Beneath a churning sea of clouds, the wind howled across the mountain face. Rock split under the gale. The pines clinging to the cliffs bent and groaned, and the night felt like the edge of some forgotten hell.
A dark shape punched through the cloud cover and plummeted.
A gray shadow accelerated after it.
Thirty feet from the ground, the gray figure caught the dark one. Their combined weight drove them faster, not slower. Then — a sharp crack at the gray figure's waist, and two red ribbons exploded outward. They snapped taut in the screaming wind, stretching twenty, thirty feet in an instant, each more than three feet wide. They caught the air like wings dipped in blood.
The wind held them. Slowed them.
Just before impact, the man in gray drove his palm downward. The blow struck the snow-packed earth with a thunderclap. A bowl-shaped crater blew open. The ice layer fractured outward in spider-web cracks. Between the ribbons, the gale, and that single devastating palm strike, the two touched down alive.
The ice recoil traveled straight up through the gray figure's legs and into his chest. A second force, uninvited, pushed back through his body and rattled his organs.
The corners of his lips curved slightly.
"You——"
The man in black had long since lost the veil across his face — the wind had stolen it somewhere above the clouds. But the dark cloth draped over his head still covered most of his features. This was Liu Yan. He laughed now, light and unhurried.
"Hahahaha... as I said before, you are simply too emotional. A man who feels this much — why would he drive his brothers away? Why would he kill his friends? I genuinely cannot understand it. But because of that, you will never be able to kill me." He pressed his sleeve to his face and walked away, leaving almost no mark in the snow.
Tang Li fell to one knee.
She pressed her hand to her chest and abdomen and knelt in the snow. Blood gathered at the corner of her lips — a small, dark bead against skin that remained somehow composed. Her mouth still held the shape of a smile, which made the blood look almost decorative.
If you fall to my hand in these mountains, you'll jump from the cliff yourself... I fight to save you... and you repay me with a palm strike.
Ayan. You really are...
She exhaled, and the thought broke apart. Then came a wet surge from somewhere deep, and she pressed her hand to her mouth. Blood soaked through her fingers and dropped into the snow below.
She sat in it a moment without moving.
Fang Zhou was buried now. Resting. Whatever peace she had managed to carve out of all of this — it had gone into the ground with him.
And now the consequences waited, patient and without mercy.
Tang Li knelt in the shattered snow. Her silver hair whipped through the blizzard, half of it plastered dark with blood. The red ribbons at her waist lay stretched across the broken ice, their ends snapping in the wind. She looked like something carved — red and white against the mountain dark, beautiful in the way that ruins are beautiful.
A soft sound on the ice. Footsteps, deliberate and careful, picking across the destroyed surface toward her.
"Mr. Tang..."
She looked up.
A woman approached through the drifting snow, wrapped in dark fur, no jewelry in her hair. Her face was straight-boned and striking — twenty years old, perhaps, and carrying a tiredness in her features that didn't belong to her age. She walked close, then stopped, looking down.
"What's happened to you?"
Tang Li's expression settled back into its familiar ease, like water finding its level. "Ah Who," she said softly. "You've come."
The woman in fur swept her gaze across the red ribbon, the blood on Tang Li's body, the ruined snow. "He fell from the cliff. You went after him."
"Yes."
"And after you saved him —" she paused — "he hurt you."
A quiet exhale. Not quite a sigh.
"Girl Ah Who." Tang Li rose from the ice. Her injuries were severe — that much was clear from what she didn't show. But her hands and feet moved without stumbling, without trembling. A pearl that has rolled through mud is still a pearl. "The snow is bitter cold. He's safely down. Please go back before the cold reaches you. I'd hate to be the reason you suffer for it."
She smiled when she said it. The smile was real.
The woman in fur didn't move. "My child... is he well? Lately?"
"Very well." No hesitation, no edge. "He has an unusual temper. Be careful with him."
"He is what he is," the woman said slowly. Her eyes drifted to the bloodstains. "When something takes hold of him — a feeling, a purpose — he will cross a thousand miles in a single night to follow it through. But he is not a cruel person. Willful, yes. Proud, certainly. Perhaps he has been hurt in ways that made him harder than he needed to be. If he truly wanted you dead..." She left the sentence where it was.
"I know," Tang Li said, gently. "Miss Ah Who — go home without worry. I'll resolve the matter of the Xinggui Nine Heart Pills at the Romantic Shop. And please — don't mention that you saw me here tonight."
The woman in fur smiled. It was a clean, uncomplicated smile. "A drifting person of humble station — what business do I have accepting politeness from Prince Tang? I owe you more than I can say." She gave a small bow. Then, quietly: "Mr. Tang carries heavy burdens and suffers much. Please. Take care of yourself."
Tang Li's lips parted as if to answer. Then she stopped. She watched the woman in fur walk away through the snow until the storm swallowed her.
She is Feng Feng's mother. Liu Yan's maid. The woman Liu Yan cannot stop reaching toward and cannot bring himself to hold. She is a good person.
Tang Li looked up at the peaks — hundreds of feet of ice and stone vanishing into the storm above.
She pressed both hands to her chest and abdomen. Her brow drew in, just slightly. Then she shook her sleeves, and the red ribbons still wrapped at her waist unspooled and came into her hands — what remained of them, anyway.
This ribbon had a history. It was the life's work of Master Pujuan of Lianhua Temple in Luoyang — a renowned craftsman whose reputation had outlasted most of what he made. The silk came from a small red insect, spun into thread a hundred times finer than ordinary silk and stronger by a measure that defied comparison. Swords would not cut it. Water would not rot it. Fire would not catch it. Because blades couldn't touch it, it could never be cut into fitted garments — so Master Pujuan had woven it as it was: a single piece, three feet wide and forty or fifty feet long. Worth more than most people would see in a lifetime.
In all his years of work, Master Pujuan had treasured this cloth above everything else he made and refused every offer for it. Tang Li had crossed his path some years ago, under circumstances she rarely discussed, and when the master died, he left the ribbon to her. She had known what waited on this mountain. She had packed the ribbon before dawn.
Now she gathered what remained of the red silk, tucked it away, stood straight, and began climbing again.
Her broken body moved through the blizzard like a falcon in a dive — rising and falling in rhythm with the mountain's face, gaining height. Within moments, she was dozens of feet up, still climbing, disappearing into the dark.
Chi Yun reached the base of the cliff as the first gray light touched the sky.
He had come down the rock face the hard way — hand by hand, through ice and vertigo — and his martial skill had kept him alive through three separate slips that should have finished him. By the time his feet touched flat ground, the night was almost spent.
He searched.
The snow was a ruin. Cracked ice, blood in the drifts, deep impressions where something heavy had landed. But no bodies. No cloth. No trace of either person beyond a shallow line of footprints pressed into the blood-stained snow — faint, feminine in stride — leading away from the site.
He stared at them for a moment, then followed.
Chi Yun had not been gone long when Wan Yu Yuedan and Zhong Chun Ji arrived at the base of the peak. They circled the mountain once, then again. They did not find the blood-soaked ice.
Wan Yu Yuedan exhaled. "We can't find anyone. That may mean whoever fell isn't lost. It's cold. We should go back."
Zhong Chun Ji scanned the cliff face. "What if they're... what if they got caught on the rock somewhere and they're..." She couldn't finish it.
"Maoyang Peak is nearly vertical. There's almost no ledge to catch on." Wan Yu Yuedan kept his voice even.
Her voice dropped lower. "But what if he's... what if there's nothing left to find?"
Wan Yu Yuedan smiled, calm as ever. "Miss Zhong — don't let your mind run ahead of you. I believe Tang Li is not the kind of person who dies from a fall."
At the words don't let your mind run ahead of you, color rose in Zhong Chun Ji's cheeks without warning. She went still, looking at him — the clean lines of his face, the unshakeable composure he wore like a second skin. She thought, suddenly and unbidden: if it had been him who fell —
She said nothing.
"What do we do now?" she asked quietly. "We brought sixty-three people from the Romantic Shop to heel. But he never told us what to do after."
"Now," Wan Yu Yuedan said, "we go back to the palace. We say both of them are fine. And we wait for him to come home."