Her head hurt.

  Not a little. Not faintly.

  It throbbed.

  Low and dull, like someone had pressed a smooth stone behind her brow and decided to .

  By the time the spiritual lesson ended and Lin Yujing dismissed them with a glance and a wave of a long-fingered hand, Rulan wasn’t sure if she’d breathed properly at all or simply imagined the whole thing. She didn’t feel enlightened. She didn’t feel settled.

  She felt wrung out.

  Like cloth.

  Like failure.

  She made it as far as the base of the path before she slumped onto a bench and dropped her head into her hands with a dramatic, uncoordinated thud.

  Shen Li, of course, was already waiting.

  “You look like someone lit a fire under your eyelids,” she said.

  Rulan groaned. “Don’t talk to me.”

  “I wasn’t talking. I was making an observation.”

  “Then observe in silence.”

  Shen Li tilted her head. “No.”

  Rulan groaned louder and let herself sag farther over the edge of the bench, knees parted, hands dragging down her face.

  “I’m dying,” she muttered.

  “You’re not.”

  “I’m spiritually dying.”

  Shen Li let out a very small, extremely unsympathetic snort. “Come on. Food hall.”

  “I can’t walk.”

  “Then you can crawl.”

  Rulan glared at her from between her fingers.

  “Are you always like this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do people like you?”

  Shen Li considered. “Sometimes.”

  Rulan made a wheezing, defeated sound and allowed herself to be pulled upright by one limp sleeve. “Fine,” she muttered. “But I’m going to complain the whole way.”

  “You already are.”

  The food hall was half full by the time they arrived. Warm, hazy with cooking steam and faintly sticky with spilled tea. Rulan carried her bowl like a relic, cradled reverently between her palms as she dropped into a seat at one of the long outer tables and leaned over it like someone guarding her last meal.

  Congee. Pickled greens. Something that might have once been pork, in very small pieces.

  She stared into it with the dead-eyed intensity of someone who wasn’t sure if they wanted to eat or drown in it.

  Shen Li sat across from her, not saying a word.

  Rulan took one bite. Then another.

  Then, without lifting her eyes, she mumbled, “You’re going to bring out the scroll again, aren’t you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I hate you.”

  “I know.”

  Rulan pointed her spoon at her with grave solemnity. “I mean it.”

  “Your handwriting says otherwise.”

  “That was okay character.”

  “Two.”

  Rulan groaned. “You counted?”

  “I always count.”

  Shen Li pulled the scroll from her sleeve like a magician drawing out a prophecy. She smoothed it on the table between them, careful not to let it fall into Rulan’s porridge.

  The brush and ink came next. Rulan stared at them like someone being handed a shovel after collapsing from planting season.

  Shen set them down gently and said, in a tone of voice only slightly above deadpan, “Let’s practice .”

  Rulan pressed her forehead to the table.

  “I can’t even feel my dan tian,” she muttered into the wood.

  “That’s fine,” Shen Li replied. “Today, you just need to spell it.”

  Rulan lifted her head enough to squint, disgruntled. “It’s two characters, isn’t it?”

  “Two strokes more than you’ve done before.”

  “Do you watching me suffer?”

  Shen Li smiled, a rare thing, sharp and fleeting. “Yes.”

  Rulan stared at her, then laughed once—lopsided and bitter and real.

  “I don’t get you.”

  “That’s alright,” Shen said. “You don’t have to.”

  Rulan picked up the brush like it weighed half her body.

  The first stroke dragged. Uneven. Too much ink.

  The second bled outward.

  “You’re pressing too hard,” Shen said calmly.

  “I know.”

  “Then stop pressing.”

  “That’s harder than it sounds.”

  “I know.”

  She drew another line. Then another. Her hand cramped halfway through the second character and she hissed softly under her breath.

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  “Dan tian,” she muttered. “What even it.”

  Shen Li’s voice was even. “A centre.”

  “That means nothing.”

  “It means everything,” she said. “Eventually.”

  Rulan grunted and hunched further over her bowl.

  Another line. Another breath.

  Still crooked.

  But less so.

  — — — —

  They had both fallen quiet again, the soft scratch of brush against parchment a brittle sort of rhythm between them.

  Rulan’s latest attempt at lay before her—still unbalanced, the spacing uneven, the second character drifting upward like it had tried to flee mid-stroke. But it was legible. Almost.

  She scowled at it. Then at the brush.

  Then, lifting her gaze just enough to be casual, she asked, “So what’s your story?”

  Shen Li didn’t look up.

  “Story?”

  “You know,” Rulan said, flicking her fingers as if waving away the weight of it. “Why you’re here. What you did before the Sect.”

  Shen Li traced the next character slowly, her brush barely whispering against the parchment.

  “Not much,” she said, after a beat. “Grew up in a border province. Parents still alive. Had a tutor. Passed the ministry’s exams.”

  “You don’t talk like someone from the provinces.”

  “I listened to people who didn’t.”

  Rulan made a noise somewhere between a hum and a grunt. “Didn’t think I’d get anything useful out of you.”

  “I told you.”

  “You told me nothing.”

  Shen Li looked up then, her expression unreadable. “I told you enough.”

  There was no sharpness in it. Just a line drawn in the sand with the same precision she used to draw characters.

  Rulan huffed through her nose and returned to her parchment.

  Dipped the brush.

  Stared at the smear she’d left on the edge.

  “I’m not from anywhere,” she said, not looking up.

  “I know,” Shen replied.

  “I don’t even know if I had a name before someone barked ‘Rulan’ at me and I decided to keep it.”

  “It suits you.”

  Rulan blinked, then snorted. “What does that mean?”

  Shen Li tilted her head, considering. “It’s stubborn. Short. Keeps growing back.”

  “That’s not flattering.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be.”

  Rulan smirked despite herself.

  The next character she drew bled too heavily in the lower stroke. She cursed softly, pulled the parchment a little to the side to start again.

  “You’ve got clan training, don’t you?” she asked after a moment. “Even if you’re not from one. That formal stuff. The way you sit. The way you talk.”

  “I had a good tutor,” Shen Li said.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  Shen Li looked down at her writing. “It’s the one you’re getting.”

  Rulan rolled her eyes. “You’re insufferable.”

  “And yet you keep sitting with me.”

  “You keep dragging me.”

  “That too.”

  They lapsed into silence again.

  Outside the food hall, the air had dimmed further, streaked with the first strokes of evening. Lanterns swayed gently from the rafters, casting long golden ripples over the table and scroll.

  The parchment felt warmer now, somehow, despite the ache in Rulan’s fingers.

  She wasn’t sure if the conversation had helped or made things worse. It felt like trying to catch fish with her hands—slippery, messy, never quite enough to hold.

  But it was something.

  So she leant into it.

  “Do you think I’ll make it?” she asked, low.

  She didn’t mean to say it aloud.

  But the words escaped anyway.

  Shen Li didn’t answer right away.

  She looked at Rulan—really looked at her, for the first time in a while. At the furrow in her brow. The ink smudge along her cheekbone. The way she still sat like someone expecting the bench to be pulled out from under her.

  Then Shen Li said, very quietly, “Yes.”

  Rulan frowned. “Why?”

  “Because you haven’t run yet,” she said. “And everything about you says you should have.”

  “You seem to think you’ve got me all figured out,” Rulan said.

  The words came out sharper than she intended—not a bite, not quite, but close enough to sting if you leaned in.

  She didn’t look up from the parchment, but her brush hovered in midair, paused above the next stroke as if she were still deciding whether to finish it or tear the whole page in half.

  Across from her, Shen Li didn’t flinch.

  She set down her own brush with deliberate care and smoothed the edge of the scroll between them, as though folding a crease that wasn’t there.

  “I don’t,” she said.

  Rulan scoffed under her breath. “Could’ve fooled me.”

  “You talk like someone who’s always been underestimated,” Shen continued. “But the moment someone doesn’t underestimate you, you start looking for a trap.”

  That made Rulan pause.

  Not stop. Just pause. The way someone might at the edge of a drop they didn’t expect.

  She frowned at her half-finished character and didn’t respond right away.

  Shen waited.

  Not expectant. Just still.

  And after a long moment, Rulan muttered, “Because there usually is.”

  “That’s not the same thing,” Shen Li said softly. “That’s not the same thing at all.”

  Rulan looked up.

  Just a flick of the eyes, but enough.

  Shen’s expression hadn’t changed. Calm. Measured. That irritating poise she always wore like armour.

  But there was no smugness in it.

  No pity either.

  Just… presence.

  The kind of presence that didn’t lean in or step back. Just stayed.

  “You think I’m trying to figure you out,” Shen said, “but I’m not. I’m watching.”

  “And that’s better?”

  “It’s real.”

  Rulan stared at her, brows drawn low.

  She didn’t know what to say to that.

  Didn’t like that there was to say to that.

  And so, because silence felt too vulnerable, she reached for irritation like a reflex.

  “Sounds like something a monk would say,” she grumbled.

  Shen Li smiled, faint and lopsided. “I read too many scrolls.”

  “Yeah, no kidding.”

  Rulan dipped her brush again. Ink thick and steady this time.

  The strokes came easier.

  Not perfect. Not even good.

  But hers.

  “Still don’t like you,” she muttered.

  Shen didn’t look up from the parchment. “I know.”

  And for some reason, that made Rulan’s chest ache a little less.

  It was well past twilight by the time Rulan parted from Shen Li at the fork in the path.

  The mountain air had cooled further, turning crisp enough to sting at the tips of her ears. Lanterns swayed along the outer paths, casting soft pools of gold that puddled on the stone and flickered in the mist.

  Her fingers were stained dark from the ink, dried into the fine lines of her skin. Her wrists ached. Her head throbbed.

  Every character Shen Li had drilled into her was still spinning behind her eyes, swimming in loose rhythm with Lin Yujing’s voice, the day’s breathing cycles, and the residual embarrassment of having her posture corrected twice by a boy who hadn’t even met her eyes.

  “I liked my head better when I didn’t know any literary script at all,” she muttered to herself.

  The lantern above her door was already lit when she returned.

  She pushed the gate open quietly, stepping into the courtyard of the tier-three house with careful feet, not wanting to make more noise than she had to. The stone was cool underfoot. The moss at the edges of the steps gave just a little as she climbed them.

  She was almost to the door when it opened from the inside.

  Wang Feiyan.

  Of course.

  Wang Feiyan stepped out into the lamplight with her usual, glacial precision. Her hair was freshly coiled, not a strand out of place. Her outer robe had changed—frost-blue silk with faint embroidery in pale silver thread, sharp and clean, a sky unbothered by clouds.

  Her eyes landed on Rulan’s ink-stained hands first.

  Then the smudge on her cheek.

  Then, pointedly, the state of her boots.

  Wang Feiyan’s nose curled like someone had just waved smoke beneath it.

  “You’re not entering house like that.”

  Rulan froze halfway up the step, blinking once. “Like what?”

  “Like something dragged in by the wind.”

  “I live here.”

  “And I ”

  Rulan felt the tiredness in her spine go tight and sharp. “Then keep cleaning.”

  Feiyan’s expression didn’t change, but her shoulders straightened.

  “You’ve already stained the hallway once.”

  “Pretty sure that was dust,” Rulan said. “From your fancy sleeves dragging across the floor.”

  Wang Feiyan took a step forward, cold and upright. “This house was offered to cultivators. Not ink-blotted strays.”

  “And yet here I am.”

  “You don’t belong here.”

  “Neither do you,” Rulan shot back. “If your clan hadn’t been disgraced, you’d be up the mountain already, wouldn’t you?”

  That landed.

  Not visibly. Not loudly.

  But the silence that followed was still.

  Wang Feiyan’s chin lifted by a fraction. “You think I won’t have you thrown out?”

  Rulan laughed, short and low. “For what? Being messy? Let me guess—your ancestors embroidered your birthright with silver thread and now you have to live with people like me.”

  Feiyan took another step forward.

  Closer now.

  The lamplight caught the edges of her expression—not a snarl, not a scowl.

  Something colder.

  Measured.

  And just a little bit angry.

  “I could make sure your name doesn’t last the season,” she said, quiet. “One report. One note to the instructors. No one would question me.”

  Rulan didn’t flinch.

  Her jaw clenched.

  And she smiled.

  A small, vicious little thing that didn’t reach her eyes.

  “Do it, then.”

  Wang Feiyan blinked.

  Rulan’s voice didn’t rise, but it dropped lower—cooler. No longer defensive. Just of swallowing herself.

  “Break all the little sect rules. Go ahead. Put your hands on me. Write your report. Make your move. Let’s see how your clan likes their little frost daughter getting banished from the sect over a dirty robe and a bruised ego.”

  She took one step forward—closer now, close enough to see the muscles tick in Feiyan’s jaw.

  “See how far you get with that crest stitched on your back and mud on your shoes.”

  Feiyan’s mouth parted.

  Then closed.

  Nothing was said.

  For a heartbeat, the world held still.

  Then Wang Feiyan turned—graceful, precise—and vanished back into the house without another word.

  Rulan let out a long, low breath.

  Then another.

  Then she wiped her hand across her face, smearing the ink further, and went inside.