Yue Yang was not, by nature, a gossip.

But Ming Rihao’s catastrophic life story struck him as the kind of achievement that deserved acknowledgment — it took real dedication to accumulate that density of misfortune — and so he went straight back to the others and told all three women everything, with what he considered appropriate editorial embellishments.

They sat in stunned silence for a long moment when he finished.

Even Yue Yang, whose emotional defenses had been forged across years of exposure to every variety of dramatic fiction the modern world produced and had reached something approaching divine-artifact grade, had found the story a bit much. For Yue Yu, Qianqian, and the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady — women who had not spent their formative years steeping in melodrama — the effect was considerably more pronounced.

Seeing them struck dumb, Yue Yang magnanimously offered comfort. “It’s not that bad, really. Messy family history, overwrought plot — there’s worse out there. Take this one detective who shows up everywhere and people keep mysteriously dying around him, one per visit, sometimes more, and everyone still thinks he’s delightful. Or there’s this group of heroes, every time they appear a monster manifests and at minimum one city gets flattened, but children across the land consider them role models—”

“What are you talking about?” Qianqian looked at him with the expression of someone who had given up trying to follow the thread. “Who’s the detective? What heroes?”

“What I’m saying is, you haven’t seen enough melodrama yet. If you’d ever watched a certain category of long-running drama — woman with three terminal illnesses and unshakeable optimism, cycling through a rotation of men who all love her, everyone sobbing constantly, she dies beautifully in someone’s arms after causing several deaths and calling it fate — that is actual horror. And don’t get me started on a certain genre of fiction from a place that might as well be called the Divine Forbidden Zone, I’m not even going to say the name—” He shuddered, put his hand over his own mouth, and stopped speaking.

“You’re not making any sense,” Qianqian said.

“Is this Forbidden Zone near White River City?” Yue Yu had already reached for the map before reconsidering. A place called the Divine Forbidden Zone presumably wasn’t going to show up on any map.

“What I want to know,” the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady said, cutting through all of it, “is what we’re supposed to do about any of this. Nearly ten thousand years of tangled grievances and irreversible hatred — I am not getting involved in that. Let them kill each other. It’s their business. I’m not cleaning up someone else’s ancient mess.”

“We’re not cleaning it up,” Yue Yang said. “I just think Ming Rihao’s life deserves a moment of appreciation—”

Qianqian’s fist connected with his shoulder and moved him sideways.

Ming Rihao had been an adversary once, technically, but he’d also cooperated with them at the Prison Emperor’s divine palace. His life was genuinely terrible. Finding it funny — and saying so out loud — was a specific kind of bad behavior that even Yue Yang’s track record didn’t fully excuse.

Though Qianqian privately thought the Rage Domain Emperor — the second brother, the one who had thrown away every good thing he had out of misplaced fury and wounded pride — had earned exactly what he’d gotten. And the new Water Palace Master, and the Divine Radiance Domain Emperor who had murdered his own wife for power — those two could suffer as long as the universe found interesting. The only one the story had treated with any consistency was the Revenge Domain Emperor. He’d been born into someone else’s disaster and made the best of it.

Some hatreds, Qianqian thought, genuinely couldn’t be resolved. This was one of them.

The story unsettled Yue Yang in a way he didn’t immediately voice.

Tianhua Domain had seemed complicated before. Now it looked considerably more so. If a Divine Codex was at the center of all this — and all available evidence suggested it was — then the Central Divine Hall would be watching this region with the single-minded intensity of a cat at a mousehole. Ji Wuri was currently occupied with the Trial Grounds, going after a different Codex, so he wasn’t the immediate concern. But the Central Hall hadn’t built its power by producing one Ji Wuri. There were others like him. And if one wasn’t coming, that didn’t guarantee another two weren’t already here.

More than that: the three-thousand-year war was too sustained to be simple ambition. The scale of slaughter, the specific shape of the conflict — Yue Yang thought about what he knew of how divine artifacts formed bonds, what he knew of how certain seals were broken, what he knew of what sufficient blood sacrifice could accomplish in the context of celestial-level objects.

If someone had already found the Codex — had found it three thousand years ago and had been slowly, methodically using the war as a mechanism to meet the requirements for bonding with it, soul by soul, death by death—

He laid this out for the three women.

They were quiet for a moment.

“You’re saying there might be someone here at Ji Wuri’s level,” Yue Yu said slowly.

“Possibly.”

Qianqian’s expression had gone very still — the particular stillness of her sixth-sense processing something it didn’t like. “That would explain why everything about this region feels wrong. Not just dangerous. Wrong in a way I can’t point to.”

“Unlike the Trial Grounds,” the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady said after a long pause, “the Trial Grounds only let in a limited number of people. Whatever Ji Wuri has helping him there, the access is constrained. Tianhua Domain has no such constraint. The Central Hall can deploy people here continuously. If we’re right about what’s being attempted, they have every reason to.” She looked at Yue Yang. “This will be a different order of fight than anything we’ve walked into before.”

That landed in the room and stayed there.

No one contradicted it.

Yue Yang was still turning it over when Qianqian stood up.

She looked at Yue Yu for a moment with a very specific expression. Yue Yu read it immediately, shook her head in small rapid movements, both hands up in a gesture of not-that-not-me-please. Qianqian ignored this entirely, lifted the Dorothea Pearl Necklace from around her own neck, and fastened it firmly around Yue Yu’s.

“The Fourth Mother would benefit most from this, but after her, you’re the closest match. We can’t keep hesitating. Strength comes first — everything else waits.” She turned to Yue Yang and, without ceremony, removed the Rain-Flower ring from his hand and pressed it into Yue Yu’s palm.

Yue Yu looked down at the ring. It still held warmth from Yue Yang’s skin.

Her head dropped slightly.

She didn’t protest. That was her answer.

Qianqian visibly relaxed — she’d been more anxious about this than she’d shown. She pulled Yue Yu into a brief hug, then turned back to Yue Yang, who was still somewhere inside his own thoughts, and grabbed his arm.

“Stop thinking. Whatever we’re dealing with, it’s more complicated than we can fully map right now. What we can do is get stronger. That’s where we start.”

Yue Yang came back to the present and looked at her oddly. Qianqian was usually the last one to suggest paired cultivation in company — with Yue Yu and the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady present she’d always found a reason to defer, to let someone else go first, to be elsewhere. Her sixth-sense had been talking to her, and whatever it was saying had overridden her usual reserve.

Yue Yu and the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady had noticed too. Today’s Qianqian was operating at a different frequency.

“I need to ask you something.” Qianqian’s voice had dropped a register. The slightly combative edge she usually used with him as armor had gone quiet. “The Prison Emperor’s divine sword — I don’t think I can merge with it yet, so don’t worry about that. But is there a way to push me past my current ceiling? I keep getting a feeling — not clear, more like pressure — that something big is coming faster than we’re ready for. I want to be standing next to you when it does. Not watching from the side. Not being protected. With you.”

She’d always been proud about this. Independent cultivation, never asking for his time when she could avoid it, never wanting to feel like a weight. This was something different.

Yue Yang understood where it was coming from. He’d watched her in the fights — the Chitian River battle, others before that — doing everything she could and still unable to reach the places where the deciding moments happened. The enemies had kept getting stronger. She was still below the Perfect Innate Sovereign threshold, still unable to fully bond with the Prison Emperor’s divine sword. Every day Wuxia spent unconscious was a day Wuxia’s integration deepened, the Book of Truth climbed toward divine-artifact grade, the gap between them widened.

Qianqian would never say that last part. But Yue Yang knew her well enough to read what sat underneath the urgency, and the knowledge of it made something in his chest tighten.

This fierce, stubborn, brilliant girl. Always fighting with him, always too proud to lean, and now standing here with her eyes open and her guard down.

He looked at her for a long moment. Long enough that her chin came up slightly and she started bracing for a refusal.

Then Yue Yang reached into his ring and produced a pearl.

It was beautiful — softly luminous, its light shifting through colors that didn’t quite have names, the kind of radiance that made the air around it feel like it was paying attention.

“First, I need you to not hit me,” he said. “Because I have a confession. When I was extracting things from the Black-Flame Lord, along with the Fire God Soul-Tempering Herb — I also got a pearl. I’ve been holding onto it. I wanted it to be a surprise. Look — the White Tiger Holy Pearl. Quasi-divine rank.“

Qianqian stared at him.

Then at the pearl.

Then at him again.

She didn’t speak for a long time. Her expression went through several stages that she seemed to have no control over, and then two tears, fast and bright, slid down her face and fell onto his hand — the one holding the pearl — and where they landed, a faint pulse of energy moved through the pearl’s surface like a ripple in still water.

She tried to smile. Her mouth refused to cooperate and went in the opposite direction.

She held the expression together through what was clearly significant effort, and then gave up trying to manage any of it, leaned forward, and bit his hand — small teeth, sharp, a proper bite — and when he yelped she let go immediately, wrapped her arms around him, and kissed him.

It was not a tentative kiss. Her small fist found his back and knocked against it repeatedly throughout, with the absolute commitment of someone registering a formal complaint.

The knocking, however, was doing approximately the damage of a disgruntled butterfly.

“You horrible man,” she said, when she finally came up for air, voice muffled against him. “I hate you so much.”