Fine. Whatever happens, happens. Sooner or later this boy was going to get the better of her anyway. Tonight, she’d just have to throw caution to the wind.

Better a short sharp pain than a long slow one.

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady closed her eyes and made her decision.

And the strangest thing happened the moment she did.

The tension unwound. The anticipated dread and resistance — none of it came. The chaotic feelings that had been crashing around in her chest for days went quiet with almost unseemly speed, and what replaced them was a peculiar clarity, a gathering of attention that left her more focused and present than she’d been in some time.

It’s actually fine, she thought, and was surprised to find she meant it.

Her mind, newly settled, drifted toward the project notes — and she felt something move in the back of it.

Vague. Something about the materials.

“You’re planning to use purified gold, mystic silver, and red copper as the three grades?” The words came out before she’d consciously decided to say them. She couldn’t have explained why. She just felt, somehow, that something was off.

Yueyang turned to look at her. “Is there a problem? My thinking was — Sky-rank or above contracts get purified gold wrist devices. Below Sky-rank gets mystic silver. Non-upgradeable puppet war beasts or non-combat specialized types get red copper.”

“Mm.” She listened to his reasoning. It was sound. This had been the consensus of Yueyang, Yue Yu, Wuhen, Wuxia, Luohua, and Qianqian working together. There shouldn’t be a gap in it. And yet.

She couldn’t say what was missing. She just knew something was.

Yueyang studied her with genuine curiosity.

She had participated in the rune formation experiments — but she was, objectively, an outsider on the technical side, well behind the specialists. And yet he’d learned not to dismiss this kind of thing. Intuition from an unexpected source, a flash from someone who didn’t know enough to be constrained by the existing framework — sometimes that was exactly what a problem needed. He thought of Bao’er, the Gold Elf girl who routinely managed to accomplish important things through a combination of total ignorance and spectacular luck, in ways that no technically competent person could have replicated.

“I can’t say it in words,” the Imperial Lady said. She was the kind of person who, under normal circumstances, would never agree to what she was about to say. “You come and sense it.”

Since the shared cultivation beneath the World Tree, everyone had developed a version of what Yue Yu and the Sick Beauty had named the Heart-Link — a ribbon of soul-energy, different in each person’s hands, that could carry meaning where words fell short. The women used it rarely in daily life; privacy was privacy, and most things were easier to just say. But when the thing in your mind couldn’t be reached by language, the Heart-Link was there.

Light rippled between her fingers.

Wuxia’s Heart-Link was threaded through with ancient rune-variants. The Imperial Lady’s was different — quieter, less immediately visible, but what shone in it was starlight, sparks that burst outward in sharp-edged points, more like bursts of qi than soft light. She often drew on its patterns herself when studying martial forms.

The ribbon found his hand.

The moment it connected, she felt him enter — blunt and immediate, the way he did everything — and the sensation of being perceived so directly was somehow worse than standing in front of him without clothes. More exposed. She held the connection with effort, heart going at a gallop, and made herself stay still while he took what he needed from her wordless understanding.

He didn’t rifle through her secrets. He went directly for the thing she couldn’t articulate, and felt for it with complete attention.

His face, when she looked at him, was luminous.

With the inherited knowledge and the World Tree’s accumulated wisdom at his disposal, he could catch a flash of intuition faster and more accurately than almost anyone. He didn’t need a second to resonate with what she’d felt.

He stayed with it for a while, pulling the thread further than she’d reached herself.

When he opened his eyes, something was moving in them — a clarity she associated with him at his best, intelligence surfacing through the medium of his expression the way light comes up through water.

“I understand. You’re absolutely right.” He grabbed her shoulders, laughing, and took a moment to stop laughing before he could continue. “Wuxia said before that something felt incomplete, that she wanted to go back and think about it. I didn’t expect you to be the one who found it. We thought through Sky-rank contracts, and below-Sky-rank contracts, but we left out something critically important — growth-potential war beasts. We considered it early in the design phase and then moved on and forgot it. The wrist device doesn’t have to be limited to people who can’t form Grimoire bonds. Even Grimoire-contract warriors could use one — especially young children with limited self-protective ability. A growth-potential war beast developing alongside them, or a mature war beast providing protection — that changes the safety calculation entirely. The Sky Stairway’s talent pool isn’t growing. The Longteng continent’s is shrinking. If that trend continues, we have nothing to compete with in the heavenly realms. Adding this category changes things considerably.” He shook her by the shoulders with unrestrained enthusiasm. “Cat-cat, this insight is the most important contribution to the whole next generation of talent cultivation.”

“I — did I really think that?” She twisted her hands together, flustered. The compliment was doing something to her composure. “I genuinely thought that?”

“It was in you. You just couldn’t reach the words for it.” He laughed again. “You don’t talk enough, that’s the problem.”

“I talk plenty—” Her own voice surprised her. It was almost inaudible. She was startled to find herself sounding like this — small and soft, nothing like her usual register. What’s happening to me? I can’t even get irritated at him properly anymore?

She noticed the Heart-Link was still threaded around his fingers.

She pulled it back, quietly mortified, and looked up at him with the half-fearful certainty that he was about to use this moment against her in some way.

He wasn’t.

“Cat-cat,” he said, “that’s the right direction. Open up more. Talk to people. When I’m not available, find Wuhen or Yue Yu or Qianqian — everyone cares about you.”

“Don’t call me—” The nickname again. Cat-cat. “I’m not — don’t—”

“Only when it’s just us.” He leaned in and kissed her cheek, light and quick, and then turned back to his work like nothing had happened.

She stood exactly where she was.

He had kissed her. On the lips, actually — a brief contact, barely more than a touch, but still. Her first.

She hadn’t been ready. There had been no warning. She hadn’t even seen it coming. And now she was standing here calculating whether he was far enough away that she could touch her own mouth without him seeing, and whether she was imagining the feeling or whether it was actually still there.

He turned around.

“Come on.” His hand found her shoulder.

“Already?” She surfaced from the first-kiss inventory with a small jolt. He’s moving straight to the double cultivation protocol? Right now? She hadn’t—

Her mind raced through the next several steps of what that entailed. If he took her sleeves — if he leaned in again — how close was too close — what did she do with her hands—

He placed a coat over her shoulders.

Then he took out the Three Realms Compass.

“We need to move. I had an idea — if we’re making the highest-tier wrist devices from sun, moon, and star stones, and the next tier down from rare heavenly minerals like Drip-Flame, Dream-Ice, Thunder-Flower, and Stormbell ore — that puts the best materials out of reach for anyone who might want to copy us. The rune formations, they can’t replicate anyway. But the materials too — cut them off at the source. There’s a place called Black-Flame Canyon. I heard there’s Drip-Flame ore there. I have Dream-Ice, Thunder-Flower, and Stormbell already. If I can confirm the Drip-Flame deposit, the device could actually be produced.”

Materials. They were going to collect materials.

She let out a breath of mixed relief and something more difficult to name, and pressed one hand lightly to her own chest, which was behaving in a somewhat disorganized manner.

When they arrived in the heavenly realm’s Black Wind City, he bypassed both the city lord’s residence and the New Jade Fortress entirely, heading instead toward Black-Flame Canyon.

The flight was long.

Somewhere along the way, she stopped flying beside him and let him take her hand, because she was slower. A little further on, she had found her way onto his back, arms around his neck, tucked against the warmth of him as he moved through the heavenly sky.

The broad solidity of his back against her — the specific heat of it — produced a sensation she couldn’t file anywhere familiar. She wasn’t embarrassed by it anymore. She was something else, something that had a faint sweetness at its edges.

She found herself wiping a trace of sweat from his neck in a voice she barely recognized as hers. “Tired? Should we stop and rest for a moment?”

“You weigh less than a cat.”

“I’m not a—” The protest came out with a softness that she registered with internal alarm a half-second later. When did I start doing that? She cleared her throat and tried again at a more normal register. “I can fly on my own. I’m just slower.”

“It’s fine. Sleep if you want. I’ll wake you when we arrive. Last I heard there was Drip-Flame ore in Black-Flame Canyon — never got around to confirming it. I have the rest. If the deposit is real, the device is within reach.”

He shifted her weight on his back in the absent way of someone adjusting a familiar load, and gave her a brief pat in passing — the same unconscious gesture she’d seen him use with Qianqian.

The touch, casual as it was, drained whatever structural integrity she had left. She went limp against him, hanging on without any particular intention, face pressed to his shoulder blade.

He hadn’t meant anything by it. She knew that. And yet.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, the protocol she’d been so terrified of an hour ago had changed shape. The fear hadn’t gone away exactly — but alongside it now was something different, something that felt less like dread and more like waiting.

Strange. Two hours ago I was going to refuse with everything I had. And now I’m—

She didn’t finish the thought. She was thinking about it too much, and the more she thought, the warmer it got.

She closed her eyes.

Pressed her cheek to his back and breathed him in — the particular scent of him, warm and unmistakably present — and somewhere between one breath and the next, she slept.

In her dream, something made her smile.

A shallow smile, at the corner of her mouth.

Unguarded.

Overflowing with something that had been missing from her dreams for a long time.