She explained, “This is a rope snare used for catching wild horses or cattle. Once caught, it’s near impossible to break free—the harder you struggle, the tighter it gets.”
Fortunately, Captain Wang had feared she might encounter danger while searching, so he had one of his men lend her a constable’s standard equipment.
A constable’s kit wasn’t much—just a knife and a coil of rope.
The knife was for defense; the rope for binding criminals.
She hadn’t found the official knife as handy as her own slaughtering blade, but not wanting to reject Captain Wang’s kindness, she had taken the rope along.
Xie Zheng was silent for a moment. It was clearly a life-and-death situation, yet whenever she spoke, the tension in the air seemed to ease, if only slightly.
The remaining masked men exchanged quick looks. One of them suddenly raised his sword and hurled it at his captured companion.
The man ensnared by Fan Changyu was instantly struck down, blood spraying across the snow.
Fan Changyu cursed furiously, dropped the rope, and charged after them with her slaughtering knife.
Xie Zheng coughed up a mouthful of blood. Fearing she would be outnumbered, he ignored his own grave wounds and tried to follow. But as he took a step, his boot struck something hard beneath the snow.
He moved his black boot aside—and saw a waist token.
When his eyes made out the insignia engraved on it, his phoenix-shaped eyes instantly sharpened with alarm.
He picked up the waist token and tucked it into his chest. When he looked again toward the masked men being pursued by Fan Changyu, his gaze was as calm as if he were watching corpses.
The few surviving masked men were being torn at by the three or four hounds, while Fan Changyu—this freakishly strong woman—continued to chase them down relentlessly. For a time, they were overwhelmed and had no way to retaliate properly.
But soon, they noticed her weakness. Much of her fighting relied on brute strength and speed—she had little real experience in life-and-death combat. Surrounded and attacked from several sides, she was soon unable to defend fully, her body quickly marked by wounds.
The gash on her arm burned fiercely; her movements grew sluggish. Though she tried to learn how to block and parry, the progress wasn’t nearly enough to match several seasoned fighters at once.
When one masked man swung his sword down toward her wrist, Fan Changyu felt her heart clench. Her technique was too slow—she couldn’t dodge in time.
A wrist injury could mean anything from losing her grip to losing the use of the whole hand.
She gritted her teeth, prepared to fight to the death.
At that critical instant, a strong, long-fingered hand closed over hers from behind. Compared to the warmth of her skin, that hand was cold as lake ice.
He somehow used just the right strength—guiding her wrist into a twist. The edge of her slaughtering knife flipped upward and struck from below, chopping viciously toward the masked man’s elbow. Then, with domineering force, the blade scraped along the bone, slicing flesh as it traveled upward, catching beneath the armpit at tendon and cartilage—then lifted sharply.
The masked man’s sword fell from his grasp. His arm, drenched in blood, hung limp, and he let out a scream so raw it cut through the snow-filled air.
Fan Changyu, long used to scraping bone and trimming meat, felt her scalp prickle remembering that very motion. She turned instinctively to look back—only to glimpse the pale line of the man’s jaw as he held her hand firmly, guiding her through another parry to deflect the next deadly strike.
His strength wasn’t forcing her—it was leading her, teaching her to avoid the enemy’s blows. And when it came time to strike, she still unleashed her own raw power in full.
Her one weakness vanished. The remaining masked men immediately faltered, unable to hold their ground.
Fan Changyu truly had a touch of talent in combat. As she followed the movements Xie Zheng guided her through, she was also quick to exploit openings—landing a fierce kick on one masked man, sending him flying back into a pine trunk. The tree shuddered, and a cascade of ice shards came crashing down in a glittering spray of snow.
At the same moment, the man behind her twisted her wrist through a knife flourish, driving the slaughtering knife straight into another masked man’s chest.
Fan Changyu could distinctly feel the wound in his palm reopen—the warmth of his blood welled out, wetting both their hands where they touched. Yet his palm remained cold as ever.
The flashing sword light before her eyes flickered wildly, and her heart seemed to tremble with the same shock as the collapsing ice-laden pine.
“Don’t lose focus.”
His voice, cold and low, sounded by her ear. Because of the way he held her hand to guide the blade, their bodies were close—she could almost feel his faint, cool breath brushing her skin.
Her entire ear tingled numb.
Suppressing the urge to touch it, she forced herself to concentrate on her strikes.
When the blood-stained slaughtering knife finally pressed against the neck of the last masked man, Fan Changyu could at last catch her breath.
She had noticed earlier—this one seemed to be their leader. The masked man she’d snared before had been silenced by his very sword.
Fan Changyu pressed the knife down, carving a shallow line of blood across his neck, and demanded coldly, “Who are you people? What grudge do you hold against the Fan family?”
But the man didn’t look at her. His gaze fixed past her shoulder—on Xie Zheng. It was as if he were trying to make sure of something. When Xie Zheng lifted his eyes and met his, recognition flared at once. The man’s pupils constricted violently, his expression turned ashen—then, in a sudden movement, he seized the blade of Fan Changyu’s slaughtering knife still resting against his throat.
Fan Changyu and Xie Zheng were standing so close that she didn’t realize the masked man’s gaze had been fixed on Xie Zheng. When he suddenly moved, she was startled, thinking he meant to seize her blade. She pressed the knife down hard, trying to pin him in place—yet the man only gripped her knife and thrust it toward his own throat.
A splash of bright blood scattered across the trampled, chaotic snow.
The masked man collapsed, throat severed.
Fan Changyu stared, too horrified to speak for a long time.
She looked at the slaughtering knife in her hand, the blood on it still wet, and murmured, “Why would he…”
Rather die by his own hand than utter a single word—who on earth were these people?
Could they be the enemies her father had made in his escorting days?
Looking at the dead leader, Fan Changyu thought of her parents’ deaths, and her mind became a tangled mess of confusion and dread.
When Xie Zheng saw the man slit his own throat, he frowned as well. But his body, wounded and exhausted, had already reached its limit. Once the danger passed and the last thread of willpower snapped, the world spun violently before his eyes.
He finally coughed up the blood he had been forcing down—and could no longer keep hold of his sword.
Fan Changyu turned at the sound behind her and saw him collapse into the snow, his face and lips drained to the same shade of white. She forgot everything else and rushed to his side to check his injuries.
His old wounds had reopened, and new ones covered him besides.
The thought that he had risked death again, all because of her family’s troubles, filled her with guilt heavy as stone.
She had brought no medicine with her, but reasoned that these bandit-like men might have some. Searching the dead leader’s body, she indeed found a small bottle of medicinal powder.
Since she couldn’t tell what kind of powder it was, she tested a little on one of the man’s still-bleeding wounds. When the blood clotted, she finally dared to use it on Xie Zheng.
The moment the strong medicine touched his flesh, the burning pain was like knife and fire combined, pulling him halfway back to consciousness. Yet he remained weak to the point he couldn’t even lift his eyelids.
After a rough bandaging, Fan Changyu hoisted him onto her back and started toward where she’d left Changning.
Her own arms were marked with shallow sword slashes from the earlier fight. They weren’t serious, but every movement sent a hot, prickling pain up her arms.
Trying to distract herself, she spoke half in jest to the man on her back: “This is the second time I’ve carried you out of the snow.”
The man didn’t respond—he must have fainted again.
The ache made sweat bead at her temples. She whispered softly, “Thank you.”
Thank you—for saving Changning.
If she’d lost her younger sister, she would have no one left in this world; she wouldn’t have known how to keep living.
The wind and snow howled. She trudged forward, leaving a deep line of footprints across the white expanse.
Little Changning was waiting under the pine where they had been before, clutching the gyrfalcon. Seeing her elder sister returning with Xie Zheng on her back, she ran forward at once. “A-jie!”
Fan Changyu, burdened by the man on her shoulders, couldn’t lift her sister into her arms. A bead of sweat rolled down from her forehead, stinging as it passed over a scrape on her cheek. She looked Changning up and down and asked, “Ning-niang, are you hurt anywhere?”
Changning shook her head. When she saw the man on her sister’s back unconscious, her eyes reddened, and she choked, “Brother-in-law got hurt protecting Ning-niang…”
The blood that had flowed from his palm when he guided her still stained her own hands, hot as if burned by fire. A dull ache stirred in Fan Changyu’s chest. She said quietly, “Don’t cry. We’ll take him back and find a doctor.”
She was always calm, always steady.
And whenever Changning heard her elder sister speak like that, all her fear dissolved—everything would be fine.
When their parents died, she had cried so hard she nearly couldn’t breathe. It was her elder sister who had sat beside the bed, holding her close, saying, “Don’t be afraid—you still have A-jie.”
Little Changning looked at the bent line of her sister’s back, wiped her tears clumsily with her sleeve, and followed her through the snow, one deep, one shallow footprint at a time, clutching the gyrfalcon tightly in her arms.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
“This is the second time I’ve carried you out of the snow.”
“Thank you.”
In his half-conscious haze, Xie Zheng heard someone speaking to him. The voice was familiar—so familiar—but he couldn’t remember whose.
His eyelids were impossibly heavy; his mind had turned to pulp. He couldn’t think, couldn’t move, only felt himself sinking, endlessly, into a dark, boundless depth. The chill seeped through every seam of his bones.
Fighting against that downward pull was exhausting. When he finally let go, his whole body seemed to grow weightless.
“Zheng’er.”
Someone was calling him again.
He could no longer remember that gentle woman’s face clearly, yet every time she appeared in dreams, he somehow knew it was her.
Why had she come into his dream now?
Hadn’t she abandoned him long ago?
Xie Zheng didn’t want to answer her, but his gaze moved of its own accord. Ahead, in the rear garden of the marquis’s residence, the woman stood smiling, holding a child’s hand as she looked toward a heroic man practicing fist forms in the courtyard.
“Zheng’er’s father is a man who stands tall under heaven. When Zheng’er grows up, he must become a man like his father.”
Xie Zheng saw her gentle smile turned toward him—and realized with a jolt that he had become that very child.
He said nothing, only watched her face, so vivid in dreams yet always blurred when he woke.
He missed her. But she had left too soon—so soon he could no longer even remember her features.
The man in the courtyard vanished, replaced by a coffin being carried back from the battlefields of Jinzhou.
The woman, dressed in mourning white, threw herself upon the coffin and wept until her heart seemed torn to shreds; not even a house full of maids and servants could restrain her.
The scene shifted again. She was wearing new clothes now, sitting before a bronze mirror, brushing her brows. Her brows were as elegant as distant mountains, her face exquisitely beautiful—but anyone could see she was not happy. She murmured, “Why didn’t he keep his promise? He said he’d come back and draw my brows for me.”
Like a young girl sulking because her beloved had failed to come for their tryst.
She saw him then, smiled, and beckoned him over. Xie Zheng didn’t move. A child, about four years old, with a small gold crown on his head, ran past him instead.
The woman handed the boy a plate of osmanthus cakes, her voice as soft and warm as ever.
“Zheng’er, are the osmanthus cakes good?”
He finally spoke, his voice low and almost edged with hatred: “It doesn’t taste good.”
The woman seemed not to hear him at all. She lifted the little boy into her lap, her gentle voice growing faint and faraway. “Zheng’er must become a man like your father—a great hero who stands tall beneath the heavens.”
“Be good now, go outside and eat your osmanthus cake.”
Then she touched up her makeup, put on her finest clothes—only her brows remained bare. Taking a length of white silk, she hung herself from the beam.
Her general had broken his promise, never returned to draw her brows. So she went to find him.
The servants burst through the door; cries filled the room. The child stood at the threshold, staring at the hem of a beautiful skirt swaying in the air.
When Xie Zheng struggled awake from that nightmare once more, his body was drenched in cold sweat.
A bitter medicinal taste lingered between his teeth, making his tongue go numb. As his vision cleared, he saw a patched bed curtain and, beside the bed, a figure standing against the light.
