Ji’an sighed, the last remnants of her interrogation slipping away.

She couldn’t bring herself to bully a traumatized kid, even if the kid was a lying, bratty menace.

"Fine," Ji’an relented, gently pulling her arm back and sliding another candied hawthorn across the table. "You can keep your secrets, Su Yin. But know this: you are currently under the roof of General Lin Tianzong. If you are harboring enemies, or if your presence here brings danger to this estate, I will personally throw you back into the borderlands. Understood?"

Su Yin nodded frantically, her mouth full of candied fruit. "I promise! I won’t cause any trouble! I just want to stay with you!"

"You cannot stay with me forever," Ji’an corrected, standing up and stretching her arms over her head. "I am a cultivator. Once the Emperor’s political circus is over, I am returning to the Celestial Sword Sect. You are staying here. The General will ensure you are returned to your ’merchant’ family."

Su Yin’s face fell instantly. "The Sect? But... but they won’t let me inside the sect! I don’t know how to cultivate!"

"Then I suggest you learn how to embroider really well, because you are not following me up that mountain," Ji’an said firmly, offering no room for negotiation.

She walked toward the bathing chamber. "Now, get out of my room. Or go sleep on the chaise lounge in the corner. I am taking a bath, and if you try to peek, I will blind you with a ladle."

Su Yin grumbled, but she obediently hopped off the chair, grabbing the remaining hawthorn skewers and curling up on the plush velvet chaise lounge near the window, watching Ji’an with a mixture of awe and stubborn determination.

As Ji’an finally slipped behind the heavy privacy screen of the bathing chamber, the hot steam rising from the scented water wrapping around her tired muscles, she let out a long, shuddering breath.

The night had been a catastrophic whirlwind of emotional devastation and political landmines.

She sank into the hot water, letting it cover her up to her chin, closing her eyes.

The silence of the water was comforting.

It washed away the smell of the Imperial Palace.

It washed away the phantom sensation of Lin Feng’s hand on her neck.

In the quiet steam, her thoughts drifted back to the mountain.

She raised her left hand out of the water, looking at the midnight-blue threads of the Frost-Silk Pulse Guard.

"Just a few more days, Wangchen," Ji’an whispered to the empty, steaming room, a soft, weary smile touching her lips. "Just a few more days of playing politics, and then I’m coming back. Do not freeze the kitchen before I get there."

The path forward was terrifying, and the male leads were closing in, but for the first time since she had arrived in this world, Lin Ji’an knew exactly who she was.

She was not a ghost, not an imposter.

***

Deep within the lightless, in the purgatory of the Eternal Cloud Peak’s seclusion caverns, Xie Wangchen sat upon the slab of ten-thousand-year-old Glacial Marrow.

He was meditating, desperately attempting to forcefully circulate his Ice Qi to mend the fractured, chaotic state of his spiritual sea.

The Inner Demon tribulation had passed, but the devastation it left in its wake was absolute.

The hallucinatory image of Lin Ji’an, pinned beneath him on a bed of crimson silk, her chest unbound, her body undeniably, breathtakingly female, was seared into the back of his eyelids.

It was a brand burned directly onto his soul.

He had spent the last two days trying to convince himself it was merely a trick of the demon, a perverse manifestation of his own depraved desires, trying to rationalize his "cut-sleeve" obsession with a boy.

But as the hours ticked by in the freezing dark, a strange, persistent chill began to creep down the Vanguard’s spine.

It wasn’t the physical cold of the cave; he was immune to that.

It was a cold, creeping premonition.

A dark, instinctual unease that whispered of shifting variables and unseen predators circling his territory.

He looked down at his left wrist.

The microscopic, midnight-blue thread of spirit-silk, the tether he had woven into Ji’an’s pulse guard, was glowing faintly in the dark.

A few days ago, it had pulsed with the chaotic, adrenaline-fueled rhythm of a life-or-death battle.

Now, the pulse was steady, calm, and slow.

She was resting.

Logically, he knew she was safe.

But the dark, suffocating monster beneath the ice was restless.

It demanded visual confirmation.

It demanded to look into those silver-flecked eyes and ensure that she still belonged to him.

’Just a quick conversation,’ Wangchen rationalized to himself, his long, pale fingers gently tracing the glowing blue thread. ’To put my mind at ease. I will not reveal the turbulence in my heart. I will simply check on him.’

Before he had gifted her the Frost-Silk Pulse Guard, he had mentioned in passing that the jade bead possessed a secondary, short-range communication array.

He had never intended to use it so soon.

He had planned to wait out his seclusion, to forge his chains. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

But the urge was overwhelming.

Wangchen closed his eyes, channeling a tiny, concentrated sliver of his Golden Core Qi directly into the blue thread.

"Answer me, Ji’an," Wangchen whispered to the freezing dark.

.

.

.

Hundreds of miles away, in the innermost, heavily warded courtyard of the Lin General’s Estate, Lin Ji’an stepped out of the steaming, scented waters of her private bathing chamber.

The hot bath had been a profound, spiritual experience.

She had scrubbed the mud, the dried blood, and the cloying scent of Blood-Hand Tu’s aphrodisiac incense from her skin until she felt human again.

She dried off quickly with a plush towel.

Because she was entirely alone in her private, heavily secured quarters, she completely bypassed her usual, agonizing routine.

She did not reach for the thick, suffocating linen chest binder.

The estate maids had laid out a set of incredibly soft, high-quality sleepwear for her on the vanity.