The Grimoire World.

After his conversation with the Freedom Queen, Yue Yang had returned to the Grimoire World and settled into stillness.

At first, Princess Qianqian and Yue Yu thought nothing of it and went about their own cultivation. Time passed — how much, none of them could quite say — and the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady was the first to finish her session. She’d had half a mind to invite Yue Yang for a bath, but one look at him sitting there, clearly still deep in thought, and she decided to leave him be. He sometimes disappeared into his own head like this when he was working through an experiment — an hour, two hours, nothing unusual.

But when the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady finished bathing and was ready to sleep, Xiao Nu’s quiet murmuring brought her up short: Yue Yang had been sitting like that for five hours.

Five hours.

That had never happened before.

What on earth had occurred out there?

Princess Qianqian and Yue Yu learned of it and were equally stunned. All three women huddled outside the door, peering through the hairline crack, voices barely above a whisper.

“So what do we do? Should we go in and wake him?”

“If he’s in the middle of chasing down some insight,” Yue Yu said, shaking her head slightly, “calling him back might mean losing it entirely.”

“The problem is he’s been like this for way too long.” Qianqian had never seen him this far gone.

“Maybe he’s right at the edge of something. We have to trust him.” Of the three, Yue Yu was always the one with the most faith in him — not a blind faith, but the deep, settled kind. She was certain he wasn’t simply daydreaming. He was reaching for something.

“Then we wait a little longer,” the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady agreed. She could support him in that much.

“You two wait. I pushed myself too hard in cultivation today — I’m exhausted.” Qianqian turned it over in her mind and decided there wasn’t much to be afraid of. He was thinking through something he didn’t yet understand, working toward clarity. If Xue Wuxia were here, she might actually be able to help. Qianqian herself was another matter — the gap in their cultivation was simply too vast right now. Entering his consciousness directly would leave her dizzy and with a splitting headache.

She decided not to wait. Rest first. Yue Yu was here, so nothing would go wrong.

Another hour passed.

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady began losing her battle with sleep, yawning in spite of herself. Yue Yu saw it and told her to go rest — both she and Qianqian had cultivated hard all day, pushing past their limits again and again to force advancement. When exhaustion finally arrived, it arrived completely.

“Go on,” Yue Yu said. “Xiao Nu will keep me company.”

Xiao Nu settled beside her, and the two of them talked quietly to pass the time. Xiao Nu, whose heart never carried the weight of worry for more than a few minutes at a stretch, was mid-sentence when she simply… stopped. Her eyes closed. She slid peacefully into Yue Yu’s lap and was asleep.

Yue Yu looked down at her, caught between exasperation and fondness.

“What am I going to do with all of you,” she murmured, and carried Xiao Nu carefully to the bed, tucking the blanket around her small shoulders.

When Fourth Mother wasn’t here, Yue Yu became her stand-in without anyone asking. She always had.

Especially for this particular little brother of hers — the one who was most afraid of being alone. His power grew greater with each passing month, but in so many other ways he was still something like a child who hadn’t quite finished growing up. He needed people around him. When there was no one, he grew restless in a way that had nothing to do with cultivation.

Yue Yu would never have admitted this aloud, but she didn’t mind it. She more than didn’t mind it — she loved seeing it. Especially when he turned to her, specifically, as the one he depended on. In those moments the distance between them disappeared entirely, and there was nothing but unguarded ease. Being beside him as he walked from one success to the next, caring for him in all the small daily ways — it produced a feeling she had no words for. A kind of joy that nothing else in the world came close to.

Not that she would ever say so.

The night deepened. Everyone slept.

Yue Yu looked at him, still motionless, and let out a quiet breath.

Wuxia was unconscious. Luohua and Inan were away. Qianqian had gone to rest. Who was here to help him? No one.

Sitting there like that, hour after hour — it was impossible not to worry. Whatever had happened out there on that ship, couldn’t he at least have told them before retreating into himself?

She almost moved. Then stopped.

No. She checked the hall — everyone sleeping. She’d been back and forth on this for a while now, but each time she reached the same conclusion and stepped back. Using the Heart-Link to enter his consciousness would interrupt whatever he was working through. And worse — he would see everything. All of it. The things she kept carefully folded away, deep down, where she pretended she didn’t have them.

That would not do.

And yet.

She couldn’t simply sit here either.

She stayed still a little longer. Then she stopped pretending she was going to stay still.

What’s stopping me? This was her little brother. Her Xiaosan. If he was in difficulty, if she had any way to help — what was there to weigh against that? Even her own bones, if it came to that. And if she couldn’t even do this much, what did it mean to say she’d walk beside him?

She made her decision.

Checked the hall one more time. Still quiet. No one stirring.

Just this once, then. Just this once, and never again.

Yue Yu crossed to him, lowered herself down beside him. The Heart-Link energy reached out, tentative and trembling, and brushed against his arm. Sank in.

Her arms, sometime before she noticed, had drawn him gently into her embrace.

Whatever is troubling you, little brother — whatever it is — tell me. Just me, quietly, where no one else can hear. Whatever it turns out to be, I’ll share it with you.

She had expected confusion. Difficulty. Pain, perhaps.

She found only stillness.

His inner world was quiet as the sea after a storm has spent itself — not the held breath before violence, but the genuine calm afterward. Sky and water meeting at a seamless horizon. The surface unbroken in every direction.

Yue Yu’s mind-form felt itself become something like a newborn: pure, unclothed, without a trace of self-consciousness. And there he was, in the distance, sitting exactly as his body sat outside — quiet, unhurried, at rest.

She drifted toward him, her mind-form moving as naturally as breath. She reached out and touched his back, gently, and then folded herself around him, her arms encircling him from behind.

Where two minds made contact, they began, slowly, to merge. The heart’s full contents flowing in both directions at once — secrets, longings, fears, the things carried in silence that no words had ever been found for. In this world, there were no walls. Everything was simply known.

In an instant, she understood what he’d been reaching toward — the profound meaning that had pulled him inward, and the extraordinary rising of his inner realm that had followed.

And he understood, in the same instant, what she had been carrying.

The worry. The care. And deeper than those — the feeling that trembled when she thought of him, the one she kept folded so small she could almost convince herself it wasn’t there.

He knew her. She knew him. She could even feel his response to knowing — something quiet and steadying, like a hand placed over a startled heart.

She could sense the deepest chambers of him. He could sense the deepest chambers of her. In this moment, they were a single thing.

The only sorrow was that her realm could not reach as far as his. So much of what he carried was beyond what she could receive — not because he withheld it, but because the vessel wasn’t large enough yet. And in some places, she chose not to look. The intimate spaces he shared with Wuxia, with Qianqian, with Luohua and Inan and the others — those belonged to them. She skirted around them deliberately, kept her attention moving, gave those places their privacy.

Even so, a few things reached her before she could redirect herself. A moment from a paired cultivation session. A particular evening. The flush of it hit her before she could step aside, and she felt the warmth rise in her face even in this formless state.

But his mind carried hers onward.

Upward, through the ceiling of things, until she felt them break through something — the sky of the inner world, punctured from below, and on the other side of it: everything, impossibly vast, the mortal world shrinking away below into something too small to make out.

Was it fear? Wonder?

Both, she thought. And beneath them both, a strange, floating joy. The kind that came from having no ground beneath you and finding you didn’t need it.

Why are you showing me this? Is this what you’ve understood? Or is this the problem you’re trying to solve?

“If there’s something I can do to help,” her mind-form said, “I don’t know how — but tell me, and I’ll do it.”

He didn’t answer in words.

His mind-form simply shone.

He didn’t need to ask. He already knew she would say yes. She didn’t need to know how. She already knew he would lead.

Their minds merged again — not to share, this time, but to cultivate. What followed was something new, something born from the understanding he had just arrived at. Not only mind but body too. The White Frost Bloom of his Innate Sword Qi flared brilliant, and their robes dissolved into nothing, and they were close — closer than close — the purest yin flowing into the most perfect yang, water into fire, fire into water.

Not a clash. Nothing discordant, nothing violent.

Only deepening beauty. Only ascent.

Mind and body together, rising through something that had no name yet.

The energy column struck upward through the roof of the Grimoire World like a second sky was trying to open above the first.

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady and Princess Qianqian woke from their sleep with a start, and stood staring at the pillar of radiance — that stupendous, magnificent thing that no description could touch the edge of — as Yue Yu’s energy poured into his breakthrough and the light kept climbing. Only now did they understand how high he had gone with this insight, and how far.

Xiao Nu turned to them and raised one small finger to her lips.

Don’t wake them.

Qianqian smiled a little, traded a look with the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady, stretched her arms with the slow grace of someone who has decided to be charmed rather than surprised, and went back to bed. All of this had apparently not happened.

The next morning, Yue Yu woke in the merged dreamspace of their shared inner world feeling as though every part of her had been washed clean and made new.

Then she noticed she was draped across him.

Then she noticed that something was being extremely impertinent against a place it had absolutely no business.

She was on her feet before the thought fully formed. Heart hammering. She reached out carefully to assess the situation — and exhaled.

Fine. He had simply startled her. No real transgression had occurred. She had not just had a heart attack for nothing, but it had been alarmingly close to one.

She dressed quickly. He was still sleeping. Good.

She gathered his clothes and moved to dress him before he could wake and complicate matters, but that particular piece of him was determined to remain a difficulty, and she was forced to conduct the entire operation in a state of profound mortification, deeply grateful that no one was watching. She tucked the blanket around him with rather more force than strictly necessary, checked the hall — still quiet, everyone still asleep — and pressed her hand briefly over her own heart.

Good. Fine. This was all fine.

She slipped out through the door, firmly suppressing the urge to hum.

Put herself to work in the kitchen instead. Breakfast.

An hour later, when she came back carrying the tray — warm and fragrant and exactly right — she found him blinking himself awake, already lifting his nose toward the smell.

“That smells amazing,” he said.

She looked at him.

“Lazy worms who don’t wash their face and brush their teeth,” she informed him, “can watch other people eat breakfast.”

If every morning could be like this, she thought, setting the tray down, I would spend my whole life looking after this ridiculous person.

Which was exactly what she fully intended to do, because apparently he could not be trusted alone for even a single day.