Failing to extract the Eye of the Underworld’s secret from His Majesty didn’t particularly worry Yueyang. Once the Imperial temper cooled, the information would come. These things couldn’t be rushed — and shouldn’t be.

Wuxia had been spending her days in deep conversation with Fourth Mother about something, and no amount of careful probing from Yueyang produced a single useful detail. She simply wouldn’t say.

Qianqian had gone up the Sky Stairway to find Yue Yu and hadn’t come back, which suggested the persuasion campaign was ongoing. What exactly Qianqian had done to upset the gentle Yue Yu, Yueyang couldn’t figure out. He thought about it for a while, then gave up and buried himself in the war beast wrist device research.

With Yue Yu away, he had no assistant. The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady, watching him flounder, eventually took pity and volunteered.

She had assumed it would be light work.

After the third explosion, she had revised this assessment considerably. The failure rate was appalling. She had come very close to a genuine cardiac event on two occasions. She began to understand, dimly, why Yue Yu — who assisted with these experiments daily and met each outcome with a smile — was something close to a saint.

“Stop, stop, stop — this obviously isn’t working. Try something different.” After three consecutive failures on the same approach, the Imperial Lady had run through her reserves of patient silence and was making her opposition known. She had, it was true, promised not to object to anything. That promise had lasted less than a day.

“Failure is entirely normal,” Yueyang said, with the air of a senior researcher addressing a skeptical public. “Any research that hasn’t gone through several hundred failures has no foundation. And even when something actually works, it needs to be tested across every variable. But explaining this in detail would be wasting words on someone like you, so I won’t bother.”

The Imperial Lady, facing the weight of his habitual authority on matters like this, said nothing.

“The real challenge with this experiment,” Yueyang continued, talking more to himself now, “is that the memory requirements are severe. Every step has to be exact — not approximately exact, but exactly exact. With memory like mine it’s manageable. Has anyone seen my Scarlet Flame crystal? Where did I put it?”

“What happens if a step goes wrong?”

“Explosion.”

“You just said the Scarlet Flame crystal was missing,” the Imperial Lady said, with a sudden cold feeling spreading down her spine.

“Found it. I’d just forgotten to put it in the lower rune formation. But my Blue Ice crystal — I genuinely cannot find that one anywhere—” He began dismantling the workspace in search of it.

Oh no.

The Imperial Lady remembered exactly where the Blue Ice crystal was. She had placed it — or possibly misplaced it, now that she was thinking about it more carefully — into the middle layer of the rune formation during her last round of assistance. She turned and ran.

Not fast enough.

The explosion lifted her off her feet and deposited her in the corner of the room, where she spent several seconds being slowly buried by airborne debris.

When she dug herself out, she discovered that the back of her clothing from shoulder to hip had been comprehensively removed by the blast. Structurally unharmed. Structurally drafty.

Yueyang had gone straight up to the ceiling and was now hanging from it like a piece of smoked meat — blackened from head to foot, identifiable as human primarily by the fact that he still had visible whites in his eyes and intact teeth.

When he came down, the Imperial Lady looked at him.

“You said your memory was excellent.”

“My memory is excellent,” he said, scratching at his hair. “What I’m not tracking is the physical location of materials. That’s always been Yue Yu’s department — she organizes everything and hands me what I need. My memory is occupied with the rune formations.”

The Imperial Lady stood with this for a moment.

She thought back over what had just happened, and what had happened in the previous explosions, and arrived at a conclusion she found deeply uncomfortable: the Blue Ice crystal confusion had been her fault. She had been distracted, rattled by the earlier blasts, and had placed something where it didn’t belong.

Maybe the failures hadn’t been his at all.

Maybe they had been hers.

She said nothing. Admitting this directly was not something she was prepared to do. But she went out to wash her face, adjust herself, change her clothes, and returned with the private determination to be actually useful this time. Completely, fully useful, with full attention throughout.

The next attempt she came back to ended in an explosion while she was still tidying from the previous one. The shockwave flung her into the wall.

Everything she had just organized scattered across the floor in configurations that defied description.

She very nearly cried.

She set her jaw and started over.

When she’d cleared the debris and looked up again, Yueyang had assembled a formation considerably larger and more complex than anything she’d seen from him so far. The degree of precision involved was evident — every line and every junction occupied his entire attention, to the point where she could see his eyes tracking minute changes in the structure. Sweat was running freely down his face, cutting pale channels through the layer of blast residue.

She watched him work for a while.

She found a towel and brought it over.

“Don’t cover my eyes!”

She had been about to dab at his forehead. She pulled back.

When Yue Yu wipes his face, he doesn’t shout at her. She always knows exactly what to do and when. She swallowed what she’d been about to say and tried again — more carefully, from the side, not in his line of sight.

She brought water. He yelled at her not to interrupt him.

She set the water down and stood with it, watching him sweat and calculating the situation. The water needed to get into him somehow. Yue Yu would have a method. What would Yue Yu do?

She couldn’t feed it to him by spoon — his hands weren’t free and his eyes couldn’t move from the formation. Too slow, anyway.

She stood there thinking about it until she remembered the bubble-blowing straws she’d seen in Yue Shuang’s collection. She left at a run, raided the small girl’s treasure box without pausing to put anything back, returned with several straws, assembled one into the cup, and held it up to his mouth.

He drank without looking at her or commenting. When he finished: “More.”

She moved fast.

On the way back she noticed one of her sleeves hanging in tatters and tore it off entirely. On the way through the door she remembered something — Yue Yu always emerged from the lab wearing sleeveless clothing. That had always seemed like a specific choice. It was apparently a practical one.

She turned back to the formation just in time to see it accelerating — the symbols flickering faster.

It’s going to blow.

Her first instinct was to get clear. She looked at Yueyang. He wasn’t moving. His eyes were locked on the formation and he was watching every change with complete intensity. If he’d wanted to shelter himself, he could have — domain force alone would have been enough to protect him from anything this experiment could produce. But he wasn’t going to. He was going to stay and look, and take whatever came, because whatever came immediately before the explosion was the information he needed.

The explosion arrived.

She crossed her arms in front of her face and took the shockwave standing.

The fresh clothes were distributed across the room in fragments. She was uninjured.

She lowered her arms, and stood there in the aftermath with a new and unexpected feeling settling somewhere in her chest.

The formation, she realized, had been different this time. The first time she’d seen it, it had two layers. When she’d been on the verge of losing her temper and leaving — she’d noticed it had become three. And now, just before the blast, the central structure had sprouted four peripheral support formations around it.

Every explosion had been followed by advancement.

He was choosing to absorb the impact rather than avoid it because avoiding it meant losing what the impact could teach him.

That’s why his research keeps moving forward. Failure by failure, blast by blast, something accumulated. Everyone on the outside saw the results. Nobody saw what it cost.

The memory confusion made sense now too. His recall was genuinely exceptional — the rune formation was being tracked and stored in full, update by update, every microsecond of its evolution locked in. There was simply no capacity left over for tracking which physical object was where. His mind was already full of things that mattered more. He’d been miscategorizing Scarlet Flame and Blue Ice crystals because the part of him that would ordinarily handle that was occupied.

That was why he needed Yue Yu.

She was the part of the process he couldn’t do himself.

The Imperial Lady stood in the debris-strewn room and understood something about this boy that she hadn’t, until now, fully understood. About his ambition and his work and the gap between how he appeared and what he actually was.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go again. You rebuild the formation — I’ll handle the materials. I won’t make any more mistakes.”

Yueyang gave her a look that was faintly puzzled. Hadn’t she been furious five minutes ago? Something had clearly shifted.

“Wipe your face first.” She had never heard herself sound this gentle. She worked the towel carefully across the soot on his face, keeping her movements small and controlled, not interfering with his work. His shirt was already structurally compromised beyond salvage — she stripped the remains off without particular comment. She’d seen him without it before. They were doing research. Yue Yu clearly didn’t worry about this, and she wasn’t going to either.

Boom.

“Again.”

BOOM.

“I’m fine. Again.”

Under her full and dedicated cooperation, Yueyang’s progress on the war beast wrist device’s rune formation continued to advance.

Three days later, Qianqian finally returned from the Sky Stairway with Yue Yu.

They pushed open the door of the laboratory — which had developed a pronounced lean and an alarming reluctance to stay closed — and stopped.

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady was entirely devoid of clothing, wiping the face of an equally unclothed Yueyang with an expression of complete and focused tenderness. Both of them were entirely absorbed in the experiment. Neither registered that the door had opened, or that anyone had entered.

Qianqian stared.

She had seen the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady in many configurations over the years. She had never seen her like this.

Yue Yu, beside her, was smiling.