Since ancient times, benevolence, righteousness, and the wisdom of sages have stood as pillars upholding heaven and earth.

Throughout Chizhou’s thousands of years of history, any ruler who established a kingdom and claimed a throne was required to receive the mandate of three dynastic imperial seals: the Divine Seal, the National Seal, and the Secret Seal. Should even one be lost, it was deemed that heaven’s mandate had not been bestowed, and the signs of collapse would surely follow. The Su clan, who founded the Tiancheng dynasty in the present era, had indeed lost one — the Secret Seal among those three imperial seals.

The Su clan had originally been loyal subjects of the former dynasty of Niexuan. Following the treasonous uprising, they seized the throne from their former sovereign, the Qiu clan, renamed the capital Quecheng, and declared the nation Tiancheng. Yet it was ultimately a kingdom obtained through theft. When the Niexuan emperor faced the fall of his dynasty, he had mustered every last ounce of his strength to dispatch the three imperial seals along separate routes, hoping to sever the Su clan’s dream of ruling the realm.

After the Su clan slew the former king, they spared no expense deploying heavy troops to hunt down the martial arts masters who had been entrusted with concealing the seals. Within three days and three nights, they had intercepted two of the seals. However, the escort entrusted with the final seal was none other than the fallen dynasty’s princess, Qiu Feiyu.

The fine steed Qiu Feiyu rode was a Qicong horse bred at the Migu Mountain Pass — a breed capable of covering a thousand li in a single day while navigating treacherous terrain with ease. Tiancheng’s pursuing soldiers chased her for over a month before finally cornering her at the edge of a marshland north of Huozhou. Legend has it that Qiu Feiyu would sooner die than surrender. Together with her horse, she charged deep into Bai Yaoguan within the marshlands, carrying the last imperial seal with her as she sank into the cold, muddy swamp. From that day on, the Secret Seal vanished without a trace from all of Chizhou.

After the Su clan consolidated its rule over the realm, they pursued a policy of deliberate concealment — downplaying the fact that one seal was missing. They publicly declared that the Secret Seal had long since been recovered, and that Qiu Feiyu, in shame and fury over losing the seal, had taken her own life by the sword at Bai Yaoguan.

Yet the matter was riddled with suspicious inconsistencies. For one, Qiu Feiyu’s body was never found. Furthermore, the hundred-man military unit that had pursued her was disbanded upon returning to the capital. The soldiers were discharged and sent home to farm, yet one after another they died not long after reaching their hometowns. Additionally, at the founding ceremonies of Tiancheng and all subsequent grand sacrificial rites to heaven, the emperor had never once produced all three imperial seals for public display.

All those who had once served in the former imperial palace had long since scattered to the winds. Nearly a hundred years had passed, and even those who had once laid eyes upon the Secret Seal were now few and far between — to say nothing of anyone knowing its whereabouts.

Thus the Su clan’s Tiancheng throne sat unshaken through the years. Just as everyone was on the verge of forgetting the missing seal altogether, a great upheaval shook the dynasty.

Bai Heliu, once the Deputy Imperial Censor, had committed treason and defection — taking with him one hundred thousand troops as he fled to Bijiang in the southern territories.

This was what became known as the Yu’an Rebellion.

How does a mere civil official mount a rebellion?

That had always remained a mystery.

As the fortune-tellers put it: “Heaven does not will the destruction of the Bai clan — this is the decree of fate.” The meaning being that for the Bai clan to have committed treason right beneath the emperor’s nose, and to have taken an army and established their own territory, must surely have been the deliberate intention of heaven itself.

The common people chatted idly about it over the years without much concern. But in recent times, the standoff between Bijiang and Tiancheng had grown increasingly intense. War seemed as though it might descend at any moment, and the people of every prefecture lived in anxiety, carefully sniffing out developments from all sides.

The matter of the Secret Seal had not yet stirred the city into an uproar, but Xiao Nanhui knew — this was merely the beginning of the storm.

Whenever she had slipped out of the mansion in the past, it had always been together with Bolao. Over time, the two of them had honed a remarkable ability to evade both Dujuan and Uncle Chen. They traveled light, requisitioned two swift horses, and once outside Quecheng’s gates, they were fish returned to the open waters.

Within the Marquis Mansion, she could use Dujuan’s imposing authority to keep Bolao in her place at every turn. But once outside the mansion, it was Bolao’s world entirely.

Although Bolao was small in stature, she fought with uncommon ferocity.

She and Xiao Nanhui were different. Xiao Nanhui had been trained under Xiao Zhun, learning the combat arts meant for the battlefield — she had little experience in the jianghu, and while her martial skills were formidable, she was prone to suffering from underhanded tricks. Bolao, on the other hand, had come from the Andao Academy, where she had specialized in assassination and concealed weapons. By the time she was fourteen, she had already earned a ranking on the jianghu’s list of top fighters. Yet fate was unkind to the gifted — her height had not grown a single inch since she turned fourteen, and the Academy’s grandmaster ultimately passed the celebrated Dou clan blade technique on to someone else.

Over this matter, Bolao had harbored resentment for a very long time, and had even once sworn never to set foot in the jianghu again.

Of course, Bolao’s sworn oaths were the last things one should trust.

Like a bird long accustomed to soaring free, she might grumble about the hardships of hunger and cold, yet deep in her bones she could not bear the gilded comfort of a cage. And so when Xiao Nanhui brought up the journey to Huozhou, she made a show of reluctance and hemming and hawing before finally agreeing.

She had spent three days making secret preparations, then left a letter behind and slipped out through the city gates at the very last moment before the gates closed at the hour of You — ensuring that anyone who wished to give chase would have to wait until the gates reopened at dawn the following morning.

They rode hard at a swift pace, heading northeast into the rising sun, and it took the two of them more than ten days of travel before they reached the borders of Huozhou.

The moment they entered Huozhou, the sunlight vanished. The skies had been uncooperative lately, and the entire region of Huozhou lay blanketed beneath a massive dark cloud. While the temperature was nowhere near as low as in the depths of winter, several successive rainfalls had left the air wet and cold. A constant layer of mud covered the ground, and one careless step would soak a boot straight through — the kind of bone-deep chill that was in no way inferior to the cold of midwinter.

Both horses had their hooves perpetually wrapped in a layer of cold wet mud, causing them to slip while on the road. After several days of this, Jixiang regarded Xiao Nanhui with eyes full of grievance.

Although Bolao was small in stature, she loved to ride tall and imposing horses. Her horse bore a bold and fierce name — Huaqiu — and had a swirl in the fur on its hindquarters that, viewed from behind, looked like a flower in full bloom.

To reach Huozhou, one had no choice but to cross the Great Fen Ferry.

Yueyuan was a small town situated beside the ferry crossing at the Great Fen. As a considerable number of travelers passed through here on their way to Mu Er He, the town was quite lively. The inns and taverns all had burning braziers out front, luring weary travelers inside to warm their frozen bodies.

Xiao Nanhui and Bolao led their horses from one establishment to the next, only to be told at each one that it was full. The blame lay with the unusual wretched weather — though spring had already arrived, freezing rain had continued to fall without pause. Broken shards of ice that had just thawed upstream on the Hunhe River were being swept downstream by the swelling current. The water moved powerfully and swiftly, and chunks of ice large enough to punch holes in boat hulls on impact had left no boatman willing to attempt a river crossing at such a time. The Great Fen Ferry had not sent out a single vessel in ten days.

Merchants and travelers eager to reach the other bank had crowded into the small villages and towns near the crossing. The inns had long been packed beyond capacity, and many proprietors had seized the opportunity to hike their prices sky-high — yet rooms still could not meet demand.

By the time she knocked on the door of the last inn in Yueyuan town, it was already the hour of Hai at night. The innkeeper who answered was clutching a hand warmer, his narrow squinting eyes not even bothering to look at the person before him. Before Xiao Nanhui could open her mouth, he cut her off: “Terribly sorry, young sir — this establishment is full. If you want a meal, you’re welcome to find a seat inside yourself. As for lodging, you’ll need to try elsewhere.”

With that, he began to retreat back inside. Bolao quickly stepped forward, wedging her foot in the door before it could close. Her eyes darted around and landed on the last remaining key still hanging from a broken wooden rack inside the room, so she lowered her voice: “Brother, isn’t there still a room vacant? I can see it plain as day.”

The innkeeper waved his hand dismissively. “Not at all, not at all. You’ve mistaken what you saw.”

“In this bitter cold, brother, do us a kindness, won’t you?”

Bolao’s foot remained as immovable as a stone guardian deity at the gate. The innkeeper couldn’t force the door shut, and irritation crept into his voice: “I’ve already said it’s full — why are you still making trouble here? Do you take advantage of my establishment being modest in size? Let me tell you, that premier room marked with the character for ‘Heaven’ was reserved half a year in advance by a distinguished guest by the name of Zhong. That gentleman paid me a full year’s worth of silver. How could I simply turn around and let it to someone else?”

Xiao Nanhui and Bolao exchanged a glance, both fully aware of how this sort of scheme worked. They put on their most earnest expressions: “The innkeeper is truly a man of integrity. Given the late hour, the esteemed Master Zhong surely won’t be arriving tonight. We only need a single night’s lodging and promise not to cause you any trouble whatsoever.”

As expected, the innkeeper feigned a show of difficulty, then held out five short, pudgy fingers.

“Fifty taels.”

She smiled through the sting of it. “Deal.”

Five plump and gleaming silver ingots disappeared into the innkeeper’s pocket, and his squinting eyes seemed to open a fraction wider: “The stable is across the way. If your horse is led off or stolen, this establishment bears no responsibility.”

Xiao Nanhui was already too tired to bother with him any further. She signaled with her eyes for Bolao to go inside first and take stock of the situation, then led Jixiang and Huaqiu toward the stable on her own.

The stable was extremely crude. The trough held only some rather stale hay, and not even the remnants of beans or oats were visible. Jixiang pawed at the ground in displeasure. She took out some dried mushrooms she had prepared earlier and mixed them into the hay, and only then did the horse settle down, somewhat reluctantly appeased.

The rain was coming down harder and faster now. She turned around and walked briskly back to the inn.

The inn itself was also pitifully small — by appearances, not much of an improvement over Jixiang’s stable. Just inside the entrance were five or six ramshackle tables, all of them crammed with people. Some had paid only for drinks, simply wanting somewhere to rest, and those people had just sat down directly on the floor. Bolao was already squeezed into a corner, craning her neck to call out: “Hey, over here!”

She removed her rain cloak and carefully squeezed her way over. She had no idea how Bolao had managed to secure that spot, yet somehow she had even freed up a broken wooden stool for her. As she sat down, Bolao grabbed her arm, making sure her backside was fully planted on the stool.

“Sit properly — someone will snatch it away from you otherwise.”

Xiao Nanhui found the whole situation somewhere between amusing and exasperating. She ordered two bowls of hot noodle soup and, as she ate, began to observe the people scattered around the room.

Three or four paces to her left sat a merchant traveling with his entire family — six people in total, occupying a considerably large patch of space. The clothing of the man and his wife indicated a household of comfortable means. However, his children were uniformly a line of girls, all half-grown. They sat in orderly fashion yet still received occasional murmured scoldings from their father, giving the impression of a family that had tried and failed to produce a son. They had ordered a rather lavish spread of food. But once the soup at the table ran low, the man lowered his head to look at his account ledger, leaving his wife and daughters not daring to continue eating.

Among the scattered travelers sitting on the floor in the corners, quite a few eyes were also sizing up that family — though most gazes were fixed on the food at their table. Only one pair of eyes rested discreetly on the belt pouch at that man’s waist and on the bulging bundle of belongings nearby. That one was a middle-aged man with a strip of cloth bound around his forehead. Though no conspicuous weapons were visible on his person, his hands — with their protruding knuckles — immediately marked him as a trained fighter. He seemed to have been traveling in the rain for a considerable time; his coarse cloth garments were soaked through, and water dripped steadily from him, pooling on the floor and spreading beneath the table nearest to him. Under that table were a pair of feet clad in white boots, which at that moment shifted aside with a slight air of distaste.

The owner of those boots was a young gentleman dressed entirely in white. His features were passably handsome, though his face appeared to have been dusted with far too much fragrant powder, rendering it an alarming shade of pallor. He held a porcelain cup with his little finger crooked elegantly, taking small sips of wine — a cup he had clearly brought himself, by the looks of it notably finer than anything the establishment had to offer. Seated on either side of him were two young women of lovely appearance. While they were not the stunning beauties one might find in a place like Wangchen Tower, they were charming and alluring, both fixing him with flirtatious gazes and breaking into soft, coquettish laughter at intervals, as though he had just said something terribly amusing.

As the wine rounds progressed, the two women’s laughter grew increasingly exaggerated, threatening to pitch them forward and backward in their seats. The scent of their powder and rouge drifted to the neighboring table, yet the three large men seated there appeared utterly unmoved. Each kept his eyes fixed ahead with rigid composure, not even stirring when the trailing hem of a woman’s dress brushed across their backs. On closer inspection, though their clothing differed from one another, the weapons laid upon the table before all three of them were identical — compact, single-edged broadswords with short guards. Everything about them exuded the unmistakable air of government officials, though for reasons unknown they appeared to be disguising their identities while moving among the common crowd.

Xiao Nanhui lowered her gaze and, before the contents of her bowl could cool, finished every last noodle and drop of broth. Bolao had clearly grown accustomed to Dujuan’s cooking, and was being rather particular — she had left some food behind.

She hadn’t brought much travel money this time around, and having just been fleeced by that unscrupulous innkeeper, she truly could not spare any silver to improve Bolao’s meal. She was just about to say something to persuade her to eat more when the inn’s rickety wooden door was pushed open again.

A gust of cold wind swept in along with a spray of rain. Those near the door grumbled, yet the person who entered offered not a single word of apology.

The one who led the way wore a sky-blue coat and had a square, unremarkable face — the kind a person sees and immediately forgets. She had already turned her gaze away, but from the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of the sword scabbard at the man’s hip, and abruptly stopped.

That sword — she had seen it somewhere before.