When the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady watched Yueyang finish off the Black-Flame Lord and settle down to cheerfully examine the Black-Flame Soul Crystal — refined over thousands of years inside the Lord’s elemental body — she finally couldn’t help herself. She walked over and tapped his arm.

“Why all the talking? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to kill him outright and take everything?”

Yueyang called up a tongue of Nirvana Flames and began purifying the soul crystal.

He watched it reduce from a fist-sized lump down to something barely larger than a fingertip, then held it out for her to inspect. “If I’d cut straight to the killing, the soul crystal we pried out would have been sub-Sacred quality at best — not particularly useful. But after that little performance, he was emotionally devastated, his soul was cracked from the strain, and even though it had been naturally bonded to the Black-Flame crystal for thousands of years, my Sovereign intent had already worked a fracture into it. That’s how I could extract it cleanly without losing a scrap of quality.” He turned the glittering fragment in his fingers. “Not only did we come out with it intact — it refined all the way up to Sacred-rank.”

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady couldn’t argue with the results.

She still felt vaguely uneasy. “Was it really… all right to do it that way?”

“Catie.” Yueyang smiled. “Stop thinking of it as a person. Think of it as a monster. Fighting monsters and claiming their loot — that’s the most natural thing in the world.”

“But it had a human shape…”

“Then call it a ‘humanoid monster’ and move on.” He didn’t let the subject linger. “Simba — that fire-elemental body of his is decent quality, actually. Consider it a reward. Drag it outside and have yourself a proper meal.”

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady watched Simba comply and muttered quietly to herself, “He’s going to die with his eyes open.”

“He’s already dead,” Yueyang said reasonably. “Does he really care about his eyes at this point? Now — let’s keep mining. All this Drip-Flame ore isn’t going to collect itself, and I am not leaving a single piece for someone else.”

He picked up a pickaxe and got to work without another thought.

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady stood watching him for a moment, struck — as she occasionally was — by the contradiction of him. She had known men of great standing who would have considered this kind of scavenging beneath their dignity, and yet here was Yueyang, one of the most formidable beings she had encountered, cheerfully swinging a pickaxe over a pile of ore. And yet the same man would hand over ten thousand wyverns without blinking. She had never quite figured out what his actual principles were, and she was increasingly convinced the answer was simply that he had none — or rather, he had his own, and they bore no resemblance to anyone else’s.

“Oh — what happened to the Ground-origin Yin Flame?” she asked, remembering. “It just vanished.”

“It didn’t vanish. I told him it did.” Yueyang didn’t look up from his work. “I put up an illusion through my domain. I’d already collected the real one. Took considerable effort, actually — had to wrap it very carefully in Nirvana Flames to contain it, then store it in the Grimoire World. Nearly failed twice. Looking back, it was touch and go.”

“The Ground-origin Yin Flame can’t be easy to capture.”

“Obviously not. Took me a full ten minutes.”

Ten minutes, said with tremendous self-congratulation.

“Wait.” She stopped swinging. “You collected the Fire God Soul-Tempering Herb and had time to capture the Ground-origin Yin Flame?”

“Harvesting the herb barely took a minute. The Yin Flame was the real work—”

He caught himself, but not quite in time.

“You.” The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady’s temper arrived fast and hot. “You finished collecting the herb and didn’t say a word to me? I was out there half terrified out of my mind — when the Black-Flame Lord fired that shot at what I thought was the Yin Flame, I charged down here to die with you, and it turns out you’d already—”

She dropped the pickaxe, closed the distance in two strides, shoved him flat on his back, and planted herself squarely on his waist with her fist raised.

“Don’t do anything rash,” Yueyang said quickly, capturing her wrist. “Rashness is the enemy of good judgment—”

“I’m not being rash. I just want to hit you.”

The urge to sink her teeth into him until he understood what it felt like to be on the receiving end of someone else’s games was almost irresistible. Almost.

“To be fair,” Yueyang said, “it wasn’t that I didn’t want to call out to you. You were in the middle of a breakthrough. Your cultivation was moving on its own — I couldn’t have pulled you out of that state without disrupting something important.”

She paused.

That was… actually true. She did remember that.

“So I was wrong about you?” The indignation deflated somewhat. “I owe you an apology?”

“No, no. Blame me entirely. I should have been faster with the herb. If I’d managed it in one second instead of one minute, there’d have been no misunderstanding at all. Completely my fault.”

He said it lightly, with just enough self-deprecating warmth to take the edge off her embarrassment entirely. She gave him a look of exasperated affection and shifted slightly. “Let go. I’m getting up.”

“You’re sure you won’t hit me?”

“I’m not that petty.”

“Really sure?”

She looked at his expression — the elaborate theatrical caution of a man who was pretending to be far more frightened than he was — and found it impossible to stay angry. “You absolute coward. I promise I won’t hit you. Satisfied?”

Yueyang exhaled with the relief of a man stepping back from the gallows, one hand pressed to his chest. “Thank goodness. I was afraid you were going to deploy the ‘chest-crushing torture’ on me. You know my willpower is terrible. I’d confess to anything under that kind of interrogation.”

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady felt a vein throb in her forehead.

She understood perfectly what ‘chest-crushing torture’ was a reference to.

She raised her fist again. “What else are you hiding from me?”

Yueyang’s reflexes were, as always, infuriatingly quick. He caught her hand, arranged his face into the expression of a martyr facing the firing squad for the good of the cause, and announced: “Do you honestly think that I, possessor of the finest discretion in the entire Sky Stairway, would volunteer that you just sat down hard enough to split your trousers open, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination? That kind of devastating secret goes with me to the grave.”

She blinked.

Then, reflexively, she looked down.

She found, to her absolute horror, that he was entirely correct.

For a moment she sat there, struck dumb.

When she looked back up and found him grinning, something in her snapped — and she acted on an impulse she would never, under ordinary circumstances, have acted on. She leaned forward and pressed herself down, letting what she had to press with land squarely on the face of the grinning thief beneath her.

You’re so afraid of the chest-crushing torture? Then let’s see how you do when it’s actually happening.

“Catie — mercy — I surrender — it is genuinely possible to suffocate from hap—”

“You deserve it.”

One day later.

Back in the Tianra Palace, the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady delivered her one-hundredth warning to the infuriating man walking beside her: “If you breathe a word of any of that to anyone, I will end you.”

Yueyang put on his most dutiful expression and patted his chest solemnly. “One hundred percent guaranteed. Unless Qianqian or the others apply the same torture method, in which case I make no promises.”

She had run out of the energy to be properly furious at him. Getting angry at this particular variety of scoundrel was simply the wrong tool for the job.

Hitting him was far more efficient.

Her fist was still rising when Princess Qianqian and Yue Yu appeared to meet them, the princess bright-eyed and smiling as she leaned in toward the Imperial Lady: “Did that awful man give you any trouble?”

The Imperial Lady came very close to saying yes.

“No,” she said instead. “He wouldn’t dare. I’d have flayed him.”

Yueyang, beside her, arranged himself into the portrait of a gentlemanly soul unjustly suspected.

No one believed it for a moment.

“Yue Yu and I are taking Bing’er to the Ancient Forest tonight to absorb the ancient rune energy,” Qianqian said, turning to Yueyang with a smile that contained a hint of mischief. “We’re counting on you to help with that — which means we’re leaving you in Cousin’s capable hands!”

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady could not refuse. She could only accept her fate with a sigh. Manage him? I can barely keep him from managing me. At the very least, she supposed, she could prevent him from wandering off to buy ore from the heavenly realm.

“I’ll watch him,” she said. “Even if he wants to go mineral shopping in the heavenly realm, I’ll be there.”

“I will defer entirely to leadership,” Yueyang declared, with the look of a man committed to following his wife’s guidance for the next fifty years.

“You. Be quiet.” She was genuinely annoyed now — because while it was true that during the later part of the chest-crushing torture, a certain someone had taken shameless advantage of the situation to get a few handfuls in, none of that had been agreed to, and it was far too early to be throwing around words like wife—

“Cousin, you’re amazing,” Qianqian said admiringly. “If you ever officially join the household, I imagine discipline standards here will improve considerably.”

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady turned and walked away.

That night, she couldn’t sleep.

She’d expected him to come knocking. Had prepared herself for it, in fact — had even planned, with some precision, exactly how hard she intended to hit him when he arrived. But the knock never came. Qianqian and Yue Yu were out. His Majesty had refused to see him. He had nowhere to go and no one to bother.

And yet, apparently, he had simply gone to bed.

She lay there staring at the ceiling for a while, then finally gave up, threw a robe over her shoulders, and padded out into the corridor. She pushed open the door to his room, found his bed empty, and after a moment’s pause — during which she did not think about where he might have gone, and with whom — drifted toward the laboratory.

Light spilled from under the door.

She pushed it open.

The Drip-Flame ore was stacked in a small mountain. He was working through it piece by piece, refining each one between his palms — the larger chunks reducing to something egg-sized at most, the smallest barely larger than a bean. On the other side of him, an answering mountain of Drip-Flame Crystal Gold had accumulated, tens of thousands of glittering pieces.

Everyone saw the victories. The rare finds, the impossible negotiations, the effortless dominance. Almost no one ever saw this part.

She didn’t know how long she stood in the doorway.

Her eyes had gone unexpectedly warm. Something had tightened in her throat.

She blinked the feeling away, let a quiet smile settle on her face, and stepped inside. When he reached for the next piece of ore, she got there first and pressed it into his hand. She didn’t have a cloth nearby; she used the sleeve of her robe to wipe the faint sheen of sweat from his forehead.

“You just got back,” he said, turning to look at her with mild surprise. “Shouldn’t you be resting?”

“You’re doing all the work by yourself. Can’t someone else help, even a little?”

And then — before she had consciously decided to do it, before anything in her had properly consulted anything else — she leaned down and pressed her lips briefly to his.

Just for a moment. A quiet, small thing.

Then they both went still.

They looked at each other.

Neither of them knew quite what to do next.

She reached out, turned his head firmly back toward the ore pile so he’d stop looking at her, and spent a moment being very busy with absolutely nothing while her face did something it hadn’t done in a very long time.

What just happened, she thought distantly. I just — on my own — and it counted this time, it absolutely counted—

Except.

Both times now — him kissing her, her kissing him — had been so sudden that she’d barely registered them before they were over.

“Catie,” Yueyang said. He sounded thoughtful. “That was too fast. I didn’t really feel it properly.”

He was suggesting they try again.

“Say that one more time,” she said, in a voice that had gone very small and very dangerous, “and I will actually kill you.”