The immortal had gone white with fright and immediately administered acupuncture, then sent someone to fetch his master.

Sun Sihuai took one look and declared that her shoulder bone had fractured and blood had pooled internally. Had the treatment not come in time, she likely would not have had the strength to speak by now.

“This disciple of mine is quite something,” Sun Sihuai said, shaking his head with a smile. “When I first taught him the Vitality-Stabilizing Needling Technique, he was utterly reluctant to learn it — and yet now he wields it more readily than anyone.”

Chen Baoxiang was about to nod in agreement, but the words disciple and Vitality-Stabilizing Needling Technique floated through her mind, and she paused.

“Master.” She lifted her head abruptly. “How many people in this world know your Vitality-Stabilizing Needling Technique?”

Sun Sihuai bent over the medicine he was preparing. “That needling technique is my own master’s exclusively guarded method. My master passed it only to me, and I have passed it only to Fengqing.”

“…” Chen Baoxiang blinked slowly.

If she remembered correctly, back when she had still been in her own body, the immortal had used the Vitality-Stabilizing Needling Technique on Cheng Huaili.

If only Sun Sihuai and Zhang Zhixu knew this technique in the entire world, then where had the immortal learned it from?

Chen Baoxiang turned it over in her mind, and murmured under her breath without thinking: “That can’t be right…?”

“Hmm?” Sun Sihuai hadn’t caught it.

She collected herself, and with a look of grave seriousness, said to him: “Master, if someone had been deceiving you from the very first day you met them — what would you do?”

Sun Sihuai answered without a moment’s hesitation. “Poison them. Kill them.”

Chen Baoxiang: “…”

Gratifying, certainly. But wasn’t that against the law?

She thought it over and let out a small wail. “If I were the one being deceived, I probably wouldn’t kill anyone. At most I’d just find them frightening and never dare trust them with my heart again.”

“That sounds far too easy to take advantage of.” Sun Sihuai disapproved strongly. “If the cost of wronging you is so small, you’ll be wronged forever. You ought to learn from Fengqing in this regard — he always repays every slight without fail and never lets anyone who has deceived him get off lightly.”

As he said it, the corner of his eye caught a hem of clothing just beyond the partition screen. “Oh, child, what are you doing standing out there? Come in.”

The pale blue hem went rigid.

Zhang Zhixu came around the screen, his expression exceedingly complex, and clasped his hands in a bow. “Master.”

“How long have you been there?”

“Just arrived.”

That was a lie. He had been there since Chen Baoxiang first asked about the Vitality-Stabilizing Needling Technique, but the further he listened, the more a chill crept up his spine, until he had simply stood there and could not move.

He did not dare look at Chen Baoxiang. He only lowered his eyes and said, “These past few days have been a great deal of trouble for Master. I’ve had Jiuquan reserve a table for you at Zhaixing Restaurant — the most popular performance troupe in Shangjing will be performing alongside the meal.”

Sun Sihuai had no particular indulgences except for a deep love of listening to musical performances. His face broke into a wide smile at these words. “You really are the most filial one. Things here are nearly finished — your master will go ahead and rest a while, then?”

“Your disciple will see Master off.”

Chen Baoxiang watched, and noticed that he was gone for a very long time before he returned — and when he came back, he had changed into a pale violet robe.

“Oh?” She looked at him in puzzlement. “Great Immortal, why are you wearing that?”

Ever since the immortal had taken on Zhang Zhixu’s appearance, his fine, costly robes had never repeated themselves from one day to the next. She had been keeping count of the colors — in barely half a month, he had gone through red, orange, scarlet, green, teal, and blue. But no matter how many he cycled through, there had not been a single purple among them.

She had found it odd at the time and gone to ask Jiuquan about it.

Jiuquan had answered: “Our master finds purple garish and vulgar. He never wears it.”

Chen Baoxiang had been impressed upon hearing this. What precise intelligence, she thought. The imitation is seamless — he’s even more Zhang Zhixu than Zhang Zhixu himself.

But now, the immortal looked at her with an expression of perfect innocence, then glanced down at his own robe. “I got my clothes dirty when I was seeing Master off, so I ducked into a nearby cloth shop and bought something to change into. Is it not nice?”

It wasn’t that it wasn’t nice — with that face, practically anything would look nice on him.

But still!

Chen Baoxiang looked out at the doorway with anxious eyes. “Zhang Zhixu hates that color!”

“What taste,” the immortal muttered with a grimace. “This color is distinguished — only those of noble bearing can carry it off.”

Chen Baoxiang felt a deep kinship with this sentiment, and they cheerfully slapped palms in agreement.

Then her face fell. “Have you forgotten you’re still supposed to be impersonating him?”

“Oh, right.” The immortal smacked his forehead as if just remembering, then let out a wry smile. “That man’s life is exhausting to live. And exhausting to perform.”

“Hmm?” Chen Baoxiang didn’t understand. “You seem quite at ease to me — you’ve been at it this long without raising anyone’s suspicions.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” He smiled bitterly. “I’ve made careful inquiries into Zhang Zhixu’s every preference and diligently mimicked them. I’ve done reasonably well at it. But so many of his habits are the exact opposite of mine.”

“He loves bamboo — I find bamboo disagreeable. He can swim — I fear water. He is sensitive to cold — I prefer the cold.”

“He is allergic to canola flowers, while those happen to be my absolute favorite. And this purple — he dislikes it, yet I find myself instinctively buying it.”

He spread his hands toward her in a gesture of helpless resignation.

Chen Baoxiang felt understanding dawn on her. “So you and he are two completely different people.”

“What else would we be?” He looked baffled.

She quietly let out a small breath of relief and smiled. “Nothing else. It’s only right that you should be.”

Zhang Zhixu curled up the corner of his mouth and, while examining her injury with an air of carelessness, said: “It’s fortunate I learned the Vitality-Stabilizing Needling Technique from someone over a hundred years ago — otherwise you would have passed out today.”

Chen Baoxiang’s ears perked up sharply. “A hundred years ago?”

“That’s right. At the time, only the master of Sun Sihuai’s master’s master knew this technique. I studied it under him.”

This was the sort of claim that even a ghost would hesitate to believe.

But coming from the mouth of an immortal of boundless power, Chen Baoxiang found it entirely plausible. “So that’s how it is. I nearly mixed the two of you up.”

“How could you think such a thing.” Zhang Zhixu looked away. “He and I — one is an immortal, and one is a mortal.”

“Exactly!” She asked with bright curiosity: “So, Great Immortal — if you found out that someone had been deceiving you, would you repay every slight without fail, the way Zhang Zhixu does?”

Outside, Liu Sheng — bound and fettered — was being shoved down the street, stumbling with a look of utter dishevelment.

Zhang Zhixu glanced out the window, his gaze evasive. “Of course not. Why would I be as petty as him?”

Chen Baoxiang let out an enormous sigh of relief.

For some reason, both of them felt a little guilty. She turned her head and pretended to study the violet smoke curling from the incense burner, while the immortal busied himself examining the embroidered pattern on the bed curtain with similarly unconvincing nonchalance.

“By the way,” she said, “what happened with Lu Shouhuai?”

Zhang Zhixu answered: “Based on the existing evidence and charges, the case can only be classified as corruption. The deaths in Yanglin Village cannot be pinned on Lu Shouhuai. The investigation into the Xiaohui Moneylending House has moved more quickly — all those implicated have been imprisoned, Lu Huan and Lu Xi included.”

Even as he said it, he felt the injustice of it himself. Why should Lu Shouhuai escape with his life? Why should corruption be punished with nothing more than dismissal and a light penalty?

But the laws of the Great Sheng dynasty had been written by officials, and so naturally the punishments those laws prescribed for officials themselves were very lenient. No one had ever thought there was anything wrong with this. But viewed through Chen Baoxiang’s eyes, was this not precisely the source of all official misconduct being allowed to flourish unchecked?

What was even more frightening was this: even knowing that, every official who had any say over the law would still be entirely unwilling to change it.

Something in his chest slowly sank. His expression grew heavier by degrees.

Zhang Zhixu forced himself to rally his spirits, wanting to say something to lift Chen Baoxiang’s mood — she was still recovering from her injury, after all, and was not well-suited to brooding.

He looked up — and found the person in the bed studying him with a gleam of scheming calculation in her eyes. “Great Immortal, does this mean I could also hold a grand birthday banquet and extort a small fortune out of everyone while I’m at it?”