Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

Chapter 150: Airtight

"...What?"

Su Qingyue turned from the window with the patience of a tutor whose student has fallen a lesson behind. "Which part lost you?"

"The part where my storeroom became your bedroom."

"Ah." She nodded, as though this were a perfectly reasonable thing to be confused about and she would generously clear it up for him. "Then let me walk you through it."

And she did, and that was the whole trouble.

"Your sect and mine sealed terms tonight, or our fathers are sealing them over the wine as we stand here. Frostmoon sends disciples to Skyedge. That was the bones of the thing before either of us left the hall." She ticked it off without lifting her voice. "A body of my sect’s disciples, posted on another sect’s mountain, needs someone of rank to command them and answer for them. I am my sect’s heir. There’s no one higher to send in my place. So I stay." A small pause. "With me so far?"

"I’m with you as far as ’staying at the sect,’" Xuan said. "It’s the jump from ’at the sect’ to ’across the hall from me’ that’s losing me."

"That part is the one piece our fathers left to us, and didn’t decide for themselves."

She came away from the window and faced him properly, and the teasing edge went out of her, traded for something more level.

"They talked the marriage through tonight, the two of them. I know well enough how those talks tend to go. But mine didn’t agree to it on my behalf, and yours didn’t agree to it on yours. They looked at the two houses, decided it made good sense, and did the rare thing and handed the choosing back to us. So I’m not standing in your storeroom informing you that we’re betrothed and this is my room now." A pause. "I’m telling you I want it to be. And I’m asking what you want."

It pulled the wind out of whatever he’d been assembling to say.

"Let me put the case to you plainly, since you’ll weigh it plainly." She counted it out, but gently this time, an argument between equals and not a snare.

"You lose nothing by it. The wedding would be years off; the war sees to that, and so does the fact that we’re both barely into our twenties. A betrothal binds our houses far tighter than treaty ink ever could. A sect the Second Prince has his eye on gives him pause when there are two heirs and two banners standing behind one promise, and not just a handshake he can sit back and outwait. And the whole cost of it to you is time spent coming to know the person you’d marry, which you would be spending regardless." The last of it arrived quieter, the certainty thinning into something more honest. "I’d rather spend it. I want to know you. That’s the real reason I put this on the table back in Yuncheng, before anyone could make me do it."

[ For what it’s worth. ] Mira, gentler than he was used to from her. [ She means it. She isn’t working you. I’d have told you the second she started if she were. ]

"And before you take all night turning it over," Su Qingyue added, the dry edge flickering back, "our fathers are waiting on the two of us to confirm this. They left the choice to us; they didn’t leave the room. By now they’ve run dry of wine to talk over, and I’d wager we are the topic of conversation. The longer we take, the more they’ll read into the taking."

Xuan drew a breath and actually weighed it, which caught him off guard. A day ago he’d have reached for a deflection on reflex.

The sect’s side of it was plain enough. A true bond with Frostmoon, sealed and not merely signed, was worth more to a battered house than almost anything else lying on the table, and his father had never once been wrong about leverage in his life. Only a fool turned down a stronger wall with a war climbing toward the gate.

But that wasn’t the thing tipping him, and he knew it even as he reached past it. The less convenient truth, the one harder to say aloud, was that he didn’t mind her. More than didn’t mind. She’d climbed his mountain, looked at the hill they’d left him on to die, and found something there worth tying her own name to. She argued with him as though he were worth the argument. After a year of being pitied or feared or both at once, that was not a small thing, and he wasn’t fool enough to dress it up as one.

He let the breath go.

"Alright," he said. "Yes. Not for the alliance, though I won’t pretend it doesn’t help. Because I’d like to know you too, and I’d sooner find out what this is than spend a year on the far side of a hallway wondering about it." The dry crept back in, since he couldn’t quite help himself. "And because I’d rather not be the reason two patriarchs are kept waiting on their wine."

Something eased out of her face, a thread of tension he hadn’t marked her carrying until it was gone. For all the certainty she’d argued with, she had not actually known what he would say. She’d wanted the yes. The discovery rearranged a few things in his head, none of them in a direction he disliked.

"Good." The small curve at the corner of her mouth came warmer than any she’d let him see yet. "I’ll take the storeroom after all. We can shift the crates in the morning."

"...We’re really doing this," he said, mostly to himself.

"We really are." She sounded quietly pleased about it. "Do try to keep up."

He was halfway into a reply, something about which of the two of them ought to be keeping up with whom, when Mira’s voice shifted register in his head, every trace of the play draining out of it at once.

[ Xuan. ] Quiet now, and serious. [ Something’s stirring down in Blood Fang. They’re moving Han Ying. Walking him somewhere he hasn’t been, deeper in, past every stretch of the place I’ve managed to map. ] A beat. [ I think we’re about to learn what they’ve been keeping back there. ]