The cold wind made the window frames rattle gently. Winter Solstice was a snowy night; the soft rustling of falling snow was hidden within the wind.
I sensed a change in Lin Chongtan’s attitude, and I felt even more the intimacy in his movements. If it were before, I surely would have pushed him away, but not now.
I reached out to grab a corner of his clothes and gave a soft “mm” in response.
Lin Chongtan’s eyes suddenly darkened, and his grip on my cheek tightened. I knit my brows in pain, but fearing that frowning would make me look unattractive, I quickly smoothed my expression.
The next moment, I saw Lin Chongtan let go of me, seemingly preparing to get out of bed. Panicked, I quickly grabbed his sleeve.
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere. You go to sleep first.” Lin Chongtan’s back was toward me.
I sat up along with him, changing from pulling his sleeve to hugging his waist from behind.
“Tansheng.”
If I had a choice, I would never have chosen this path.
“Please help me! I can even do that kind of thing.” I took a deep breath and finally forced the words out.
The youth I was holding had, at some point, begun to take on the appearance of a man near his capping ceremony. The boyishness he had when I first met him at thirteen was fading, yet he remained as elegant as jade, refined and noble.
I envied him; my whole life, I wanted to be him.
But I also understood that I could never be him.
Lin Chongtan stayed silent for a while before turning his head to look at me. Seeing him turn, I instinctively let go. In an instant, he lifted me from the bed and walked toward the desk. Before I could react, I had been placed upon it.
I immediately wanted to jump down, but he pressed his hands against my waist.
“How do you want me to help you?” Lin Chongtan leaned in and asked softly.
This position made me feel inexplicably endangered. I looked around nervously before looking back at him.
“I… I don’t know, but you have a way, don’t you?”
After I spoke, I heard Lin Chongtan give a low “mm,” and my heart leaped with joy.
But he continued: “I do have a way, but are you sure you can do what you just said?”
I knew Lin Chongtan was giving me a choice. There were two paths before me: one was to act as if nothing had happened and maintain our old relationship; the other was a path of no return, where the way forward was unclear.
I bit my lip and hesitated, but in the end, my vanity won over everything.
When Lin Chongtan saw me nod, his face lost all expression. He reached out and untied the drawstring of my clothes. I didn’t dare look, turning my face away.
When the cold air hit my skin, I couldn’t help but shiver. And in the next moment, something even more terrifying happened.
I let out a cry that was completely unrefined. It was so loud that I feared Qiongqiu and Baichi next door would hear, so I immediately covered my mouth with my hand.
How could Lin Chongtan do something so bold? And a desk is a place for studying—how could he… how could he do this here?
At that time, I did not yet understand the cruelty of intimacy. it allows another person to completely invade your life, and even your body. People tangle together like animals, forgetting propriety, shame, heaven, and time.
“Tansheng, Lin Chongtan…” I couldn’t help but call his name. I pushed him, but he caught both my hands. In a rough and overbearing way, he showed me the consequences of choosing that second path.
He scared me to the point of tears, but I didn’t dare cry out too loud, so I could only whisper and beg him to stop.
I can’t remember much of what happened after that.
I only know that when Lin Chongtan lifted me down from the desk, I pulled my clothes tight with one hand and wiped the tears from my face with the other.
Lin Chongtan did not let me go. He held me on his lap. After what had just happened, his lips were redder than usual. He gazed at me calmly; seeing the lingering tears in my eyes, his fingers pinched my cheek once more.
“Do you still want me to help you?” His expression was so calm, as if the person who just did those flippant, shameless things wasn’t him.
My hand tightened around my clothes; the damp sensation still remained.
“Yes,” I forced the word out.
In that second, Lin Chongtan’s gaze was very complex. I still couldn’t read the emotion in his eyes, so I could only free a hand to pull at him. “Tansheng.”
He finally stopped looking at me. He tidied the messy desk and spread a piece of rice paper before me.
“The topics for the grand exam are actually easy to predict. If you predict them correctly and memorize about eighty percent of what I write, you naturally won’t rank last.”
As he spoke, he began to write on the paper.
I always knew Lin Chongtan was brilliant, but tonight I truly realized the gap between us. He had clearly drunk a lot of wine, and his hand holding the brush shook slightly, yet he wrote the essay almost in one go. Even more frightening, he wrote three long essays in a very short time.
After finishing the third one, Lin Chongtan paused.
“No, too difficult,” he whispered. He crumpled the paper and threw it on the floor, starting again.
Startled by his behavior, I momentarily forgot what I had just endured and watched blankly. Without realizing it, the night passed into the late hours. Lin Chongtan finally put down his brush. By then, I was exhausted and leaning lazily against him.
The sound of him setting down the brush woke me up for a moment, but soon my eyelids drooped again.
Suddenly, I felt a warmth on my lips. I struggled to open my eyes and found Lin Chongtan kissing me. I was simply too tired to think about why he was suddenly kissing me, and my eyes slowly closed.
After finishing the third grand exam, I felt quite dazed. Although Lin Chongtan told me the topics were easy to guess, I had only half-believed him—until I saw the exam paper.
When I left the classroom, I went to find Lin Chongtan almost immediately.
He had finished earlier than me and was having Qiongqiu and Baichi pack his bags. The Academy was on break, and we had over ten days of vacation ahead.
Seeing me, Lin Chongtan seemed to guess what I wanted to say. “I recently got a new painting of winter plums; come into the room to see it.”
Not long after I entered the room, he followed.
“The topics were predicted correctly. I wrote exactly what you gave me. Will the instructors realize it’s not something I could write?” I asked him hurriedly.
Lin Chongtan shook his head slightly. “The ones grading the Outer Court papers this time are Instructors Xu and Zhao from the Inner Court. They haven’t taught you, so they won’t find it suspicious. Besides, the essay you memorized isn’t exactly a masterpiece.”
Hearing this, my heart settled a lot.
Just as Lin Chongtan said, when the results came out, no one suspected my score. I had improved by ten places. Although it was only ten places, the instructors’ gazes were finally no longer filled with disappointment.
They thought I had improved through my own hard work, unaware that I had traded my body for it.
At that time, I didn’t know that all this glitz was just an illusion. I had tasted the sweetness of so-called progress, and I began to want to taste more.
To that end, I spent more and more time with Lin Chongtan, until even the usually slow Liangji noticed something was wrong.
“Young Master Chun, you haven’t come back to sleep for a long time lately.”
Liangji’s words startled me, but I quickly steadied my nerves and said, “You know that—Tansheng is giving me extra lessons.”
Liangji wanted to say more, but I cut him off. “Fine, how about I don’t go to lessons tonight? Are you bored sleeping alone? Let’s talk for a bit before sleeping, then.”
Back at the Lin manor, when I couldn’t sleep, I would pull Liangji to talk. Since entering the Academy, I realized we hadn’t had a late-night talk in a long time.
Liangji pulled up a stool to sit by my bed. He stared at me for a while and said, “Young Master Chun, I feel like you’ve changed a bit.”
“People change when they grow up. I’m almost eighteen,” I said, trying to gloss it over.
“That’s not what I mean.” Liangji wanted to say something, but he couldn’t find the right words; he gestured wildly with his hands, his face scrunched up.
I didn’t want to discuss it further, so I changed the subject. “Liangji, tell me a story about when you were little.”
Unlike me, Liangji had an extremely happy childhood, so he was always joyful when telling stories about it. Seeing his happy expression made me feel happy too.
But tonight, even though he was telling the same stories, my mind started to wander to other things.
I had already sent my grades home. Mother wrote back saying Father wasn’t very satisfied and hoped I would work harder.
I knew what Father wanted: a son with famous talent.
Lin Chongtan was that son.
In less than two years in the capital, Lin Chongtan’s name had spread among the high officials and nobles. At this year’s sacrificial ritual, he was invited by the Crown Prince to play the zither.
Since then, his performance of Ode to King Wen became known to the world.
King Wen was the founding emperor of our dynasty. Countless people throughout history had written odes to him, but they were often considered decadent music that failed to show a founding emperor’s power.
Lin Chongtan’s piece alone, without a single word—made one feel as if they saw the ivory seals leaving the palace and the iron cavalry surrounding the dragon city through the music. It was as if one saw the majesty of King Wen himself.
For this year’s Mid-Autumn Banquet, Lin Chongtan was formally invited. He was the only person without an official rank to attend the palace banquet, and he had just turned eighteen.
Compared to him, my progress in the grand exam was insignificant.
“Young Master Chun?”
Liangji’s voice pulled me back to reality.
I dazed for a moment before saying, “Sorry, Liangji, I was daydreaming.”
“It’s okay, Young Master. Are you tired? Go to sleep, then. I’ll heat some water before I go to bed,” Liangji said.
I suddenly felt guilty and took his hand. “Liangji, when I’m done with this busy period, let’s go for an outing in the suburbs during the break, okay?”
Liangji nodded eagerly.
Time flew like a white horse passing a crack, and my eighteenth birthday arrived.
This time, Lin Chongtan came to find me personally. He took me out of the Academy for a night boat ride on Biyao Lake.
Aside from the boatman, it was just the two of us.