Chapter 183: Muscle by Muscle
The door of the seclusion room opened for the first time in sixty-odd days, and three people got a clear look at what two months of ignoring his own body had produced.
He knew it was bad from their faces before he worked out why. Wei Tianming’s careful composure developed a small crack. Lian, a step behind him, brought her sleeve up over her nose with the speed of a woman who had walked face-first into a wall of something. Even Qingyue’s chin lifted a fraction.
The smell reached Xuan a half-second later, bouncing back off the doorframe into his own face, and he nearly gagged on his own existence.
’Oh,’ he thought. ’Oh, that is me.’
[ Two months, Xuan. Two months, no water, in a sealed stone box, sweating out of every pore while you played the hero. ] Mira sounded like she was pinching a nose she did not have. [ You have produced a genuinely historic stink. I would frame it, if I had hands. ]
’Thank you,’ he told her. ’Genuinely. That helps a lot.’
Behind her sleeve, Lian made a small strangled noise and took a diplomatic step back toward the fresher air of the stairwell. Wei Tianming held his ground, though the cost of it showed around his eyes, which was either loyalty or a private decision that flinching would be worse for everyone’s moral
He looked down at himself. Two months in robes he had not changed, gone stiff in places he chose not to think about. His hair hung in ropes. There was grime worked so far into his hands it had stopped being dirt and turned into a finish. He had walked out of that room feeling like a man remade on the doorstep of Foundation Establishment, powerful and honed and reborn.
He smelled like something a tomb had spat back out.
And Qingyue was smiling at him. A real one, small and warm and wholly untroubled by the state of him, the smile of a woman who had left food outside a door for two months and had finally got the door to open. It knocked him off balance worse than the smell had.
"Do not say it," he warned her. And then, because he could not help himself, quieter, "...It is good to see you too."
She tipped her head and looked him over, unhurried, from the wild hair down and back up again, and the smile shifted into something with more mischief in it.
"You have changed," she said. "Under all of that. The shoulders. The way you stand now." A cool, appraising pause. "Two months did no harm at all to your frame, whatever they did to your smell."
"You are studying me very closely, for a woman who just told me I smell like a grave," Xuan said. "Anyone watching would think you were analyzing me. Thoroughly."
"Muscle by muscle," Qingyue agreed, without a flicker of shame, and had the pleasure of watching him lose the thread of whatever he had lined up to say next.
[ I like her, ] Mira said, thoroughly delighted. [ I have always liked her. She does in one sentence what takes me a whole paragraph. ]
Wei Tianming cleared his throat with the pained dignity of a man who would rather be on the far side of the mountain.
Lian abandoned subtlety altogether, sleeve still clamped over her nose, her voice coming out muffled behind it.
"I am so sorry to interrupt whatever this is," she said. "Truly. It is very sweet and I hate to be the one. But there is a princess sitting in the main hall and we genuinely do not have time for it. Your father is down there. Your brother. The mothers of the house, the elders, all of them, ringed around an imperial envoy and waiting on you." She flapped her free hand toward the stairs. "So please. Hurry!"
Xuan dragged a hand down his ruined face.
"Right. Well. Then we had better move," he said. "Which, the way things currently stand, is going to have to start with me not walking into an imperial audience smelling like a battlefield in high summer."
What came next was the least dignified span of his month. Lian conjured buckets of steaming water out of somewhere with frightening efficiency, and left him to it, mercifully.
Xuan scrubbed two months off his skin until the water in the basin turned a color he refused to look at directly.
[ You missed a spot. ] Mira, helpful. [ The spot is your entire back. Also both of your ears. Honestly, how does a grown man forget he owns ears. ]
’Are you going to narrate the whole thing?’
[ Every second of it. This is the most fun you have handed me in two months. You cultivated without making a sound, like some noble little monk, and now you are losing a wrestling match to your own hair in a bucket. I am savoring it. ]
He wrestled the hair back into something a person might admit to owning, and dug out the single set of good robes he kept for the occasions he usually went well out of his way to dodge. He ignored almost every word she said, which was its own kind of company.
He came back out washed, dressed, upright, and finally looking like the heir of a rising sect instead of the thing that heir might keep chained in a cellar. Qingyue waited for him at the top of the stairs, composed once more, the Young Mistress of Frostmoon slid neatly back over the woman who had counted his muscles a quarter hour before.
"Ready?" she asked.
He looked down the long stair toward the main hall, where an imperial princess and a hundred armed guards and every last member of his family stood waiting to decide what he was.
"No, honestly, I didn’t expect this news after I went cultivating, but oh well." he said honestly, and rolled his shoulders once inside the stiff good robes. "Let us go anyway."
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