Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

Chapter 145: A Fine View

The question hung in the air a breath longer than it had any right to.

Xuan looked at her. Su Qingyue wore the same wintered calm she always did, a face built to surrender nothing. But under it, plain as a crack running across river ice, he caught the glint of someone thoroughly enjoying herself after lobbing a question like that at him out of nowhere.

It was a knack of hers, he was learning. Ask the one thing that ought to knock a person sideways, and wait, serene as a snowbank, while they grope for footing. On Earth he’d have filed it under sniper’s patience. Here he filed it under her name and left it there.

He didn’t answer at once. He held her gaze instead, turning over what to say, though it shouldn’t have been hard. After a slow breath, he gave it to her.

"How do you expect me not to think about something like that?" he said. "The first few days it gnawed a hole in the back of my head. Who says goodbye to a person that way?"

The mischief broke through into a small, crooked smile. "Me," she said.

"Yeah." His mouth tugged. "I worked out you were capable of something like that about an hour after I met you." He let a beat go by. "So. Happy with your answer?"

"Not entirely." The smile held. "But I expect I’ll press you on it later."

He walked her in after that. The welcome banquet stood ready and waiting, and warm light spilled over them at the threshold. Long tables of lacquered black ran the length of the room, picked out with red along their edges in the sect’s colors, and servants threaded between them with careful hands, setting down cups and trays and wine vessels without a single clink out of place. A few of them let their eyes betray them as they worked, flicking toward the sight of a Skyedge heir walking shoulder to shoulder with one out of Frostmoon.

The air carried the whole freight of a feast getting underway, roast meat and spiced wine and the green sweetness of forced blossoms someone had coaxed open early for the day.

Against all of it walked Su Qingyue and her private winter, a thread of cold trailing after her like a held breath, and the contrast was nearly comic: a hall sweating to look warm and generous, and the guest of honor’s daughter cooling the air a pace around herself wherever her boots fell.

Two years and a hundred miles had done nothing to soften her, far as he could tell, and he caught himself glad of it.

Xuan led her to the smaller side table set near the inner screens. It stood close enough to the principals to keep the courtesy intact, far enough to give the two of them room to say whatever they liked without weighing every word against the ears of two sects’ worth of patriarchs and elders.

He waited for her to take her seat, and took his own. A maid appeared to pour for them both before either thought to ask for it. He was aware, the way a man is aware of weather, of how many eyes in the hall tracked the pair of them to that table and politely found something else to look at.

A Skyedge heir and a Frostmoon heir, bent over the same cups. Everyone in the room could run the arithmetic the patriarchs were running, and everyone had the grace to pretend they weren’t.

"They’re attentive," Su Qingyue said, watching the girl withdraw. "Down to the smallest detail."

"Important guests arrived today." He turned his cup without drinking from it. "It would be strange if they weren’t quick on their feet to hand you the best of what we have."

"If we’re important guests, then I’m flattered to hear you say it."

"What’s that supposed to mean?"

"That I enjoy it when you flatter me."

That pulled a short laugh out of him. He’d walked into the line with his eyes open and somehow tripped over it anyway. Most people he could read three steps ahead; with her he kept ending up a beat behind, and the galling part was how little he minded it.

"Direct." He set the cup down. "I might’ve taken you for the more guarded sort, except I think I got to know you a shade too well back in Yuncheng."

"Hm." She tilted her head, unconvinced. "Allow me to doubt that. There are a good many facets of me you’ve never seen."

"Oh?" He leaned back. "Now you’ve got my curiosity. Which ones, if I’m allowed to ask?"

"Perhaps you’ll find them out, in time."

He hadn’t braced for her to be this forward. Back on Earth a woman flirting with him this openly had been a rare event, and one who did it the way she did, dry and sure of herself and three steps ahead, was, if he was honest with himself, a little spellbinding.

Which was, he reminded himself, beside the point. His father wanted the alliance; the marriage was a clause inside it, a knot pulled tighter, nothing he had any business losing his head over. He recited that to himself with all the conviction of a man who already suspected the reminder wasn’t going to take.

Beyond their table the two patriarchs had gone warm over their cups, and the elders of both houses, the Frostmoon ones surfacing at last, were folding in among the Skyedge ranks. The whole room tilted toward a real celebration, two sets of people who’d walked in wary now talking over each other and laughing at the wrong beats, the way strangers do once the wine has decided the alliance is as good as signed.

Qingyue followed his gaze and caught him taking in the breadth of it, two houses thawing toward each other across the lacquered tables.

"A fine view, don’t you think?" she said.

And the angle of her attention, when he glanced over, left him unsure whether she meant the hall at all.