The night wind sweeping across the Silver Lotus Lake was glacial, but the air between them burned.
Lín Jié did not hesitate. The woman formed no silent farewells to the past, no prayers to her ancestors. Grief had already turned to ash on the floor of an empty room. She looked at the large, calloused hand hovering millimeters from hers.
Her ink-stained fingers rose in the dim light.
The woman's trembling, cold skin touched Zhì Yuǎn's palm. The moment contact was made, the hollow, suffocating cold crushing her chest evaporated. A colossal, terrifying gravity descended upon her shoulders — not to crush her, but to anchor her. The man's thick warmth traveled up her arm, flooding her stagnant meridians, cementing a promise that required no contracts on rice paper.
Zhì Yuǎn closed his fingers around her ink-stained ones with unwavering firmness. The emptiness in the god's gaze dissolved, giving way to a dark, quiet, gentle warmth. A faint smile curved the corners of his lips.
"Good choice," his deep voice broke the stillness of the waters. "Come and meet those who fill in the blanks the world forgot to write."
He did not guide her back through the gardens on foot. The hand holding Lín Jié's squeezed lightly, and the air around them cracked. The fabric of the world folded in on itself. The silver moonlight, the lotuses, and the cold wind simply ceased to exist.
When Lín Jié blinked, the breath failed in her throat.
They were no longer at the lake. The atmospheric shock hit the secretary's face like a sledgehammer. The oxygen inside was so heavy and thin that her lungs burned. The air carried no trace of the palace's floral incense; it reeked of sandalwood, ozone, and a thick, sweet, obscene musk that saturated every inch of the chamber.
The dense, profane heat saturating that air struck the woman like a fist. A feverish, scandalous flush rose up Lín Jié's neck, her stomach lurching in a mix of vertigo and a dense warmth that made her instinctively press her mature thighs together beneath her modest tunic.
Her green, analytical eyes swept the space. It was the main chamber of the Pavilion of the Autumn Wind, but the refined cedar furnishings had been unceremoniously shoved to the corners. At the center of the room, occupying an absurd expanse, rested a monumental bed of black wood, draped in an ocean of scarlet silk and velvet sheets. It was a titanic structure, built to bear the weight of calamity.
The mattress was the battlefield of a recently ended massacre.
Sprawled facedown at the edge of the sheets, Yù Méi slept heavily. The golden warrior was completely bare, her skin gleaming with a thin layer of sweat. One of the younger sister's thick, full legs rested carelessly over Mò Yán's hips; the diplomat snored in a blind stupor, her enormous bust rising and falling in ragged breaths beneath a white silk robe hanging wide open. Curled against the diplomat's back, Bái Wǎn slept a deep sleep, her divinely soft face pressed against the pillow.
And tangled within that profane heap of limbs, skin, and sweat were the untouchable legends of the empire.
Huáng Bìyù, the unyielding Dragon Earth warrior, had her muscular arms marked by violent bite marks and dark bruises, her sleeping face exhausted, buried against the pale curve of Qīng Yǔ's breasts. The Holy Healer — the fairy who had been the cause of Qīng Yì's suicide mere hours before — snored with absurdly swollen lips and her legs sprawled carelessly open across the velvet. The purest Yin of the Two Pearls radiated the heavy, sated corruption of furnaces that had been brutally consumed down to the very last drop.
Lín Jié held her breath, her grip on Zhì Yuǎn's hand turning desperate. What rested on that bed was the rawest, most visceral display of women pushed far beyond their biological limit.
And leaning against the immense headboard, the queen of the altar was awake.
Yù Qíng wore only a translucent dark blue silk robe, loosely tied at the waist. The priestess's pale, immaculate skin glowed beneath the light of a single oil lamp. She held an ancient bamboo scroll in her cold hands, reading casually while she rested from the carnal carnage.
The goddess in blue raised her face. The scroll lowered slowly to her lap.
Yù Qíng's black eyes swept over the outsider's exhausted posture, the deep circles under her eyes, and the militaristically buttoned tunic, stopping precisely on Lín Jié's ink-stained fingers, still firmly intertwined with Zhì Yuǎn's hand.
The smile that curved Yù Qíng's red lips completely disarmed the room. It was sweet, soft, and laden with a sadistic, welcoming fascination.
"My heaven has a wonderful gift for finding fertile soil where the world sees only dry stone," Yù Qíng's velvety voice slid across the room as she descended from the monumental bed.
Her bare feet touched the wooden floor without a sound. The priestess walked toward them. Lín Jié stiffened her shoulders, teeth locking in anticipation of the shock and the blade that clan matriarchs typically unsheathed against intruders. But Yù Qíng merely stopped before her, raised both cold hands, and cradled the secretary's flushed face with a lethal delicacy.
"Look well at the air you are breathing now, woman of ink," Yù Qíng whispered, her thumbs grazing Lín Jié's mature cheeks, the scent of her husband's sweat and the sleeping goddesses' lust radiating from her skin. "The dust you organized for weak boys was left outside."
Lín Jié swallowed, her green, analytical irises fixed on the dark well of Yù Qíng's eyes, her skin prickling under the relentless scrutiny.
"I have nothing but dirty hands..." Lín Jié's voice came out thin, scraping against her own dry throat.
The sound of a long, loud yawn cut through the chamber's stillness.
On the monumental bed, Yù Méi stretched. The hardwood groaned under the warrior's vigorous muscles as she extended her arms, rolling onto her back and opening her almond-shaped eyes. The Brutal Blade blinked a few times against the lamplight, then focused on the dressed, rigid figure of the new woman holding her husband's hand.
Yù Méi propped her chin in her hand and crossed her bare legs, the predatory smile drawing itself slowly across her swollen lips.
"If you keep taking a stroll in the dark and coming back with a new woman every time, husband..." Yù Méi's guttural voice echoed through the room, loaded with dirty, carnivorous humor. "Sooner or later, all that fire of yours is going to burn itself out halfway through."
The younger sister let out a raspy laugh, baring her canines.
"Lies," she corrected herself, winking at Lín Jié with an intimidating, perfectly relaxed familiarity. "We all know that even if you dragged the entire imperial palace into our bed, your fire wouldn't go out. But the bed is going to need more sheets."
Zhì Yuǎn let out a low laugh, the baritone vibration warming the room. His grip on Lín Jié's hand remained unshaken, anchoring the woman in the middle of the natural chaos that was his family.
But the warrior's husky voice had woken the rest of the bed.
Qīng Yǔ blinked. The Celestial Feather — the healer the entire empire revered as an untouchable legend — lifted her creased face from the pillow. Her white sleeping tunic was torn at the shoulders, exposing the bite marks and dark bruises covering her once-immaculate skin. She looked like a broken, consumed doll, her breathing still ragged.
Qīng Yǔ's blue, exhausted eyes met Lín Jié's green irises.
The temperature in the room plummeted instantly. Lín Jié's fingers tensed in the god's hand. The secretary's short nails dug into her own palm until nearly drawing blood. There she was. The perfect fairy. The woman who had never spared Qīng Yì a single glance, yet had driven him to implode his own foundation in an empty, dark room.
Qīng Yǔ did not hold the gaze. The Holy Healer lowered her head, the flush of shame mingling with the damp lethargy of her dominated body, shrinking back into the sheets in pure submission to the room's owner. She was the very image of ruin.
Lín Jié clenched her teeth. Hatred bubbled up her throat, ready to be spat out. She wanted to blame that destroyed fairy. She wanted to scream that a good man had died because of those moans.
But Qīng Yǔ's silence hit her like a mirror.
Lín Jié looked down at her own hands — at the ink staining her fingertips for ten years. The fury relented, evaporating into the room's thick air, leaving behind nothing but the cold ash of reality.
"I wanted to hate you," Lín Jié's voice came out dry, not reaching back toward the past, but cementing the present. The woman loosened her fists, her mature shoulders falling in resignation. "But glass doesn't shatter just because someone strikes it. It shatters because it is weak."
Yù Qíng, still only inches from her, raised one eyebrow, her black eyes flickering with pure approval.
"It was I who built his throne of lies," Lín Jié continued, her voice no longer trembling. The grief had finished drying. She was not speaking to the fairy on the bed; she was speaking to herself. "I swept the blood off the political floor so he would never need to dirty his own boots. And in doing so, I kept him a coward — incapable of looking at the real world. My sacrifice was worthless. I only want to forget that I wasted my life."
Silence reigned in the room, broken only by the heavy breathing of the sleeping women.
Yù Qíng smiled. Not with lethal sweetness, but with the sadistic, devoted fascination of someone who had just weighed a piece of heavy porcelain and decided it deserved to hold the top shelf.
The goddess in blue slid her hand forward, cold fingers pulling the cheap pin holding Lín Jié's severe bun in place. The dark green hair — so dense it appeared black — fell heavily over the secretary's voluptuous shoulders, softening the bureaucratic rigidity and revealing the dormant, fresh beauty of the woman.
"Dust burns fast when thrown into the right furnace, woman of ink," Yù Qíng whispered, her red lips nearly grazing the newcomer's ear.
The priestess turned her face toward Zhì Yuǎn. The god's gaze had not retreated; the colossal Hunger in his Dantian burned in the darkness of his irises, demanding the consummation of that new soil.
"Our heaven still has a great deal of fire left to spend tonight," Yù Qíng purred, the poetic, perverse malice dripping from her words as she undid the first buttons of Lín Jié's thick tunic. "Let him melt those old memories of yours. Until nothing remains but his name in your throat."