The moonlight was hazy, and shadows swayed among the bamboo as the night breeze brushed gently against their cheeks, dispelling the heat of the day.
Cheng Danruo glanced around and realized that this was indeed an excellent place for a private conversation. The bamboo stalks were slender and could not conceal a person on their own, but layered one behind another, they screened those within from view, making this a safer place to talk than inside a room.
Yet the words she had been holding on the tip of her tongue still refused to come out.
She continued to hesitate. Should she really say it? And if she did, how should she begin?
Xie Xuanying did not rush her.
After a moment’s hesitation, he slowly sat down beside her, keeping an eye on her expression from the corner of his eye, ready to get back up the instant she frowned. Yet even after he had settled into his seat, she said nothing.
He took this as a kind of encouragement and gradually turned his gaze towards her, studying her appearance.
She looked just as she always had. Her face was free of powder, and her lips untouched by rouge. Her complexion was as clear and unadorned as plain water, clean and understated. Yet the skin beneath her eyes was tinged blue, and fine red veins threaded through them, making it obvious that she had not been getting enough rest.
Fatigue weighed down her slender brows. Damp strands of hair clung to her temples and cheeks, only to dry in the warmth of her skin. They trembled in the evening breeze like willow catkins drifting through the spring air, making him feel an inexplicable itch.
“Young Master Xie.”
Her voice brought him back to himself.
Xie Xuanying collected his thoughts. “Go ahead.”
“Have I ever told you that Wang San-niang’s illness wasn’t dysentery?” Cheng Danruo looked at him.
Last time it was Xu Yi–niang, and now it was Wang San–niang. Why did she always bring up other women when she spoke to him? Xie Xuanying grumbled inwardly, but aloud he replied softly, “You never explained it in detail.”
“The day she ate the pastries was the same day she went to Willow Pond with the palace maids. The others developed dysentery that evening, but her symptoms began in the late afternoon, making her the first to fall ill.” She spoke slowly. “The others had dysentery, but hers was merely diarrhea. At first, I thought I had misdiagnosed her, but she recovered quickly after taking the medicine, just as I expected.”
“Then she must have had a weak digestive system,” he said, “and eating something cold brought it on.”
Cheng Danruo said, “I asked her about it. San-niang said that at home, she could eat cold food without any trouble, and this sort of thing rarely happened to her. Besides, she said the bowl of crystallized milk curd tasted a little astringent.”
Xie Xuanying’s expression gradually grew serious. “Are you certain?”
“There’s something else.” Cheng Danruo sidestepped his question and continued on her own. “Do you still remember Huang’er?”
It had only been a few months. Of course Xie Xuanying remembered. Huang’er was Commandery Princess Jianing’s dog, the one that had caused a huge commotion at the Wang residence and nearly cost her her life.
“What has happened to the princess now?” he asked.
She shook her head and lowered her voice. “Not long after I entered the palace, the Hall of Peace and Joy sent over a palace maid named Liu’er. She died just five days after arriving. She had hydrophobia too.”
Xie Xuanying immediately grew solemn. “What happened next? Can this disease spread from person to person?”
“No, it cannot.” She explained, “For a person to contract this disease, they must have been bitten by an infected animal. I asked Liu’er about it, and she told me that sometime around last November, while she was on duty in the imperial garden, a cat came over. It was snow-white and adorable, and she couldn’t resist teasing it. That was how she got bitten.”
Xie Xuanying pressed his lips together, his brows gradually furrowing.
Cats and dogs could scratch people, and the imperial consorts were afraid of injuring their faces. Unless they were particularly fond of such animals, they would not keep them as pets. Most preferred to keep birds for amusement instead. Thus, in the enormous palace, only the Empress Dowager kept a pug, while Princess Rong’an had a Persian cat.
The cat Liu’er had described was unmistakably Princess Rong’an’s Snow Lion.
Yet Snow Lion was perfectly well in Xiefang Palace, showing absolutely no signs of rabies.
“Could she have been mistaken?” he asked instinctively.
“I don’t know,” Cheng Danruo replied. “I don’t know whether Liu’er was telling the truth, or whether she was delirious with illness and talking nonsense.”
Favors were best kept within one’s own circle. No matter how much she trusted Xie Xuanying, she would not leave him any grounds to use her words against her.
“I’m simply telling you everything I know, exactly as I learned it.”
No one among the palace attendants would dare gossip about what sort of person Princess Rong’an was. Cheng Danruo had never met her herself, so she would not speculate either. In any case, she had already told Xie Xuanying what she knew. How he chose to judge the matter was up to him.
She lowered her voice. “I owe you many favors. Now that I know about this, I have no reason to keep it from you. If you think I’m trying to drive a wedge between you and someone else, so be it.”
“How could I ever think that of you?” He lowered his voice too, speaking rapidly. “And you shouldn’t think that way of me either.”
Cheng Danruo raised her head in surprise.
They were sitting very close, with barely a fist’s width between their shoulders. She could faintly smell the incense on him, a subtle bitterness that was also fresh and crisp. In the hazy moonlight, she could just make out the texture of his skin, his thick, well-defined eyebrows, and the faint lines on his lips.
These distinctly human details made him seem less like a statue carved from white jade and more like a living, breathing person. For a brief moment, she felt strangely ill at ease.
The corners of Xie Xuanying’s lips curved almost imperceptibly.
“You do believe me, don’t you?” he asked softly, his voice barely louder than a whisper. Yet there was a resonant quality in his throat that made her ears tingle with an uncomfortable sort of itch.
She turned her face away. “I suppose so.”
“I know what kind of person you are.” He gazed at her. “You could easily have kept this to yourself, but you took a risk to tell me. I appreciate what you’ve done for me.”
“Don’t take it to heart. I did it for my own sake,” Cheng Danruo hurriedly replied. “I wasn’t about to let myself be frightened half to death for nothing.”
Remembering the terrifying incident the previous year, Xie Xuanying’s expression darkened slightly. He fell silent for a while, and had just begun to think of something to say when he caught sight of a figure emerging at the far end of the path.
“Someone’s coming.” He sprang to his feet and peered intently into the distance.
Sure enough, someone was approaching. The figure drew closer beneath the moonlight, keeping close to the wall as they came.
“We should get out of sight.” Xie Xuanying immediately stamped out the incense stick and kicked it into the grass before taking her by the hand and leading her away.
Quick as a flash, Cheng Danruo remembered the cloth they had been sitting on and snatched it up, hurriedly tucking it back into her sleeve.
The bamboo grove had never been dense enough to conceal people, and now it was no better at hiding them. Rather than venture deeper into the grove, Xie Xuanying led her straight behind a weathered stone stele at the back of the pavilion.
No one knew how long the stele had been there. Its upper half had been damaged, and its surface was covered in moss. Only a few characters remained faintly legible, including “Moon” and something that might have been “Pavilion”.
They had barely settled into hiding when the newcomer drew near.
It was a woman with a slender, graceful figure. Standing beneath the temple wall, she imitated a cat and let out two coquettish little calls.
Xie Xuanying frowned, all sorts of suspicions flashing through his mind.
Then a bald head appeared above the wall, peering down. The man actually vaulted over the wall with his bare hands and dropped lightly to the ground.
The two immediately threw their arms around each other, clinging tightly as they made their way towards the pavilion.
Cheng Danruo: “…”
“You heartless wretch.” The woman nestled against his shoulder and chided him. “I haven’t heard a word from you in days. I thought you were dead.”
The man didn’t get angry even when she hit him. He wrapped an arm around her neck instead. “Why bring that up? Someone at the temple fell ill, and I’ve been run off my feet. I finally got a chance to slip away today, didn’t I?”
He peppered her with kisses. “Enough about me, Mei-niang. That bastard hasn’t been beating you, has he?”
“He doesn’t beat me anymore. He just spends all day in bed, shouting and cursing.” Tears welled in the woman’s eyes. “When will this life of mine ever end?”
“Your rotten, black-hearted father married you off to a piece of human garbage like him,” the man said.
“It’s simply my fate.” The woman burrowed into his embrace. “With you here, at least life isn’t quite so unbearable.”
Overcome with sympathy, the man held her tightly around the waist.
The two could no longer spare any words. They got straight down to business.
Clothes rustled.
In the more than ten years since transmigrating into this world, Cheng Danruo had rarely seen men in the inner quarters. After entering the palace, she had barely seen any men at all. So when she suddenly witnessed such a vivid, lifelike scene, she couldn’t help turning her head to sneak several more glances.
The monk was burly. For someone who ate nothing but vegetarian food to grow so big, he must have been getting plenty of protein.
The woman was a little thin. Wait, were those wounds all over her back?
Good heavens, they were still lying on the ground?
“The wounds haven’t healed yet,” she frowned, unconsciously slipping into a clinical critique. “She ought to be on…”
She stopped herself so abruptly that she even bit the tip of her tongue.
Cheng Danruo clamped her mouth shut. She couldn’t believe she’d actually said that out loud. This wasn’t the dormitory, where she and her classmates could watch films together, point things out on the screen, and complain about scenes that made no medical sense.
She must simply have been too tired today, and the moonlight too bewitching, to have let her guard down.
Xie Xuanying hadn’t heard her… had he? Uneasily, she stole a sidelong glance at him.
He was watching her in silence, his lips pressed tightly together.
Cheng Danruo: “…”
It was fine. As long as she acted as though nothing had happened, he would start wondering whether he’d imagined hearing anything at all. Perhaps she hadn’t even spoken aloud just now.
With that, she withdrew her gaze and continued watching, perfectly composed.
The broken stele stood just over a meter behind the pavilion, offering them an unobstructed view.
The woman was covered in bruises and wounds. Her husband must have beaten and kicked her on a regular basis. The pavilion’s blue-grey brick floor was cold enough to chill anyone to the bone, yet she didn’t seem to care in the slightest, lost in the pleasure of being intimate with the man she loved.
The man caressed her delicate face and called her by name. “Mei-niang.”
Again and again, his voice rang out, the scene brimming with sensuality.
Gradually, Cheng Danruo became absorbed in what she was watching, and the curiosity that had retreated in alarm earlier began to stir once more.
Passion, love, desire.
No matter how rigid the rules of propriety, no matter how stringent the restrictions, they could never suppress the longing within the human heart.
She had spent far too long suppressing herself in this world. Yet for this one brief moment, through the entwined bodies of these two illicit lovers, she quietly reclaimed a little of her own humanity. The corners of her lips rose uncontrollably, and a strange, inexplicable pleasure welled up inside her.
Xie Xuanying clenched the hands clasped behind his back.
He was far more self-disciplined than Cheng Danruo. With his back to the pavilion, he followed the rule of propriety and refused to look at what he shouldn’t. Instead, he kept his gaze fixed on her profile. Who would have thought she had no intention of turning away at all? She remained perfectly still, watching without moving an inch.
Then the sounds grew increasingly intense, yet a faint smile appeared on her lips.
Curious yet embarrassed, Xie Xuanying couldn’t resist stealing a glance from the corner of his eye. The moment he saw what was happening, his entire body tensed, and he hurriedly snatched his gaze away.
She seemed to sense something and turned her face towards him.
Their eyes met, each harboring their own thoughts.
Xie Xuanying’s body was rigid. He desperately wanted to do something, but the stone stele was small to begin with, and badly damaged besides. Even the slightest movement might leave them exposed, so he dared not move carelessly.
Yet he felt profoundly uncomfortable, as though something about the situation was decidedly off.
He wasn’t imagining it.
Cheng Danruo had just watched a live performance for adults, and her thoughts had yet to return to a state of innocence. Inevitably, when she looked at him, there was a peculiar, appraising quality to her gaze.
Ordinarily, Xie Xuanying seemed to embody every conceivable virtue and blessing, like a lotus flower meant to be admired from afar but never touched. She appreciated his beauty, placing him in the same category as the bright moon and the rosy glow of the evening sky, finding comfort simply in gazing at him from a distance.
But now, in the bamboo grove in the dead of night, with their breaths almost mingling, even someone who seemed as celestial as an immortal had to come down to earth.
It was the morning of the twentieth of June, and the first ten-day period of the hottest part of summer had already begun. By custom, people switched to gauze garments at this time of year.
The gauze robe Xie Xuanying wore during the day was woven with embroidered patterns in gold thread across the shoulders, chest, and back. But since he would be travelling at night and wished to avoid drawing attention, he had deliberately changed into a robe of dark-patterned gauze, woven with a repeating design of four joined ruyi-shaped clouds.
At first glance, the fabric appeared plain, but when the light struck it, the interlacing threads revealed a beautiful pattern.
More importantly, the gauze was extremely thin. Held up to the sunlight, it would allow the light to pass through easily, revealing the pattern and even the skin beneath.
A patch of moonlight illuminated one corner of him, landing, by sheer coincidence, on his shoulder and neck.
Unlike a Daoist robe, a round-collared robe had no white inner collar to cover the skin. Beneath it was simply his flesh.
Cheng Danruo had been preoccupied earlier and had paid little attention to such details. Now, looking at him from so close, she could make out the contours beneath his loose gauze robe.
That tantalizing hint of intimacy was timeless.
She struggled to control her gaze and decided to turn her attention back to the ill-fated lovers.
Xie Xuanying, meanwhile, had already given up trying to resist. He was eighteen by traditional reckoning and had turned seventeen by the Western count, the very age when a young man was at his most vigorous. If she could look at him, of course he could see her too.
I mustn’t lose my composure.
He drew a discreet breath, then quickly raised a hand and curved it around her head, covering her eyes with his palm.
Cheng Danruo: “?”
He leaned closer and whispered in her ear, “You’re not allowed to watch anymore.”
She was speechless. It’s not as though I was watching the midnight show in the pavilion.
Still, since he had misunderstood, all the better. She pretended not to know what he meant and gave a slight nod.
Xie Xuanying secretly breathed a sigh of relief. Then, ever the gentleman, he lowered his eyes and waited for the couple next door to finish their long-awaited reunion.
Who knew how much time passed before the illicit lovers finally called a halt.
They clung tightly to each other, pouring out the feelings they had kept bottled up for so long.
The man said, “I’m done being a monk. Come away with me. I’ll treat you well, I promise.”
“Don’t say such foolish things.” Tears glistened in the woman’s eyes. “This is my fate. I’ve accepted it.”
The man’s expression hardened. “I’ll kill that bastard. I can’t let you keep suffering at his hands forever.”
The woman laughed and cried at the same time, yet still shook her head. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she said gently, “Can we stop talking about him? Let’s ask only for tonight, not tomorrow!”
The moment Cheng Danruo heard those words, she felt her legs ache in sympathy.
Sure enough.
They started again.
