — even through the gates of the underworld, even through the purgatory of hell, I will follow.”
His fingers lightly brushed the stray hairs at her temple, and with a gentle touch, tucked them behind her ear. As though the words he had just spoken were nothing more than a casual reminder.
The more he spoke with shallow words that ran deeper than the sea, the less she knew how to respond.
At this very moment, a sound came from the doorway.
Ding Weixiang came quickly into the room, turned and closed the door, was just about to speak — and instantly forgot what he had come to say.
Su Wei had already risen and walked unhurriedly to one side.
She breathed a quiet sigh of relief and made a deliberate covering gesture, waving her hand.
“Lieutenant Ding — come, have some soup.”
Ding Weixiang’s wide eyes were as round as those of a man facing a great enemy, fixed on the table and the soup with an expression that suggested he was half-inclined to deploy the wall-climbing technique on the spot and escape through the ceiling window.
“My — my lord—”
His master pretended not to notice his expression and strolled idly to the window.
“Did you manage to get a clear read on the routes?”
Ding Weixiang drew a deep breath and stood at attention by the door, still keeping himself well away from the table.
“In response to my lord — more or less, yes. Three days from now, whatever move they make, we will be able to act first.”
Su Wei nodded and looked at the sky outside.
“Three days is too long. What about tonight?”
Xiao Nanhui, pretending to drink her soup, couldn’t help but pause.
“But didn’t Shen Shi’an say she was giving us three days—”
“Not one word she says do I believe.” The man’s voice had gone cold, as though an entirely different person from the one whose gaze had burned with intensity just moments ago. “Not only her words — even what my father the prince said long ago cannot be taken as entirely reliable.”
“From what she told us, at least the matter of the woven silk doesn’t seem to be entirely fabricated nonsense—”
“As for lies — if they were entirely invented out of nothing, they would be full of holes, and people would always find the flaws. Most people weave their lies together with the truth. It wins credibility, and achieves their purpose. Even if the listener senses something is off, they can’t be certain which parts are true and which are false.”
“But if that’s so, if she had a deceiving intent, how can we hope to learn the truth about the woven silk from her?”
“Beyond this woven silk, she certainly has other designs on us. Figuring out exactly what she wants from us may be a more direct and accurate way to get at the truth than any vague, ethereal prophecy. Shen Shi’an is meticulous and far-thinking. When the secret seal first came to light, countless eyes — visible and hidden — all across Huozhou were watching. She lost something on her own turf. The second time around she must be exceedingly careful. First — she knows I must have my reservations about the Shen family, and so she wouldn’t be able to send anyone too clever to hold the fort at Yueyuan. That’s why Shen Linlin ended up on the scene. Second — she deliberately named the prayer beads as her exchange condition, which in itself was a form of probing.”
But probing for what?
Unless one had seen it with their own eyes, no one should have known the true purpose of those prayer beads.
Yet thinking of the old woman’s expression when she had mentioned the Zhong Li surname, and of the Shen family’s reaction to the prayer beads — both then and just now — Xiao Nanhui was no longer certain.
Ding Weixiang was clearly thinking along the same lines. Having just freed himself from the enormous awkwardness of a moment ago, he had now fallen into unprecedented anxiety.
“Surely my lord wouldn’t truly consider exchanging the prayer beads for a prophecy of unknown authenticity?”
“I won’t exchange them, and she won’t either.” Su Wei paused, and stated his conclusion. “Because what she wants should be something else entirely.”
And almost simultaneously, Xiao Nanhui had arrived at her own conjecture.
“Scholar Zong once mentioned to me that the Heavenly Sash was meant to be paired with the national jade seal. If the woven silk we have is indeed that Heavenly Sash recording an important prophecy, then what she truly wants above all else may still be the secret seal.”
Or rather — the same secret that both of them concealed.
But if that were so—
“Then why didn’t Shen Shi’an directly propose the secret seal as the exchange condition?”
Ding Weixiang voiced her own uncertainty. Su Wei turned his gaze toward the sun tilting in the west outside the window.
“Perhaps she thinks the price of that object is too steep. Or perhaps she actually knows the secret seal is not currently on our persons.”
Before this journey into Heimu County — uncertain of what lay ahead, fraught with danger — it did seem there was little reason to bring along a treasure like the national seal, once lost and now recovered.
Yet Xiao Nanhui sensed something subtly off.
She remembered that during the spring hunt, he had also abruptly entrusted something to her. At the time she had thought it was a spur-of-the-moment empty stratagem. Looking back now, there may have been another reason.
“Was it intentional — not having that object on you?”
His gaze was still on the window, or perhaps on some distant place beyond it.
“I have a conjecture I haven’t yet been able to verify. So that object cannot stay near me for the time being — but I’ve entrusted it to two old friends who are keeping watch over it. They’re both honest men and will look after it with care.”
Honest men? Could this person actually have honest men around him?
Xiao Nanhui was full of doubt. She gave a perfunctory nod.
Thinking of the fierce battle that still awaited tonight, she set aside those suspicions for now and lowered her head to eat her meal with focused attention.
Midsummer days are long and nights short, but in the mountains the sun still sets earlier than elsewhere.
Past midday of the Unitary Hour, the meditation courtyard of the Yongye Temple had already begun to grow dark.
Once evening came, there were no more incense-burning visitors, and the temple was frugal with its candles and oil, always giving priority to the main hall. The side halls and inner courtyard were often dark from sunset to dawn. After years of this, everyone was used to it — except for the monks on night watch duty who would light their oil lamps, everyone else, even when they had to get up in the night, did so by feel.
After evening prayers, the monks each took their vegetarian meal portions back to their rooms. Zhu Yu, carrying a separate bowl, ladled himself a full portion of food and made his way toward the sutra repository behind the side hall.
Though the sutra repository still went by its name, in truth there were no longer any precious scriptures or canonical texts within. Any young monk who had lived in the Yongye Temple for a few years knew that the most valuable things in the temple had long since been moved by the abbot to behind the main hall.
It was already a remote location to begin with, and at night, even the mosquitoes were too lazy to visit. Tonight, however, flickering candlelight was seeping through the cracked doors of that hall.
Zhu Yu pushed open the doors with one hand, stepped around the classical texts and medical compendiums scattered in disorder at his feet, and grabbed a fan from the wooden rack, waving it around to try and disperse the damp medicinal fog filling the space.
The wooden racks inside the hall had been moved aside. In the center stood an abandoned incense altar, and on the altar rested a square piece of beautiful green jade. Sitting before the jade with his back to the door was a man in white robes, busy at something that couldn’t quite be made out.
Zhu Yu gave a light cough.
“施主 Hao, dinner is ready.”
The man in white turned around. Those eyes — grown large and round from hunger — stared unblinking at the bowl in the young novice’s hands.
His nostrils flared slightly, his nose twitching. When those wide-open eyes saw what was in the bowl, the light in them instantly went out.
Zhu Yu seemed entirely unable to see the changing expressions on the man’s face. He thrust the bowl into the other man’s hands and considerately handed him a pair of chopsticks as well.
“We’ve had good rains these past few days, and the radishes and cabbages have grown especially well. You’re in luck, benefactor.”
In luck? Since when did radishes and cabbages qualify as luck?
Hao Bai lowered his head to look at the bowl in his hands, feeling as though his entire field of vision had gone green. He looked back up at the thing on the table — also green.
His pupils contracted. A surge of stifled, pent-up frenzy rose up within him. He hurled the bowl aside, slapped his knee and leaped to his feet. He grabbed the hoe from the herb-sorting tray and raised it above his head.
“Today — today I must see meat. Otherwise I’ll steal! I’ll rob! And I’ll pin the blame on you lot!”
Zhu Yu sighed, looking right through the pitiable man’s raised hoe as though it weren’t there.
“This little monk advises Benefactor Hao not to try his luck again with Old Guo’s chickens on the eastern hilltop — that family keeps seven yellow dogs, and I hear they have a particular fondness for biting thieves on the backside.”
The white-robed physician flailed the hoe around wildly, each word a drop of blood and tears as he made his grievances known.
“I haven’t taken the tonsure. I haven’t converted to Buddhism. Why am I getting radishes and cabbage at every single meal?!”
“The abbot says — summer heat is upon us, and eating too much meat produces excessive internal heat. Benefactor Hao is a physician himself — how can he not understand this much?”
Zhu Yu finished speaking and gave a slightly disdainful shake of his head, then turned and walked toward the door.
Hao Bai stumbled after him a few steps, both hands gripping the red-lacquered pillar at the entrance to the hall, his complexion going from black to red to green.
“Where is Yikong? I want to see Yikong! Yikong! You stingy monk, you bald—”
Zhu Yu, already moving quickly around the side of the hall and away, stopped in his tracks and stuck a finger in his ear.
He didn’t know if it was his imagination, but beyond the faint, listless cursing behind him, from the direction of the mountain gate, there seemed to be a few distant sounds of a bell ringing.
Absent a festival day or a Buddhist ceremony, the mountain gate of the Yongye Temple was always quite desolate. If any incense-burning visitors or passing travelers came seeking help, they could ring the bell at the mountain gate themselves to signal their presence.
For the past month, the rains had left the mountain paths muddy and impassable, and incense visitors had been few and far between — let alone passing travelers.
Could it be a bird seeking a roosting place, setting that bell off again?
But the sky was already getting dark, and it was hard to say whether someone hadn’t run into trouble on the mountain path.
He thought about it and decided to light an oil lamp and head to the mountain gate.
The dim light of dusk passed through the moisture in the trees and fell on the stone path. The young novice carrying the lamp made his way among the trees, adeptly avoiding patches of moss that hadn’t been cleared in some time, with a kind of practiced lightness.
It was only a matter of a moment before he arrived at the mountain gate. And indeed, stopped beneath the stone memorial arch in front of the temple gates was a horse cart.
Zhu Yu stepped closer, and a faint, lingering stench of rot mixed with the earthy smell of rain hit him in the face.
He glanced at the large wooden crate being pulled behind the cart, steadied his composure, and stood himself upwind, not moving.
“Benefactor — have you encountered some difficulty?”
The huddled shadow beneath the cart’s awning stirred, and a middle-aged man wearing a bamboo hat with black gauze came into view.
“May I ask, young master — is this the Yongye Temple?”
Zhu Yu nodded.
“It is.”
The middle-aged man jumped down from the cart and removed his bamboo hat, revealing a face with a dark, bluish-black complexion.
“This humble one is passing through, and noticed people eating porridge at the foot of the mountain. I inquired, and only then learned there was a temple in the mountain, so I brought my cart here. I wonder if the young master monk might extend some compassion and offer some porridge and a place to stay for the night?”
Over these years, under the abbot’s careful guidance, he had received more than he could count of all manner of visiting pilgrims. But looking now at the face at the bottom of the stone steps, Zhu Yu couldn’t help but take half a step back.
“The question of lodging requires me to consult with the abbot. However, we do still have some radishes and cabbages, and if the benefactor doesn’t mind, please come with me.”
The middle-aged man nodded hastily, his expression very earnest.
“That would be wonderful — wonderful.”
After walking back along the way he had come for a few steps, Zhu Yu’s feet suddenly stopped.
He turned around and looked at the man driving the cart.
“Benefactor — this little monk still has one thing he doesn’t understand.”
The middle-aged man chuckled twice, carelessly looping the reins around the horse post.
“Please speak freely, young master monk — this old man will tell you everything he knows.”
The oil lamp was raised a little higher, lighting up the novice’s clear, bright eyes.
“A few days ago, the abbot threw out his back lighting the lamps, and so today he was feeling lazy and pushed the porridge-serving duties onto Venerable Renqin of the Dacheng Temple. The Yongye Temple served no porridge today. Why would the benefactor lie, saying he had seen people eating porridge at the foot of the mountain?”
The middle-aged man’s face still wore its smile.
“Because — because—”
His voice seemed to catch on something lodged in his throat. His face also seemed to have suffered a stroke of some kind — each muscle twitching and freezing, locked in conflict, as though they had forgotten how to return to where they belonged.
“Because—”
Thud.
The middle-aged man fell face-first, flat onto the stone ground before the mountain gate, and lay there without moving.
The young novice was startled, and was just about to step forward to check on him — when suddenly something invisible flashed past before him, extinguishing the oil lamp in his hand in an instant.
It seemed like an evening breeze.
But the weather was so oppressively hot — where would an evening breeze have come from?
The last glimmer of light before dark disappeared into the mountains. In the darkness, the large wooden crate on the cart began to emit a peculiar, muffled sound.
Creak, creak.