R-rated scene up ahead!
Yàn Shū had a system.
The system was simple, elegant, and had served him well for a long time: find a quiet corner, open a scroll, and become invisible.
People tended to overlook scholars. This was not an insult. It was a feature. When you were overlooked, no one interrupted your reading, no one asked you to settle disputes, and no one dragged you into the kind of social catastrophes that seemed to find everyone else with alarming regularity.
He was in the middle of a particularly fascinating passage about medicinal root cultivation when the door of the Thousand Fang trading post flew open and a woman walked in.
He looked up.
He immediately looked back down.
He immediately looked up again.
She was, objectively, several things at once. Tall. Her eyes, when they swept the space, were the color of amethysts catching firelight.
They landed on him.
He looked back down at his scroll.
The words had stopped making sense.
