Yuzhen clutched the vial as footsteps echoed at the alley's entrance. Two women from the inner market bustled past, chattering, not giving the alley a second glance. Once their voices faded, Xu Qingli let go of his wrist and stepped back, as if she'd never touched him.
"Don't thank me," she said.
"I wasn't planning on it."
"I know."
Her fan snapped shut. The cut on his palm still throbbed. He fiddled with the vial inside his sleeve. It was tiny, easily hidden, and so light he'd almost forget it was there if not for the lingering warmth from her hand.
"What is it?" he asked.
"A meridian-calming pill." She eyed him, a flicker of annoyance in her gaze. "Low-grade. Nothing special. But it's better than walking around with your spiritual energy all messed up."
He almost asked why she even had something like that. Then he decided against it. People from prominent families carried weirder things.
"And if I don't take it?"
"Then just toss it," she replied. "I've already done the hard part."
Something in her expression stopped him from getting defensive. It wasn't kindness, or pity – she would have mocked him if it were pity. It was more like impatience, or perhaps just an unwillingness to watch someone make a scene, bleeding in an alley after losing face in public.
Yuzhen slid the vial deeper into his sleeve. Xu Qingli noticed, a ghost of satisfaction crossing her face for a split second before she spoiled it. "You really were an idiot."
"Yes."
That seemed to catch her off guard. She stared. "You admit it?"
"I'm injured, not losing my mind."
A quick, bright laugh escaped her before she could catch it. "You should go home," she said.
"That was already my plan."
"No." She glanced toward the street. "I mean today. Don't try to save face by doing anything else stupid before sunset."
He looked at her then, really looked, and realized that despite her sharp words, she was younger than her steady gaze suggested. Not by much. Maybe a year. Enough to make her feel the need to mask concern with mockery. He'd met kinder people. He'd also met far less honest ones.
"I'll keep your advice close to my heart."
"That sounds insincere."
"It is."
"Good." She opened her fan again and turned away. "If anyone asks, I came to watch you suffer and left disappointed."
Yuzhen leaned a shoulder against the alley wall. "Then you were truly let down today."
This time, she didn't hide her smile. She just waved a hand without looking back and stepped into the street, as if she'd never entered the alley at all.
He stayed put for a while. The market sounds drifted in and out, fainter now. Nearby, wine jars clinked hollowly. Someone argued over spirit dates. A child's laughter, then a cry, then laughter again. Just normal sounds. His breathing had evened out. The humiliation, however, hadn't.
He looked down at his hand. The cut had stopped bleeding. The sight annoyed him more than it should have. Such a small wound for such a foolish mistake. He uncorked the vial. A faint, bitter scent rose. It wasn't top-quality stuff for a clan auction, but it was decent. He tipped the pill into his palm. Gray-green, smooth, refined quickly but not carelessly. He swallowed it dry.
A few breaths later, the effect began. Cool threads seemed to sink into his meridians, one by one. The ache in his ribs eased, not gone, but less sharp. Yuzhen put the empty vial away and left the alley.
The guard who had been tailing him was waiting outside, his face a mask of professional neutrality. The man said nothing about the pavilion, the alley, or the fact that he'd clearly seen Xu Qingli go in and come out. Good.
"Back to the estate," Yuzhen said.
The guard bowed. "Yes, Young Master."
The walk home felt longer than it had that morning. Maybe because word had already gotten out. He saw it in the glances that followed him – not mocking this time, but alert, curious. The kind that signaled fragments of the story had already raced ahead of him. *Bia Yuzhen played spirit chess. Bia Yuzhen lost. Bia Yuzhen's meridians are worse than people thought.* Rumors bred fast in Mingzu, especially with fresh gossip.
By the time the Bia gates came into view, he craved only two things: silence and the locked door of his old cultivation room. He got neither. The moment he stepped into the front courtyard, a household attendant hurried down the stone path. "Young Master, the Family Head asked that you go to the west hall when you returned."
Yuzhen stopped. "Now?"
The attendant hesitated. "…Yes."
Of course. He almost said he'd change first, wash, breathe, become someone less raw before facing his grandfather. But delaying would only make the summons feel heavier. So he nodded once and changed direction.
The west hall was tucked deeper into the estate than the main reception rooms, past a stand of old bamboo and a narrow bridge over a stream that never quite stopped murmuring. Bia Zhenyuan used it for private matters, family business, the kind no servant repeated loudly, even if they knew. The doors were open. Inside, only two people waited. His grandfather sat at the tea table by the window. Beside him, shoulders hunched over a stack of loose papers, was Bia Minghe.
Yuzhen paused at the threshold. His eldest uncle looked up first. Of his father's brothers, Minghe resembled him the least. Where Bia Mingchen had been quietly handsome, broad-backed and steady-faced, Minghe had sharper features and a scholar's hands, long-fingered and often stained with ink or medicinal paste. He wasn't weak – no son of the main Bia branch could afford to be – but his strength lay in order, records, and decisions made after carefully gauging the room's temperature. Today, he looked tired.
"Come in," Bia Zhenyuan said.
Yuzhen stepped inside and bowed. "Grandfather. Eldest Uncle."
Minghe gave him a look that lingered for a moment on his face and hands before moving away. He'd noticed the strain, then. Not surprising.
"You were in the market," his grandfather stated. It wasn't a question.
"Yes."
"And in the pavilion with Yu Chengxiu."
"Yes."
Bia Zhenyuan lifted his cup, drank, and set it down. "And because one humiliation wasn't enough, you sat at a spirit board with a broken foundation."
Yuzhen kept his eyes down. "Yes."
A dry, humorless chuckle came from his uncle. "At least he's not pretending otherwise." That was the worst part. There was nothing to defend. Yuzhen had known better. He'd done it anyway.
For a while, only the stream outside made noise. Then Bia Zhenyuan said, "Come here." Yuzhen stepped forward until he stood beside the tea table. "Hand."
He obeyed. The old man took his wrist with far more gentleness than his voice ever suggested. Spiritual sense brushed across Yuzhen's meridians, cool and probing. It lasted only moments. When Bia Zhenyuan let go, the lines around his mouth had deepened. "Who gave you the pill?"
Yuzhen blinked. His grandfather snorted. "Your meridians are calmer than when you left. Someone had the sense you lacked."
"Xu Qingli," Yuzhen said.
His uncle's brows rose. Bia Zhenyuan only grunted. "At least the Xu Family produced one child with a useful head." That startled a laugh out of Yuzhen before he could stop it. It disappeared just as quickly.
Minghe leaned back from his papers. "Do you know why your grandfather sent for you?"
"Because I embarrassed the family?"
"No," Bia Zhenyuan said flatly. "If that were enough to summon you, I'd have called you in when you were six."
Yuzhen looked up. His grandfather's expression had changed. Not softened. Something heavier. Minghe gathered the loose papers into a neater stack and pushed one sheet free. Even from where he stood, Yuzhen recognized the writing instantly. His father's hand. His chest tightened so fast it hurt. The paper was worn at the folds, stained at one corner. Not old enough to be from years ago, not new enough to have arrived easily. Yuzhen forgot the spirit board, the market, the alley, Xu Qingli, and the ache in his meridians.
"When?" he asked.
Minghe looked at him for a moment before answering. "An hour ago."
Yuzhen didn't reach for the letter. He was suddenly afraid to touch it. His father had entered the secret realm eight months ago. Eight months of silence, no messages, no tokens, no broken communication jade lighting up in the middle of the night. At first, there had been confidence in the household. He was Early Golden Elixir. He'd gone with two companions. He wasn't reckless. Whatever was delaying him would pass. Then the first month stretched into the third. By the fifth, servants stopped mentioning his name carelessly. By the seventh, even hopeful people lowered their eyes before saying, "We still haven't heard anything." And now…
"Read," Bia Zhenyuan said.
Yuzhen took the paper. The first line was enough. *My son, if this reaches home, do not let your grandmother cry too much.* The words blurred. He blinked hard and read on. The letter had been written in haste; he could feel it in the cramped slant of the characters and the places where the ink had pooled. His father wrote that the secret realm wasn't what the old records claimed. That the inner restriction had shifted after opening. That two paths had collapsed and sealed behind them. That one companion had died. That the other was injured. Yuzhen's grip tightened.
Then came the part that made his stomach turn cold: *There is a spring in the inner valley said to restore damaged foundations. I have not yet confirmed it, but the signs are real enough that I cannot turn back now. If I must remain longer, do not come after me rashly.* There were more lines after that. Warnings. Instructions. The names of two people in a nearby city who might know the old route markers. A note for his elder brother regarding the family granary accounts, absurdly ordinary in the middle of everything else. And one final line at the end, written darker than the rest: *Tell Yuzhen this was my decision. He is not to carry it as a debt.*
The hall fell very quiet. Yuzhen read that last line again. And again. He had spent eight months carrying exactly that debt. His father had gone because of him. Because every physician in Mingzu had failed. Because no one could say broken foundations healed and mean it. Because hope, however thin, had been enough to send an Early Golden Elixir cultivator into a shifting realm that killed one companion and trapped the others.
He lowered the letter carefully. "When are you sending people?" he asked.
Minghe's expression shifted. "Yuzhen," his uncle said, "we're still deciding that."
"No. You've already decided. You're deciding how much to tell me."
Minghe went still. Across from him, Bia Zhenyuan said, very quietly, "Look at me."
Yuzhen did. "You are not going," his grandfather stated. The words landed like stones. For one heartbeat, neither of them moved. Then Yuzhen laughed once, not because anything was funny, but because if he didn't, something worse might come out instead. "I didn't ask to go now."
"You were about to."
Yuzhen's mouth closed. That, too, was answer enough. Bia Zhenyuan leaned back in his chair, eyes hard as old bronze. "Your father wrote what he wrote because he knew you. He knew exactly what foolish thought would rise in your head the moment his letter touched your hand."
Yuzhen looked down at the page. The last line seemed to burn through the paper. Outside, the stream kept murmuring under the bridge. Inside, his grandfather's voice dropped even lower. "Your father entered that realm to bring you back a future," he said. "If you throw away what little you still have trying to run after him in your current state, then everything he did becomes a joke."
Yuzhen said nothing. He couldn't. Because the cruelest part was that his grandfather was right. And because buried under the shock, under the guilt, under the sudden bright flare of hope that his father was still alive, another thought had already taken shape – cold, immediate, impossible to ignore. A spring that could restore a damaged foundation. His father had gone in for that. For him. And somewhere behind his ribs, where his broken meridians still ached no matter how he carried himself, something answered like a wound touched by light.