Li Wu came sliding rapidly down the slope.

He must have seen the male corpse at the bottom, but he did not stop — he went straight for Shen Zhuxi.

Shen Zhuxi sat where she had fallen, her face drained of all color, a look of helpless terror fixed on Li Wu as he closed the distance in a single swift stride. In the next instant, she was lifted from the ground as easily as a feather, Li Wu pulling her up with one hand.

Li Wu stood in front of her, blocking the corpse entirely from view. Shen Zhuxi’s heart was still hammering, her legs threatening to give way — the only thing keeping her upright was Li Wu’s grip on her arm.

“It’s all right. Don’t be afraid.” Li Wu repeated softly, his right hand making slow, steady pats against her back.

Only once Shen Zhuxi had gradually steadied herself did he turn slightly to the side — still shielding her from the sight — and call out to Li Que, who had just slid down the slope behind them, “Go take a look. See who it is.”

Li Que picked up a branch from the ground and walked to the corpse, crouching down. He used the thicker end of the branch to turn the body over to reveal the face.

His expression did not change. He examined the face, then rifled through the clothing for anything the person might have been carrying. After a moment, Li Que tossed the branch aside and said, “It’s Chen Tieguo from town. Stabbed seven times. Died from blood loss. There are bruises on his wrists — he was bound before being brought here. Nothing on him. Not a single copper coin.”

“Anything else lying around nearby?” Li Wu said.

Li Que swept the toe of his shoe through the wild grass around the body, then shook his head. “Nothing.”

“We’ll talk more once we’re back down,” Li Wu said. “Diao’er, grab the basket.”

“Got it…” Li Kun muttered.

Li Wu covered Shen Zhuxi’s eyes with his hand, turned her in the opposite direction, then crouched down in front of her.

“Get on.”

Li Que, seeing this, took the bewildered Li Kun by the arm and set off ahead of them down the mountain path.

Shen Zhuxi’s legs were like water and her mind was in chaos — she was in no state to worry about the propriety between men and women, not with a corpse at her back. All she wanted was to get away from this place as quickly as possible.

She climbed onto Li Wu’s back. Li Wu adjusted his grip with a single motion and lifted her with ease, striding forward at a steady pace.

Lying against Li Wu’s back, Shen Zhuxi was struck by a sudden and familiar feeling. Surely this was not the first time this had happened.

But when had Li Wu ever carried her before?

She strained to remember, but her mind produced only scattered fragments.

A blazing sunset. Overlapping shadows. A narrow country path between the ridges of a field.

Was it a dream she had once had?

“Are you still frightened?” Li Wu asked.

Shen Zhuxi came back to herself and said, with stubborn bravado, “I’m not frightened at all.”

“Good,” Li Wu said. “Have you seen a dead person before?”

“…Of course I have.”

Shen Zhuxi thought of the palace maid who had been beaten to death by the Mother Consort — and of the bodies strewn across the forbidden palace on the day the city fell.

“Then there’s even less reason to be afraid.” Li Wu said, unconcerned.

“Are you not afraid of ghosts?”

“Where do ghosts come from?”

Shen Zhuxi paused, then said, “…From people after they die.”

“Then there you have it,” Li Wu said. “He could only die once. I could make it die twice. If ghosts are real, it should be afraid of me.”

Shen Zhuxi could not help but laugh, and some of the dread lingering in her chest dissolved in the face of his brazen self-assurance.

“Should we report this to the authorities?” Shen Zhuxi asked.

“The magistrate’s office has been closed. Where exactly would you go to report it?” Li Wu said.

“Someone was killed,” Shen Zhuxi said, surprised. “Can we really just leave it at that?”

“Depends on who was killed. Chen Tieguo was a notorious scoundrel in town — penniless, addicted to gambling. Do you really think the county magistrate would bother investigating a case over someone like him?”

“Then what happens to the body?”

“Unidentified bodies turn up every day. One more doesn’t make a difference. Chen Tieguo just had bad luck — if he had died inside the town, someone might have dragged him off to a common burial ground. But dying out here in the wilderness, not a single constable will come.”

“So he just…rots in the open air?” Shen Zhuxi could not hide her distress. “Does he have any family? Perhaps they could come and collect his remains for a proper burial…”

“When he died, that was the end of his family. His parents were both worried to death because of him.”

Shen Zhuxi fell silent.

Li Wu’s long legs carried them along at a brisk pace, and even with her weight on his back, he moved effortlessly. The climb up had felt endless — yet beneath his long strides, the path seemed to disappear beneath them without her even noticing.

Once they reached the foot of the mountain, Shen Zhuxi felt a twinge of awkwardness. She tugged at Li Wu’s collar and said quietly, “…I can walk on my own now.”

Li Wu paid no attention and kept walking.

Shen Zhuxi could see people ahead and was terrified of being seen. She urged him again twice more, and Li Wu finally set her down at the roadside.

“You complain when climbing. You complain when I carry you. You really are something else — a proper princess, through and through!”

This insufferable man grumbled and cursed beside her, but Shen Zhuxi let it go in one ear and out the other.

Her mind had been fixed on one question the entire way down, and she spoke it aloud now without thinking. “Will the killer simply go unpunished?”

Li Wu glanced at her. “In the imperial palace, if a low-ranked servant girl went missing, would anyone come looking?”

Shen Zhuxi knew the answer, so she said nothing.

“The lives of ants matter to no one. Whatever a person was in life — once they become a mangled corpse, they are just an ant. And this world has no shortage of ants,” Li Wu said.

Shen Zhuxi’s expression fell. She thought of her own hidden identity — if she died now, no one would know that the person who had died was the Princess of Yue. People would only say that Li Wu’s new wife had died.

She mocked herself quietly: “If I were to die, I too would be nothing but the corpse of an ant.”

“What nonsense,” Li Wu said flatly. “Am I dead to you? You’re the wife I emptied my savings to marry. If anything ever happened to you, I would tear through heaven and earth to find whoever did it and crush them.”

“Why is your way of speaking always so coarse?” Shen Zhuxi frowned.

Li Wu said fiercely, “Then stop thinking such gloomy thoughts. My entire fortune is tied up in you — you’re not allowed to die even after I do.”

“I was speaking hypothetically —”

“Hypothetically is not allowed either!”

The two of them bickered all the way home, arriving just in time to see Li Que and Li Kun emerging from the kitchen, having arrived ahead of them.

Li Que said, “Big Brother, I took all the knotweed out of the basket. How shall we cook it?”

Li Kun called out eagerly, “Braised meat! Braised meat!”

Li Wu nodded. “There’s still a piece of meat in the house. Braised meat it is, then. Li Kun, come help me cut the meat.”

Li Kun’s face broke into a wide, delighted grin as he answered with a resounding yes.

The two of them headed into the kitchen to prepare the evening meal, while Shen Zhuxi stayed in the courtyard to tend to her thoroughwort. Li Que crouched down beside her and said, “Sister-in-law, do you know how to dry thoroughwort properly?”

“…How is it done?” Shen Zhuxi asked, puzzled.

She had assumed you simply set it out in the sun.

Li Que grinned and said, “Watch me.”

He went to the back courtyard and returned shortly with two large, round flat-weave bamboo trays. He picked up the freshly gathered thoroughwort and removed any withered leaves, then laid the rest across the trays. Shen Zhuxi followed his lead, and the two of them worked side by side until the trays were filled.

As she worked, a thought struck her, and she asked Li Que, a little uneasy:

“This thoroughwort — could it have grown by absorbing nutrients from the corpse?”

Li Que burst out laughing. “Of course not, sister-in-law. The spot where you picked the thoroughwort is nowhere near where the body was.”

“It wasn’t that far,” said Shen Zhuxi, still unsettled. “Just a few steps down the slope.”

“Even so, it’s still down the slope — a good distance away.” Li Que said.

Though his words persuaded her, Shen Zhuxi kept picturing the corpse’s bare-boned hand every time she handled the thoroughwort.

“Who do you think killed him?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” Li Que shook his head. “Half of Yutou Town had lent money to Chen Tieguo. He never paid anyone back, and he stole whenever he had the chance. He had enemies everywhere.”

None of the three Li brothers seemed to give Chen Tieguo’s death a second thought, but Shen Zhuxi could not shake the image of what she had seen on the mountain.

At dinner, she ate even less than usual.

That night, she tossed and turned, unable to sleep. The darkness of the inner room felt more foreign than ever. She wanted desperately to fall asleep, yet dreaded that Chen Tieguo’s face would appear in her dreams.

By the fifth time she turned over, the Li Wu sleeping beside her spoke. “Can’t sleep?”

Shen Zhuxi was lying on the inner side, the two of them separated by two fluffy feather dusters, each tucked under their own quilt. She turned her head, and through the soft puff of feathers, she caught a glimpse of Li Wu’s eyes in the dim room — steady and dark, like stars, calm and unwavering in the darkness.

In that moment, Shen Zhuxi felt quietly grateful that someone was beside her. Li Wu’s fearless eyes, afraid of neither heaven nor earth, had an odd way of settling her unease.

“Can’t sleep,” she said softly.

“Why not?”

“…Because I keep thinking about how the killer who murdered Chen Tieguo might still be in town.”

“Not necessarily in town. He might have left right after doing it.”

Shen Zhuxi said nothing, though she did not believe it. Imagination always ran wildest when it was least wanted — the moment she closed her eyes, she could almost feel the killer lurking somewhere in the dark room, or crouching behind the osmanthus tree peering in, or perhaps — right now — passing just beyond the gate of their courtyard.

There was no cold wind, and yet Shen Zhuxi felt a chill beneath the covers.

Li Wu watched the fear move across her face and said plainly, “You’re frightening yourself.”

Shen Zhuxi bit her lip and said nothing.

“Here’s the thing —” Li Wu’s eyes shifted as a thought occurred to him. “I can bring Chen Tieguo’s killer to justice. But I don’t do business at a loss. You’ll have to give me something in return.”

“What kind of something?”

The words were barely out of her mouth when Li Wu suddenly leaned toward her.

“What are you doing?!” Shen Zhuxi panicked and yanked her quilt up, clutching it tight against her chest.

Li Wu cornered her against the edge of the bed. The two fluffy feather dusters between them were flattened to a thin sliver under his weight.

“I want —” Li Wu fixed her with a burning stare.

The intensity in his gaze was overwhelming, like being watched by a predator. Shen Zhuxi was too frozen to move, and all she could do was swallow involuntarily.

“What…what do you want…” she managed, stumbling over the words.

“I want you —”

Shen Zhuxi’s face went pale.

“To make me a thoroughwort sachet with your own hands.” Li Wu said.

This man and his dramatic pauses —

In Li Wu’s own words: he had nearly sent Shen Zhuxi to her grave with that.

Li Wu retreated back to his side of the bed, lying flat on his back, hands folded behind his head. He said, in a casual, offhand tone, “No delegating to others. Not so much as a single thread. It must be embroidered by your own hands. Do we have a deal?”

The terms were entirely reasonable, yet Shen Zhuxi did not agree right away.

She hesitated for a moment, then asked, “Will this be dangerous for you?”

Li Wu suddenly rolled over to face her, staring at her directly, those dark bright eyes unblinking. The look made her face grow warm, and she instinctively looked away.

The room was dim, and Li Wu did not catch her averted gaze.

He said, “Are you worried about me?”

The question was straightforward enough, yet the way Li Wu asked it gave it an unexpectedly intimate weight — as though her concern for his safety came not from the perspective of a co-tenant, but from a wife who truly cared for her husband.

The tone flustered Shen Zhuxi. She said, with stubborn deflection, “I’m worried that if you die, I’ll have nowhere to live.”

Li Wu answered without missing a beat, “If I die, you’ll be my widow. Everything I have goes to you. How could you have nowhere to live?”

Bringing up death for no reason at all —

Shen Zhuxi glared at him. “You have the nerve to say that about me — you’re the one who’s always dwelling on gloomy things!”

“My life is cheap. It won’t be snuffed out so easily.” Li Wu’s expression was relaxed. He reached a hand across and patted her on the shoulder through the quilt. “Get some sleep. In the morning, think about what you’d like to embroider on my thoroughwort sachet.”

“Embroider what?” Shen Zhuxi asked blankly.

“What do you think should go on it?” Li Wu answered her question with a question.

That hand continued its slow, steady patting against her shoulder, never stopping.

But I don’t know how to embroider anything at all…

Shen Zhuxi drifted off, drowsy thoughts still turning over her sparse embroidery knowledge, before she could arrive at any answer.

Li Wu watched the pure, unsuspecting look on her sleeping face for a long while without looking away.

“Mandarin ducks, of course — that’s what you embroider on it, you little fool.”

He said it in a low voice.