Yu’an was a place of much rain — it often fell from dusk through deep into the night, not stopping until just before dawn.

So the nights of Yu’an rarely saw the moon, and the skies above Douchenling seldom showed the stars.

Yet tonight, Douchenling had moonlight. Pale moonlight, like the frost that falls in the ninth month, draped the entire mountain forest in a hazy white. Only in one place was that softness and stillness torn open — charged with a killing intent that left one deeply uneasy.

A Chinese rose tree crashed to the ground, its cut surface as cleanly smooth as a tabletop polished for months.

The purple-robed swordsman reversed his palm and struck, sending the broken trunk flying like a siege battering ram into a dozen or more soldiers surrounding him, then crashing through the barrier of wooden spikes that the Yanyi Camp had set up in advance. The sword in his hand carved arcs of icy light through the night, and wherever it passed, flesh and blood flew.

Yan Guang had long since spurred his horse forward. After several exchanges, he finally recognized the man before him as the purple-robed swordsman who had been hunted in recent days, and his eyes betrayed his disbelief.

“Yulin Villa was sealed off five days ago — you actually—”

Yanzi stood with his sword at his back, his bearing as arrogant as it had been the day he ascended the summit of the Changmi Terrace.

“Withered branches and fallen leaves, snakes and ants and wood-boring beetles — do they think they can stop me from coming and going as I please?”

Lu Songping looked at the still-damp traces of water on the purple-robed swordsman’s clothing, and several things fell into place.

“You were one step too late — he came in through the waterway.” But this was not something he had failed to anticipate. “I had already thought — if I moved against the person in this mountain, you would certainly come. Now that you’re here, you may as well stay.”

Yanzi tilted his head in surprise.

“Just you?”

“Perhaps I alone would not be enough.”

Yanzi’s gaze shifted and landed on Yan Guang nearby, catching his breath.

“Add him? Still not enough.”

Lu Songping smiled strangely.

“I never said we only have two people.”

Before his words had finished, a figure shot out from behind Yan Guang’s formation and flew straight at Yanzi.

In his hand was an ordinary long halberd borrowed from the Yanyi garrison, yet it moved with more agility than the flexible blade in Lu Songping’s own hand. In two or three exchanges he forced Yanzi back half a step.

The young swordsman planted his right leg and held firm, silently absorbing the force of that deadly strike, and at last narrowed his eyes to get a proper look at the newcomer.

The brown robe was worn beyond repair, the face looked even more weathered and haggard than before, but those eyes still burned with a light that could not be extinguished — locking onto his quarry like the eyes of a hawk.

“The Dongyao Sword. You are not yet worthy of it.”

Yanzi stared at the elder for a long moment before something finally came back to him.

“It’s you? You’re still alive?”

Zong Hao’s face showed nothing. After a pause, his voice came low and measured.

“Where have you taken the Xiao boy?”

Yanzi wrinkled his brow slightly.

“Why should I tell you?”

Zong Hao laughed coldly.

“You don’t have to. I have my ways of making you speak.”

Zong Hao’s last word had barely fallen when it was Lu Songping who suddenly drew his sword and struck — his flexible blade slicing at a precise and cunning angle toward the three inches below Yanzi’s ribs. At the same moment, Yan Guang came at him head-on with his saber, while Zong Hao drove his halberd into the ground and launched himself upward into the air.

Three people, three schools of technique — though they had never worked together before, the presence of a formidable enemy brought out an unprecedented, effortless coordination between them.

Yanzi was clearly displeased. As he deflected and parried, he could not resist trading barbs with the most troublesome of the three — the elder in the brown robe.

“You came from the Andao Academy under the Grand Officiant — and yet you stoop to ganging up on one person, a victory without honor?”

In martial world duels, for the sake of winning with a clear conscience, the greatest taboo was a fight that could not be called a fair match.

The pity was that none of the three before him could any longer be considered men of the martial world, and none of them had ever spoken a word about the martial world’s rules. Every one of them was ruthless and single-mindedly bent on winning. No one gave the slightest thought to whether they were ganging up, or whether their victory would be without honor.

Zong Hao said nothing. His halberd never paused to defend — only to attack. Wherever its tip swept, killing intent spilled out, yet it moved with the quick, precise cunning of a wasp’s stinger. Yan Guang focused on holding the line and finding openings, his Yanyi saber sweeping in great arcs, the force of a tiger’s roar behind every strike. Lu Songping was the most cunning of the three — slipping into any gap, never missing a chance to move in from a blind angle and follow up with a decisive blow.

Yanzi was no fool either, and he quickly read the situation. He stopped wasting breath and let his killing strikes come in earnest.

All four fought with intent to kill or be killed. Not an outsider in the world could have forced so much as a finger into the space between them — they could only watch as the masters fought in a tangled, furious knot.

At first, Yanzi’s movements were unpredictable and his sword force was fierce and abundant — so much so that facing three at once he still held the upper hand. But the weapons in the hands of Lu Songping’s three covered each other’s gaps across close, mid, and long range. As time passed, the advantage shifted — a sense that the tide was turning began to emerge, leaning slowly against Yanzi.

Then, at that very moment, a desperate shout from Zhao Youshan erupted at the gap in the mountain entrance.

“Lieutenant Lu, something’s wrong! Get — get down—”

Lu Songping’s movement stuttered. His left shoulder caught a sword stroke.

He only had time to see Zhao Youshan and the remaining few soldiers come stumbling out through the narrow gap in the mountain face, their torches nowhere to be found.

Then, a vast and invisible force exploded from deep within the mountain, shattering solid matter and bursting outward. In an instant, the soldiers who had been running in last were crushed to nothing.

Yanzi had evidently braced for this — riding the momentum of Yan Guang’s strike, he gathered his energy and vaulted high into the air, turning nimbly and landing on a protruding shelf of rock partway up the mountain face. From there he watched everything below unfold, the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth.

A piercing wind screamed out from the narrow gap between the mountains, like the howl of a mountain demon. In the night, an invisible blade seemed to cleave out from the pass, carving a deep trench through the ground directly opposite the entrance. And still the force was not spent — it continued to sweep in all directions, cutting through the grass and rock and sand around it until a clearing of more than a hundred zhang had been scoured clean.

The Yanyi Camp soldiers who had been holding their position at the mountain pass were sent flying by this sudden devastating force. Of those standing further out, half were shaking and pale, not knowing what had just struck them.

Yan Guang, who had been thrown from his feet along with Lu Songping and sent rolling into the mud, didn’t know either. But not even a trace of fear or hesitation crossed his face.

“Sorcery and wild spirits — nothing to fear! All soldiers, follow me and drive it back with force! Cut them to pieces!”

With that, he yanked his Yanyi saber free from the rubble and charged forward — only to be caught around the waist by Lu Songping beside him.

“What’s the rush?! You haven’t even gotten a clear look at what we’re dealing with—”

“What is there to look at?! If you’re too frightened, get out of my way! Watch your old uncle Yan send it wailing for its parents and force it to show its true face!”

If there had been any garrison camp closer to hand, he truly would never have wanted to get the Yan Family involved.

Lu Songping’s exasperation showed plainly on his face. He felt as though he was holding back not a general of Tiancheng, but a wild boar that had been storing up energy all winter.

Seeing that he was losing his grip, he could only speak quickly.

“Given the situation right now, neither of us can get close — don’t force a frontal attack! As long as we keep it surrounded, and we draw this out, we will gain the upper hand.”

Did they truly have the upper hand? Lu Songping didn’t believe that himself.

Before coming here, he had already worked through every worst-case possibility, even going so far as to deploy Zong Hao as a piece on the board — yet what was unfolding still far exceeded his calculations.

He suddenly recalled the incident at Seqiu, and the description given by the soldiers who had rescued the Emperor — four words: heaven splitting and earth shattering.

He had not been able to imagine what those words meant at the time, and had thought those soldiers simply had poor command of language and a flair for the dramatic.

Now he understood.

Clouds drifted across the moon, casting a vast shadow across the mountainside, and the figure that walked out from within the mountain blurred into the surrounding contours, becoming a dark presence without solid form — like a ghost.

“You are clever. This time you deliberately sent in expendable fodder to scout ahead, and knowing that your body has already entered into a binding with mine, you joined forces with a descendant of the Qu Family to deal with me. A pity — in the end, you are nothing but mortal strength. Stake your lives on it as you will — it is nothing but a mayfly trying to shake a great tree.”

A gust tore the clouds open. Moonlight broke through, illuminating the speaker’s face — gaunt and gnarled as a dead tree.

So this was the true face of the thing that had attacked him in the darkness.

Lu Songping said nothing. For one instant his peripheral vision flicked toward the dark, lightless forest behind him.

In the next, a hollow voice emerged from the skeletal frame.

“You are stalling for time.”

The invisible force gathered again, shredding the surrounding shrubs and undergrowth before continuing onward, sweeping stones and sand up from the ground, stirring them together into a roiling column of wind that spiraled skyward from the dark base of the mountain — rising like a pillar of black smoke.

“Here it comes again!” Yan Guang raised his arm to shield himself from the flying debris. “Lu Songping — have you sorted out what we’re dealing with yet? What do we do now?!”

Lu Songping had no time to explain. His eyes were fixed on the shifting, chaotic battlefield.

To get past that constantly swirling and transforming demonic wind, his window of opportunity was one in a million. He had to seize it.

If a direct approach was impossible, then another method had to be found.

He suddenly pressed against the trunk of a tall yellow pine behind him and vaulted upward. His left hand plunged into the treetop, and when he came back down, a long bow and three Tread-Cloud arrows were in his hands.

He nocked an arrow. His gaze locked onto the silhouette wrapped within the wind blade, and he loosed the first arrow in a swift, fluid motion.

The silver-white arrow shot out in the moonlight, trailing a long, fine line across the night — and was quickly severed by the wind blade.

Lu Songping’s hands did not stop. He nocked again.

Not far away, the swordsman on the rocky shelf had already read his intent. He flew down toward him at once — only to meet the brown-robed elder who had been holding still until now.

The second Tread-Cloud arrow was loosed. This time it nearly broke through the invisible wall of wind, falling just short at the last moment before being struck down.

The fierce wind around him seemed to be slowly weakening. Lu Songping stilled his breathing and focused all five senses on this final arrow.

The arrow flew — like a silver serpent threading into the wind screen.

And in the next instant, the purple-robed swordsman’s blade came at him from the side.

Yanzi had deliberately taken a full blow from Zong Hao’s halberd — just to get close enough for the kill.

Lu Songping had not prepared for this angle. He could only twist toward the swordsman’s blind spot, hoping to buy himself a breath of space to draw his sword and strike back.

But then he watched in astonishment as the Dongyao Sword slid from the swordsman’s right wrist across the shoulder blade — and flowed into his left hand like a current of light.

In that moment, he finally understood what had cost the short-statured swordsman beside Xiao Nanhui his life.

Sword mastery this profound, and the man could still wield it equally with either hand.

He had grown careless.

“Got you.”

The young swordsman’s bloodied smile appeared at the back of his neck, a barely concealed excitement in it, the white blade in his hand still moving — sweeping toward the back of Lu Songping’s neck.

At the very last instant, a slow, meandering voice materialized from thin air.

“Junior apprentice. Step aside.”

The voice was unhurried — yet somehow it seemed to have reached every ear present in a single moment.

Lu Songping had no time to react, but Zong Hao several steps away instinctively hesitated — and then a dark shape grazed past the two of them, passing between their faces.

Lu Songping had grown up among wanderers and rough people. He had seen no shortage of underhanded methods in his early days — assassins who took lives for money had all the time in the world to devise things that left no room for defense.

But something that made no sound breaking the air — passing like nothing more than an evening breeze — he had never encountered anything like that before.

The dark shape arrived before Yanzi in an instant. He instinctively moved to dodge, but the thing seemed to be attached to his brow by an invisible thread — no matter how he retreated or evaded, in the end he could not escape it.

Yanzi was struck squarely between the eyes and staggered back three steps.

And then he realized something. Even when Zong Hao had pressed him with the halberd just now, he had only given back half a step.

Nearby, Lu Songping finally came back to himself and looked down at the ground — and froze.

Lying on the ground in front of Yanzi was a shoe.

The most ordinary kind of shoe — blue cloth upper, hemp sole — the kind sold three pairs for twenty wen at the evening market in Quecheng.

At the same moment, the wind on the clearing finally died.

A faint rustling came from the forest behind him. Then a vast, indistinct dark shape slowly became visible, its features barely discernible in the moonlight.

The newcomer looked altogether peculiar — dark hair hanging loose to his shoulders, yet a face that appeared to belong to a man of eighty years or more. His coarse white robe looked as though it had been washed through many times over, like a mourning garment, yet it had been put on with extraordinary neatness.

The creature beneath him was a pitch-black mass — far larger and more powerfully built than any ordinary military horse, passing through the dense forest without a moment’s pause. The thick, flourishing shrubs and tangled thorny brambles became soft and yielding in an instant, parting to make way for the enormous form as it came through.

Only when that great creature stepped out of the forest and into the clearing did anyone see it clearly: the mount was a giant blue-horned qiong ox, bare-backed, without saddle or bridle. And the white-robed, black-haired elder sat steadily atop it — a duster adorned with feathers of every color and variety in one hand, one foot tucked beneath him, the other raised and crossed — and the shoe on that raised foot was gone.

Lu Songping felt a great stone in his chest settle into place, and his whole bearing became sharper.

“My gratitude, Master.”

Xie Li tapped his motley feathered duster and waved with a smile.

“Don’t mention it.”

Zong Hao gave a cold snort, his voice making no effort to conceal his contempt.

Xie Li glanced at the disheveled, wretched-looking elder in the brown robe in the middle of the clearing. His expression was entirely at ease.

“What sort of face is that you’re making at me? If I hadn’t stepped in just now, you’d already be dead.”

Zong Hao finally broke his silence. A strange, cackling laugh came from him, shrill and unnerving.

“Many years since last I saw Senior Apprentice, and you are still just as insufferable.”

Xie Li seemed too idle to bother with Zong Hao. He tilted his head back to take in the night sky, then looked down at the scene of destruction all around him, and after a long moment, let out a sigh.

“They say Yu’an once thrived with mulberry and peach orchards and was a fine and prosperous place. To my eye, there is rather too much yin energy here — it does not bode well. It is time to drive away some of this ill fortune.”

In the center of the clearing, Yanzi slowly wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth. His long sword gathered force, poised and ready.

“So they were stalling for time — waiting for you to arrive.”

Xie Li seemed only now to notice the swordsman’s presence and turned to look at him.

“That sword — is it still serving you well?”

Yanzi turned his wrist, and the blood that had gathered on the blade dripped cleanly away along the spine.

“I have used this sword to kill countless masters of the martial world. By my count, the most recent — just a few months ago — was someone from your own Andao Academy. I wonder — did the Academy’s head see to collecting the body?”

The words carried an unmistakable malice, yet Xie Li only sighed.

“Long ago I gave the name Bolao to her and Yanzi to you, hoping that the two of you would complement each other’s weaknesses and grow together in your skills. Yet from the moment you both entered the Academy, the two of you never once crossed paths. You stole a sword and fled the sect first. She, stung by wounded pride, entered a general’s manor after. Truly you were fated never to meet — and when at last you met, one of you was bound to be hurt.”

“Those who meet in war are there either to kill or be killed. What is wrong with that?”

Xie Li drew two short daggers from his sleeve and dropped them on the ground.

“Nothing wrong with that. But the one thing you should never have done — never, in all the world — was to shatter her weapon.”

Once more that barely concealed arrogance showed on Yanzi’s face.

He recognized those daggers, naturally enough.

After all, the number of people who had ever managed to wound him was not great. He had some impression of the owner of those daggers.

In the past, those who fell to his sword were faces he could never keep hold of — blurred, forgettable, unable to pull even a fraction of his attention from his own world.

“Victory and defeat decide all things in battle. The strong devour the weak — those who lose must accept that judgment. Her martial arts were beneath contempt, and her weapon was just as base.”

“Beneath contempt, is it.” Xie Li let out three peals of laughter, thrown to the sky — in the laughter was a careless, unbridled lightness that seemed to belong to a far younger man. “Then tell me — do you know why the Dongyao Sword has developed a crack?”

Yanzi visibly started.

His sword — aside from himself, no one could touch it, let alone draw it and examine it up close.

And the crack had appeared at a peculiar moment, in an exceedingly small form — if he had not spent each and every day in the company of his sword, he might never have noticed it at all. How did the person before him know?

His face showed an incongruous mixture of confusion and anger — like the crack on his sword.

“It is because when I strike, the force is not reined in — the vibration caused it.”

“Ignorant child. I’ll tell you, since there’s no harm in it.”

The white-robed elder looked at the purple-robed swordsman. In an instant, the depths of his eyes returned to stillness without a ripple.

“The Dongyao Sword was forged from meteorite iron — though few know this. When the sword was being cast, some material remained over. Not enough to forge another blade, yet too fine to discard. So the Andao Academy had it made into a pair of short daggers and kept them in the Hanling Pavilion, never mentioning their origin to later generations. Because the blade was short and it was a paired set, in a hundred years no one in the Academy showed any interest in them — until Bolao came to study with us.”

From another mountain’s stone, one may cut jade. Swords forged from the same vein share no distinction of strength or weakness.

What he had considered beneath contempt was in truth born of the same origin as his own blade. What he had called base was, in the end, no different from himself.

Xie Li slowly rose from the back of the great qiong ox, his left foot stepping out flat onto the beast’s shoulder, and all those present saw for the first time how tall this elder was, and how the force that surrounded him pressed down on them — even to observe him from a distance was to feel an unwillingness to meet his gaze.

“Weapons have no noble or base among them, and martial arts have no high or low. For all who enter my school, the very first lesson is the practice of reverence and humility. Judging by what I see before me today, you still have a great deal to learn in this regard.”

The last syllable of his words had not yet fallen, and he was no longer on the shoulder of the great beast.

He held no weapon — only the feathered duster, gaudy with its riot of colors. Yet that instrument meant only for brushing dust from surfaces burst through the air with a tremendous killing force, every bird’s tail feather it bore transforming in an instant into a storm of blades and rain of swords, sharp beyond anything to withstand.

The purple-robed swordsman instinctively gathered his focus and raised his sword to meet the blow — and then he heard a sharp crack, and a blaze of multicolored feathers exploded before his face.

With a single strike, he had shattered his own indomitable sword.

With that same strike, both his collarbones were crushed.

For a swordsman, the connection between shoulder blade and collarbone was the most vital of all. He was not fatally harmed — but he was, for all practical purposes, no different from a cripple.

It was a duel that had ended before it could truly begin, so swift it left everyone in a state of baffled confusion.

And the one who had brought all of this about suddenly put on the expression of a frail and delicate soul, standing in place coughing and wheezing with his hands on his hips.

“Old age — no longer what I once was. When the weather gets hot like this, the coughing and shortness of breath act up dreadfully.”

Even Lu Songping — as flexible and adept as he was at reading a room and going with the wind — found himself at a complete loss for words.

And that Zong Hao, who was himself a thousand-year-old turtle, had clearly seen through Xie Li’s kind of ten-thousand-year ancient tortoise long ago. He paid him absolutely no mind, walked straight up to Yanzi, grabbed him by the collar, and turned to leave.

Yan Guang, seeing this, hurried to follow.

Lu Songping had something else that needed confirming. He walked directly to the withered elder in the center of the clearing and pulled the Tread-Cloud arrow from between his brows. There was no life left in that body at all — a foul, dark liquid seeped from all seven orifices, and then the corpse seemed to melt like a candle, collapsing into a puddle of slime.

Not far away, Yanzi’s demented shouts came in broken fragments.

“Nothing but a decaying vessel. The divine is undying! You can never destroy it — never—”

Lu Songping stood in place for a moment. Everything about this night felt like some grotesque, impossible nightmare.

He turned and walked toward the broken sword lying scattered on the ground.

The Dongyao Sword — from the day of its forging, it had been a sword of the royal line, a symbol of the prosperity and enduring strength of this land beneath his feet. And now—

“What a pity.”

“A pity for what? Without a skilled craftsman, it’s just a lump of raw iron. No more useful to look at than my dust-brushing duster—”

Lu Songping glanced at Xie Li, and though he could not quite treat the sword as a heap of scrap metal, he went forward to pick up the fragments.

Yet the moment he lifted one piece, he stopped entirely.

Between the two halves of the broken blade lay a small fragment of something grayish-white — hard and faintly cool to the touch, with a slightly rough and uneven texture beneath his fingers.

It looked like a piece of bone?

“Who would have thought.” Xie Li’s voice, which had been drifting away, suddenly moved right beside him again. “This thing looks rather like it might be the ill omen in all this ill omen. It ought to be taken to that treacherous monk Yikong to have a look at.”

Lu Songping’s expression became somewhat strained.

“Master Yikong should no longer be in Quecheng at this time.”

“Not in Quecheng?” Xie Li raised half of one dark eyebrow. “Then where has he gone?”

“Wancheng.”

Xie Li nodded with understanding.

“He left, and on his heels the monk was already on his way. That really is impeccable timing. Wouldn’t you say so, Lieutenant Lu?”

Lu Songping dared not respond. The image of the monk’s earnest face wishing him a pleasant journey floated before him, and he suddenly felt that the ill fortune of this evening was, in truth, nowhere near over.

Thirty li beyond the southwestern border of Huozhou, a carriage raced along a somewhat overgrown country lane.

It was a fine carriage — solid and well-made. Fine horses — swift and full of spirit. The only problem was the driver, who seemed rather lacking in diligence: humming a half-audible tune under his breath, a half-flattened wine pouch tucked under one arm, so at ease with the whole affair that as long as the carriage did not veer into a ditch, he seemed content to amble along like this indefinitely.

From behind, the curtain was abruptly yanked open, and a palm came down without ceremony on the back of his swaying head.

The mild wine-induced haze and the idle pleasure of open country were shattered in an instant. Luo He whipped around in fury.

“Insolent girl! How dare you — how dare you—”

“How dare I what?” Xiao Nanhui raised both eyebrows, every last pretense of civility gone from her face. “If we don’t make it by today, I won’t just be insolent — I’ll be merciless, heartless, conscienceless, and gutless—”

Being threatened out of nowhere, Luo He was deeply unhappy.

“Whose fault is it if we can’t find the road?! I haven’t been back in over twenty years — that isn’t the same tree, those aren’t the same rocks, Old Zhang’s family has had two more generations at the incense altar — how am I supposed to remember whether the village entrance faces east or west?!”

“Don’t try to change the subject! Even after being away from Suyao for years, I can still find my way back to the city.”

Luo He looked this half-deranged woman up and down, and a wave of disdain — accompanied by a sense of superiority from nowhere in particular — washed over him.

“And what is Tiancheng to you? You think some wild backwater from west of the mountain range is in any position to compare?”

Of all the things Xiao Nanhui despised, she despised people who looked down on others the most casually. Despising someone for the region of their birth was even more contemptible. But she was no longer the straightforward girl who would fly into a rage so easily.

These days, her tongue was not a thing to be trifled with.

“And what do you think is sitting in your carriage — do you imagine a tea house floor attendant has any right to take such liberties?”

The counter struck like a mountain falling from above. Luo He sputtered.

“I — I am at the very least this young man’s maternal grand-uncle — show me some — show me some respect!”

Over these past few days, every time they had a disagreement, this person had invoked the convenient title of maternal grand-uncle to press his advantage. Before, she had been too consumed with worry over whether Su Wei might simply sleep his way into death to pay it much attention. But now she felt it was high time to sort this out once and for all.

“Maternal grand-uncle? I don’t care what kind of uncle you are! The nerve of anyone — claiming to be related to the Emperor by convenience. His mother’s family was wiped out long ago, not a single one left. So where exactly did you crawl out from?”

Luo He’s face turned red from the base of his neck up, like a golden toad engorged with blood from a failed mating display, on the verge of choking to death on his own pride. After a long moment, he managed to croak out a few words.

“None — none of your business!”

Xiao Nanhui laughed despite herself. She couldn’t be bothered to waste more breath on this pickled stick of a man, so she leaned out through the curtain and shoved the idle driver unceremoniously to one side.

“Sit still if you don’t want to fall off!”

The reins cracked sharply through the air, and the horses bolted forward toward the gray, hazy distance ahead.

Less than half an hour to dawn by the look of it — though it was not yet the autumn harvest rush, the early-rising farmers were already busy in the fields, and the cattle herders had long since called their flocks out of the pen.

A faint scattering of smoke and daily life slowly filled the land. Xiao Nanhui drove the carriage along the small road until it reached a fork splitting into three.

“Which way?”

Luo He’s mouth was half open, eyes sweeping the surroundings — utterly at a loss.

Xiao Nanhui lifted her foot and sent the dithering deadweight tumbling off the carriage with a single kick, then drove the horses straight toward a small courtyard ten or so paces away.

The courtyard looked modest and unassuming — the fence posts sunk into the mud were listing to one side — and the plot sat directly facing the fork in the road, which from a perspective of household geomancy was considered highly inauspicious, the whole dwelling speaking of its owner’s lack of refinement.

She pulled the horses to a stop and looked into the courtyard.

Inside, an elderly woman was bent over, tidying the chicken coop. Not far from her, a young man in blue stood with his back to the gate, helping out.

Xiao Nanhui considered a moment, then spoke as amiably as she could manage.

“Excuse me, might I ask—”

She had barely gotten the words out when the white-haired old woman suddenly shot upright on the spot — one hand seizing that young man by the ear and one hand planted on her hip, scolding him at the top of her lungs with enough force to carry for a thousand li.

“I told you yesterday to add less water when you mix the chicken feed — why is it still this runny today?! Are you trying to kill the chickens or trying to kill me?!”

The young man in blue had no power to resist — retreating step by step while not forgetting to apologize and placate her.

“I’ll use less — I’ll use less—”

Strange — why did that voice sound so familiar?

Xiao Nanhui was still puzzling over this, hesitating over whether to go forward and ask for directions, when in the very next moment the young man in blue turned around, and she nearly toppled headlong off the carriage in shock.

He saw her too, and his expression froze for an instant — before he immediately spun back around, leaving nothing but a back with several chicken feathers stuck to it and an extremely complicated set of emotions.

Xiao Nanhui judged that what she was looking at was a complex amalgamation of shame and embarrassment.

“Ding — Ding Weixiang?!”