Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

Chapter 146: Among Other Things

"What do you mean by that?" Xuan asked. "Me?"

He said it as a joke. He knew full well what she meant, but she answered him anyway.

"Among other things." A pause, unhurried, while she turned her cup a slow half-circle on the wood. "Though in this case, no. I wasn’t talking about you."

Which was a yes by any other name, and they both heard it.

His face held, but the rims of his ears went warm. He’d reached for her game and closed his hand on nothing; he hadn’t counted on her handing it straight back. A year of hard living had taught him to keep his face flat under far worse than a pretty woman’s needling, and he’d thought himself good at it. The ears were a tell he hadn’t managed to drill out yet.

"I imagine you mean the peace," he said, recovering what footing he could.

Qingyue inclined her head, her expression smoothing into something tranquil. "I do. It’s a lovely thing, isn’t it? After everything these last months have thrown around." Her gaze drifted over the warm room, the laughing elders, the lamplight pooling on black lacquer. "Though I doubt anything that fell on me compares to what fell on you. Yuncheng. The mines. The ambush on your road home from the tournament." A beat. "And whatever your life was before any of that."

She couldn’t have known how much that last line carried, and he kept it off his face. A life before. She meant a hard childhood, a sickly heir’s bad years. She didn’t mean another world entirely, another name, a death she would never hear a word about. He let her keep the smaller version of it.

He didn’t let the words drag him down; he had no cause to. "Hm. They haven’t been easy months, true. But things tend to happen for a reason." He turned his cup a slow quarter. "I won’t pretend a day like this one isn’t pleasant, though. A few hours of not bracing for the next blow."

It was true, which caught him off guard. He’d expected the role of gracious heir to chafe like a borrowed coat. Instead, with the wine flowing and the hall warm and a frost-cold woman trading edges with him as an equal, he’d misplaced the performance somewhere and simply been a man at a table for a while.

"Right?" The corner of her mouth curved. "No assassinations. No duels, no wars, none of the power struggles waiting just over the season."

"True." He let the lightness ebb a little. "The fight over the Emperor’s throne won’t keep itself waiting long. I’m hoping our two families can come to terms before it reaches us."

"They will." She said it without a flicker of doubt. "My father backs the Third Princess as well."

"Does he?"

"He does. Though he didn’t arrive there the way yours did." Her eyes came to his, something warmer moving under the cool. "Your father told mine how things stood, back when they met in Yuncheng. And then there was the alley, the one where you pulled me out of trouble." The curve returned. "His opinion of your house climbed a good deal from there."

Xuan remembered the alley better than he let on, the narrow dark of it, the half-breath where it could have gone a very different way. He hadn’t stepped in for politics. He’d done it because it was unfolding in front of him and he had the means to stop it.

Around them the voices had been rising the whole while, loosened by the wine that did its usual work at a gathering like this, turning stiff courtesy into real laughter. The hall had gone properly loud, and he could barely follow their own conversation over the swell of it.

So he tipped his head toward the doors. "Want me to show you the grounds? We can carry this on somewhere we can actually hear each other."

Surprise crossed her, the good kind. "Gladly."

He stood and offered her his hand. She weighed it for a breath before she took it, and let him draw her up. Her fingers came cold against his, the way the rest of her promised they would, and she was in no rush to take them back.

Across the hall, Kai caught the small exchange and marked it without a word. He had Yueyue tucked against his side, the girl having fastened herself to her brother for the evening; she’d shadowed him everywhere since he came home, still half-afraid he might fold back into the locked room she’d lost him to once already. He kept one hand on her head and watched the two heirs make for the doors, and whatever he made of it, he kept that off his face too.

With that, Xuan led Su Qingyue out, the din of the banquet thinning to a murmur at their backs.

The night air pulled the last of the heat off his face the moment they cleared the doors. After the crush and clamor of the hall the grounds opened up vast and hushed around them, the lanterns Yu had strung along the east wall laying long warm pools across stone that, three days back, nobody would have called fit for a guest to walk.

Su Qingyue moved at his side without hurrying to fill the air, content to let the place introduce itself first. He found the quiet with her no harder to carry than the noise had been. Below the wall the mountain dropped away into dark, and far down the valley a scatter of lights marked the mortal town awake late. It was, he had to admit, a fine view after all.

Back inside, with the doors barely shut behind the pair of them, Lin Zhen set his cup down and turned to the man across the table, the warmth of the evening narrowing into something with edges.

"Well, old friend," he said. "Shall we begin?"