Yu Wanyin had long since grown out of the phase where she imagined the world revolving around her. She was a working adult, not some middle school girl lost in daydreams. In a situation like this, everyone was drowning — who floated back up depended entirely on their own ability. Besides, Xiahou Bo had sought her out personally, met with her, and even handed over a token to Zhang Wangbadang. Had he told Xiahou Dan about any of that?
She waved a hand. "Don't worry. I understand."
Xiahou Dan was quiet for a long moment before saying, "I won't stab you in the back."
"Yeah, of course not," Yu Wanyin said, only half listening. "You're a good person."
Xiahou Dan: "."
The Empress Dowager's faction moved swiftly against General Luo's son, who had been making loud, obvious noises about his dissatisfaction. They turned around and dug up a charge of lax military discipline and exploitation of the common people, impeached a deputy general in his army, and installed a civilian from the Ministry of War to oversee operations.
King Duan's advisors gathered in a single room and argued in circles. Some said the Empress Dowager had finally gotten the emperor fully under her thumb, which was why she'd grown this brazen. Others countered that an emperor who personally executed the Minister of Revenue in open court didn't look like a puppet of anyone — she was probably just losing her mind.
Xiahou Bo sat at the head of the table and listened to the debate with patient amusement before smiling and saying, "The situation is still unclear, but certain plans can move forward regardless. It's time to bring down Grand Tutor Wei."
Xu Yao's heart lurched.
Xiahou Bo turned to him. "Are you ready?"
Xu Yao's family had fallen from grace years ago, and King Duan had been the one to pull him from the wreckage. Since then, he had quietly fixated on Wei Taifu — watching, waiting, planning revenge. The Grand Tutor was a careful man, one of the rare people in the Empress Dowager's circle who actually possessed a functioning brain, and he had never once slipped up.
Until recently. Xu Yao had finally caught him, and the effort had cost him enormously.
"The witness is secured," Xu Yao said.
Xiahou Bo spoke slowly, his voice measured. "Grand Tutor Wei has a silver tongue. He charmed the emperor completely, wound himself around the throne like ivy. One witness alone may not be enough to convict him. I'll work on finding another in the coming days. Consider it partial repayment for what happened to your father."
At the mention of his old father, Xu Yao's face went white. "Thank you, Your Highness."
Xiahou Bo patted him warmly on the shoulder. "When Grand Tutor Wei falls, I'll move to make things right. Perhaps we can bring Elder Xu home."
Xu Yao lowered his head so Xiahou Bo couldn't read his expression.
A voice rang in his memory, cold and unhurried: "Only I would dare rescue Elder Xu. King Duan wouldn't — he's a thief who fears his own shadow, afraid the truth will surface. Once you're no longer useful to him, your old father will simply die in exile. Believe it or not?"
Did he believe it?
His father had been a loyalist through and through, a man shaped by the old emperor's favor. He had poured his heart into serving the throne, backed the tyrant with everything he had, and ended up destroyed for it. Xu Yao had learned to despise the emperor's weakness — and despise Wei Taifu's treachery even more.
But he had been blind about one thing. He had never once stopped to ask himself where a man as cautious as Grand Tutor Wei had found the confidence to step forward and frame his father in the first place.
A few days later, the young crown prince's birthday arrived, and the Empress Dowager put on a lavish palace banquet in his honor.
King Duan was in attendance.
The moment he walked in, not a single member of the Empress Dowager's faction acknowledged him. Xiahou Bo wore his usual face — gracious, polished, the picture of refinement — and delivered a congratulatory address to the little prince with elegant composure. He stayed long enough not to draw comment, then excused himself early on the pretext of some urgent matter.
He drifted through the palace grounds in the dark until he found a desolate courtyard near the Cold Palace.
This was the meeting place he had arranged with Xie Yonger through encrypted correspondence. His dark guards had already swept the perimeter and confirmed no one was present. One of them gave him a quiet nod.
Xiahou Bo walked into the long-abandoned hut.
No lights inside. Dim and still. Xie Yonger stood by the window and turned at the sound of his entrance, smiling. "Your Highness."
"Yong'er," Xiahou Bo said, his voice soft with concern, "I haven't seen you in so long. You've grown thin."
In the overgrown weeds beneath the window, Yu Wanyin thought flatly: He's certainly living up to his reputation.
She had been lying in that grass for a full hour — longer than the dark guards had been there. There was a faint evening breeze tonight, and she lay completely still, breathing slow and even, hidden inside the wind, unfound and unnoticed.
The meeting place was well concealed, but it wasn't impenetrable. Yu Wanyin had read the script.
This tryst had been written in The Devil's Favorite Concubine: Transmigrated, and she happened to remember it. If events continued following the original text, Xiahou Bo would bring up Grand Tutor Wei next.
Sure enough, fragments of conversation drifted out through the window.
"...Some time ago, Grand Tutor Wei's son ran his horse through a crowded street and killed a commoner. The victim's family traveled to the capital to file a complaint — not just about the incident itself, but accusing the local salt inspector of corruption, embezzlement, and bleeding the people dry."
Xie Yonger: "Blocking an imperial petition is a serious crime."
Xiahou Bo: "It is. The salt inspector knew the complaint was coming and contacted Wei Taifu privately. Wei Taifu, eager to protect his son, conspired with him to bury the whole affair. To convict Wei Taifu, we need to unearth this case — and we need a specific piece of evidence to do it."
"What is it?"
"A priceless treasure. A Buddhist relic. It appears on the salt inspector's gift ledger, and he almost certainly used it to bribe the Grand Tutor. My people searched the Wei estate and found nothing — it's likely Wei Taifu sent it into the palace and had his sister, Concubine Wei, keep it..."
Xie Yonger listened carefully. She was thinking about something — something from A Thousand Trees Bloom in the East Wind at Night. It had mentioned a ghost ball carved from ivory in Concubine Wei's quarters: five concentric layers, exquisitely crafted, kept as a decorative offering in the inner Buddhist hall. In reality, a relic was hidden in its hollow heart.
Xie Yonger said, "In that case, I'll steal it for you."
Yu Wanyin, still flat in the weeds: "..."
Impressive.
Other transmigrators, the so-called Chosen Daughters of Fate, worked this hard. They were better than you and they put in the hours.
And from the breathless warmth in Xie Yonger's voice right now, it sounded like she was genuinely a little dazzled by Xiahou Bo.
Yu Wanyin quietly pinched her own thigh.
Xiahou Bo laughed. "Steal it? How would you even know the relic is with Concubine Wei, Yong'er?"
Xie Yonger stumbled, silent for a beat, then managed, "Well... if Your Highness has reasoned it out, then surely..."
"You give me too much credit."
In the grass, Yu Wanyin pinched her thigh again — not to hold back laughter this time, but to stay grounded. Because she had just worked something out.
Xiahou Bo was not a transmigrator.
If he had come from the same layer as her, had read The Devil's Favorite Concubine: Transmigrated and crossed over, he would have known immediately that Xie Yonger was a transmigrator too. He would have made contact right away — they would have been natural allies, with no reason to hide from each other. Even if he'd come from Xie Yonger's layer alone and only read A Thousand Trees Bloom in the East Wind at Night, one look at Xie Yonger picking up a guitar would have been enough to clue him in. In that story, Xie Yonger had no grievance with him. There was no reason they wouldn't have recognized each other by now.
And yet here they were, still speaking in the stilted, formal cadences of their respective characters, with Xie Yonger continuing to spin her performance for someone she believed was the original occupant of his body.
So he was the original. No doubt about it.
This entire exchange matched the Transmigrated text word for word. Both of their trajectories remained exactly on script.
In other words: the faint, stubborn hope Yu Wanyin had been nursing — that four transmigrators might eventually call a truce and figure something out together — was dead.
Which left one outstanding mystery: if Xiahou Bo was the original, why had he gone out of his way to approach Yu Wanyin?
Was it simply because she was the tyrant's new favorite? Or had Xie Yonger, trying to cut off any potential romantic entanglement between Yu Wanyin and Xiahou Bo, said something to poison his opinion of her — and accidentally made him curious instead?
Yu Wanyin was still turning this over when her focus slipped and she forgot to regulate her breathing.
Footsteps in the grass. Close.
She went completely still. Cold sweat pricked along her skin.
The steps drew nearer. A fire-fold flickered in and out of the dark. Someone walked into her field of vision, and through the gaps between the grass blades, she made out a face she almost recognized.
It was Xu Yao.
Still in disguise, still dressed as one of King Duan's guards. Yu Wanyin was silently praying he would walk past her when he stopped. His gaze dropped. His eyes found hers — directly, unmistakably.
Yu Wanyin held her breath so hard her heartbeat felt like it might crack her chest open.
From inside the hut, Xiahou Bo's voice drifted out, quiet and unhurried. "What is it?"
Xu Yao paused. He extinguished the fire-fold. "Your Highness. There appear to be palace attendants approaching from the far end."
Xiahou Bo sighed softly, and took his leave of Xie Yonger with audible reluctance.
Yu Wanyin waited until every footstep had faded — until even the echo of Xie Yonger's retreating steps was gone — before she exhaled in a rush and seized her own collar with both hands.
Xu Yao had found her. And then he had lied to the King.
The alienation plan was working.
Yu Wanyin was still trying to recall the source text — specifically, how Xie Yonger was going to infiltrate Concubine Wei's quarters to steal the relic — when her maid Xiaomei appeared the next morning, bristling with righteous indignation.
"Noble Consort Xie and her group went to visit Concubine Wei today and spent the whole time talking badly about you, my lady!"
Yu Wanyin: "..."
Of course. She's using me as cover.
Steal from Concubine Wei while trashing my name in the same visit. That's efficient, Xie Yonger.
By afternoon, things moved fast. Concubine Wei swept through the inner palace with a full squad of guards, conducting searches, turning out pockets, upending furniture, overturning everything in sight. She'd had every concubine who'd visited her that morning checked one by one, and the racket was so tremendous it reached the Empress Dowager herself.
The Empress Dowager summoned Concubine Wei and demanded an explanation. Concubine Wei claimed she'd lost a piece of jewelry and suspected theft. Then she drew the Empress Dowager close and murmured something private in her ear.
Obviously, it was the relic.
The Empress Dowager understood the gravity of it and chose to look the other way. Let her keep searching.
What followed was not pleasant. Countless eunuchs were whipped. Palace maids slapped. A storm that swept through every corner of the palace grounds.
Yu Wanyin didn't go to watch. She sat in her side chamber, cracking sunflower seeds.
Then her maid rushed in with a report: a small thief had been caught in the back courtyard.
Yu Wanyin went to look. A young eunuch she didn't recognize was cornered against the wall, head down, shaking, refusing to say a word about why he'd come or who had sent him.
By now, Yu Wanyin's default assumption for anything unexplained was: Xie Yonger. She took in the scene quickly, her eyes dropping to the ground near the eunuch's feet, where the soil was just slightly disturbed.
She smiled, calmly dismissed the eunuch, and sent everyone else away. Once the courtyard was empty, she crouched down and dug.
A rough, imperfect little bead came up out of the dirt.
You hid your stolen goods here to frame me if you got caught. Impressive work, Xie Yonger.
By evening, Concubine Wei had stopped being subtle. She arrived at Yu Wanyin's door with soldiers, splitting into three groups: one to tear up the courtyard, one to ransack the inner rooms, and one to hold Yu Wanyin in place for a full search.
Concubine Wei's smile was sharp as broken glass. "The Emperor is with the Empress Dowager right now. No one's going to save you today, you little wretch."
Xiahou Dan: "Surprise — I left early."
Concubine Wei: "?"
Concubine Wei was dragged away.
Late that night, Yu Wanyin handed a food box to her maid. "Deliver this to Noble Consort Xie. Tell her it's a midnight snack I made for her personally."
Xie Yonger opened the box. Inside was one plain, bare steamed bun.
She broke it apart.
The relic fell into her palm.
The next morning, a representative of King Duan's faction stood up in court and formally accused Grand Tutor Wei of corruption, bribery, and obstructing an imperial petition. The evidence presented was complete: witnesses and physical proof alike.
Grand Tutor Wei was escorted to the Court of Judicial Review. Concubine Wei went to the Cold Palace.
Yu Wanyin was on her way to the Archives Hall for her shift when she ran into a cluster of concubines in the corridor. Xie Yonger was walking among them.
For years, Xiahou Dan had treated the entire harem with a single consistent policy: total indifference, or occasionally something worse. Everyone had quietly resigned themselves to it. And then Yu Wanyin had appeared out of nowhere and thrown the misery of everyone else's situation into sharp relief. It was hard not to resent someone for that, even if the logic was circular.
The most senior among the group, a Consort of the first rank, was the one who spoke first. "Well. Now that Concubine Wei has fallen, I suppose someone has cause to be pleased with herself. Though one does wonder how long such good fortune can last..."
Yu Wanyin's instinct was to glance over her shoulder and check whether Xiahou Dan was about to materialize from a shadowed corner.
He was not.
The senior consort, emboldened, pressed on. "Lady Yu seems to be waiting for someone. Can it be she truly thinks —"
"Sister." The voice was mild. Measured. "Mind what you say."
It was Xie Yonger.
The senior consort blinked, stung by the quiet rebuke, and swept away with her followers, tossing Yu Wanyin one last poisonous glance.
Xie Yonger lingered at the back of the group. She turned and looked at Yu Wanyin.
Yu Wanyin smiled at her with the warmth of a grandmother at a school play.
Xie Yonger's eyes slid away. There was a long, visible internal struggle. Then she made up her mind, shaped a single silent phrase with her lips: Thank you.
That evening, Yu Wanyin and Xiahou Dan went over the eavesdropping incident in a full debrief and arrived quickly at a shared conclusion: King Duan was the original occupant of his body. No question about it.
"Good," Xiahou Dan said. "He hasn't read the script. We can use that."
"And Xu Yao," Yu Wanyin added. "He covered for me, which means he's already having doubts about King Duan. He's one of the smartest advisors in the original text. If we can actually bring him over, he's worth ten ordinary people."
"So we need to drive a real wedge between them."
"Right. With Grand Tutor Wei locked up, Xu Yao will use the opportunity to investigate his father's case — he might even find a way to question the Grand Tutor directly. If we want to frame King Duan, we need to prepare in advance. Go get to Wei Taifu first and coordinate his testimony before Xu Yao can reach him."
"That works." Xiahou Dan paused. "Incidentally — my people have located Elder Xu. He's alive, but the years in exile weren't kind to him. He's old, frail, and..." He hesitated. "Not quite himself anymore. He doesn't recognize people."
"That's awful."
"It is."
Yu Wanyin shook her head slowly. "His suffering can't be wasted. Pin that on King Duan too. Say he had Elder Xu poisoned during the journey back — that's what drove him out of his mind."
"Brilliant."
Two scheming villains exchanged a satisfied handshake.
The Court of Judicial Review's prison was designed to hold the highest-ranking of criminals, and the further in you went, the heavier the guard. The deepest cells were dark except for a few torches guttering on the walls.
Grand Tutor Wei was huddled in the corner when he heard footsteps. He looked toward the entrance and his eyes went straight to the embroidered dragon-pattern boots.
He scrambled to his knees with the fluid ease of a man who had performed this exact movement many times, and launched immediately into his usual opening: "Your Majesty, your servant has been wrongly accused! I have given everything in your service, my sole desire to ease your burdens, and yet these petty men —"
Xiahou Dan didn't give him two sentences. "Do one final thing for me, and your family will be safe."
Wei Taifu heard the finality in that and frantically tried to force out tears. "If Your Majesty would only hear the full account! At the time, the salt inspector —"
Xiahou Dan fast-forwarded through that too. "Do you know who is truly responsible for your fall?"
Wei Taifu went very quiet.
He looked up slowly. The emperor's face was hidden in shadow, only a vague shape in the dark. But somehow, inexplicably, Wei Taifu was certain: whatever expression was on that face right now, it was not the expression of the tyrant he had spent years manipulating.
"The order came from King Duan," Xiahou Dan said. "The evidence was gathered by Xu Yao — Elder Xu's son, who changed his face and became King Duan's advisor. He's been waiting patiently for years to destroy you. Now here you are."
Wei Taifu's face went slack. "He's still alive?"
Xiahou Dan's smile was cold and thin. "When Elder Xu fell from grace, King Duan secretly saved the son and raised him to see you as his life's great enemy. Years of careful planning. Now you've been brought down."
Wei Taifu bowed his head. He bit down so hard his gums bled.
Xiahou Bo.
The emperor's voice came again, utterly flat, almost bored. "Isn't it almost funny? That good royal brother of mine used you to destroy the Xu family. Now he uses the Xu family to destroy you. Perfect symmetry. You have to admire the consistency."
Wei Taifu felt the room go black at the edges.
The emperor knew.
He knew all of this?
Years ago, Wei Taifu had joined the Empress Dowager's party but had never been trusted with real power — he'd been too cautious, too small, always passed over. Then King Duan had pulled him aside with a proposition: step forward and impeach Elder Xu. He would provide the evidence himself, fabricated so cleanly it could not be questioned.
It was the only genuinely dangerous gamble of Wei Taifu's career.
He had won. He had distinguished himself before the Empress Dowager and risen from there without pause.
And this emperor, this apparent fool they had all spent years maneuvering around, had been watching it all quietly. Like someone watching a play from the wings.
Wei Taifu shuddered so violently it shook the floor beneath him. The fight left him all at once. "Your servant deserves death. I know there is no road left. But I ask only one thing: how did Your Majesty learn all of this?"
All those years. He had been treated like an idiot to be led around, while — had the emperor been pretending the entire time?
But if he had seen everything clearly, why had he done nothing? Why had he let them pick off every last loyal official one by one?
"Oh," Xiahou Dan said, "I was mostly guessing. Threw it all out there and saw what you confirmed."
Wei Taifu: "..."
Wei Taifu: "?"
Xiahou Dan was already walking away. "If Xu Yao sends someone to ask you questions, answer honestly. Think of it as leaving something good for your family."
Yu Wanyin was at her usual post in the Archives Hall when a palace attendant came upstairs with a message: someone was waiting at the entrance, no authorization token, refusing to give his name, claiming she would recognize him when she saw him.
She went down a few steps and looked.
A young man she had never seen before stood looking up at her.
Yu Wanyin: "..."
Who are you?
The young man bowed. "Lady Yu."
Yu Wanyin: "!"
That voice. That particular quality of deep, long-carried grief. Xu Yao — without his disguise?
He had come today as himself, wearing the face of a condemned official's son. Without any disguise at all.
A bad feeling settled into her stomach.
"Come up," she said. She brought him to the second floor, sent away the attendants, and went straight to the point. "What happened?"
She hadn't expected him this quickly. Just this morning she and Xiahou Dan had been working through the logistics of retrieving Elder Xu, and the staged ambush scene they planned to use hadn't been arranged yet. More importantly — they hadn't prepared any kind of safe exit for Xu Yao. No defection route. No way for him to cross over cleanly and come out of it whole.
He'd arrived in a hurry, hadn't even bothered with a disguise. That usually meant something was right behind him.
When Xu Yao opened his mouth, she was not wrong. "I have urgent business with His Majesty. Would you be able to help me reach him? I don't have clearance to enter the palace grounds."
"I can't bring you in myself — I'd be stopped at the gate. But if you wait here, I can find His Majesty and bring him to you. The Archives Hall has guards. You'll be safe here without a token."
He caught the implication about what he was running from. "You know about the situation?"
"If it concerns Elder Xu's case, then yes, broadly. I know what's happening."
Something shifted in his expression. "His Majesty truly values you." He took a breath. "I've been investigating my father's wrongful conviction. But King Duan must have anticipated this — he had measures in place to eliminate me. A short while ago I returned to my room and drank a mouthful of tea. The taste was wrong. The burning started almost immediately. I realized I'd been poisoned."
"Wait —" Yu Wanyin stared at him. "You've been poisoned? Right now?"
She looked at him properly for the first time. His forehead was sheened with cold sweat.
She was on her feet immediately. "Stop talking. I'm getting a physician."
Xu Yao caught her arm. "King Duan wants me dead. If he's made that decision, there's no walking away from it. I stole a horse and got out through the back gate — shook the pursuit for now, but I can't enter the palace directly. This was the only place I could come." His grip tightened, just slightly. "Before I die, I have one thing to ask."
"You're not going to die. Stay calm."
Xu Yao swayed. Blood appeared at the corner of his mouth.
She moved toward the door again; he held on. The words came fast. "I served King Duan for years. I know his plans. Everything. If His Majesty can bring my father home, I will repay that debt with everything I have."
"He will," Yu Wanyin said immediately. "His Majesty keeps his word. Your father is already on his way home."
Xu Yao's eyes went red. For a moment he couldn't speak. "My father... my father spent his whole life hoping the emperor would become someone worth serving. If he comes back... he will give everything that remains of him to help."
He was afraid they wouldn't follow through. He was rushing to prove his father had value, that there was a reason worth rescuing him for.
Yu Wanyin's chest ached. She did not tell him about Elder Xu's current state. She said gently, "His Majesty holds your father's wisdom in the highest regard."
Xu Yao nodded. Then a cough tore through him and blood came up, and with visible effort he steadied himself. "The pursuit will arrive soon. I recorded King Duan's plans in a book. It isn't on me — I hid it in the Wei estate when I was there for the investigation. Kitchen, back window, three feet out, dig down. Don't go for it right away. King Duan will be watching you. Wait at least seven days —"
From below, a palace attendant screamed: "Fire!"
Xiahou Bo had not sent men to chase Xu Yao down.
He had sent men to set a fire.
One clean sweep: Xu Yao, whatever secrets he carried, whatever destination he'd run to, all of it — the Archives Hall — burned to nothing, ashes and silence.
Yu Wanyin threw herself against the window and looked down. The fire was, she had to admit, impressively even. It ringed the entire building in a perfect circle, not one gap left open. The guards' bodies were already on the ground nearby. King Duan's men had moved in fast, disabled the perimeter, and doused the wooden structure in oil before the first flame caught. Now the wind was with the fire, and it climbed toward the second floor with terrible speed.
Palace attendants were running from the far end with buckets. But the firefighting infrastructure of this era was not exactly robust, and counting on them felt optimistic at best.
The smoke hit her eyes and they began to water. She scrambled back to Xu Yao's side. "The ground floor is completely gone. We can't jump — we have to go through the stairs and out. Now."
She pulled together everything she remembered from the fire safety lessons drilled into her in school, stripped off her outer robe, grabbed the teapot, and soaked the fabric through. Then she reached for Xu Yao's robe. "Take this off."
Xu Yao was already barely upright. When she pulled at him, he went straight down to the floor.
Yu Wanyin: "..."
The building was nothing but fuel — not a single thing in the Archives Hall wasn't flammable. The first floor was already a wall of fire, the screams of the palace attendants rising through the smoke.
Xu Yao kept coughing blood, but his voice was steady. "Prepare yourself, then listen to me while you work."
She was already crying from the smoke, fumbling with her handkerchief, soaking it in the cold tea that remained.
"King Duan didn't know," Xu Yao said, "that I didn't bring the book with me. It's in the Wei estate. I hid it there during the investigation."
The tea was cooling fast. She grabbed the wet robe and wrapped it around her shoulders, pressed the damp cloth over her mouth and nose.
"Kitchen. Back window. Three feet out. Dig down. King Duan will have eyes on you — don't go immediately. At least seven days. Wait..."
Yu Wanyin ran for the stairs.
His voice broke apart behind her, trailing in and out through the smoke. "Get out. Don't stop for anyone. Find the Emperor... stay alive..."
The Archives Hall had been built beside a reflecting pool, as a precaution against exactly this kind of disaster.
The attendants had formed a chain from the pool to the entrance, pouring water over the doorway in waves, and they'd managed to beat back the worst of the flames enough to hold a narrow path open. They were shouting into the smoke when a figure came hurtling out of it with fire burning on her clothes.
Yu Wanyin cleared every last one of them and threw herself into the pool.
"Lady Yu!" Hands grabbed her, pulled her back onto the bank.
She stood there dripping, hair scorched, skin screaming at multiple points, eyes completely vacant. The rational part of her mind had been burned away somewhere back in that building. She was shaking down to her bones, and all she could hear was Xu Yao's voice, still looping: Don't stop for anyone...
A palace maid was saying something frantic and rushing toward her with arms outstretched.
Yu Wanyin looked at her and saw a stranger, every face around her suddenly distorted and wrong. She shoved the maid's hands away and broke into a stumbling run toward the palace interior.
She didn't know where she was going. She just knew she couldn't stop. Whatever was behind her had teeth.
She ran until her legs gave out and she pitched forward onto the ground, and that impact was enough to knock two degrees of clarity back into her head.
She looked up.
And saw the last person she wanted to encounter right now.
Xie Yonger looked stunned.
Xie Yonger had been in an impossible situation when Concubine Wei began her searches: there was nowhere safe to hide the relic, so she'd had someone plant it in Yu Wanyin's courtyard. If it wasn't found, no harm done; if it was, Yu Wanyin would take the blame. A clean solution.
Except the eunuch she'd sent had been caught in the act.
Xie Yonger had known, listening to his miserable report, that she'd lost this round. Yu Wanyin would obviously figure out who was behind it — she had precedent to work with. And Lady Yu was the tyrant's cherished favorite. If she wanted someone dealt with, she only had to say the word.
But Yu Wanyin hadn't reported her.
She'd even returned the relic.
Why?
Xie Yonger had been turning this over ever since. Did Yu Wanyin genuinely not want to fight? Had the changed circumstances — no romantic storyline, no reason to fixate on King Duan — kept her from going dark? If she wasn't the villain of the story, did that mean Xie Yonger had taken that role by default?
She was still chewing on all of it when she heard that the Archives Hall was on fire. Her first thought: Yu Wanyin had been working there.
Was this how it ended? The female lead's arc just... cut off?
Xie Yonger had run toward the Archives Hall in disbelief and met Yu Wanyin halfway — scorched, soaked, barely together.
Their eyes met.
Yu Wanyin seemed to run a quick calculation. Then she extended one trembling hand.
"Sister," she said. "Help me."
Xie Yonger hesitated for only a moment before stepping forward to catch her.
"You're hurt," Xie Yonger said, already looking around for help. "You need to be carried. Let me go get someone—"
Yu Wanyin grabbed her like she was a lifeline and would not let go. "Don't go. Don't leave me."
Xie Yonger: "?"
Do we... have that kind of bond?
A warm, composed voice came from behind them. "Ladies."
It landed on Yu Wanyin like a bucket of ice water. Her legs buckled; only Xie Yonger's grip kept her upright.
Xiahou Bo stepped forward, concern written all over his face, moving to support Yu Wanyin's other side. "I heard there was a fire at the Archives Hall. I've already sent men to help. I'm glad to see you made it out safely, my lady. Where are you hurt?"
Yu Wanyin's lips moved. Nothing came out.
Xiahou Bo decided not to wait, and simply lifted her into his arms with the decisive ease of a man who was checking whether she was carrying anything — the wide, sweeping motion of it made that plain. "I'll escort you back to your quarters."
She met his calm, unreadable eyes. It took her a long moment to find her voice. "...Thank you, Your Highness."
Xiahou Bo walked a few steps. Yu Wanyin twisted in his arms to look back at Xie Yonger with the desperate eyes of someone silently screaming: Your man is carrying me. Aren't you jealous? Please say something. I am begging you.
Xie Yonger dropped her gaze to conceal what was in it, then said graciously, "That's very considerate of you, Your Highness. I'll come along."
Yu Wanyin: Thank you thank you thank you please do not walk away.
Xiahou Bo said pleasantly, "No need to trouble yourself. Would you mind finding a physician instead, Consort Xie?"
Xie Yonger looked at him with briefly wounded eyes, decided she didn't want to appear openly possessive, and yielded. "Of course." She turned and left.
Yu Wanyin's heart stopped completely.
Xiahou Bo walked on at an unhurried pace. "You're trembling."
"The burns," Yu Wanyin said, summoning what remained of her composure. "They sting."
"You've suffered. Forgive me for arriving too late."
Could you not have arrived slightly later still?
Yu Wanyin was running on two simultaneous tracks — one watching his hands for any sudden movement, the other performing the warm, yielding softness expected of the original Yu Wanyin. She let herself lean gently into him. "Now that you're here, I'm all right."
He smiled. "I thought you had changed a great deal since entering the palace. It seems you're still yourself after all."
"Does Your Highness wish I had changed?"
He tilted his head to look at her. "I'd hoped you might still be unafraid of me, as you were the first time we met."
Right. And who do I have to thank for almost burning me alive just now?
"Being close to the imperial throne is like being close to a tiger," Xiahou Bo said, his tone as tranquil as if he were discussing the weather. "Rather than fearing me, you might do better to fear the Emperor. We are alike in our suffering. Any who genuinely treat me well, I will genuinely protect."
Yu Wanyin tilted her head and blinked up at him. "I'm afraid I don't quite follow, Your Highness."
Oh, I follow perfectly. What he'd actually said, stripped of the courtly language, was: choose your side carefully — those with me prosper, those against me don't.
She played innocent all the way through it. Xiahou Bo smiled. "You're sharper than you let on. Speaking of which — last time you gave me a sample of your calligraphy, and I forgot to send a gift in return..."
The sound cut off. A rush of boots on stone, and then a wall of guards in black surrounded Xiahou Bo from every direction.
At the front was the tyrant, his face cold as iron. "Put her down."
The silence that followed was absolute.
Yu Wanyin's shell-shocked brain immediately produced two equally absurd responses to this extremely cliché line. The first: If you don't want her hurt, have a car ready with one million in cash, and come alone. The second: Bold of you to try — my looks alone put me at a decisive advantage.
Xiahou Bo, thankfully, did not go the dramatic route.
He set Yu Wanyin down with careful hands and bowed. "Your servant saw the lady injured and acted in haste, forgetting proper form. I ask Your Majesty's forgiveness..."
Xiahou Dan didn't look at him. He crossed the distance in three strides, stripped off his outer robe, and wrapped it around Yu Wanyin's soaked, shivering frame.
Yu Wanyin had been holding herself together through sheer stubbornness for longer than she could measure. Now, at last, her backup had arrived. The last thread of tension snapped.
She felt the darkness take her even as she fell forward, and the last thing she knew was the solid wall of Xiahou Dan's chest catching her weight.
She drifted in and out for days, half-submerged in a low fever. When she finally surfaced properly, she was in her own side-chamber. Her throat felt like dry kindling. Outside the window, heavy rain was falling, and the light was gray and dim. A bronze lamp swayed gently beside the bed. Xiahou Dan sat with his back to her, slowly stirring a bowl of medicinal broth.
She hadn't realized how steadying it was to see someone's back.
She stared at him for a while. Then her gaze drifted to the lamp flame, trembling with each gust that found its way through the seams.
He turned. His expression shifted when he saw her awake. "Oh good. You had a minor burn and then went into contaminated water — I was genuinely worried the antibiotics wouldn't hold. The wound is small, though. It's already healing."
Yu Wanyin said nothing.
He reached over to help her sit up. "Drink the medicine. Think of it as water to bring the fever down — " He stopped. "Why are you crying?"
"I'm just glad," she said, voice cracking, "that you're from the same place I am."
The first real encounter with death had been too much. All this time she'd been floating through this world as if it were a half-remembered dream — drifting through it at a remove, the way you drift through someone else's story. And then the smoke and the screaming and Xu Yao's blood on the floor, and the dream had snapped shut and she was inside it, and the ground beneath her feet was a long fall down.
If he hadn't been here — another person from the same world, someone who used the same words she recognized, someone who meant by home the same impossible country — she didn't know whether the fear or the loneliness would have broken her first.
Xiahou Dan tried twice to talk her out of it, then gave up and let her cry. He didn't look much better himself — his usual composure had gone somewhere and not come back.
When she finally ran dry, he held out another spoonful of the broth and let his voice go quiet. "Some of the attendants from the Archives Hall made it out. They've all been taken for treatment. As for Xu Yao... the coroner said his posture was peaceful. The poison took him before the fire did. He didn't suffer twice."
Her chest tightened at the name.
"The arsonists were caught. They're disposable men — nothing leads back to King Duan. Elder Xu has been brought in from exile and is being housed at a villa outside the city. He's no threat to anyone at this point, and he should be comfortable for whatever years remain." Xiahou Dan paused. "Incidentally — it turns out King Duan actually was behind his fall from grace."
He described the conversation with Grand Tutor Wei in the prison cell.
Yu Wanyin absorbed it. "So we were planning to frame King Duan... for something he actually did."
"That's the situation, yes."
For a brief moment, a strange thought moved through her: How does he get it right every time? Xiahou Dan had read none of the source text. He'd worked entirely from the thin intelligence she'd given him and arrived, eyes closed, at a truth the original novel hadn't even bothered to explain. That was either extraordinary intuition, or —
The thought passed before it fully formed. She told herself it was reasonable to assume the worst of King Duan at every turn. Anyone would have guessed the same.
I was going to be the great villain of this story, she thought. Then I spent two rounds against Xiahou Bo and realized I had a long way to go.
"Xu Yao mentioned a book," she said, and lowered her voice to relay what had been his last words. Xiahou Dan listened without speaking. His face had gone pale.
He looked at the candle flame. "What was Xu Yao's ending in the original?"
"I think he stayed with King Duan. Became a court official eventually."
Xiahou Dan laughed — a short, mirthless sound. "So we're the ones who killed him."
Yu Wanyin had just wiped her nose. She felt the sting threatening to return. "Don't think of it that way. If you want to think of it another way — in the original story, Xu Yao died without ever knowing the truth. He spent his whole life serving the man who destroyed his family."
Xiahou Dan said nothing. His finger pressed against his temple. "And I still let you get hurt for nothing..."
She didn't understand why he seemed lower than she was. She forced herself to rally. "It wasn't for nothing. We have Xu Yao's lead. In a few days we can retrieve the book. I just hope he recorded enough detail, because I truly don't remember the fine points of the original text anymore."
"I keep thinking," he said, still rubbing his temple, half to himself, "whether any of this matters. In the logic of this story, the villain's ending is fate. Every struggle just makes it more pathetic. Wouldn't it be simpler to eat and drink and wait for what's coming..."
"Absolutely not," Yu Wanyin said. "You cannot give up this early. I am not ready to die." She scrambled for traction. "It means something. It has to. You can't just hand the world over to the people willing to be the worst in it. You make your fate. There are still ways to turn this around. The drought that's coming in the original — we can find drought-resistant crops, we can prepare —"
She stopped.
The Archives Hall was ash. Where exactly was she going to do research?
She deflated. "Actually, eating and drinking doesn't sound that bad."
Xiahou Dan: "..."
"You could have held out a little longer."
The Empress Dowager came to pay a personal visit.
The visit proceeded as follows:
"I hear you've had quite an ordeal. Do you know who set that fire? When a woman rises too quickly, she makes enemies. Perhaps this is a lesson that the Emperor's affection alone cannot —" [approximately five hundred words of classic guidance omitted]
Yu Wanyin: "Yes, yes, of course."
"In this deep palace, every woman who receives a little warmth believes she has finally arrived, not understanding that imperial favor shifts like weather —" [five hundred words omitted]
Yu Wanyin had nowhere to be. She let her mind go empty and nodded at intervals.
"You don't imagine that with Concubine Wei gone, you'll simply step into that position? Concubine Wei had the leverage of her family behind her. My protection. When she went too far, she went to the Cold Palace — but she'll come back. Your father is what rank, exactly? Do you understand —" [five hundred words omitted]
"Yes, yes, that's right."
The Empress Dowager extended a fingernail painted with deep red lacquer and tapped Yu Wanyin lightly on the cheek. "A woman in this place must be clever about survival. Choose your shelter wisely. Serve me well, and I will take care of you."
"Of course, Empress Dowager. Thank you."
The Empress Dowager left Yu Wanyin's rooms that morning.
By afternoon, a palace attendant came with a report: "His Majesty has promoted Lady Yu to the rank of Noble Consort."
The Empress Dowager: "?"
The new Noble Consort was personally escorted by the Emperor into the Noble Consort's palace — formerly Concubine Wei's residence, long the most extravagant quarters in the inner palace. It had been gutted and refurnished for the new occupant, every surface renewed, the whole place now gleaming with the accumulated grandeur of a properly appointed bower.
Every eye in the palace that had been waiting for Yu Wanyin's fall shifted. They were watching now — watching carefully, trying to identify what particular quality she possessed that had so completely captured the tyrant's attention.
They watched all the way to the new quarters, and the only person who spoke was the tyrant himself.
"My love, this courtyard is well-defended now. I've assigned you personal dark guards. No one will find a gap to exploit again."
Yu Wanyin knew this was for the benefit of every listening ear around them. "Your Majesty is too good to me."
The bodyguard roster had been hammered out between them the night before. Can't we find some people in the original who stayed loyal to the end? Xiahou Dan had asked. The ones who helped you bury people, she'd answered. They never turned. The guards had been stationed overnight.
"My love, look at the courtyard — do you need more space? Are you tired of hotpot? We could stock this pond with fish, put a grill over here, have the option of grilled fish whenever the mood strikes —"
Yu Wanyin: "?"
Are you designing your own living quarters right now?
She clapped her hands with appropriate delight. "How did Your Majesty know I love to eat?"
The attendants around them exchanged very private thoughts. This was not the manipulation of a dangerous seductress. This was the most low-effort performance they had ever witnessed. Fresh palace girls didn't even play it this simply anymore.
Xiahou Dan smiled. "My love is a pure and uncomplicated soul."
The attendants collectively forgot how to breathe.
The tyrant does not deserve a sophisticated game!
Yu Wanyin ate and rested for a handful of days, and found herself profoundly restless. The corporate worker had never gone this long without a deliverable, and ancient palace life offered approximately nothing in the way of distraction. Lying in the sun every day had given her a backache.
She was annoyed at herself for being constitutionally unsuited to leisure. She was more annoyed watching Xiahou Dan seem perfectly content.
One evening after grilled fish and wine, she said: "We should leave the palace for a day."
"Field trip?"
"Not exactly. I figured out how to get to Xu Yao's book without King Duan noticing."
Xiahou Dan gave her a look. "Whatever happened to eating and waiting for death?"
"Waiting for death is boring. Let's try flailing around a bit more first."
"..."
"Here's the thing: if we go straight to the Wei estate, King Duan will have people watching and he'll know what we're after. So we mislead him. We go out, but we don't go there. We go find someone first."
"Who?"
"In novels like this there's always someone with off-the-charts martial ability living in obscurity in the city. In this book specifically, he has history with you. Personal history."
An hour later, two impoverished-looking scholars were walking through a busy market street, several elite bodyguards trailing behind them in equally threadbare disguises.
Xiahou Dan's borrowed face was a sickly yellow. He held a folding fan over his mouth and spoke quietly. "In theory, the Empress Dowager and King Duan haven't made a decisive move against me yet. But walking around like targets — is this actually wise?"
"No. But there's no other way. This person will only respond to you directly."
Yu Wanyin, for her part, looked not just impoverished but specifically malnourished, as if she hadn't grown properly.
"His name is Beizhu," she said. "He and your mother — the late Empress Cizhen — grew up together. He was her childhood guard, and I believe he was in love with her, though the chapter was melodramatic enough that I skimmed it. After she entered the palace and died young, Beizhu became convinced someone inside had killed her. He left in grief and fury, found remarkable teachers, and became one of the finest martial artists alive."
She took a breath. "In The Devil's Favorite Concubine: Transmigrated, he returned to the capital to find you. He saw the chaos and went underground to watch and wait and protect you when the time came. He acted too late to change the ending, but he still complicated things for King Duan considerably."
"So you want to find him ahead of schedule."
"Yes. Because Xie Yonger only has A Thousand Trees Bloom in the East Wind at Night. She doesn't know Transmigrated. She doesn't know Beizhu exists. He can be your hidden piece. You can send him to steal the book from the Wei estate. Someone with his ability will have no trouble."
There were other uses for him too, but those could wait.
Yu Wanyin stopped. "Here."
Xiahou Dan looked up.
The Pavilion of Flowing Red.
A pleasure house.
"Go in," she said, and waved to the guards. "All of you."
Guards: "?"
"So when you said he was 'underground' in the capital..."
"The book said he was in a brothel."
"That seems —"
"It's fine. And it gives King Duan something to work with. Let him think you're dissolute. Come on, I'm not scared, why are you?"
Xiahou Dan was pulled through the door before he could finish objecting. A wave of perfume hit them both immediately. At the entrance stood a madam with an impressively classic beauty mark, who looked them up and down with professional skepticism.
Yu Wanyin smiled shyly and pressed a handful of silver coins into her palm. "We're scholars here for the examinations. Wanted to see the world a little."
The madam's face transformed. "Right this way, gentlemen!"
Yu Wanyin swept the whole group toward the private rooms.
Xiahou Dan: "...You're extremely comfortable with this."
"I've read a lot of low-quality fiction."
In short order they were surrounded by warmth and music.
Yu Wanyin had a small pretty girl feeding her grapes, and was making appropriately lascivious sounds.
Xiahou Dan's expression developed a slight twitch. He leaned close. "How long are we here? And how exactly do you plan to find Beizhu?"
"I don't remember what he looks like. But there can't be that many men working in a brothel. And according to the text, you look like your mother — he'll recognize you."
Xiahou Dan pointed at his borrowed sickly yellow face.
Yu Wanyin: "..."
She turned to the girl in her lap. "How many male staff are there working here?"
The girl's eyes flickered briefly. "Why do you ask, sir?" She kept her expression pleasant. "I can't recall exactly. Four or five, I think."
"Any who came on in the last couple of years? Big build?"
A quick light moved through the girl's gaze and vanished.
She turned away to pour wine, smiling. "I arrived late myself, I'm afraid. I'm not sure. Drink with me?"
In those few seconds, several things happened simultaneously.
The girl, now with her back to them, exchanged a look with another girl across the room.
One of the bodyguards caught her hand motion and was already moving.
Yu Wanyin tapped Xiahou Dan's arm.
Xiahou Dan sent a single look across the room. Stand down.
The guards settled.
The girl turned back with the wine cup and held it to Yu Wanyin's lips.
"Thank you, thank you." Yu Wanyin took it and made a show of drinking.
Every cup in the room was offered to someone. The bodyguards sniffed theirs discreetly, registered the sedative, and played along — a moment of dramatic swaying, eyes rolling back, slumping to the ground.
Yu Wanyin and Xiahou Dan followed suit and went down.
The girl stood up straight and her voice turned flat. "Get the madam."
The madam arrived quickly. "Tie them up. Wake them with cold water."
Yu Wanyin thought, lying there: We only asked about a single employee. Why this scale of response? Unless someone else here already knows who Beizhu is — but that can't be, the book was clear that he kept that hidden.
She decided to keep watching. She stayed still while they tied her, and didn't react when the cold water came.
The madam: "Who sent you? Who are you working for?"
Xiahou Dan coughed and blinked. "We asked one question about one person. You can't tie up paying customers."
"Then sit there," the madam said pleasantly, "until you feel like talking." She left and locked the door.
The moment the footsteps faded, the bodyguards had knives out and were cutting each other loose, then crouching to untie Xiahou Dan and Yu Wanyin.
Xiahou Dan rolled his wrists and settled back into his chair. "Now what?"
"Out the window, find him ourselves?"
"Fine."
Two guards slipped out the window. The remaining ones distributed themselves across the room near the doors and windows.
Yu Wanyin looked at Xiahou Dan. "You should probably head back if this takes much longer. But if we do find him, you need to be the one he sees."
"I'll stay. I still need my face to work."
She grabbed from the fruit plate and started eating grapes while she waited. "You want some?"
"..."
"Why do you seem like you're having fun?"
She had been half-dead four days ago. How was she already operating at full capacity?
"Happy or miserable, it's still the same day," she said. "Corporate survival rule number one. You're just used to the world adjusting for you — the shock of it not doing that is hitting you harder. You have to level out or we won't make it. Yeah?"
She patted his arm.
Xiahou Dan said nothing for a long moment.
"All right."
"All right what?"
He just smiled and didn't answer.
One of the guards near the door pressed his ear against the wood. "Someone's coming."
Too soon for the original group to return. Everyone moved fast — back in position, hands behind their backs, a small length of rope visible at the wrist, still convincingly bound.
Yu Wanyin hissed, "What about the two who went out?"
No time. The door opened.
It was not who they expected. It was an old man with a broom, a rag over his shoulder, shuffling in with the profound lack of enthusiasm of someone who had been sweeping floors for too long. He cast a single bored glance at the room — noting, apparently without curiosity, that there were tied-up people in it — and bent to collect the grape skins and fruit rinds from the floor.
Yu Wanyin let herself breathe.
And then drew it back in again, very quietly.
She tugged the hem of Xiahou Dan's robe and moved only her eyes: Him.
Xiahou Dan: ?
That's Beizhu.
Only people who had punched their quota for the week knew how to recognize others who had. This old man sweeping the floor had eyes that didn't match his posture. In the moment when he'd glanced at them, something had passed through his gaze like a flash of fang.
So Beizhu was hiding as a janitor.
Xiahou Dan, apparently arriving at the same conclusion, after a brief hesitation, said: "Hey."
The old man did not look up.
"Friend. You look familiar."
The old man stopped cleaning and looked at him.
"Since we've crossed paths, why not drop the pretense and meet as ourselves?"
The moment those words landed, something happened to the old man's face. He went very still. He stared at Xiahou Dan. Several things passed between them, invisible and precise. Then he put his rag down and walked over.
Yu Wanyin, sensing the wariness in every line of him, tried for her best unthreatening smile. "No misunderstanding here. We're all friends."
She knocked her shoulder against Xiahou Dan's. He reached up and peeled the prosthetic from his face.
"I am —"
In the fractional second that followed, several things happened.
The old man saw Xiahou Dan's real face and was no longer reaching for the broom. His eyes went lethal.
Yu Wanyin processed that look and understood that something was very wrong, but couldn't yet parse it —
A blade appeared in the old man's hand. It drove straight toward Xiahou Dan.
"Watch out!" She shoved him sideways. Both bodyguards launched toward Xiahou Dan's body —
And then right in front of all of them, the old man's body was wrenched sideways, lifted as if by invisible hands, and dropped.
He hit the floor and stayed there.
A knife was buried in the side of his neck, sunk so deep it had nearly come out the other side.
Everyone turned to look at the door.
The door had a hole through it the size of a fist. The knife had been thrown from outside, punching through the wood without losing velocity, curving with some instinct that was not instinct at all, and burying itself exactly where it needed to go.
What kind of force did that take?
The door was pushed open.
Everyone in the room and outside it went absolutely still.
Standing there was the madam: full-figured, beauty mark and all, staring at Xiahou Dan with a shaking voice that came out as a man's.
"You..."
Yu Wanyin looked at Xiahou Dan. He had already pulled off his face.
A wild thought was assembling itself in her mind. She looked at the madam. "You're..."
The madam put a hand to the beauty mark and pulled it away with a soft pop. His skeleton crackled audibly — a muffled series of internal adjustments — and he straightened up, and up, and up, until he was someone else entirely: tall, loose-limbed, a face that had a kind of weathered, far-traveled clarity to it. Martial and unhurried. The shape of someone who had chosen the wilderness and made peace with it.
Yu Wanyin had read about this technique. She had not expected to see it demonstrated while sitting on a brothel floor.
"You're Beizhu?!"
Beizhu kept his eyes on Xiahou Dan. His voice was unsteady. "How did you know I was here?"
Xiahou Dan: "And who was that on the floor?"
Yu Wanyin: "And why did he try to kill us?"
Xiahou Dan: "One at a time. Please."
A moment later, they were seated around the table.
Xiahou Dan gave Beizhu first turn.
"His Majesty is aware of you through a letter our mother left behind," Xiahou Dan said smoothly, without a breath of hesitation.
Beizhu's expression crossed into something soft and long-buried. "Nan'er wrote about me?"
"..."
In the span of a silent second, Yu Wanyin constructed an eight-hundred-word tribute: something about a decade of distance and unanswered longing, about leaving letters in hollow trees, about looking for a face in every crowd and finding only strangers.
She telegraphed all of this to Xiahou Dan with her eyes.
He received it. He nodded.
"She said," he began. "If I ever found myself in danger, I could come to you."
"..."
Congratulations. That is the most emotionally inert sentence in the Mandarin language.
Beizhu's eyes went red. "She still remembered me."
Xiahou Dan pressed on before anyone's mood could destabilize further. "So I spent years after taking the throne searching quietly, and only recently found a trace of where you might be. Today seemed worth trying."
He caught Beizhu's expression and shifted the subject. "The man on the floor. Who is he?"
Beizhu: "He's been cleaning this building for two years. I only started suspecting him a few days ago — found coded correspondence in his room. He's a spy from the northern kingdom of Yan, with orders to assassinate nobles and stoke internal conflict. I'd been watching him until I could be sure. Today, when you started asking questions about male staff, I thought for a moment you were connected to him. Then I realized I had it wrong — he thought you were there to expose him."
Xiahou Dan: "So he attacked because he assumed we were hunting him."
Yu Wanyin turned over the source material in her head. This figure was there — a Yan operative who never quite succeeded, who ended up killing a single figure in the Empress Dowager's faction while being puppeted by King Duan, and was then captured and executed horrifically. She'd skimmed past it.
Beizhu: "Yan has been running these games for years — they're desperate. Finish this one and there may be others. You should be careful."
Xiahou Dan let a shadow cross his face. "Which is part of why today found me here. I'm surrounded by enemies. Outnumbered from every direction..." He let the silence say the rest.
Beizhu: "I came back to this city because I wanted to watch over you. I was only afraid you didn't need me." He looked at him directly. "Nan'er's son is my son."
"..."
That sentence. The weight of it.
Beizhu was decisive in the way of men who grew up in motion. He turned and walked back out to manage his departure, and in the space of a few minutes the news had moved through the building: the madam was leaving. The girls who worked there had clearly been looked after by him over the years and were crying with real feeling, calling after him in ways that made the whole scene feel like something borrowed from a more sentimental story.
One girl — the one who had pressed the wine on Yu Wanyin, the one who had been his eyes and his confidante in this place — wept with a particular quality of grief and asked, quietly, whether he could take her with him.
Beizhu's face went tight. He was heading into the palace; he couldn't bring anyone.
Xiahou Dan stepped close and murmured, "I'll send someone back to purchase their freedom and see them safely to wherever they want to go."
Beizhu looked at him for a long moment. "You're so much like her. She had the same warmth."
The group left. Xiahou Dan put his borrowed face back on. Beizhu washed off the cosmetics, dressed plainly, and slipped into the line of guards as if he'd always been there. In his real face he was striking — there was something in him that had the spare, self-contained quality of a man who had carved his own shape out of hard years.
Yu Wanyin said, "You're very handsome, Beizhu."
Beizhu: "What a shame. I'd honestly rather be a woman."
Xiahou Dan: "..."
Yu Wanyin: "..."
He had said, just before this, that he was hopelessly in love with Xiahou Dan's mother.
She thought about that. She thought about Beizhu's stated preference. She thought about the years spent alone after the Empress entered the palace. She thought about the very particular way some people come to understand themselves through grief and distance and reinvention.
Her phantom limb went cold.
She was still thinking privately when Xiahou Dan — with his characteristic complete lack of restraint — said aloud: "Beizhu, would you tell me about you and my mother?"
Beizhu: "Nan'er was the only person in the world who ever truly understood me. She never judged me for what I was — she simply took me as her closest friend and called me her sister."
Xiahou Dan: "..."
Yu Wanyin: "..."
"She left so young," Beizhu continued, eyes moving with quiet sorrow to Xiahou Dan. "And left you here alone." He looked at him the way someone looks at a piece of the person they loved most. "Now that she's gone, I'll be your mother."
Xiahou Dan: "..."
"Thank you," Xiahou Dan said. "Uncle."
They returned to the palace. Beizhu looked, for the first time, slightly surprised. "In the Noble Consort's quarters?"
"Eyes everywhere near my own rooms," Xiahou Dan said. "There's more privacy here. Fewer people."
Beizhu followed them inside and took in the layers of security built into the Noble Consort's residence — the guard rotations, the dark watchers, the angles of coverage — and smiled slightly. "So the rumors have something to them after all."
"What rumors?"
Beizhu looked at Yu Wanyin with an appraising sort of warmth. "That our young Emperor has given his heart to this woman."
"You've misunderstood—" Yu Wanyin began.
Xiahou Dan turned and took her hand, facing Beizhu with total sincerity. "Since Beizhu can see it, there's no use hiding it. I'm trusting you to protect her as you'd protect me."
Yu Wanyin: "?"
That was not necessary for the performance.
Beizhu looked between them with what might have been a maternal smile on a face that had never quite settled into maternal angles. "Leave it to me."
The strangeness of that exchange hadn't fully faded by nightfall.
Beizhu had already slipped away to the Wei estate. Xiahou Dan had offered help; Beizhu had waved it off. "More people means more noise. Don't wait up."
There was something in that offhand ease — the one clean sentence, the minimal gesture — that made the years of effort spent surviving this court feel briefly small.
The two of them ate a candlelit dinner. Then a candlelit late snack. Beizhu still wasn't back.
Yu Wanyin shifted in her seat. Xiahou Dan sipped his wine with the calm of someone who had decided not to worry. "The Wei estate has parties watching it from multiple angles. He'll wait for the window when everyone's guard is lowest — middle of the night at the earliest."
"I know the logic. It's just —" She paused. "We've changed so much from the original already. I don't know where things go from here."
Xu Yao had not been supposed to die when he did. Beizhu was supposed to appear much later. The ground kept shifting.
"The worst case is still just death," Xiahou Dan said.
"Yes, thank you, that is genuinely not comforting."
He laughed — low, slightly wine-warmed, a color in his face that wasn't usually there. Yu Wanyin looked at him for a second longer than she meant to.
Candlelight does things to faces.
She knew this. It was a documented phenomenon. She also knew that the man across from her was, objectively speaking, the kind of face that you'd find at the top of any list compiled by a team of professionals. She had not let herself engage with this fact, on the entirely reasonable grounds that engaging with it in her current situation was the kind of distraction that got people killed.
But Xu Yao was dead and there was wine and the lamp was doing something unfortunate to the light, and somehow her guard was two degrees lower than it should have been.
She looked away.
She was not going to think about this. Survival was the only variable that mattered. Aesthetics were irrelevant. She could look at King Duan's extremely symmetrical face and feel nothing but the urge to leave the room, which was the correct response.
The fact that looking at this face was producing a different response was simply a data anomaly. She would discard it.
"...You're staring," Xiahou Dan said.
"No I wasn't."
He looked at her with the particular expression of someone who is not going to push this.
She aggressively picked up a melon seed. "Don't make it weird."
He put his cup down. The lamp swayed. Rain had started again outside, faint against the roof tiles.
She waited for him to say something. He didn't. After a moment: "Alright."
"Alright what?"
He smiled faintly and looked toward the window.
The guard stationed near the door pressed his ear against it. "Someone coming."
Too soon for Beizhu. Everyone reset fast — positions restored, hands behind backs, rope visible at the wrist, all of it.
"The two who went out the window," Yu Wanyin said through her teeth.
No answer. The door opened.
It was a janitor with a broom and a cloth over his shoulder, shuffling in without particular interest, beginning to sweep up the melon seed shells and grape stems.
Yu Wanyin almost let herself breathe.
She did not.
She pulled on Xiahou Dan's sleeve. Held his gaze. Directed him with her eyes.
Xiahou Dan: ?
That's him.
Only someone who had spent years watching for exits knew how to spot someone else doing the same thing. This man's hands were a janitor's. His eyes were not.
So Beizhu had been hiding as the cleaning staff.
Xiahou Dan paused. Cleared his throat. "Excuse me."
The janitor didn't look up.
"Friend. You look familiar to me."
The janitor stopped and looked at him.
"Since we've ended up in the same room, we might as well be honest with each other."
That landed. Something changed in the man's face — a suspension, a shift from one kind of watchfulness to another. They looked at each other for several seconds. Then the janitor put his cloth down and walked toward them.
Yu Wanyin tried to project benign harmlessness. "No trouble here. All friends."
She gave Xiahou Dan a small push. He reached up to peel off the face.
"I am—"
In the half second that followed, several things happened at once.
The old man saw what was under the borrowed face, and his expression became something else entirely.
Yu Wanyin caught the shift and felt the wrongness of it without yet understanding it —
A blade was already in the man's hand, already moving toward Xiahou Dan —
"Watch out!" She shoved him. The guards were already in motion —
And in front of all of them, the janitor's body was wrenched sideways by something unseen and went down and stayed down, a knife buried so deep in his neck it had nearly found the other side.
Everyone turned toward the door.
A fist-sized hole had been punched through the wood. The knife had been thrown from outside, driven through the door, arrived without slowing, and found its mark as if guided.
What kind of force does that require?
The door opened.
The madam was standing in it — beauty mark, full figure, the whole setup — looking at Xiahou Dan with shaking eyes and a voice that came out in a man's register.
"You..."
Yu Wanyin looked at the madam. At the door. At the hole in the door. At the man on the ground.
The wild geometry of it assembled itself.
"Are you Beizhu?"
The madam reached up and removed the beauty mark with a clean pop. The body beneath made a series of deep internal adjustments, audible and visible at once, and then there he was — tall, clear-featured, with the particular ease of someone who had never needed to announce himself to a room.
"How did you know I was here?" he asked Xiahou Dan.
"And who was that?" Xiahou Dan asked, gesturing at the floor.
Yu Wanyin: "And why did he try to kill us?"
Xiahou Dan: "In order. Please."
They sat.
Beizhu was asked first.
"My mother left a letter," Xiahou Dan said, without the smallest flicker of hesitation. "She mentioned you in it."
Beizhu's eyes went soft with old feeling. "Nan'er wrote about me?"
Eight hundred words crystallized silently in Yu Wanyin's head — parting on a palace threshold, years of walking toward a face that was already gone, letters folded into hollows in old trees, seasons passing without reply.
She transmitted this entire emotional architecture to Xiahou Dan via eyebrow alone.
He caught it. He nodded.
"She said," he said carefully, "that if I was ever in danger, I could find you."
"..."
Ten thousand years of literary tradition. One sentence. That's all you had.
Beizhu's eyes went red. "She remembered."
Xiahou Dan: "So I spent years searching. Only recently got a lead. Came today on the chance you'd be here."
He pivoted before sentiment could derail anything. "The man on the floor."
Beizhu: "Two years of sweeping this building. I only started watching him a few days ago — found coded letters in his room. He's a Yan operative. Orders to assassinate and destabilize. I'd been observing until I was sure." He paused. "When you started asking about male staff today, I thought you might be looking for him. Then I understood the real situation — he thought you were there to expose him."
"So the attack was because we spooked him."
Yu Wanyin turned this over. She remembered this character from the text — a minor figure who never quite accomplished anything, except one killing that ended up serving King Duan's agenda more than anyone else's. Caught. Executed messily. She'd read past it in thirty seconds.
Beizhu: "Yan has been restless for years. Kill this one and there will be more. Be careful."
Xiahou Dan let something tired and real enter his expression. "Which is part of why I came. The palace is closing in from every direction..."
Beizhu: "I came back to this city to watch over you. I only feared you didn't need me." A beat. "Nan'er's son is my son."
"..."
That sentence was doing a lot.
Beizhu moved fast once he'd decided. He went back through the building, and the parting took longer than expected — the women here had clearly mattered to him, and he to them. They wept in ways that felt real. The girl who had poured the wine — his closest confidante in this place, maybe more — cried quietly and asked if he could bring her with him.
His face said he couldn't.
Xiahou Dan leaned in and murmured a solution. Beizhu looked at him for a moment.
"You really are like her. She would have done the same thing."
They filed out into the street. Borrowed faces back on. Beizhu stripped of cosmetics, in plain clothes, moving into the crowd of guards as naturally as if he'd been part of it from the start. He had a fine face on him — worn smooth by years outdoors, with a kind of ease that didn't need to announce itself.
"Very handsome," Yu Wanyin said.
"What a shame," Beizhu said pleasantly. "I've always preferred being a woman."
Xiahou Dan: "..."
Yu Wanyin: "..."
She thought about what she knew about Beizhu. She thought about Beizhu's stated preferences. She thought about the years between a palace gate closing and this moment, and what a person might find out about themselves in that span.
Her blood pressure dropped slightly.
She was still thinking about this when Xiahou Dan turned to Beizhu and, with complete composure, asked: "Tell me about you and my mother."
Beizhu: "Nan'er was the only person who ever saw me clearly. She never judged me — she simply accepted me and called me her sister."
Xiahou Dan: "..."
Yu Wanyin: "..."
"She left too young," Beizhu said. His eyes moved to Xiahou Dan with a tenderness that belonged to someone else entirely. "And left you here alone." He reached out and touched his shoulder. "Now that she's gone. I'll be your mother."
"...Thank you," Xiahou Dan said. "Uncle."
Back in the palace. Beizhu raised an eyebrow at the destination — the Noble Consort's quarters.
"Too many eyes near my own rooms," Xiahou Dan said. "More privacy here."
Beizhu followed them in, walked through the courtyard, catalogued the security arrangements with the automatic inventory of someone who made these assessments by reflex, and smiled. "The stories about you two might not be exaggerated."
"It's not what you're—" Yu Wanyin started.
Xiahou Dan took her hand, turned to Beizhu, and said with every indication of total sincerity: "Since you've seen it, there's no point denying it. I ask that you guard her as you'd guard me."
Yu Wanyin: "?"
That was not required.
Beizhu looked between them. He had the expression of someone who had been many things over the years and recognized a true thing when he saw one.
"Leave it to me."
A strange quiet settled over the courtyard after dark.
Beizhu had already gone. "More people is worse," he'd said, and walked out into the night with a broom over his shoulder for cover and vanished.
They ate. They ate again. The night deepened.
Yu Wanyin sat with her knees pulled up, watching the lamp flame. Xiahou Dan had gone quiet with his wine.
"You know what worries me," she said finally. "It's not the danger. It's that we keep changing things. Xu Yao wasn't supposed to die yet. Beizhu wasn't supposed to appear until much later. I don't know what the script looks like now."
Xiahou Dan looked at the flame. "The worst outcome is still just death."
"I know. That's the part I'm worried about."
He laughed, quietly. A little wine in it.
She looked at him — she'd meant to glance, but it became something longer. The lamp was doing what lamps do to good-looking people, which was to say it was doing its job thoroughly and without mercy, and the problem was that she had been deliberately not seeing this for weeks because she was extremely busy trying not to die, and tonight her guard was a degree or two lower than usual, and she was noticing things she had successfully not noticed.
She looked away.
She was a rational person. She had been in professional environments her whole adult life. She could look at the objective existence of a face and remain unmoved. She looked at King Duan, for instance, and felt only a strongly-motivated desire to exit.
This was clearly just the wine. Or the near-death experience. Or the statistical inevitability that at some point in a high-stress situation you would have an inappropriate thought about the one person close enough to notice your expression.
She ate a grape seed very deliberately.
"You were staring," he said.
"No I wasn't."
He did not, to his credit, push it.
She put the seeds down. She said nothing. Outside, the rain had gone quiet.
Then: "Okay," he said.
"Okay what?"
He smiled into the middle distance and didn't answer.
Some time after that, the guard at the door straightened and pressed his ear to the frame. "Someone coming."
The room snapped back. Everyone to positions. Hands behind backs. Rope at the wrist.
Yu Wanyin muttered, "What about the two outside?"
The door opened before the answer came.
A janitor. Broom in hand, rag over his shoulder, shuffling in to collect the shells and stems they'd left on the table, paying absolutely no attention to the fact that half the room appeared to be in restraints.
Yu Wanyin half-relaxed.
She did not.
She caught Xiahou Dan's sleeve. Said nothing. Moved only her eyes.
Him.
Xiahou Dan: ?
She held her breath. That's Beizhu.