Tiancheng’s four great military camps were: Suibei, Guangyao, Yanchi, and Heiyu. Among them, Heiyu was the most mysterious, while Yanchi was the largest in scale.

Suibei was cavalry — swift as the wind. Guangyao was heavy armor — indestructible. Heiyu was elite — an unstoppable force.

The name “Yanchi” derived from a type of guard’s saber: wide and long in the blade, with a slightly upturned tip, like a wild goose spreading its wings. Unlike Heiyu, which was known for its sharpness, Yanchi symbolized a kind of generous, dependable strength.

For this reason, Xiao Nanhui had once believed that Ding Weixiang, a man of Yanchi origins, ought to be someone easy to get along with — broadminded and kind.

Of course, she no longer thought so.

At this moment she stood before a desolate, uninhabited courtyard, leaning against two bare stone pillars and gazing left and right at the sky.

“If I may ask, brother, is this truly the council hall?”

The Yanchi camp aide who had led her here nodded without so much as a flicker of expression: “It is.”

She looked around again. “Then where are the people holding council?”

“They just left.”

She found this somewhat amusing. “And where is Lieutenant Ding?”

“Lieutenant Ding is inside brewing medicine. I must trouble the Right General to wait here a moment.”

Brewing medicine? If he was brewing medicine, what was so urgent that he had to summon her now?

A trace of emotion leaked into her expression. Seeing it, the man added another line.

“Or I can go in and announce you, so that the General may enter and wait inside.”

Rooms where medicine was brewed were rarely well-ventilated. The smell of herbs and the steam gathered together — it was not a comfortable place.

And there was also Ding Weixiang to contend with.

“I’ll wait here.”

The aide bowed upon hearing this and took his leave: “Then I shall withdraw first.”

Xiao Nanhui blinked. She hadn’t finished her extra questions before the man vanished as quickly as he had arrived.

She found a broken door plaque to sit on and stared blankly at the smoke rising from the crumbling stone building.

The smoke drifted with the wind — leaning left one moment, leaning right the next — yet it never ceased, as though an entire imperial kitchen’s worth of cooks were inside preparing a banquet.

Half a shichen passed, and still there was not the slightest sound from within.

Xiao Nanhui sighed and stood up. In a few strides she reached the door and struck it open with her palm, sending one of the half-collapsed panels swinging aside.

A cloud of dust rose with the motion, then drifted lazily down onto the only visible back of a head inside.

Ding Weixiang stood with his back to her before a small stove, on which sat a ceramic crock no larger than a honeydew melon, hissing with steam.

She gave a light cough — a hint at her own presence.

Ding Weixiang did not turn around. He slowly picked up a glass cup soaking in a wooden bucket beside him, scooped up a handful of clean water, and poured it over the scalding ceramic crock. A burst of steam rose and drifted lazily out through the flue.

Her gaze wandered around the bare room and settled on half a sheet of paper pinned to the wall.

The paper was wedged into a crack in the stone. Drawing closer, she could see Hao Bai’s handwriting leaping from the page — still his characteristic wild cursive script, self-styled and freewheeling. The first part appeared to be a long list of medicinal ingredients, some twenty-odd varieties in all. At the end came a single instruction: Fresh thistle is tender and fragile — it will lose its medicinal properties if placed in boiling water. It must be sealed and simmered over a low flame for one full shichen. During this time, the lid must not be opened to check or to add water. Every quarter-shichen, pour water over the outside of the ceramic crock to prevent the contents from boiling. Continue until the leaf petals dissolve entirely into the broth.

No matter how long she had spent standing outside in the wind and sun, the moment she laid eyes on this prescription, she felt herself shrink three inches.

This was not a prescription. It was a naked letter of accusation.

Who was to blame but herself for what had befallen the Emperor in her care? She truly was in the wrong.

Resolved after painful reflection, she walked forward through the rising heat and heavy smell of medicine, composing in her mind a sincere apology.

But whenever she moved to the left, the man turned his face to the right. When she moved to the right, the man turned his face back to the left.

After several rounds of this, indignation rose within her: “Lieutenant Ding, did you perhaps catch a draft last night while sleeping? Why does your face keep turning the other way?”

Ding Weixiang’s hands stiffened momentarily, then continued on as before, deaf to her words.

“I reckon you are angry with me over His Majesty’s injury. It truly was my fault, but had you been there yourself, you would have understood how desperate our situation was. That we managed to come through it alive is nothing short of a miracle among misfortunes—”

With a sharp crack, the glass cup in Ding Weixiang’s hands shattered to pieces. He let out a cold snort.

“I have guarded my master for more than ten years — he has never so much as cut a finger. How many days did I entrust him to your care? And yet you let him bleed!”

Every word was a blade to the heart, and she had no power to defend herself.

She could hardly tell him: It was your master who threw himself in front of that arrow.

Xiao Nanhui lowered her head. “Why don’t you stab me once, and we’ll call it even.”

A silence fell. Only the ceramic crock on the stove continued to bubble and hiss.

After some time, Ding Weixiang finally rose to his feet.

She had thought he was truly about to draw his blade — but instead she watched as he simply padded the crock carefully with cloth, strained its contents through a gauze net, and poured the liquid into a jade flask.

Through the flask’s clean white body, the dark color of the medicine seeped faintly through. She stared at that black liquid and swallowed.

How did this thing look so much like the Whole-Body Replenishing Broth that Dujuan cooked her every month to replenish her vital energy?

“Deliver it yourself.”

Without warning, the jade flask was shoved into her hands. Perhaps because jade stone is naturally cool, it felt only slightly warm to the touch.

Yet her mind played tricks on her, and she felt as though the thing in her hands was burning.

“This hardly seems right — you worked so hard and went to such trouble to brew this, how could I steal the credit—”

Ding Weixiang’s usually somewhat wooden face was turning red at a visible pace.

Just as Xiao Nanhui was almost convinced he harbored a secret affection for her, a roar that seemed to rise from the very core of his being came crashing toward her face, as though it meant to blow the top clean off her skull.

“You think I want to?!”

~~*

If he didn’t want to, then fine — was there anything that couldn’t be said calmly?

Xiao Nanhui switched the torch to her other hand and tucked the jade flask under her freed arm.

The stone steps in this dark, winding secret passage had worn down considerably, and with no torches lit along the way, there seemed to be no end in sight.

Half a quarter-shichen ago, she had finally pieced together — from Ding Weixiang’s near-snarling explanation — that it was not he who had summoned her, but the Emperor, who had only today regained consciousness.

The news that the Emperor had awakened did not appear to have been broadcast widely among Tiancheng’s forces. Or rather — the several days he had gone missing in the chaos of enemy attack on the day of the First Snow were also facts that the majority of people did not know.

This brief, secret chapter of history was short and urgent, yet it held immense significance. Only because of a certain well-known reason, even as one of the chief participants in writing that chapter, her name would never appear in the historical record, not even in a single brushstroke.

To think she had staked her life on taking this mission south — she did not yet know what kind of reward she would receive in the end. What she feared most was that she would receive only gold and silver, while the distinguished service and title she had set her heart on would slip through her fingers entirely.

She exhaled and looked ahead, then glanced back at the darkness behind her.

This secret passage was hidden beneath Ding Weixiang’s crumbling stone medicine room. By the look of it, it had originally been the dungeon that Magistrate Sun had used to imprison private prisoners — but it was considerably deeper than the place where she had been tortured that day.

So the council hall was not a fabrication after all — it simply wasn’t on the surface.

After walking some dozens more steps, a faint glow of firelight finally appeared ahead. As the passage turned a corner at its far end, a stone chamber large enough to hold a hundred people opened before her eyes.

The grooves in the stone bricks all around declared that this place had once been hung with instruments of torture, but now the chamber was completely empty, which made the solitary figure seated on the stone chair in the center all the more conspicuous.

“Your subject Xiao Nanhui pays her respects to Your Majesty.”

Su Wei did not rise. His wide fur robe was buttoned tightly at the collar, making that face look even more gaunt than before.

“After a brush with death and surviving against all odds — is this all Xiao has to say to Us?”

She had felt an impulse earlier to come and check that he was all right, but now that he put it to her like this, she found she did not quite know how to begin.

After a moment’s thought she replied stiffly: “Does Your Majesty fare well?”

“Well.” The man’s tone was perfectly level — he seemed rather dissatisfied with this response, plain as boiled water. “Only that the chest aches considerably.”

His chest ached? He said his chest ached?

How was she supposed to respond to that?

Yes, my Emperor. An arrow passed through your chest — it is only natural that it should hurt.

Her tongue tied itself in knots, and she could feel her eyebrow twitching: “Your Majesty possesses the true dragon’s constitution and the deepest of fortunes — all will certainly be well. I only wonder what it is Your Majesty has summoned your subject here for—”

“Have you nothing to give Us?”

Only then did she remember, belatedly, the jade flask in her hands, and she quickly offered it up.

“The medicine was brewed by Lieutenant Ding. Your subject dares not take the credit.”

Slender fingers pushed aside the stopper of the jade flask. A pungent wave of medicinal odor spread through the stone chamber — yet he seemed not to smell it at all, and without even blinking, drained the broth in a single draught.

“It was Our intention for you to brew the medicine, but it seems he refused in the end and insisted on doing it himself.”

Xiao Nanhui was beginning to feel somewhat grateful for Ding Weixiang’s insistence on handling everything personally.

“Your subject has clumsy hands and feet, and feared ruining the medicinal herbs. Your subject is also fully aware of the failure to provide adequate protection this time, and stands ready for punishment. Should Your Majesty have any command, Xiao Nanhui would gladly die ten thousand deaths—”

“Regarding this incident — outside of Ourself and you, the details are known only to Wei Xiang. From now on, there is no need to speak of it to anyone else. Do you understand?”

She startled, and a cold sweat broke out across her body in an instant.

This was not simply a matter of whether she had done her duty or not.

She knew the Emperor’s secret. If he wished to silence her, it would be entirely within reason. And if Ding Weixiang were to act, she feared she would have even less chance of prevailing.

Wretched luck — she had slept for three days and three nights straight with her mind in a fog, and had never once thought of this. When Ding Weixiang came to find her, she had actually assumed it was some personal grievance about tea and medicine.

What had come over her? In a mere few days spent together with that man, had she already begun to think of him as one of her own — and entirely forgotten that he was a ruler who occupied the highest seat of power, a man whose eyes would not tolerate so much as a grain of sand?

“Your subject understands.” She spoke, and there was a faint roughness in her voice.

He said nothing, only regarded her deeply for a moment. A trace of helplessness crossed his expression — and then something almost like amusement — before it all settled into calm.

“There is another matter for which you were summoned.”

As he spoke, he turned the prayer bead mounted on the side of the stone chair. A low, dull rumbling sounded, and one wall of the stone chamber slowly descended, revealing the edge of a pool of black water that seemed to have no bottom.

She was startled, and only then realized there was another person in this chamber.

The person had been submerged in the water the entire time, apparently lifeless — which was why she had not sensed the presence of a third party at all.

After a splash of water, a somewhat swollen face emerged from the black surface, wet hair plastered across it, faint cuts and injuries visible here and there.

She strained to make out the features, and Xiao Nanhui’s jaw dropped.

He was still — alive?

“An Lu, we meet again.”