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  The side door swung open. A serving girl stepped in with wine. She must have been distracted, because she caught the hem of her own skirt mid-step and pitched forward — wine arcing off the tray — and landed squarely in Ji Bozai's lap. Half the table went quiet. The girl looked up at him with a face full of color, her voice trembling at the edges. "Sir, I — I tripped. I meant no offense." The spilled wine hit the air sharp and warm. It should have been an awkward moment. Instead, with the girl draped across him like that, it made for a scene that was almost too easy to misread. Ji Bozai's first instinct was not to look at her. He looked at Mingyi. Wine had splashed into her hair. Her seat had been bumped. His lap was occupied by someone else entirely. Any one of those things should have made her stand up. He half expected her to reach over and pull the girl off him herself. She didn't. She blinked at the two of them with something close to nothing in her...

The two matrons exhaled when they saw the girl's eyes flutter open. They hadn't even noticed they were sweating until the cool air hit their damp foreheads. No one expected what came next. You Fangyin's gaze sharpened the moment she woke. Something hard and deliberate moved behind her eyes. She wrenched herself free from their grip and screamed with everything she had left. "Help — help me —" The matrons lunged to smother her mouth. "What are you screaming for, you fool!" Too late. The sound carried. In this quiet corner of the estate, two raw, desperate cries rang out and didn't stop echoing. A passing maid cutting through the shortcut heard them, turned the corner, and saw You Fangyin collapsed on the ground, dress soaked through, hair plastered to her face. She didn't wait to understand what she was seeing. She just screamed. "Someone fell in the water! Someone fell in the water!" The matrons went pale. The chrysanthemum vie...

Cai Zhao dressed Chang Ning's wounds herself. His robe slipped from his shoulders and she worked through the bandaging methodically, swapping out pads until the bleeding stopped, then applying medicine and wrapping the whole thing tight. She was about to pull his robe back up and call it done when Chang Ning came back to himself and leaned forward without warning. He was tall. Wide in the shoulder. The shift in his weight put him directly over her, the cage of his frame blocking everything behind him. His neck was at her eye level, the line of his throat clean, the faint smell of blood still on him underneath something cooler. Cai Zhao turned her face aside. "Have you gotten bigger these past few days?" She remembered the first time she'd seen him. Thin. Worn down to edges. "Probably." He looked at his own forearm. The bones were long, the muscle beneath pale skin dense and deliberate. "Good sleep, good food. Obvious reasons." "If you don...

Cai Zhao had accepted that nursing Chang Ning back to health would cost her weeks. In the old stories, a cultivator sealing himself away to recover took forty-nine days at the shortest, seventy-seven at the most. She had mentally written off a solid chunk of the year. Then Chang Ning happened. He spent his first morning meditating, slipped out in the afternoon, hit both the Yaolu and the Shuanglianhua Palace before sunset. The second day he stayed sealed in his room — then went out that night with a lantern and a grudge. By the third day he was managing two and a half days of seclusion before vanishing again right after lunch. Cai Zhao stood in the courtyard with her hands on her hips, staring at the sky. "Two and a half days," she announced to no one. "His self-invented cultivation method apparently tops out at two and a half days. The man bolts the moment he clears the gate and even a hunting dog couldn't track him." Jade came running back breathless. "I ...

Yan Dan had a theory about liberal arts boys: they were all a little unhinged. How else do you explain someone voluntarily choosing to sit in a classroom full of girls every day, reciting history and dissecting poetry while the rest of the world worried about physics? She stared at the empty seat next to her and felt the particular injustice of it. Someone, somewhere, had decided that exam seating should mix science and liberal arts students. That someone had never had to take a physics exam next to a person who didn't know what a formula was. The exam bell hadn't rung yet. Yan Dan was still clutching her textbook, running her eyes over equations she already knew she wouldn't remember. Around her, everyone was doing the same — faces nearly pressed to paper, absorbing knowledge through proximity. She looked up. A boy walked in. Tall. Unhurried. He checked the seating chart at the front with the calm confidence of someone who had nowhere better to be, found his seat, and ...