Chapter 1: Return

Autumn in the Fifteenth Year of the Taikang era.

A pinkish white and pure white hung together, two thin gauze curtains, as fine as cicada wings, spilling from the canopy of the bed. A faint blue thread of smoke drifted from the top of a gilt incense burner; candlelight wavered and made the curtained chamber even more dreamlike.
A man gripped her slender waist tightly, his force urgent, his voice low and detached.

“Where are you running, hmm? Did you see a ghost?”

The young lady covered her face with bare hands, crying in broken gasps.

“No—no more...”

“Miss?”

“Miss?”

A clear, airy voice seemed to answer from somewhere within her own ears.

Outside, willow branches swayed in the wind and rustled softly. In the room, the curtains stirred; a maid waited by the bed, calling urgently.

Shen Yansi woke suddenly from a sleep-drenched shock.
Her brow was damp with sweat, her breath burning and uneven, her dark hair loose around her neck and shoulders. Her bright eyes, filled as though with water, shone with alarm, and her lips trembled of their own accord. Her slender fingers clenched the quilt hard in the blankets. She looked terrified, yet a warm, suspicious flush touched her face, and her skin was fever-hot.

Qinglian dabbed at her forehead with a folded handkerchief and, in haste, spoke up.

“Miss, did you have another nightmare?”

Hearing the whisper once more, Yansi fully emerged from her confusion.
Again... only a dream.
She had had this dream for some time now, each time waking in fright.
In the dream, the man’s face stayed blurred. She could not make him out.
If only it were merely a dream, that would have been enough. The danger was this much worse...

Her life must be told from the beginning.

Yansi came from a prominent house of high standing. Her grandfather, Shen Bocheng, had won splendid military honors and was one of the six founding elders of the dynasty, a marquess of ten thousand households personally granted by the founding emperor.
Her father, Shen Xun, was appointed Assistant Commander-in-Chief of the Garrison, a second-rank office, and her younger uncle, Shen Yu, had also once served as Minister of Works.
Her grandmother was virtuous, her grandfather upright. The Shen household was strict in discipline. Father and uncle were men as unblemished as white jade, and once, in earlier days, they had been famed throughout Chang’an.
Yet all of that changed six years ago.

In the seventh year of Taikang, first her grandfather died, then her father fell in battle. The news of the latter reached Chang’an almost immediately after the former. Uncle Shen Yu, having offended the Son of Heaven, was charged with numerous crimes—collapsed city walls, shortages in the Ministry of Works, embezzlement, dereliction of duty—and sentenced to confiscation and exile.
When disaster struck, her mother and elder sister were separated from her by cruel mischance and disappeared; neither life nor death could be confirmed. As for Yansi, had it not been for Lord Ningguo, her father’s old friend, who kindly offered her shelter, who knows what would have become of her.
She entered the Lu household at the age of ten. She was in unfamiliar lands, struck by grief, longing for her family, yet to the Duke of Ningguo she was preciously loved. Though life was no longer what it had been, the Lu family’s rank and wealth surpassed even the Shen clan’s, and she was not neglected in food, clothing, or care.

Yet after six months had barely passed, misfortune returned.
She had long been delicate and prone to illness. One day she took a chill; dizzy, she stumbled and fell into the lake.
It was clear, cold autumn. Though they pulled her out quickly, it was as if she had lost half her life. She grew dangerously ill and never fully recovered, barely surviving by a thread.
Her fortune had been snatched back from death, but in return she remained terrified of cold, and in winter she could hardly leave her room.
So the Duke of Ningguo sent her to Jiangnan’s milder climate, and six years slipped by.

From that illness onward, she began to have those strange dreams.
Not merely strange—absurd beyond imagining.

She dreamed she had entered the imperial palace and become an emperor’s empress.
She dreamed that in later years, power in the Great Yong court changed hands; the realm was overturned, rebels conspired, and an army mutiny crowned a usurper.
When defeat was near, Emperor Li Yin, saying he wished to spare her from being violated by rebel soldiers, gave her poison himself.
At the edge of death she heard the sound of a long sword scraping stone, and a cold, ruthless stillness seemed to cover heaven and earth.
A man in jet-black armor strode in, proud and domineering, contemptuous beyond all bounds.
She saw that usurping lord.

And what followed was worse.
She died and returned to life as a newborn, reliving from infancy everything she had lived through from childhood to the previous year.

If that wild dream had ended there, she would have been grateful enough to call it mercy.
But months ago, she began dreaming of that man again.
Though she could not see his face clearly, Yansi recognized him at once.
He was the very traitor-turned-usurper from her former life.
And most dreadful of all: for nearly a year, what appeared in her dreams kept unfolding in reality in turn.
At first they were only trifles, and she dismissed them as coincidence, yet they came more often, more clearly, and she could no longer deny the dream’s premonition.
For that reason, Yansi had been so frightened.

Her heart hammered faster the longer she thought, and her body weakened. A faint mist seemed to blur her eyes, and her breath came short and shallow; her young hand tightened around the quilt even harder.
Qinglian held her from behind and kept wiping her with gentle motions.

“It’s only a dream, only a dream. Nothing is real. You’re safe now, it’s all right, Miss, don’t be afraid...”

She soothed and chided as she worked, cursing this wretched malady in her heart. No calming medicine seemed to work; it had made things worse for her mistress.
Miss was timid by nature, her body weak from childhood. Even six years ago she had nearly died from a grave illness. She could not bear strain; she could not bear terror.

As Qinglian watched her now, pity swelled within her.
Yansi was stunning beyond words: skin smooth and luminous like peeled lychee, water-bright and fair, with an almost celestial quality all over her. In this pale, thin white robe, with her hair arranged like silk ribbons, she looked so unreal at first glance she seemed nearly not a person at all.
Yet for such a beauty who could rival city and kingdom, her body itself was so fragile.
Yansi herself was annoyed.
She leaned against the maid’s shoulder, fully awake and clear-minded, yet her body felt limp and unwilling, and besides that body she was angry with the terrible dream.
In her mind, the blurred image of the man’s bare arms and chest would not vanish.
As before, all of it might become real.
At the thought, Yansi’s heart shook uncontrollably, and she could not step out of it.

At that moment, footsteps sounded outside.

“Miss...”

It was her other maid, Taohong.
She came almost running, breathless and in a hurry.
From behind the curtains Qinglian called, “Keep your distance, be careful of the cold air. Go to Miss.”

Taohong answered, then spoke quickly:
“Miss, people from over there have arrived!”

Yansi and Qinglian both stiffened, clearly unprepared.
By “over there,” Taohong meant the Lu household in the capital.
It was precisely to bring her back.
Song Auntie, who had cared for her food, clothes, and room for the past month, had mentioned this earlier, and yet they had not expected them to arrive so soon.

“Have they already come to Bamboo Garden?” Qinglian asked.

Taohong nodded. “Song Auntie went ahead of them to the hall.”

Qinglian’s lips twitched, her eyes slowly reddening. All her tangled feelings hardened into one bitter line:
“She must be laughing herself to tears from joy.”

Taohong answered sharply. “Of course she is. Her mouth won’t shut from smiling!”

Qinglian went on, bitterness rising. “She has oppressed Miss for these years, and surely she has already taken enough silver. Why, she refuses even to wait half a year. Miss was unwell just recently—who knows that better than her?”

Taohong replied, “Does she care one bit for Miss’s health? She just wants to flee this remote place and return to Chang’an at once. If Madam Zhang were still here, we’d have no need of her at all!”

Taohong’s words made Qinglian, who was only a little older, flinch; her anger gave way little by little. She turned toward the mistress and softened her tone.

“Enough. Don’t say any more.”

Yansi felt her gaze.
The two maids tossed reproaches back and forth, and she did not interrupt.

Among them, Song Auntie was the old nursemaid from the Shen household.
In that calamity six years ago, only a handful had remained with her. Zhang Auntie and her son, Qin, were two of them.
When Yansi fell ill in Jiangnan at twelve, Zhang Auntie had originally been there to care for her, but the poor woman died four years later and left her.
At that time Yansi was only twelve and still ill; Qinglian, Taohong, and Qin were children of similar age. Over time, the money naturally came under Song Auntie’s control as well, and all the more so because it was Lu family money.
Bamboo Garden was truly half a backwater place.
Its isolation near the famed physician’s residence, who treated Yansi, made its poverty seem exaggerated, but compared with the opulence and rank of the Lu household in Chang’an, it was a world apart.
For four years, Song Auntie had seemed affectionate in public while in private she had indeed been cruel, and again and again she wrote to the Lu household that Yansi had fully recovered. The girls had learned the truth.
A rootless orphan, a dependent girl in another house, no one had considered her truly theirs.

“Take me back.”

After a pause of silence, the soft and tender voice of the young lady sounded.
“Miss...” both maids turned to her.

Yansi had her own resolve.
If she were honest with herself, she had no patience now for Song Auntie. Her whole mind was filled with those dreams.
That man—she did not know who he was, where he was, or how she had ever become bound to him.
She only knew this: if she had such an extraordinary chance to pierce through the hidden patterns of fate, she must not let them all become real.
She had no one, no true anchor; in truth, perhaps the only shelter she could rely on now was the Lu family.
Their influence filled the heavens and earth, their wealth was mountain-high and jewel-heavy. They were surely her safest harbor.

At this thought, the young girl’s long lashes trembled. Her autumnal eyes moved slowly, clear and innocent, and, with her soft hands closing again around the edge of the sheet, she repeated, almost to herself:

“Go back... go back.”