"I knew they were crushing you. But the Emperor had decreed my deployment, my duty chained me."
"I could not stay to protect you, and I knew that if I left you in that house, you would not survive the winter. Your spirit was too fragile. The beatings, the starvation, the isolation... it was going to kill you.
He stepped closer, his imposing frame blocking out the rest of the world, leaving only him and her in the moonlit pavilion.
"I wasn't able to protect you here," Lin Feng confessed, the admission clearly tearing at his soul. "So... before I left for the North, I sought out the Grand Oracle of the Star-Seizing Tower. I paid the price needed to protect you."
Ji'an's vision began to blur as the words were hitting her ears, but her brain was entirely failing to process the magnitude of the revelation.
