By the time Qian Fan and his parents reached the main gate, half of Wutong City was already there.
He didn’t know how news traveled that fast. In his last life, it had taken a group chat. Here, it seemed to take one servant with good lungs.
Market vendors had abandoned their carts. Clan children were climbing the wall. A tea seller had somehow brought his tea. Qian Hou was craning his neck like a curious goose, and Liu An was gripping her husband’s sleeve with one hand and her son’s with the other so the crowd wouldn’t carry them off.
“What’s happening?” Qian Hou asked the man beside him.
“The Su Clan’s young miss!” the man said.
“She’s come about the engagement!”
“What engagement?”
The man stared at him. Qian Hou smiled politely. Liu An closed her eyes.
Qian Fan didn’t need to ask. He had read this chapter a hundred times. Different names, different cities, different clans. Always the same scene.
He checked the bingo card in his head.
[Engagement annulment.] Empty.
He had a feeling it wouldn’t stay that way.
* * *
The jade carriage stood just outside the gate, glowing faintly in the dusk. The four white horses breathed out clouds of frost, and the stones beneath their hooves had turned white and slick.
The door opened.
A girl stepped down.
Qian Fan had seen beautiful people in his last life, on screens and billboards. None of them had prepared him for Su Qingxue.
She was sixteen or seventeen, dressed in layered white silk that moved like falling snow. A single silver hairpin shaped like a snowflake held back her long black hair. Her face was calm and flawless, and her eyes were the pale gray of a winter sky. The air around her glittered faintly, as if tiny crystals of ice were drifting from her sleeves.
Qi Condensation, Qian Fan thought. At her age, and in this city, that was a genius.
The crowd sucked in a breath of cold air.
This time, the air was actually cold. Several people coughed.
Behind her came an elderly Su Clan steward with a long white beard and two maids carrying a small jade box.
The Qian Clan’s elders hurried forward. The gray-bearded elder who had run the ceremony bowed so low his beard touched his knees. Beside him, Qian Wanjin smiled so widely that his rings seemed to smile too.
“Young Miss Su!” Qian Wanjin said.
“What an honor! If we’d known you were coming, we would have prepared a banquet—”
“I am not here for a banquet,” Su Qingxue said.
Her voice was clear and quiet, and every person in the crowd heard it.
“I am here to see Madam Shangguan and her son.”
Qian Wanjin’s smile faltered for exactly one heartbeat.
“Of course. The boy is being fetched. As for Madam Shangguan, I’m afraid she is bedridden. Perhaps we could bring the boy to the reception hall, and—”
“Then I will go to her,” Su Qingxue said.
The elders looked at each other.
“Young Miss, the house is well…it is very small.”
“It matters not,” Su Qingxue said, and climbed back into her carriage.
* * *
What followed was, Qian Fan would later decide, the strangest parade in the history of Wutong City.
The jade carriage went first. The lane heading to the oldest corner of the Qian compound had been built for handcarts and chickens, not for glowing palaces on wheels. The carriage scraped a fence on the left. It scraped a woodpile on the right. One of the white horses stepped on a cabbage and turned it into a small, perfect ice sculpture.
Behind the carriage came the Qian Clan’s elders, walking fast and trying to look dignified.
Behind them came Qian Wanjin, still smiling.
Behind him came Qian Wudi and all four lackeys.
“Young Master Wudi is invin—”
“Not now!” hissed three elders at once.
Behind them came the servants. Behind the servants came the clan children. Behind the children came the market vendors, the tea seller with his tea, a beast tamer with a one-horned horse, and about two hundred people who had absolutely no business being there.
And somewhere in the middle of it all was Elder Qian Zhuo.
He had been sitting on a bench by the lane, counting cabbages for the clan storeroom, when the crowd swept past. It carried him along like a leaf in a flood. He held a cabbage in each hand and looked mildly confused about everything.
Qian Fan ended up wedged between his father and a stranger who smelled of youtiao.
[Host! What an exciting event! 🎉]
It’s a disaster.
[Our data shows this will be the most emotionally vulnerable moment in your cousin’s life! 😊]
Rule number two. Let’s just wait and see.
[...Noted.]
* * *
Qian Xiaotian’s house had not been built for an audience.
It had two rooms, one door, and a fence that leaned so far to one side it was mostly decorative. Within a minute, spectators had filled the tiny yard. Within two, they had already climbed the fence. Within three, several enthusiastic market vendors had already climbed onto the roof.
Something cracked.
A man’s leg shot through the roof, right above one of the four leaks. A clay bowl rattled across the floor inside.
“Sorry!” the man called.
Nobody helped him. Everyone was staring at the door.
Qian Xiaotian had arrived at a run. The servant had found him too late, and by the time he reached the main gate, the parade was already running toward his house. He had cut through the stable yard and beaten it home by a few breaths. Now he stood in front of his own doorway in his wet shoes, with mud on his trousers and hay in his hair, facing the entire city.
Su Qingxue stepped down from the carriage.
The yard went silent.
The frost around her spread across the ground in delicate white patterns. It climbed the fence posts. It crept up the walls of the little house. The whole crowd was packed so tightly into the tiny yard that when they gasped again, it felt like the air itself had been used up.
Qian Fan’s breath fogged. His father’s teeth were chattering. Somewhere on the roof, the man with his leg through the ceiling whimpered.
Only one person in the yard didn’t seem to notice the cold.
Elder Qian Zhuo had been pushed right up to the front of the crowd, where he stood calmly holding his two cabbages. His breath didn’t fog. He didn’t shiver. He simply blinked at the frost creeping up the walls with the mild interest of a man watching the weather.
The elderly Su steward’s eyes landed on him and stayed there.
Qian Fan knew exactly why the old man wasn’t cold. Elder Qian Zhuo always wore three quilted robes, one on top of the other, from autumn until spring. The clan children joked that he had been born wearing them.
The Su steward did not know this.
His white brows drew together, very slightly, and he took one small, careful step away from the old man with the cabbages.
Qian Fan decided not to think about that.
“Where is your mother?” Su Qingxue asked.
Qian Xiaotian swallowed. “She is resting. She can’t—”
“I can.”
The voice came from inside the house.
The crowd shifted. Qian Xiaotian turned.
Shangguan Yue stood in the doorway. She was leaning against the frame with one hand. Her other hand held a faded shawl around her shoulders. Her face was as white as the frost on the walls, and Qian Fan saw a thin gray line darken at the edge of her collar as the cold touched her.
It must have hurt. It must have hurt badly. But she did not show it.
“I will not receive the Su Clan lying down,” she said.
She straightened her back.
For a moment, nobody in the yard breathed.
Qian Fan had read a thousand scenes like this in novels, and they had always been about the young master. About the fiancé. About his humiliation, his rage, his future revenge.
Nobody had ever written about his mother, standing in the doorway in the cold because she refused to lie down in front of the people who had come to shame her son.
Something in Qian Fan’s chest tightened.
Beside him, his father, Qian Hou, moved.
Before Liu An could grab his sleeves, Qian Hou had already squeezed out of the crowd, taken off his own padded outer coat, and walked straight across the frozen yard. In front of the Su Clan’s heiress, half the city, and every elder of his own clan, he gently draped the coat over Shangguan Yue’s shoulders.
“It’s cold, sister-in-law,” he said simply, and walked back into the crowd.
Nobody laughed at him.
Liu An took his hand when he returned. Her eyes were wet. Qian Hou’s teeth were chattering twice as hard now, but he looked pleased with himself.
Shangguan Yue pulled the coat tighter and gave him the smallest nod.
Qian Fan looked at his father and thought that although he was a bad businessman, he was good at being a person.
* * *
Su Qingxue looked at Shangguan Yue for a long moment.
Then, to the crowd’s surprise, she bowed.
It was a proper bow, formal and precise, the kind given to an elder of a higher standing.
“Madam Shangguan,” she said. “Eighteen years ago, Senior Qian Lingyun saved my father’s life. The Su Clan has never forgotten that kindness.”
Shangguan Yue inclined her head. “Yet you have come.”
“Yet I have come.”
Su Qingxue straightened. Her gray eyes turned to Qian Xiaotian, and the frost seemed to deepen.
“A promise was made between two men,” she said. “One of them is gone. The other has left the decision to me. I did not make that promise. Neither did your son.”
The crowd murmured.
“I am already in the Qi Condensation stage,” Su Qingxue went on. “Within a year, I expect to reach Foundation Establishment. My path leads far beyond Wutong City.”
She looked at Qian Xiaotian’s muddy shoes. At the hay in his hair. At the gray light that the whole city had seen flicker and die in the Testing Stone.
“Your son’s path,” she said, “does not.”
No one laughed.
It would have been easier, Qian Fan thought, if someone had.
“Therefore,” Su Qingxue said, “on behalf of the Su Clan, I have come to end this engagement.”
Behind her, the elderly steward stepped forward and lifted the lid of the jade box.
Inside, on a bed of white silk, lay half of a jade disc.
And beside it, three small stones that glowed with a soft, milky light.
The crowd gasped so hard that the man on the roof slipped another inch.
“Spirit stones!”
“Three of them!”
“Low-grade spirit stones, three at once?”
Qian Fan felt his brain do that math before he could stop it.
Three low-grade spirit stones. Thirty gold taels. Three hundred silver taels. Three hundred thousand copper coins.
Qian Xiaotian’s mother’s medicine cost three silver taels a month.
That was 8 years of medicine.
“The Su Clan does not wish to be ungrateful,” Su Qingxue said. “Consider this compensation. Please return the other half of the disc.”
Every eye in the yard turned to Qian Xiaotian.
Qian Fan watched his cousin’s face.
He saw the moment the boy did the same math. He saw the numbers land. Eight years of medicine. No more cold nights. No more counting pills.
Take it, Qian Fan thought, before he could stop himself. Take the money. Pride doesn’t pay for pills.
[Host, I agree! 😊]
Qian Xiaotian reached up and pulled the cord from around his neck.
He held his half of the jade disc in his palm for a moment. It was the only thing his father had left him, besides a wooden sword and a name.
Then he walked forward and placed it in the jade box, beside the other half.
He did not touch the spirit stones.
“We accept the annulment,” Qian Xiaotian said. His voice shook, but only a little. “We don’t accept payment.”
The yard erupted.
“Is he mad?!”
“That’s three spirit stones, THREE!”
“Trash talent and trash brains!”
“What an unfilial child…”
Qian Wudi laughed so hard he had to lean on a lackey.
Su Qingxue’s eyes narrowed. “You would refuse the Su Clan’s compensation?”
“My father saved your father’s life,” Qian Xiaotian said. “He didn’t ask for compensation. I won’t either.”
Behind him, in the doorway, Shangguan Yue closed her eyes. Her lips moved in something that might have been a smile.
Inside Qian Fan’s head, the System made a sound like a small, wounded animal.
[He refused free money?! 😱]
Qian Fan didn’t answer.
He was looking at the thin boy in the wet shoes, standing in front of half the city with nothing in his hands.
Then he looked at the three spirit stones in the jade box.
Eight years of medicine.
A cheapskate who wouldn’t take money he hadn’t earned.
Oh, Qian Fan thought. This one’s going to be a problem.
It was also, somehow, exactly the kind of customer he wouldn’t mind giving the lowest rate in the world.
* * *
Su Qingxue closed the jade box.
She lifted both halves of the disc from it and held them together in her palm. A thread of frost wrapped around them. With a faint crack, the jade shattered into glittering white dust, which drifted from her fingers and vanished in the cold air.
“Then it is done,” she said. “The engagement between the Su Clan and Qian Xiaotian is annulled.”
Qian Wanjin stepped forward at once, bowing. “The Qian Clan fully respects Young Miss Su’s wise decision,” he said warmly.
“The boy has always been an unsuitable match. We apologize for any inconvenience his family has caused.”
Qian Xiaotian’s shoulders stiffened. So did his mother’s.
Su Qingxue didn’t look at Qian Wanjin at all.
Behind his father, Qian Wudi grinned and mouthed a single word at Qian Xiaotian.
Ant.
In the middle of the crowd, Qian Fan quietly checked a square.
[Engagement annulment.] Check.
[Host, would you like to scan Su Qingxue with Credit Check? 😊]
Can I?
[Target’s cultivation exceeds Beggar rank! Credit Check unavailable! 😊]
Naturally.
Su Qingxue turned toward her carriage. The steward followed suit. The maids followed. The crowd parted ways, and the frost began to recede from the walls.
It was over. The humiliation was complete.
That was what everyone thought.
Qian Fan, who had seen this scene in a hundred novels, knew better. In every version of this story, there was one more line. The line that turned humiliation into a beginning, the beginning of a hero’s journey.
Behind Su Qingxue, Qian Xiaotian suddenly stepped forward.
His fists were clenched. His shoes were wet. And his voice, when it came, was not loud.
But within the silent, frozen yard, everyone heard it.
“Su Qingxue.”
She stopped.
Slowly, she turned around.