Zhongli Jing slowly turned around. A smile appeared on his face — yet that smile went no further than the corners of his mouth, giving it a slightly unsettling quality. “Many thanks for the reminder, elder. We shall take care.” With that, he gestured to the person at his side.
Ding Weixiang stepped forward and lightly closed his left hand around his blade’s hilt.
There was a single flash of white light within the tea room.
Before anyone could process what had just happened, the wooden planks nailed to the tea room wall splintered apart with a crack, revealing a narrow door leading to the rear courtyard.
How he had brought down his blade, no one could say — he had severed only the door’s seal while leaving the door plank itself completely unscathed.
The young man who had spoken moments before did not linger on the room full of astonished faces. He walked with unhurried composure through the narrow doorway draped in cobwebs and dust, his attendant following close behind, who reached back and propped the fallen plank back across the entrance.
Silence returned to the tea room. Had it not been for the scattered fragments of wood on the floor, one might genuinely wonder whether two people had just passed through at all. The onlookers exchanged glances, then plunged back into a fresh round of debate, putting the strange visitors and their stranger doings entirely out of mind.
In the rear courtyard of the tea house, Zhongli Jing walked across broken stones, seeming utterly indifferent to the desolation on all sides.
The courtyard had once been planted with bamboo, but years of neglect had left it choked with weeds and littered with dead branches. The path of crushed stone led to the end of the courtyard, where a small stone cottage stood with its door hanging wide open, revealing a somewhat disordered interior floor — as though the owner had left in a hurry and the room still bore the shape of that departure.
Ding Weixiang set down a few simple pieces of hand luggage on the dust-covered table and could not help but frown. “This place is truly dilapidated and crude — are you certain you wish to lodge here, Master?”
“It doesn’t matter. Convenient is best.” He walked directly toward the room’s only bed — which could barely be called a bed at all, as the headboard and footboard had both disappeared, leaving only two wooden bed planks that still lay flush and flat in place. “Besides, I’ve stayed in far worse. There’s no point in minding it.”
With that, he extended a hand and rapped lightly on the bed planks. The planks gave a hollow sound that echoed through the empty stone room.
Ding Weixiang saw this and stepped forward, carefully shifting one of the planks aside. A black void of unfathomable depth was exposed, from which a stale, thick breath of air faintly seeped.
Zhongli Jing seemed to have expected as much. He wrapped his fur-lined robe around himself and sat down beside the opening. He half-closed his eyes, as though lost in thought, his fingers slowly working over the heavy string of prayer beads at his wrist — which now held exactly twenty-one beads, no more, no less.
Looking closely, one could see that the beads were strung on a slender golden thread and were not the uniformly rounded spheres of typical prayer beads. Each one differed slightly from the next — some longer, some shorter; some round, some flat; their colors ranging from vermilion to deep amber. Yet each bead had a warm, jade-like quality to its surface, and it was plain that the string had existed for a long time and had always been worn close to someone’s skin.
After a long while, he finally opened his eyes and stretched out his left wrist, indicating to Ding Weixiang who stood to one side.
“Take one off.”
Ding Weixiang did not respond immediately; his face was full of misgiving. He rarely questioned the other man’s orders, yet he could not hold back now. “Zou Sifang’s illness may be nothing more than rumor. Why must you take this risk, Master?”
“If he has no connection to the matter of the secret seal, this will not be needed. But if he does, it is unavoidable — we will reach this point regardless. Better to prepare sooner than later.”
“But—”
“It’s just one bead. It’s nothing of consequence.”
A rare note of dissatisfaction crept into Ding Weixiang’s voice. “Perhaps that one bead is precisely what makes the difference.”
The man finally looked at Ding Weixiang, his tone as unhurried as ever. “Has following me made Weixiang afraid of death?”
His voice was lower than before, its quality no longer clear but carrying a trace of hoarseness; the sense of detached transcendence he had projected a moment ago vanished entirely, replaced by the unspoken authority of one who commands.
Ding Weixiang startled, suddenly aware that he had said far too much today. He dropped to his knees with a thud, hastily saying, “Your subordinate would die ten thousand deaths for your sake — how could I be afraid of death? I only felt it was not worth it on your behalf, Master. If that man proves useless after all—”
Zhongli Jing’s lips curved in something that looked more like mockery than a smile. “Then let us call it a good deed for the day. Perhaps the Buddha will see fit to record it as a merit to my name.”
Ding Weixiang knew that further words were useless and finally let his gaze fall on that string of prayer beads.
“Yes.”
---
At that same moment, in a side room at the rear of Wangchen Tower, Xiao Nanhui was lighting an oil lamp. The room had been uninhabited for a long time, and a pervasive smell of mildew clung to every corner; even the wick soaking in the lamp oil had somewhat rotted, and it took her considerable effort before she managed to coax it out.
Outside the window, night had fallen completely. The faint sounds of string instruments and lively chatter drifted over from the direction of the front courtyard.
Bolao rummaged through the luggage and produced a bamboo tube, then carefully drew out a folded map and spread it on the table.
“It got wet on the river just now — not sure whether it’s still usable.”
Xiao Nanhui said nothing. She picked up the oil lamp and carried it carefully over; the flame, no bigger than a soybean, illuminated a small patch of the world around it.
It appeared to be a floor plan of a residential compound. In the center, over the main courtyard, a faded red seal was stamped — faintly in the shape of an archaic character that read “Hu.” Because water had seeped into the bamboo tube, the lower-left third of the map had been soaked through; the ink had bled and spread, obscuring the original layout of that section.
Xiao Nanhui’s brow creased.
This map had cost her no small effort to obtain — she had borrowed it through Yaoyi — precisely for situations where the plan might change and she would need to slip into the Zou Mansion. Now that Zou Sifang had sealed himself indoors, she was fortunate to have held this card in reserve.
The Zou Family’s grand residence was a well-known ancient estate in Huozhou, prized not only for its location but also for its meticulously designed chambers and courtyards. Yet prime real estate came at a steep price, and the house had sat vacant for no fewer than thirty or forty years before the Zou Family moved in.
In a manor house this old, navigating without a floor plan was a reliable path to getting hopelessly lost.
Bolao tilted her head and examined the map, then pointed at the ink-stained lower-left corner. “What a shame — when I looked at it earlier, I’m pretty sure there was a hidden passage here, and now it’s been smeared into nothing by the water.”
Xiao Nanhui thought it over and concluded it was not quite as bad as it seemed. “Even if the passage is still there, if we cannot know where it leads, it is of no use to us.” She paused, then pointed to several of the main courtyards at the center of the map. “Zou Sifang bought a compound this large; he certainly wasn’t planning to live in some cramped corner of it. We focus our search on these courtyards, and we’ll be close enough.”
Bolao was picking peanuts out of a dry fruit dish that had been sitting on the table for who knows how many years. “So we’re already breaking into someone’s home? How exciting.”
Though Xiao Nanhui herself felt the pull of it, the teachings of Xiao Zhun that had been drilled into her over the years made her somewhat uncomfortable with the phrase “breaking in,” so she dressed it up politely: “We’re simply going to have a look. Don’t make it sound so unseemly.”
Bolao curled her lip. “I make it sound unseemly? If you actually find that imperial seal, are you really not going to steal it—”
Xiao Nanhui clapped a hand over her mouth. “Keep your voice down. Walls have ears.”
Bolao smacked her hand away. “I don’t believe it. Is this thing really still a secret? If you ask me, half the outsiders in this city of Mu Er He came for exactly that.”
“All the more reason to be careful.”
Xiao Nanhui studied the map once more before putting it away. She then turned and rummaged through the luggage for a moment before a thought occurred to her — rather belatedly.
“Bolao, does anywhere in Mu Er He sell night-raid clothes?”
---