SU TANG (素醣)

  Day 4, 5th Month of the Lunar Calendar, 6000th Year of the Yun Dynasty, Shuishang Province, Huadu Sect

  It had been a beautiful day, in the way that beautiful things often come with caveats. It had been hot, unforgivably so. The kind of humid heat that clings to the skin like guilt and refuses to be shaken off. My inner robes stuck to my back in all the wrong places, and the air smelled of overripe leaves and something faintly fungal. Sunlight filtered through the forest canopy, drifting like golden shafts dancing across the mossy earth.

  The Taishan woodlands, famed for their balanced fēngshuǐ, had been anything but balanced that day. The woodlands breathed around us like some slumbering beast, trees creaking with age, birds rustling above with the indifference of gods. Insects buzzed with industry, unaware or uncaring of the royal bloodlines sweating beneath them. And there we were. An entourage so garishly out of place it was like watching porcelain dolls march through a battlefield. Gilded saddlecloths, brocade parasols, the clink of jewels. We were ornamental. And dangerously visible.

  It was there, that I heard the first swish.

  The arrow had been quick. But my eyes had been quicker.

  I caught it, just before it could lodge itself into the face of the Crown Prince. A moment later, Jiang Feng and a few others snapped to attention, drawing their bows and aiming blindly into the forest like spooked pheasants pretending to be hawks. My hands trembled around the arrow’s shaft. The tip glittered strangely—no, wrongly—in the light. A sheen too oily, too metallic, too deliberate.

  gǔtou. The Bone-Shattering toxin.

  The poison was unmistakable. The kind that liquefies nerves and leaves people screaming with nothing but memory of pain long after their voices fail. I should know. I’d studied it.

  The second arrow came then.

  The Crown Prince’s sword made contact, and the arrow splintered into two. Then—he pulled me into his arms as he vaulted off his horse. The world tilted. We hit the ground hard. Around us, arrows rained. Sloppy and panicked things fired in haste. Most sank harmlessly into trees were swallowed by the grass.

  The Imperial Guards scattered like cockroaches beneath torchlight, abandoning any semblance of formation.

  I could hear the chaos, but more than that, I could feel it. The pounding of my own heart, the wild rush of blood in my ears, the breathlessness of knowing that one misplaced step could leave your corpse wilting in a ditch.

  But I didn’t move. I just…stared.

  Stared at him. At the tight set of his jaw as he issued commands to his elite guards. At the curve of his brow furrowed in focused concern. Not for himself, of course. Never for himself.

  He still held me. Close enough for his scent to drown my thoughts. It was a blend of incense, ink, and something sharper beneath. I watched, detached, as his right hand rose to shield my face. His hand. The Crown Prince’s hand.

  He shouldn’t do that. It was idiotic and reckless.

  His hands were worth more than my entire existence. If they were so much as dirtied, all his servants would be punished.

  That’s what we’d been taught. That was the reality.

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  His Highness looked down.

  His grip softened as if only just realising he’d been holding me like something precious. His eyes scanned me, and my face burned so badly I could’ve sworn I was a walking radish.

  Gods above, please don’t ask if I’m okay, I had thought. I didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to feel that question press itself into my skin like concern from someone I couldn’t afford to care about.

  But then I saw it.

  Blood.

  Just a line—thin, elegant, almost artistic in its cruelty—sliding down the edge of his wrist. A poisoned nick.

  All thoughts vanished. I didn’t care about protocol. Didn’t care about optics. If he is poisoned or harmed, none of us will get away unscathed. I grasped his hand and poured healing energy into the wound, fast and firm. The pain in my arm intensified as my magic siphoned away…but for some dumb reason, I ignored it.

  He watched me with that half-smile of his. The infuriating one. As if he could hear every thought I was trying to suppress. And then, of course, he placed his other hand over mine.

  Gently.

  Deliberately.

  In that kind of the close proximity he knew unravelled me.

  Why does his touch do that to me?

  I yanked my hands away and stuffed them behind my back like a child caught stealing from the kitchen.

  I refused to look at him, afraid I’d meet that expression again. The one with the unknowing charm that peeled my self-control apart like bark from a tree.

  So, I looked anywhere else. And that’s when I saw her.

  Ying Yue.

  She was sprinting toward us. Hair pinned into that severe bun she wore when she meant business, like an angry official from a low-budget opera. It made her forehead look even more like an oranda goldfish, poor thing.

  She fell.

  No cry. No warning.

  One moment she was upright. The next—down.

  I don't remember if I screamed. Maybe I did. I think I shoved the Crown Prince away, which was punishable by death, but I didn’t care. I knelt beside her, shouting her name like that could anchor her to the earth.

  Ying Yue. My sister not by blood, but by all the things that mattered more. We were the snack pack. Xiao Wu, Ying Yue, and me. We survived together.

  Xiao Wu had already gone.

  And now—

  The arrow protruded cruelly from her chest, the feathered tail wagging in the breeze like a flag of conquest. Blood bloomed across her robes in slow, dangerous ripples. I clutched her face. She smiled through the agony.

  She whispered my name, her breath a threadbare thing. She asked me to do it. To end it. She trusted me to do it.

  I wanted to scream as she begged me to put her out of her pain. As she begged me to kill her.

  We both knew how painful death by poison was.

  And I couldn't. I wouldn't.

  Because I had something better.

  báilián.

  The White Lotus. A parasitic flower of unspeakable beauty. The last resort. The living curse.

  There was no one else was around. Just me. Her. Him.

  I pressed my hands to her wound and thought of everything An Lingqi ever told me. How blooming it would drain me. Strip me bare. Obliterate my immortal core. No more cultivation. No more healing. Just the wreckage of a girl too reckless to let her friend die.

  I breathed. Swirled my hands in practiced circles. I had made my decision before I even knew I’d decided.

  Xiao Wu had died.

  But Ying Yue wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Not now.

  Someone grasped at my arms, pulling me back, dragging me back. I writhed against them. Suddenly, whatever held me back blasted off in a blinding flash of light. I brought my hands together—

  báilián appeared.

  It bloomed like a sun, radiant and all-consuming, and my mind split from the pressure. The place where I had once been stabbed flared and my temples screamed, but I didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. The petals unfurled from the centre like fingers languidly stroking the air.

  All I could see, and hear, and feel, and think, was the White Lotus. An awe-inspiring deity, begging to be worshipped, beheld, given attention. It twisted my insides together, sucking up my life as the beast it truly was. It murmured with spiritual utterances and incomprehensible grunts, drawing and beckoning me closer.

  It called.

  It whispered.

  I pinched the core of the flower from the centre.

  Then I impressed the core into Ying Yue’s body.

  The magic roared.

  Her body spasmed—violently, terribly—as if rejecting life itself.

  The arrow squeezed out of her wound as her muscle, and skin, and new bone, and fat, reformed, layer-by-layer. Until an unblemished patch of skin remained on the surface.

  I threw up.

  Blood coated my hands and skirts and arms and everything. I didn’t know if it was my blood, or her blood, or my imagination.

  I don’t remember falling.