CHAPTER 9: INCENSE IN THE TENT

Regarding her decision, Yue Zhiheng was indifferent. "Whatever."

He truly didn't care whether Zhan Yunwei slept on the floor or the roof, on the bed or beneath it—as long as she remained within the perimeter of his watchful eye, the arrangement meant nothing to him.

Yue Zhiheng emerged from the inner room and moved closer to the bed, his movements unhurried, carrying the particular economy of someone for whom unnecessary motion was a waste of energy. Zhan Yunwei, who had been sitting outside waiting for him to finish bathing, found herself pushed further from the bed by his very presence—not physically, but by the gravity of his composure, which made the space around him feel like territory already claimed.

Zhan Yunwei discovered, with the uncomfortable clarity that only experience could teach, that some things were considerably easier said than done.

For example, she could not simply walk over to the bed with a normal expression and climb in as though this were any other night. The act of approaching—of crossing that small stretch of floor toward the place where Yue Zhiheng would sleep—felt weighted with implications she refused to acknowledge. But she also refused to let him see her weakness, refused to give him the satisfaction of witnessing her hesitation. So she said, with practiced casualness, "I can't sleep. I'll sit for a while."

Yue Zhiheng, unsurprisingly, had no intention of waiting for her to work through whatever private struggle she was conducting. Since the previous month, he had barely managed any sleep at all—time had become something he rationed with the ruthless precision of someone who understood exactly how precious each hour was.

For weapon refiners, time was indeed a luxury of the rarest kind.

Master weapon refiners throughout the Spirit Realm lived lives governed by their furnaces. Many worked continuously, day bleeding seamlessly into night, standing guard over the fires they tended with the vigilance of soldiers on a besieged wall. The probability of staying up all night was not merely high for them—it was the expected condition, the baseline against which everything else was measured. No one in the entire Spirit Realm could genuinely compare to the hours these craftsmen surrendered to their work.

Yue Zhiheng was even more extreme than most. Beyond weapon refining itself, the affairs of Chetian Palace demanded constant attention, pulling at his time from every direction. Even if someone were undergoing tribulation lightning directly beside him—let alone the far less urgent matter of having only Zhan Yunwei present—he would still sleep when his body demanded it. Sleep was not a luxury he permitted himself; it was a biological necessity he accommodated with the minimum possible investment.

His hand paused, hovering in front of his clothes for a brief moment—the only visible hesitation in an otherwise seamless sequence of actions. Then Yue Zhiheng simply lay down, fully clothed, as though the decision required no deliberation whatsoever.

Zhan Yunwei realized, watching him settle with that effortless composure, that she was far less composed than Yue Zhiheng in every measurable way. In her previous life, they had been Daoist partners for three years—bound together by the formal arrangement that such partnerships demanded. But the actual time they had spent in each other's physical presence during those three years was negligible, amounting to perhaps a handful of nights total. Yue Zhiheng would only appear on her immortal mountain when unusual events demanded his attention, and on those rare occasions the two would spend a single night together, mutually despising each other with a thoroughness that almost achieved its own kind of efficiency. The concept of peacefully coexisting with Yue Zhiheng—of simply occupying the same space without the undercurrent of mutual antagonism—was entirely foreign to her. She had no framework for it, no prior experience to draw upon.

Zhan Yunwei sat in the chair for a while longer, feeling the particular restlessness of someone whose body wanted to move but whose mind refused to commit to any specific direction. She wanted to practice her spirit control technique—the exercises would have occupied both her hands and her thoughts, providing exactly the kind of structured distraction she needed. But her spiritual power simply wouldn't release. It sat dormant within her, unresponsive to her attempts at cultivation, as though the strangeness of the evening had unsettled something fundamental in her connection to it.

Completely listless, with no other option presenting itself, she reached for the book Yue Zhiheng had been using earlier.

It was a treatise on weapon crafting called "On Fire Control," a dense, specialized text that detailed the precise effects of different spiritual fires on the quality and character of magical artifacts. The kind of book that, under normal circumstances, would have put Zhan Yunwei to sleep within the first three pages.

What surprised her, however—what pulled her attention forward rather than letting it drift—was the evidence of Yue Zhiheng scattered throughout the margins. He had added his own annotations and supplements in numerous places, filling the gaps between the original text with his own observations and corrections. The annotations themselves were unexpected in a way that went beyond their content.

Unlike his cold and eccentric nature—the sharp, cutting quality that characterized everything about his outward presentation—his handwriting was neat and formal, possessed of a careful deliberateness that suggested significant effort had gone into producing it. And yet it was not mature. Not in the way that the calligraphy of someone raised in the Immortal Mountains would be expected to appear. It looked, Zhan Yunwei thought with something close to puzzlement, like a child diligently completing homework—earnest and practiced, but lacking the instinctive fluency that came from years of proper instruction begun in earliest childhood.

"How strange," Yunwei thought, turning the pages with growing curiosity.

Families from the Immortal Mountains placed enormous emphasis on the education of their descendants—this was not merely tradition but something approaching sacred obligation. Knowledge and proper conduct were things children learned from the moment they could comprehend language. Most children raised on the Immortal Mountains were already well-versed in etiquette and scholarly basics by the time they could walk steadily on their own two feet.

Calligraphy practice, too, began in early childhood without exception. The characters produced by young students might not yet flow with power or express the kind of effortless grace that marked a master's hand, but they possessed at minimum a certain elegance—a structural soundness that reflected years of patient, systematic instruction. The foundation was always there, laid deliberately by tutors and family alike.

But Yue Zhiheng's handwriting was different from all of this. It was competent—clearly the product of real effort and repeated practice—but it lacked that foundational elegance entirely. Logically, this made no sense whatsoever. The Yue family was a renowned family among the Immortal Mountains, one of the great houses whose reputation and influence stretched back generations. They maintained strict rules and exacting regulations governing every aspect of family life. It was highly, almost inconceivably unlikely that their eldest son—the heir to everything the family represented—would produce such childish characters even after years of presumably rigorous instruction.

Coupled with what she had accidentally witnessed earlier that evening—the mute girl's secret, glimpsed in a moment of unguarded revelation—Zhan Yunwei found herself wondering, for the first time since arriving, about the true nature of Yue Zhiheng's background.

Was he truly the young master raised by the Yue family? Had he always been what the family presented him as? Or was there something beneath the surface of that carefully constructed identity that the world outside had never been permitted to see?

Suppressing her growing curiosity—questions of this nature were dangerous to pursue carelessly, and she was not yet in a position where danger could be afforded—Zhan Yunwei continued reading. She found that the actual content of his annotations was remarkably consistent with what she understood of Yue Zhiheng's personality.

For example, in the main text of the "Treatise on Fire Control," the author had written with confident authority: "The tempering of a spiritual sword takes thirty-six hours; six-tenths of the fire is refined, seven-tenths is excessive yang, and eight-tenths is as bad as too much."

Yue Zhiheng's annotation, scrawled in that earnest, slightly childish hand beside the passage, read simply: "Nonsense. A weapon forged with only 60% spiritual fire is inherently yin and will be a waste. 70% is better, with occasional suppression and quenching every two hours; it will definitely be extraordinary."

The meaning, stripped of its technical language, was devastatingly blunt. He was essentially saying: "You are incompetent if you lack the courage to use 70% fire. And even if you somehow manage to produce a weapon using only 60% spiritual fire, the result will be utterly useless." Though Zhan Yunwei possessed no deep foundation in the intricacies of fire control, she understood enough to recognize that anyone who dared to employ 70% spiritual fire in the forging process was operating at the very edge of what was survivable. A slight miscalculation—a moment's inattention, a fraction of a degree's deviation—could not only melt the spirit sword entirely within the furnace, consuming weeks or months of careful preliminary work in an instant, but could cause the furnace itself to explode with catastrophic force.

The processes of suppressing spiritual fire and quenching were even more demanding than the initial forging, requiring the weapon refiner to maintain unwavering mental focus while sitting completely motionless for days and nights without interruption. One lapse in concentration, one moment of wandering attention, and everything was lost.

No wonder, Zhan Yunwei reflected, that she had noticed the spirit weapons bearing lotus patterns were of exceptionally high quality—far above anything else she had encountered. Yue Zhiheng was indeed extraordinarily skilled in weapon forging. He was bold enough to push every process to its dangerous limits, and he possessed the patience to sustain that intensity across the endless hours such work demanded.

Zhan Yunwei couldn't help but scoff inwardly at the image this conjured. Boldness and patience applied to other pursuits as well, after all. Capturing people, for instance, was also something he demonstrated remarkable talent for—he could drag an entire immortal mountain down into years of sustained suffering, repeatedly inflicting losses with the methodical persistence of someone who viewed destruction as simply another form of craftsmanship.

She turned a few more pages, but lacking any real foundation in weapon crafting, the text grew progressively more obscure with each passage. Understanding required considerable time and effort, and the specialized terminology formed barriers that her general knowledge could not easily breach.

The chirping of insects outside the tent gradually subsided as the night deepened, their chorus thinning and eventually falling silent with the slow inevitability of natural rhythm. By the time Zhan Yunwei finally felt the edges of drowsiness creeping into her awareness, it was already well past midnight.

She set the book down carefully and faced, once again, the matter that had been waiting for her all evening with patient, immovable certainty: the matter of sleeping.

Fortunately—and she recognized the fortune in this with genuine relief—Yue Zhiheng had fallen asleep first. He had drifted off sometime during her reading, his breathing settling into the slow, even rhythm of deep unconsciousness. This meant she did not have to endure the experience of walking toward the bed while fully aware of his eyes tracking her every movement, cataloging every hesitation, every adjustment of posture that might betray the discomfort she was working so hard to conceal.

Moonlight streamed through the tent's opening, casting everything in pale, silver-edged light. In its glow, she could see Yue Zhiheng clearly: lying on his side, facing outward toward the tent's edge, his head resting on his left arm in a position that suggested long practice rather than conscious arrangement. His eyes were closed. His breathing was steady. He appeared, for all intents and purposes, completely and soundly asleep.

But Zhan Yunwei knew better than to trust appearances when it came to Yue Zhiheng. She knew, with the particular certainty that only repeated painful experience could teach, that if she were to make any aggressive move toward him right now—any motion that his instincts registered as a threat—the next moment would bring his eerie, cold whip snapping around her wrists with the speed and precision of something that had been waiting for exactly this provocation.

She had tried many times in her previous life. The results had been consistent, and the lesson had been learned thoroughly. There was no point wasting time and suffering in the pursuit of an outcome that would never change.

What troubled her now was a different, more mundane problem entirely. Yue Zhiheng had fallen asleep first, and he had chosen to sleep on the outside of the bed—the side closest to the tent's edge, the position that left only the inner space available for her. The space pressed against the far side, the space that required her to somehow navigate past his sleeping form to reach it. How, precisely, was she supposed to accomplish this without waking him, disturbing him, or—worst of all—giving him any reason to open those cold eyes and observe her struggling to cross the distance?

Yue Zhiheng hadn't removed his outer garment before lying down. His clothes remained in perfect order, as though he had simply decided that sleep was happening and arranged himself accordingly, without the intermediary step of preparing for it. His closed eyes and still features presented the image of a cold-hearted nobleman raised in a royal household—composed, untouchable, entirely at peace with the world and his place within it.

Compared to his seamless calm and absolute indifference, Zhan Yunwei felt profoundly, irritatingly unbalanced.

They clearly had no interest in each other whatsoever. This was established fact, acknowledged by both parties without ambiguity. So why could he simply close his eyes and sleep soundly while she had to remain awake past midnight, reading weapon-crafting treatises in a chair, unable to bring herself to approach the bed like a normal person?

Fine. She would simply treat him as a block of wood. An inert, unconscious obstacle to be navigated around with the same practical detachment one might apply to moving past a piece of furniture.

Having arrived at this resolution—and finding it, if not entirely convincing, at least functional—Zhan Yunwei hesitated for only a moment before making her next decision. She would not remove her outer robe. Her wedding dress from earlier that day was elaborate and formal, layered with the kind of ceremonial complexity that made it genuinely uncomfortable to sleep in. A night spent in such attire would leave her stiff and sore by morning, and she knew it. But compared to the alternative—lying beside Yue Zhiheng wearing only her undergarments, with nothing but thin silk between her skin and the shared space—the physical discomfort of the wedding dress was insignificant. Trivial. Worth enduring without complaint.

She had already used the purification talisman that had been thoughtfully prepared in the room earlier, so cleanliness was not a concern. Zhan Yunwei removed only her stockings, carefully gathered the layers of her skirt to keep them from dragging, and with the deliberate care of someone navigating a minefield, stepped over Yue Zhiheng's sleeping form. The wooden frame of the bed creaked almost imperceptibly beneath the slight redistribution of weight, but he didn't stir.

She exhaled—a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding—and lowered herself into the empty space on the far side of the bed. The furthest point from Yue Zhiheng that the bed's dimensions allowed. She arranged herself with her back toward him, creating the maximum possible distance between their bodies, and lay still.

Perhaps it was the soporific density of the weapon-crafting treatise still lingering in her mind, or perhaps it was the simple knowledge that Yue Zhiheng genuinely held no interest in her—that his indifference was as complete and reliable as gravity—but drowsiness descended upon her with surprising speed. Within minutes, the tension in her body began to release, muscle by muscle, and sleep drew her down.

The tent fell quiet.

*

At four in the morning, the moon retreated behind a bank of clouds, and the fireflies that had drifted through the warm air dispersed like scattered sparks finding no wind to carry them.

Yue Zhiheng opened his eyes.

His brows drew together in a crease that might have been melancholy, or might simply have been the residual discomfort of interrupted sleep. He lay perfectly still for a moment, staring at nothing, before his awareness fully reassembled itself around the present moment.

From the instant Zhan Yunwei had first arrived—from the moment her presence had entered his space and made itself known—he had snapped out of the half-daze that had been his default state for weeks. His senses had sharpened, his vigilance had quietly reasserted itself, and he had monitored her movements with the automatic, effortless attention of someone for whom awareness of potential threats was as natural as breathing.

If Zhan Yunwei had intended to overestimate herself and launch an attack against him, he would not have held back. Not for a single moment. The response would have been immediate and proportionate, regardless of the circumstances or the hour or whatever delicate social situation might surround them.

But she hadn't attacked. Instead, the girl had stood by the bed for what felt like an extended period—long enough that Yue Zhiheng had begun to lose patience with the wait, had begun to wonder whether she intended to stand there indefinitely, frozen by some private internal struggle he neither understood nor cared to understand. Finally, she had moved. Her footsteps were light—deliberately, carefully light—as she tiptoed past him with the concentration of someone crossing a frozen lake.

He could still feel it: the subtle shift as the bed received her weight, the slight sway and settling as she found her position. The mattress dipped imperceptibly beside him, and then she was still.

After a while, she stopped moving entirely, having apparently found a position that satisfied whatever criteria she was applying. The tent settled into silence.

Yue Zhiheng closed his eyes, intending to simply continue sleeping. The interruption had been minor. Sleep should resume without difficulty.

But it didn't.

Gradually, with an insistence that grew stronger rather than fading, he became aware that falling back asleep was proving unexpectedly difficult. Something had shifted in the tent's atmosphere—something subtle enough that it took him several minutes to identify precisely what it was.

Yue Zhiheng had slept beside women before.

Or rather—and the distinction mattered, though he would not have articulated why—before the age of thirteen, the only person he had consistently shared sleeping space with was the mute girl.

Back then, the world they inhabited had been very different from this one. The house they shared had been dilapidated beyond any reasonable standard of habitation—leaky, cold, and offering no protection from the elements that mattered. The sleeping arrangement consisted of a thin layer of straw spread in one corner, supplemented by scraps of scavenged old clothing repurposed as blankets. Whether it was the height of summer's oppressive heat or the brutal depths of winter, the two teenagers could only huddle together in that cramped corner, sharing whatever warmth their bodies could generate between them.

Even earlier than that—when he was seven or eight years old, small enough that the cold could genuinely kill him—there had been nights in deep winter when his body weakened to the point of failing. On those nights, when the cold crept into his bones and the world began to gray at its edges, the mute girl would wrap him in her tattered cotton-padded coat. It was the warmest thing they owned, and she gave it to him without hesitation, without discussion. Then she would hold him tightly against her, one arm around his small frame, and pat him occasionally—a rhythmic, insistent pressure against his back or his side.

They didn't have the right to fall asleep on those nights. If they did, they would never wake up again. The cold would finish what it had started, and by morning there would be nothing left but two small bodies grown stiff and silent in a corner of a broken house.

Given this history, Yue Zhiheng did not think there was anything particularly noteworthy about having a woman lying beside him. The experience was familiar. Unremarkable. It held no special significance.

But as Zhan Yunwei's breathing settled into the deep, even rhythm of genuine sleep, something changed in the tent's air. A fragrance began to emerge—not sharply, not suddenly, but gradually, like color bleeding slowly into water. It was warm, and it was sweet without being cloying: the scent of jasmine after rain, faint enough that one might almost dismiss it as imagination, yet omnipresent enough that once noticed, it could not be ignored.

The May night was already uncomfortably warm, the season having turned the air into something thick and close. Zhan Yunwei, seemingly restless even in sleep, shifted occasionally—small, unconscious movements that disturbed the fragrance, releasing fresh waves of it into the space between them.

With each breath Yue Zhiheng drew, the warmth and the scent enveloped him more completely. It was not unpleasant. That was precisely what made it troublesome.

He frowned, lying very still, and noticed with the detached analytical precision that characterized his thinking the stark difference between Zhan Yunwei and the mute girl—even though both were women who had lain beside him at various points in his life. The difference was not merely physical, though it was certainly that. It was something else—something related to warmth and fragrance and the particular quality of peaceful, undisturbed sleep, things the mute girl had never possessed the luxury of offering because survival had demanded everything she had.

Yue Zhiheng was a mature man, both physically and in his understanding of the world. He naturally comprehended what the difference meant, what it implied. And yet even as he understood it with perfect clarity, he felt disdain—for himself, for the situation, for whatever instinct had been awakened by something as simple as proximity and scent. The disdain, however, did not make the disturbance disappear. It merely coexisted with it, unhelpfully.

In the end, he resorted to the most direct solution available to him. He drew upon his spiritual power—just enough, carefully measured—and used it to block his own sense of smell entirely. The fragrance vanished as though a door had been closed. The tent's air became neutral, characterless, offering nothing to his awareness beyond its temperature.

Only then did something approaching sleep begin to creep back toward him, tentative and slow.

*

When Zhan Yunwei woke with a start—jolted from sleep by some sound or sensation she couldn't immediately identify—she found Yue Zhiheng still in the bed beside her.

She had been loud in waking. Too loud, certainly, for someone who prided herself on awareness and control. If Yue Zhiheng wasn't dead—and he demonstrably wasn't—he couldn't possibly have remained indifferent to the noise and sudden movement.

He hadn't. He was already sitting up when she turned to look at him, one hand pressed against his temple in a gesture that spoke of fatigue rather than alarm. He rubbed the spot for a moment, glanced at her with eyes that held both weariness and a distinct undercurrent of dissatisfaction, and then turned his face toward the tent's entrance. "Come in."

Zhan Yunwei was quite certain she had read his expression correctly. Weariness. Dissatisfaction. Both directed, at least in part, at her. She felt a flicker of bewilderment—she had gone to bed later than he had, had spent hours sitting in a chair reading while he slept undisturbed. If anyone in this tent had grounds for dissatisfaction, it should have been her.

Shi Hu and Bai Rui, who had been waiting outside with the patient readiness of attendants accustomed to early mornings, entered the tent and moved to help Zhan Yunwei change out of yesterday's clothing.

Yue Zhiheng, who wanted no one to serve him in any capacity and found the very idea of being attended to vaguely irritating, retreated behind the screen to change on his own. The partition provided a boundary that suited everyone's preferences simultaneously.

Shi Hu, young enough that her reactions still showed plainly on her face before she could think to conceal them, looked at Zhan Yunwei and registered visible surprise. Her new mistress was still wearing yesterday's wedding dress—the elaborate ceremonial garment that had been carefully selected and prepared for the marriage ceremony. The surprise was immediate and undisguised, flickering across Shi Hu's features with the transparency of someone who hadn't yet learned to keep her thoughts from her expression.

Bai Rui, by contrast, had clearly anticipated this outcome. She showed no surprise whatsoever, her movements efficient and practiced as she produced a fresh silk dress for Zhan Yunwei to change into. The new garment was simpler than the wedding dress—elegant but functional, appropriate for the day's activities without demanding the same ceremonial weight.

After Zhan Yunwei had changed and the morning's basic preparations were complete, someone entered the tent and approached with the careful, slightly reverent manner of a servant delivering a message from someone of significant importance. The voice was lowered to a respectful whisper. "The Ancestor wants the Eldest Young Master to take the Young Mistress to the front hall for dinner."

Zhan Yunwei felt something click into place within her memory—a recognition so immediate it felt almost physical. Something very similar had happened in her previous life. The same summons, or one close enough to it that the parallel was unmistakable.

The "Ancestor" referenced by the servant was Yue Zhiheng's grandfather—an elder of considerable reputation and even more considerable skill. In his youth, this old man had been a remarkable weapon cultivator in his own right, one whose achievements had been spoken of with genuine reverence even among peers who were themselves exceptional. But later in life, an injury had destroyed the use of his legs entirely. He could no longer walk, could no longer move through the world as a functioning member of the family's daily life. In response, he had withdrawn to the weapon-refining pavilion and entered a state of deep seclusion, sealing himself away from the affairs of the household and the wider world alike.

Zhan Yunwei's father—the Mountain Lord himself—had spoken of this Elder Yue to her on more than one occasion, and each time his tone had carried unmistakable respect. Not the polite deference that one offered to someone of high status, but something deeper: the genuine recognition of one who understood the weight of what this old man had accomplished and sacrificed.

Later, when word had reached the Mountain Lord that the Yue family had submitted themselves to the dynasty and had participated in the slaughter of people who had fallen into evil—had turned their considerable skill and power toward destruction rather than protection—the Mountain Lord had sighed deeply. His heart, in that moment, had been filled with complex emotions that he did not fully articulate but that Zhan Yunwei, knowing her father as she did, could read in the set of his shoulders and the particular quality of his silence.

Yue Zhiheng, for his part, had not expected this summons. His grandfather, who had maintained his seclusion in the weapon-refining pavilion for years without interruption, had somehow learned of his grandson's marriage—and not merely learned of it, but had decided to act upon the knowledge by requesting that Yue Zhiheng bring Zhan Yunwei to meet him. The speed with which the old man had received and responded to the information suggested that his seclusion, whatever else it might be, was not absolute isolation from the household's affairs.

He looked at Zhan Yunwei with an expression that was, as always, difficult to read. "Shall we go?"

Zhan Yunwei understood, with a clarity that drew partly from her previous life's experience and partly from her own careful reading of the situation, exactly what this invitation meant and why it had been extended.

The old man meant well. She was certain of this. Perhaps he could not disobey the Spirit Emperor's arrangements—the political framework within which the Yue family operated left limited room for individual defiance. But he also cherished the friendship that had once existed between himself and Zhan Yunwei's father, a connection forged on the Immortal Mountain in an earlier era when such friendships between families of different allegiances were still possible. The only thing the old man could do—the only gesture available to him within the constraints of his position and his physical condition—was to make her life within the Yue family marginally easier. To signal, through the act of receiving her, that she was not without allies.

The Yue family was a complicated, often uncomfortable household—a mixed collection of personalities and loyalties that did not always align. But regardless of the family's internal complexities, Yue Zhiheng now held absolute power within it. His authority was unquestioned, his decisions final.

And regardless of whether Zhan Yunwei had any feelings for Yue Zhiheng—regardless of how awkward her status within the household remained—if Yue Zhiheng took her to the front hall today, publicly and deliberately, it would constitute an unmistakable acknowledgment. An acknowledgment that he recognized her as his wife. That she held a legitimate position within the family's structure. That she was not to be dismissed, ignored, or treated as an inconvenience.

Those within the household who harbored ulterior motives—who might otherwise have tested the boundaries of what they could say or do to a new bride whose husband paid her no visible attention—would have to think very carefully before acting on those impulses.

In her previous life, Zhan Yunwei had refused this kindness when it was offered. She had been passive then, and indifferent, retreating into herself and shutting out the world rather than engaging with it on its own terms. The refusal had cost her, though she hadn't fully understood the price at the time.

This time, she had made a different choice before she even arrived. This time, she intended to face life positively, to engage with it rather than withdraw. And this—this invitation, this small but significant act of public acknowledgment—was exactly the kind of opportunity that positive engagement required her to accept.

Zhan Yunwei nodded, and when she spoke, her voice carried the decisiveness of someone who had already weighed the options and found only one acceptable answer. "Let's go."

"Then let's go."

The two left the courtyard together and began making their way through the Yue family's residence. The grounds had been bestowed upon the family by the Spirit Emperor several years ago—a grant of territory and property that carried with it the implicit weight of imperial favor. The residence itself, however, was not as extravagant as the mansions belonging to nobles in the royal city. Yue Zhiheng's particular favor with the emperor had only developed over the last two years, and the family had not moved to the royal city in response. The residence remained as it had been—comfortable, well-maintained, but deliberately modest by the standards of those who wielded comparable influence.

Along the way, celestial servants and maids stationed at various points throughout the grounds greeted them as they passed. Some of the greetings carried warmth. Others did not.

Yue Zhiheng, walking beside her with his hands clasped behind his back, spoke without preamble or particular emphasis, as though offering a piece of practical advice about the weather. "If you hear anything unpleasant later, just curse back."

Zhan Yunwei hadn't expected him to say that. The instruction landed with the slight absurdity of someone advising a guest to bring an umbrella to a dinner party. Who began a meeting with relatives on the very second day of a marriage with a war of words? What kind of household operated on those terms?

"Who would say unpleasant things?" she asked, genuinely uncertain whether he was being serious.

Yue Zhiheng thought about his collection of strange and wonderful household members—the particular personalities that had accumulated around him over the years, drawn by his reputation or his power or simply by the gravitational pull of someone who was himself so fundamentally unusual. He considered them for a moment, and then said, with perfect calm and not a trace of irony: "Anything is possible."

Zhan Yunwei choked slightly on the response. "I don't know how to curse." The admission felt almost embarrassing to make aloud. Cursing—crude, aggressive verbal combat—was strictly forbidden on the Immortal Mountain where she had been raised. It simply wasn't something she had ever been taught, never been exposed to, never had any reason to practice.

Yue Zhiheng glanced at her sideways, and the expression that crossed his features was something between a sneer and genuine assessment. Cold, certainly. But not entirely unkind—or perhaps merely practical in a way that, coming from him, approximated kindness. "Then learn. I'm not in the manor most of the time. Even when I am present, I won't help you."

The statement carried no cruelty, only honest fact. He could curse—and when he did, he did so with an unpleasantness that had become something of a legend among those unfortunate enough to have experienced it firsthand. But his preferred method of dealing with people who annoyed or threatened him was direct action rather than verbal sparring. The result was that even those household members who might have wanted to say something provocative or cruel found themselves unable to—not because they lacked the desire, but because they understood, with the clarity that comes from having witnessed the consequences of testing Yue Zhiheng's patience, that the cost of doing so was simply too high.

Zhan Yunwei walked in silence for several steps, processing this unexpected orientation to her new life. In her previous life, she had been passive. Indifferent. She had shut herself inside and ignored everything and everyone around her, building walls so high and so complete that nothing from the outside world could penetrate them. It had felt, at the time, like a reasonable strategy for survival.

This time, she had chosen differently. This time, she intended to face life as it came—directly, actively, without retreating behind silence and withdrawal. And the first thing that choice demanded of her, apparently, in the Yue family of all places, was learning how to curse?