The servant's excuse arrived half-formed and died on her lips.
She had opened her mouth — the automatic defensive reflex of a girl who had spent eighteen years navigating palace hierarchy by being invisible and polite — and whatever she'd been about to say simply evaporated. Her throat produced a small, dry sound. Nothing useful came after it.
Cang had not moved from the bed. He didn't need to.
The air in the cabin shifted.
It was not a visible thing. Not qi pressure in the way cultivators exerted it — no blazing aura, no visible compression of atmosphere. It was subtler and somehow more absolute than that. The way gravity is absolute. The way the deep current beneath a river's surface moves regardless of what the surface does.
Both women felt it simultaneously.
Lin Yuxi's feet left the floor first.
