“Who is this girl?”
Mo Yin’s voice rose, light and amused, as he brushed Yanlong aside with a single sweep of his fan, as though shooing away an annoying fly.
He stepped forward unhurriedly, with that careless elegance that seemed to never leave him, and bent down until he was level with Tianyin’s face.
Their eyes met.
That was when Tianyin noticed it: deep within his pupils, golden and almost liquid, there was a lotus.
Tiny, perfect, its delicate petals slightly opened—and it was turning.
Slowly.
As though animated by a life of its own, as though an entire world were breathing inside that simple gaze.
Wow…
She remained frozen, unable to look away, hypnotized by a sight she had never imagined possible.
She had seen many strange things, but never anything like this.
Time seemed to stretch, as if the golden lotus were searching for something deep within her, an answer even she did not know she possessed.
Mo Yin stared at her for another moment, silent, almost thoughtful, then a smile split across his face, a smile that revealed just how much he had understood.
“Interesting!” he exclaimed as he straightened, a mischievous glint in his voice.
“Yanlong…
I pity you!”
He laughed softly, almost to himself, as he reopened his fan with a theatrical flourish.
That was when Pei Ruxue stepped forward in turn, without a word at first, her confident stride enough to make Mo Yin step back with an almost careless roll of his shoulder.
She stopped in front of Tianyin, looking her up and down with the cold contempt of someone accustomed to passing judgment.
“Let me see…” she murmured, a look of disdain twisting her painted lips.
She wound a strand of Tianyin’s hair around her index finger, examining it as one might examine a worthless object found at a market.
“There’s nothing special about her,” she finally said, her voice sharp.
“She doesn’t even have an ounce of beauty!”
Yanlong immediately stepped between them, his hand closing around Pei Ruxue’s wrist to stop her dead.
Something in his gesture betrayed more than simple courtesy toward a stranger—an almost instinctive urgency, as though he could not stand seeing Tianyin touched in front of him, without even knowing himself why.
“That’s true,” Pei Ruxue continued without backing down, her gaze slowly shifting from Tianyin to Yanlong, a smile on her lips that never reached her eyes.
“It really is astonishing that the great Prince Yanlong would take an interest in a girl as insignificant as her.”
A tense silence settled over them, disturbed only by the rustling of the wind through the surrounding leaves.
Yanlong did not answer immediately.
He led her a little farther away, out of earshot of the others, still gripping her wrist firmly, his closed expression betraying nothing of his thoughts—except perhaps, deep within his eyes, an ancient weariness, that of a man tired of justifying feelings he himself did not understand.
“Aren’t you supposed to marry Prince Jiang Yuhan of the North in two days?
So don’t interfere in my affairs.”
She yanked her wrist free with a sharp, almost violent movement and fixed her eyes on his, searching for a weakness, a doubt, something she could cling to.
“You know very well that you’re the only one I love,” she whispered, her voice suddenly losing all its hardness, breaking into a fragility she showed no one else.
“Why are you avoiding me?
Why do you stay by the side of a girl who comes from a clan that the entire mortal world despises?
What does she have that I don’t?”
Yanlong remained silent for a long moment, his eyes fixed on a distant point, as though he were searching for the answer to that question himself—as though Tianyin had awakened something ancient and inexplicable within him, an attraction unlike anything he had ever known, one that unsettled him almost as much as she did.
“Whether I like her or not, that’s my concern,” he finally replied, already walking away, his footsteps firm against the cold stone of the path.
“So stay out of it.”
He paused, without turning around, his silhouette outlined against the fading light.
“We grew up together.
Even with all this hostility between us…
I wish you a happy marriage.”
Then he left, leaving her alone.
Pei Ruxue remained motionless, tears slowly welling in her eyes without making any attempt to hold them back, her fists clenching convulsively, wrinkling the delicate fabric of her dress between her trembling fingers.
Her chest rose and fell with a rage mingled with grief, a pain so sharp it nearly stole her breath.
“One day, you’ll love me until it kills you,” she swore inwardly, her voice trembling with restrained fury, echoing through her mind like a promise carved in stone.
“And on that day, you’ll crawl back to me and beg me to love you, Yanlong.”
She remained there for a long time, alone in the garden, like a broken statue no one would come to comfort.
Meanwhile, far from that scene, far from Pei Ruxue’s tears and the weight of her reproaches, Yanlong walked without any particular destination, his mind still haunted by the question he had been unable to put into words: why her?
His steps carried him, without him truly deciding to go there, toward the pond—as though a part of himself refused to stay away from the girl who had just upended the quiet order of his certainties.
That was where he found them.
Sitting in the warm grass, the calm water reflecting the sun’s last rays like a silver mirror, Mo Yin and Tianyin seemed a thousand miles away from the turmoil that had just shaken the garden.
Mo Yin, his chin resting on his hand, listened with genuine, almost childlike fascination to every word Tianyin spoke.
She was telling him about the celestial world—the palaces suspended among clouds of immaculate white, the rivers of light that flowed without ever running dry, the winged creatures no mortal had ever had the chance to glimpse.
Her voice grew soft, almost dreamy, as she spoke of those memories, and Mo Yin drank in every word as though drinking precious wine, unable to conceal the wonder written across his face.
Yanlong stopped a few steps away, watching the scene in silence.
Something inside him tightened at the sight of such carefree closeness, a closeness he had never known how—or never wanted—to allow himself with her. This chapter is updated first at novelping dot com.
He did not try to understand the feeling, nor where it came from; he simply moved forward, silent as a shadow, his red-and-black robes fluttering lightly in the breeze.
He said nothing.
He strode forward with determination and closed his hand around Tianyin’s wrist, his grip leaving no room for argument.
“Let go of me, Yanlong!” she exclaimed, surprise quickly giving way to indignation.
“Where are you taking me?”
She tried to pull free, tugging at his arm with all her strength, but his grip did not weaken by an inch.
Alarmed, Mo Yin tried to intervene, taking a step toward them—but a single glance from Yanlong, icy and absolute, was enough to stop him dead, as though the very air between them had frozen.
“Don’t even try,” Yanlong murmured, a calm, cold threat vibrating beneath every syllable.
Without another word, he lifted Tianyin as though she weighed nothing and threw her over his shoulder.
She immediately fought with all her strength, hitting him, twisting, shouting his name—but nothing worked.
Yanlong’s grip remained unshakable.
In the struggle, the strip of fabric holding the little bell around her ankle suddenly came undone and fell toward the ground.
With a swift, almost instinctive movement, without even slowing his pace, Yanlong caught it in midair and closed it inside his fist.
At that exact moment, the little bell rang for the first time, its chime spreading through the air.
The world seemed to freeze, the silence growing heavier with every passing second, as though all of nature were holding its breath.
A little farther away, the bell rang a second time—and suddenly, a cloud veiled the sun, casting a strange, cold shadow across the entire plain.
Yanlong mounted Tianyin onto his horse without a word, leapt into the saddle behind her, and sent it galloping across the wild expanse, the pounding of its hooves echoing like a drum through the oppressive silence.
Then the bell rang a third time: the cloud had transformed into a swirling veil of sand, and the wind suddenly rose, growing stronger and more violent with every passing moment, as though the sky itself were guarding a secret on the verge of breaking free.
Yanlong eventually stopped his mount in the middle of nowhere, the animal breathing heavily, its flanks glistening with sweat.
But Tianyin, taking advantage of the brief respite, suddenly broke free and began to run, her heart pounding wildly.
With one hand, without any apparent effort, Yanlong caught up with her, his long black hair swirling in the wind like a ribbon of dark silk mingling with hers.
He seated her in front of him on the horse, facing him, his hands firmly imprisoning hers to prevent her from escaping again, their hair intertwining beneath the relentless assault of the wind.
Then, without a word of explanation, he lifted the hem of her robe along her leg.
“What are you doing?!” she cried, her cheeks flushing red as she desperately tried to pull the fabric back down with her trembling hands.
He did not stop.
He looked at her with such intensity that Tianyin forgot even her indignation, pinned in place by that dark, insistent gaze that seemed to read everything within her—every thought, every doubt, every frantic beat of her heart.
She no longer knew where to look, what to say, or even what to think—only this silence remained, charged with something she could not bring herself to name.
He leaned toward her.
Instinctively, she recoiled, her back arching as he drew closer, but he immediately tightened his arm around her waist, holding her firmly for fear she might fall from the horse into the emptiness of the plain.
Their eyes met, intense, burning, and time seemed to stand still—a breath, two, an entire eternity contained within that single moment when nothing else existed but their two faces, so close to one another.
Then, with the tips of his lips, he caught the strip of fabric between his teeth and leaned closer still, his hand sliding down to Tianyin’s ankle to tie the ribbon back in place with a delicacy surprisingly gentle for a man whose movements were so rough, finally silencing the chime of the little bell that had not stopped trembling at the slightest jolt since the beginning of their wild race through the wind and sand.