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Fan Changyu lifted the braising basket and lowered it into the water to drain. The smell rising from the pot was rich and layered, the sauce color deep and glossy, far better than anything sold at the cooked-food stalls in town. Changning stood at the stove, eyes scanning every piece in the basket. Her face fell. "No pig ears." She loved pig ears. Fan Changyu prodded the fat sausage and pork belly with chopsticks. Both yielded easily, cooked through to the core. "Fat sausage noodles tonight," she said. "Pig ears tomorrow." Changning brightened immediately. Fan Changyu kept the fire going, ladled out the braising broth, rinsed the pot, and set water to boil. She laid out five portions of noodles. "Go next door," she told Changning. "Tell Aunt Zhao not to make anything tonight. Tell them to come eat with us." Changning took off at a trot. Noodles take no time at all. Fan Changyu set four large bowls and one small one on the coun...

Fan Changyu was out the door before the neighbors lit their stoves. Tucked inside her jacket: just over three hundred wen and a silver hairpin her parents had bought her years ago, the kind that cost more than two taels when the family still had money to spend. She had one plan. Pawn the hairpin, pool the cash, buy a pig. The pawnshop keeper examined the hairpin with the flat expression of a man who had disappointed people for a living. Three fingers. Three hundred wen. "This is solid silver," Fan Changyu said, "and you're offering three hundred wen?" "Silver, yes. Light, though. And the style is old." He set it on the counter. "I'll go to five hundred. Not a wen more." "One tael. Nothing less." He slid the hairpin back toward her. "Then take it home." She picked it up and walked out. He called after her before she reached the street. One tael, he said. First sale of the morning, consider it charity. She walked...

For a moment, Changling thought she had misheard. "Shen Yao... the son of the Shen family in Luoyang?" Mingyue Zhou did not finish his thought, but the implication was clear enough. She had been far from the Central Plains for too long. The world had moved without her. "The Shen family," he said, "was always the weakest of the four great clans. Inferior to the Heyue family in both arms and wealth. Yet in the end, they took half the Central Plains." The words struck like a needle through the chest, each heartbeat driving it deeper. Shen Yao. How could it be him? She remembered the first time Shen Tiannan brought his son to call on the Yue family. She had barely glanced at the boy. Among the four great clans, the Shen family's only real asset was Shen Tiannan's standing in the martial arts world. The man had spent half his military influence to drive Changsheng forward, then assassinated the Prince of Beiyan as a gesture of submission, and so ...

The mask he had believed impossible to remove came free without warning. Mingyuezhou was entirely unprepared. Only when Changling prodded him to move did he brace the iron framework with both hands and lift it slowly from his head. In the faint, shifting light, a curl of dark hair fell loose. The face beneath had strong, clean lines, but his eyes carried something unexpectedly gentle. In Beiyan, a man who looked like that was called refined. Changling stared. She was not naive about handsome men. In her years of glory, every person in her orbit had been striking in one way or another. But she had always pictured Mingyuezhou as rough-hewn, the kind of northern face carved by weather and war. To find this beneath the iron was genuinely surprising. He looked no older than twenty-four, maybe twenty-five. Changling folded away the ten years she had slept and smiled at him the way she might smile at a younger brother. "You're quite good-looking." She had used words like th...

Something about those words hit deep. The air in my chest turned thick and hot, almost impossible to breathe through. She hadn't tried her best. Chu Tiansu's words about an unavenged sea of blood had branded themselves onto every step she took, and she had watched Cangyun cut down right in front of her. Changling's eyes were open and perfectly still, cold enough to raise goosebumps. She held his gaze without flinching and said nothing to justify herself, only: "There has to be someone expendable in every fight. I am not your grandmother. I have no reason to die in her place." "You——" Mingyuezhou's grief was still raw. He stepped toward her, then stopped. A mist of blood erupted from Changling's body. Her eyes rolled shut and she collapsed. He lunged forward and caught her. The moment he steadied her, he saw the knife wound on her right arm, wide open and pouring blood, her whole body cold as stone. He hadn't known the injury was that bad...