Dark clouds obscured the moon, the air heavy with the stifling restlessness of oncoming wind and rain. Jinyun Manor had already become a sea of fire.

Tongues of flame broke through the windows, licking at the rooftops of the manor. Thick smoke, carrying black ash, wantonly billowed, staining half the night sky a shocking red.

Gu Xing galloped in, reporting: “This subordinate has already dispatched men to ride at full speed toward the nearest garrison. If all goes well, reinforcements can arrive within half an hour.”

Zhao Yen carried at her side the short blade Zhao Yan had left behind. Even sitting within the carriage, she could feel the scorching heat of the flames’ baking. Frowning, she said: “The fire is too great—we cannot wait for them to arrive.”

She lifted the carriage curtain, gazing at the pitch-dark dense forest behind the manor, her mind calculating: Zhao Yuanyu, wanting to ensure the destruction of evidence, must surely have left accomplices hidden in the shadows to observe.

After a moment’s pondering, Zhao Yen fastened the short blade to her waist, then ordered Gu Xing, who was directing the crowd: “Divide our men into two groups. Half are to fight the fire—do not let the mountain fire spread to endanger the villagers of the countryside. The other half are to search the back mountain. Any suspicious person encountered, seize them all and interrogate.”

Censor He had met the Crown Prince a few times, and also knew of “his” stay at Yuquan Palace to recuperate from illness. Thus, the moment Zhao Yen alighted from the carriage, Censor He immediately handed over to a servant the soot-blackened, ceaselessly crying child in his arms, then, with tears streaming, sought to kneel: “To disturb Your Highness’s cultivation—this minister…”

Zhao Yen hastily supported him in pretense, signaling that he must not expose her identity.

She surveyed the safe clearing where more than twenty children and young girls had been brought out, still sobbing without cease, and asked: “Were all the people rescued?”

Censor He said: “There are still a few of the younger ones trapped in the fire. Attendant Minister Cen and the others are exerting their utmost to rescue them.”

Before his words had fallen, only a thunderous crash was heard from the manor’s main hall. A collapsing beam toppled, and from within the sea of flames rushed out a man whose clothing was aflame, beard and hair singed and curled. In his arms, his wet garments hissed with white smoke from the searing heat, tightly shielding two children not yet three years old.

The crowd cried out in shock—some rushed to extinguish the flames, others to carry the children.

Cen Meng’s face was covered in black soot, his lips cracked dry, his clothes burned to tatters full of holes. His exposed arms and the backs of his hands were covered with blisters from the burns.

He did not pause even to wet his throat with a sip of water, but anxiously hurried toward the group of girls who had narrowly escaped with their lives, rough, scorched hands wiping the soot from their faces one by one, trying to recognize them.

“Not A’yu.”

“You are not either.”

“Not you, none of you!”

Suddenly Cen Meng stood upright, his eyes bloodshot, his smoke-rasped throat letting out a nearly despairing roar: “Who has seen my younger sister? Her name is Cen Yu, fourteen years old, wearing a pale-yellow ruqun, with a small silver lock at her neck. She is thin and tall, about up to my chin… who has seen her?”

This final line had already broken into shattered breath.

The children of three or four only wept, while the girls, confined for so long, were also wounded in body and mind. At last one girl, her mind slightly clearer, rubbed at her tears and said in a weak voice: “When we escaped, Sister A’yu was still in the prison…”

The prison…

Cen Meng turned his head to look. One after another, the buildings collapsed in the great blaze, the rolling waves of heat striking against his ash-dark, cracked face like death itself.

He had not thought that after risking his life to save so many people, the one person he had not saved was his own younger sister.

“How could this be… was she not the one who most loved practicing martial arts? Was she not the one who wanted to become a heroine of the jianghu?”

Cen Meng murmured in a daze, then turned and hurled himself toward the flames without care for his life, but was held back with all force by the clerks beside him.

The scene was in utter chaos. What the fire devoured was not only Jinyun Manor, but also the evidence and hope Zhao Yen had pursued for so long.

Her eyes reflected the blazing flames. Suddenly, inspiration struck—she thought of something.

“This manor is not large. To imprison so many children, who would inevitably cry night and day—how did they manage to keep it silent and unheard?”

Unless—the manor still concealed a secret chamber or dungeon.

Gu Xing also thought of this layer, and immediately turned to investigate. In but a short while, he returned with results.

“Your Highness, they indeed saw a Daoist nun enter the study in the rear courtyard, and then she vanished into thin air.”

Gu Xing pressed down upon the hilt of his blade and said in a low voice, “The little girls were timid, and thought those Daoist nuns were man-eating demons of the mountain, appearing and disappearing without a trace.”

Compared with the tragic carnage of the central and front courtyards, the rear courtyard was much quieter.

The study had long since burned to nothing but a charred skeleton of beams, clearly the first place to have caught fire.

Zhao Yen surmised that Zhao Yuanyu’s urgency to burn this house proved precisely that it was of utmost importance to him.

Sure enough, Gu Xing ordered men to clear away the scorched timbers, and when certain there would be no risk of burns, he groped about and found a concealed recess behind the display shelves. Pressing down hard—

The mechanism clicked into motion. The blackened floor tiles rumbled open, revealing the yawning mouth of a secret chamber, unfathomably deep.

……

A vast, hidden alchemy chamber. The pill furnace still roared with flame, heat mingling with acrid smoke pouring in through vents on all sides.

Zhao Yuanyu, drenched in sweat, had returned once more. In frenzy he snatched at the half-finished pills scattered across the desk, his expression mad as he muttered: “My medicine must be taken away, must be taken away!”

Bottles tumbled to the floor, black-red pellets scattering everywhere. He even crawled on the ground like a dog to gather them up.

“Shizi, you must go quickly!”

The attendants pulled at him with all their strength, urging anxiously: “At such a time you still care for the medicine? If we do not leave now, it will be too late!”

Zhao Yuanyu clutched half a bottle of medicine in a death grip. Even as two strong attendants carried him away, he still muttered in crazed delirium about the “Supreme Secret Medicine.”

From his waist, a private seal fell to the ground—no one noticed.

Not half a cup of tea’s time later, Zhao Yen raised her hand to wave away the drifting smoke before her nose and stepped into the pill chamber.

In the corner stood a lotus platform; the thin iron chains used to bind children lay scattered across it. Gazing upon the mottled dark-red bloodstains upon the iron, Zhao Yen felt a nameless fury burn upward from her chest to her cheeks.

Of the nearly one hundred missing children and girls, less than a third had lived to await rescue.

Zhao Yen clenched her fingers tight, swept a glance over the pill recipes scattered on the desk, and ordered Gu Xing: “Collect all the evidence.”

“A’yu! A’yu…”

Cen Meng had stumbled in after them, trembling as he lifted up the chains.

“Brother?”

From the corner came a frail voice.

Cen Meng’s gray, broken expression instantly came alive. He sprang to his feet, searching about: “A’yu! Is it you, A’yu?”

“It’s me, Brother!” This time the girl’s voice carried a note of suppressed sobs.

The sound came from the next chamber. Zhao Yen signaled the guards to push open the stone door. Within they saw yet another small pool for water supply, where two girls—one large, one small—curled together in knee-deep water, using it to withstand the unbearable heat seeping through.

The older girl wore pale-yellow garments; from her fair cheeks and costly attire, she was certainly the younger sister whom Cen Meng cherished as the apple of his eye.

The younger girl wore rough clothes, her leg injured. Her freckled little face held wide, terrified eyes. She was none other than Liu Xiaomei, the flower-seller by Yunxiao Bridge from two days prior.

Seeing that they yet lived, Zhao Yen let out a slight breath of relief, and directed two guards forward to help rescue them.

Cen Meng plunged straight into the pool, carrying his sister out in his arms and placing her in a relatively safe spot beneath the chamber’s vent. By the faint glow of a torch, he scanned her up and down, and once assured she bore no injuries, his expression sank as he scolded:

“I told you not to run about, but you would not listen! Day after day you shout about chivalry and righteousness, yet you cannot even escape from a prison cell! If you had obediently stayed at home as your brother said, how would you have nearly lost your life?”

Some people are simply this way—hard of mouth but soft of heart. When apart, they worry endlessly; when face to face, they stiffen their necks and cannot speak a single kind word.

Cen Yu, still young, did not yet understand that some love is hidden beneath sternness.

Bewildered by her brother’s hoarse reprimand, she stared in a daze for a long moment. Tears welled red in her eyes with grievance: “If Brother thinks I am such a burden, you need not have come to save me.”

“You!”