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He looked at her without bitterness. Just looked. And somewhere in the back of his mind, an old memory surfaced — the first time he had met Senior Sister Hu Mian.
Hua Xiangwan had been wound tight that day. The moment Hu Mian appeared, she stepped in front of him like a wall and said, flat and direct: "I'm telling you now, don't try anything. No matter how good-looking he is, you don't touch him."
Hu Mian blinked, looking a little wounded. "Can I... at least have a drink with him?"
"No."
"Then talk to him?"
"Through me. You talk through me."
Hu Mian went quiet for a beat. Then she waved her hand like she was swatting away a fly. "Fine. Fine, forget it, let's eat. He's pretty, so what. Not that impressive." She turned and walked ahead, hips swaying, and didn't look back.
Xie Changji and Hua Xiangwan followed. After a moment, he said carefully: "If you speak to your senior sister like that, she might be upset."
"If she's happy, then I'm not." Hua Xiangwan didn't even slow her step.
"Why?"
She glanced sideways at him. "Because I have you in my heart. That means no one else gets to come close. Not even her."
I have you in my heart. No one else gets to come close.
He knew that was the past. Two hundred years ago.
And yet he had never been able to fully separate himself from it — as if those two hundred years were a thread still attached to him, tugging.
He looked at her now, at the bright expectation in her eyes, and couldn't find a single word to say.
Hua Xiangwan noticed his silence and felt, for no clear reason, a flicker of guilt. She knew his temperament. She turned to Yun Qingxu and said, "Why don't we go in first and see if there's anything worth finding?"
"I'll go."
Xie Changji's voice was quiet but certain. Both of them turned.
Hua Xiangwan looked at him, surprised. "You want to?"
"You come with me." He met her eyes. "When we're done, tell me something."
"Alright."
She agreed without hesitation. She knew he never pushed past what was reasonable, and even if he did ask something hard, she was capable of lying. She moved quickly. "Then let's go in. Best case, you drug her." She pressed a small pouch into his hand. "If she's too guarded for that, then—"
Yun Qingxu produced a narrow paper tube. "I have something here that works, but only if she's caught off guard."
Xie Changji nodded once. He tucked his sword into the Qiankun bag, reached out and caught Hua Xiangwan's wrist, then turned toward the door. "Let's go."
The three of them slipped into the establishment under a concealment technique, walking through the front door like they belonged there.
Inside, Hua Xiangwan swept the space with her divine sense. She caught the sound of a group being summoned to the backyard to receive distinguished guests.
"Backyard," she said, and pulled Xie Changji along.
In the backyard, they each grabbed one of the staff, swapped clothes, and fell quietly into the procession heading toward Gu Xing's private room.
Xie Changji was dressed as a male entertainer, a light veil across his face. Hua Xiangwan disguised herself as a musician. Yun Qingxu changed too, but worried about the man they'd left behind waking up alone, so he stayed near the door to monitor.
When the steward pushed the door open, Hua Xiangwan and Xie Changji went in.
Gu Xing was reclining on her side, speaking to someone nearby, red robe half-open. Everyone who entered dropped to their knees. She lifted her hand. "Rise."
"My lord," the steward began, "these are tonight's finest offerings from our establishment. Please—" He gestured. They removed their veils and looked up.
The moment Xie Changji raised his eyes, the room went still.
His gaze was cold and clear and utterly indifferent to the effect it had. People stared. The steward lost his train of thought entirely. Gu Xing sat up slowly, studied him for a long moment, then smiled and pointed. "That one."
The steward blinked. Gu Xing tossed out a high-grade spirit stone and waved Xie Changji forward. "Come here, beauty."
Hua Xiangwan, arranging herself among the musicians, watched from the corner of her eye. Something about Gu Xing nagged at her — a familiarity she couldn't place.
The steward pocketed the spirit stone with barely-concealed relief and bowed himself out, leaving only a handful of musicians and performers behind. A barrier went up around where Xie Changji and Gu Xing sat. Hua Xiangwan could see them clearly but couldn't hear a word. She kept her head angled toward her instrument and watched from the edge of her vision while mapping the room.
Gu Xing leaned toward Xie Changji, her red robe falling open at the shoulder. Her voice was light, amused. "Pretty face like that and you sit there like a statue. This your first day?"
Xie Changji said nothing.
She tilted her head. "No one ever teach you how to please a woman?"
She moved closer. He didn't flinch.
She clicked her tongue. "What a waste of a beautiful shell." Her hand rose toward his face, and she lowered her voice to something almost gentle. "No one wants to blaspheme a god. What they want is a god dragged down from heaven into the dust of the living. If you want someone to feel desire," she nodded toward the performer dancing nearby, "you have to feel it first. Look at her."
Xie Changji looked.
The performer moved with naked hunger in her eyes, but her smile shaped it into something soft — not aggressive, just irresistible.
Gu Xing tossed out another spirit stone. "Take it off."
The performer smiled and began to move, making theater of every inch, every layer, peeling it back slowly — until the last piece, when Gu Xing raised a hand: "Stop. Save the last one for the room."
The performer knelt in gratitude and withdrew.
Gu Xing turned back to Xie Changji. "Now do you understand?"
He looked at her without answering.
She laughed softly. "You really can't learn even that?"
"Serving someone out of performance is empty," Xie Changji said, his voice even. "That's not desire. It's labor."
"But besides that face of yours," Gu Xing's eyes carried a thin edge of mockery, "what else do you have to offer?"
Xie Changji held her gaze. "You can't give warmth. Can't give preference. Can't give the most important place in someone's heart. You're dull. You're flat. Plain water would be more interesting. If you can't even offer desire — what exactly are you bringing to a woman?"
"Whether she likes it or not," Xie Changji picked up the wine cup from the table and drank, "is not your decision."
Gu Xing's expression shifted. A soft laugh escaped her. "Bold words, for someone who ended up here."
Then she moved.
He caught her wrist before she'd finished the motion. She let herself fall against the pull, soft and deliberate, and hooked his belt before he could step back, pulling herself close. She looked up at him from a breath's distance — close enough that to anyone else in the room, they were practically touching.
"Does she care?" Gu Xing asked quietly.
Xie Changji went still.
"You know her temper. Do you dare turn around and look at her right now?"
Silence.
"I don't care," he said finally. His voice was dry.
"You don't care?"
"She said once she only wanted to be with me. That she was just there for me. That I belonged only to her and that I was the only one in her heart." He looked down. "I can do the same."
Gu Xing stared at him.
"Whatever path she walked, I can walk it."
"Whatever she could accept, I can accept."
"If she doesn't care — that's fine." His voice was barely above a murmur. "I can wait. As long as it takes."
"Xie Changji." Gu Xing's brow creased. "You're forcing yourself."
"Didn't she force it, once?" He raised his eyes to hers. "Senior Sister — I'm just walking her road. One time. The way she once did."
To understand the pain she carried.
To follow her footprints, step by step, through two hundred years.
He was cold by nature. He had never understood love or hatred the way others felt them. He had never understood why she had thrown herself across the boundary between life and death, or why she had endured two hundred years of it. So he would walk it himself.
She was his path. He followed.
"What's wrong with that?"
Why had Kunxuzi, Hua Xiangwan, and this woman who had lived through those two hundred years all been allowed to return — while he had been left to find his own way out from the wind and snow between realms?
"Xie Changji." Gu Xing's voice was quieter now. "She doesn't love you. She can't make you the only one. You're doing this because it seems right — but being right doesn't make you irreplaceable."
"Then I'll make myself irreplaceable."
Gu Xing went silent.
After a moment, something like amusement crossed her face. "Do you dare say that to Awan?"
"Say it or not," Xie Changji said, as if genuinely puzzled by the question, "what difference does it make?"
Gu Xing shook her head. She was about to say something more when her expression shifted — sharp, sudden. Without a word, she flung a scroll into the air and lunged for it.
Xie Changji was already moving. He grabbed her wrist, caught her before she could reach the painting. But she threw it wide, and from the scroll a massive beast erupted. She seized its tail and shouted: "Go!"
The beast lurched forward. Even braced as he was, Xie Changji was dragged off his feet and pulled into the scroll.
"Xie Changji!" Hua Xiangwan was on her feet, running.
Yun Qingxu burst in from the doorway. He grabbed Hua Xiangwan's arm; she grabbed Xie Changji's. They snapped together like a chain — and were all three yanked in after him.
Inside the scroll was the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons, a churning sea of ghosts and monsters. Gu Xing looked back at the three of them and cursed under her breath. She screamed at the beast: "Faster!"
The beast obeyed. It wheeled around and lunged at Hua Xiangwan with open jaws.
Xie Changji released her and drew his sword in the same motion. The blade flashed. Gu Xing dissolved into light and vanished into the chaos of the Hundred Demons.
Hua Xiangwan let go of Xie Changji and gave chase. He called after her, sharp and urgent: "Hua Xiangwan!"
She didn't stop.
Behind them, Gu Xing flung the scroll in wide arcs, and wave after wave of demons spilled out. Xie Changji moved like water, sword cutting through everything in his path. Hua Xiangwan followed the corridor he carved.
She caught Gu Xing within moments, closing her fingers on her sleeve. "I see you—"
The fabric tore.
Hua Xiangwan's voice died.
On Gu Xing's shoulder, half-revealed, was a painting of acacia blossoms.
She knew those flowers.
The recognition lasted only a second. Gu Xing's foot connected with her chest and sent her stumbling backward. Hua Xiangwan recovered, grabbed her arm, wrenched it back, and threw the binding rope.
Gu Xing felt her body losing strength. She didn't try to fight it. Instead, her free hand found the shard of broken iron at her side, and she drove it into Hua Xiangwan's chest.
The shard carried a familiar energy — a terrible, intimate familiarity. Hua Xiangwan felt it land like a key finding a lock inside her body. Blood surged. Pain detonated through her chest and throat. Her grip collapsed.
Gu Xing tore free, flung open a scroll, and dove in.
"Xie Changji!" Hua Xiangwan's voice was already thinning.
He was there. White coat, three steps away. He went in after her.
Hua Xiangwan stepped back and felt arms catch her. Her whole body was shaking. The blood in her veins moved wrong, roiling, painful. She was pale and couldn't produce sound.
Yun Qingxu steadied her and pressed two fingers to her wrist. A beat passed.
His face changed.
"Poison," he said.
Hua Xiangwan looked up at him, slow and trembling. "Xue... Xue Zidan?"
The man holding her hesitated. Then, quietly: "Yes. It's me. Let me treat you first."
He sealed her meridians, lifted her, and opened a portal. They stepped through it together.
Outside, back in the ordinary world, Xue Zidan carried her out of the small building, traded a spirit stone for a room without slowing down, and kicked the door shut behind them.
Hua Xiangwan, held against his chest, felt ice forming across her skin. Her whole body shook. "How did you... how did you know..."
"The moment word came about your wedding, I knew you'd try something." He set her down on the bed with practiced efficiency, sealed the room with a barrier, and pulled open her outer robe. "Once the Demon Lord's Blood Order activates, it accelerates the poison. I was worried. My real identity isn't useful here, but Yun Qingxu's is." He paused, something sharp and dry in his voice. "Besides — I'd heard things about Xie Changji. I wanted to see for myself whether you'd manage to fall into the same trap twice."
Hua Xiangwan lay against the pillow, the pain smearing her thoughts. She looked at his face and felt something slow and complicated move through her.
He shouldn't be here.
That was the thought she kept arriving at.
No matter how people outside had always assumed she was taking advantage of him, he had known the truth. Between them it was never exploitation. It was debt.
He had treated her injuries in secret across two centuries. From the day she came to the Medicine Sect, through the slow unfolding of something deeper, through her engagement to Wen Shaoqing and the rupture that followed — he had never stopped being her physician. Only ever that. And even now, hearing that she had entered the Demon Lord Trial, he had come.
Her thoughts broke apart as he drove the needles in.
Her chest and shoulder. One cut had gone black, but it was already lighter than before.
"Who changed your blood?" he asked.
She couldn't answer. She wasn't certain she'd heard him correctly.
He glanced at her once and didn't press. He worked in silence, drawing the toxin out with the needles, administering medicine with quick, clean precision. When it was done, he looked at her — shivering, pale, sheets pulled tight — and after a moment's pause, lay down beside her.
He took her hand and fed spiritual energy into her body, steady and slow. Two full cycles. The ice coating her skin began to loosen. The violent cold retreated.
Hua Xiangwan's eyes opened.
Xue Zidan felt the shift in the spiritual energy around her the instant before she was fully conscious. He rolled off the bed, smoothed his robe, and had reassembled himself completely into the composed, upright posture of "Yun Qingxu" by the time he reached the door and opened it.
Xie Changji was standing on the other side.
Sword in hand. Eyes level and cold.
The night air moved between them.
"What were you doing in there?" Xie Changji's voice was quiet and very still.
Xue Zidan let a brief look of surprise cross his face, then adjusted to something sheepish and earnest. "Senior, you're back. It seems Hua Shao was poisoned — her body was covered in ice when I found her. Fortunately my cultivation method is compatible with hers, so I was able to treat her and draw out the toxin. She's stable now."
Xie Changji didn't move. He repeated two words: "Compatible method."
"Yun Qingxu" bowed his head as if faintly embarrassed. "To be honest — the Dao Sect's heart method shares some roots with Tianjian Sect's. I've studied both, and made small adjustments between them. So if Hua Shao ever needs it again, I could help."
He glanced back into the room, then turned. "This poison requires three treatments. For the next three days, I may need to come each time. I hope senior will understand."
He bowed.
"My apologies."