Chapter 23

By the time Shen Qing had her hair half dry, the jade lotus coronet was already sitting on the table.
Li Daoxuan watched her move about his room with such easy familiarity that, if you didn’t know better, you’d think this was her house.
He stepped forward and sat down across from her. Shen Qing rattled the dice in the cup and said, “The day is long and dull, why not find something entertaining to pass the time?”
Li Daoxuan glanced sideways at the game board. “What are we playing?”
“Go is too much of a test of strategy,” Shen Qing said. “If it comes to scheming, I certainly can’t beat Your Highness. Conveniently, you’ve got a backgammon board right here. Let’s play that.”
Li Daoxuan’s mouth twitched. “You’re too modest, Miss Shen. When it comes to scheming against people, you’re hardly lacking.”
Shen Qing only smiled. She picked two small emerald dice from the cup; the smooth green cubes made her pale fingers look even more delicate.
Propping her cheek up in one hand, she studied the pear-wood board, idly rolling the dice between the fingers of the other. Li Daoxuan lowered his eyes, quietly watching her hands move.
At the moment, Shen Qing’s hair was also loose, just like his. A soft lock resting by her temple brushed lightly against her cheek and brow. She seemed to feel it and tucked the stray strand behind her ear, revealing a smooth, clean forehead.
The scene between them was like that of a young couple newly-wed, the “husband” indulging his mischievous little wife and playing a game with her.
Shen Qing slowly took out the backgammon pieces from her side of the box and lined them up on the board first. Only after she had just about occupied all the points on her left side did she finally smile and gesture for Li Daoxuan to place his.
The pieces were carved from precious agate, rounded into small teardrop shapes. The green ones clustered near her side like drops of clear jade water, just like a certain someone currently occupying a very natural place close by.
Li Daoxuan took his own pieces from the box and began placing them one by one, seemingly haphazardly.
Soon, the brown and green pieces alternated across the board, each side claiming the sixth, eighth, and twentieth points on their respective paths.
Shen Qing grinned. “Why don’t I roll the dice first?”
Li Daoxuan’s gaze fell on the Glass Heart at her throat. “Do as you like,” he said impatiently.
“Then I shall thank Your Highness.”
She tossed the dice and moved her first piece according to the points shown.
Li Daoxuan cast his own dice without much care and shifted a piece. The move left one of his pieces exactly lined up with one of hers.
Only then did a faint spark of amusement light in his eyes. Without any mercy at all, he “ate” her piece off the board.
The lazy smile on Shen Qing’s face disappeared. She slowly straightened up and picked up the dice again, muttering inwardly, Senior Brother bless me, Father and Mother bless me, before casting once more.
Round after round, the two of them gradually lost that initial nonchalance. They played like old rivals reunited, both determined to win.
A servant came in midway to deliver hot water, but Li Daoxuan brushed him off with a couple of casual replies.
When Shen Qing finally managed to send her first piece through the “moon gate,” she slapped the table and leaped up. “Li Daoxuan, you’re going to lose!”
“Don’t judge the outcome by appearances,” Li Daoxuan said calmly. “Plenty of pieces remain on the board. It’s far too soon to say who the deer and who the hunter will be, Miss Shen.”
Seeing the mood was just right, Shen Qing followed up. “Is that so? Then if I win, how about Your Highness agrees to do one thing for me?”
At last, the little fox revealed her tail. Pinching a brown piece between his fingers, Li Daoxuan lifted a brow. “And what is that?”
“Take me to exterminate some evil spirits,” Shen Qing said.
Under Li Daoxuan’s faintly puzzled gaze, she offered a fairly reasonable explanation. “At home, though Father and Mother dote on me, they’ll never let me risk myself on dangerous matters. In Xuanji Pavilion, though Senior Brother protects me well, he’s always thought my talent lacking and has never been willing to take me along to face great demons.”
Thus, though she had dealt with quite a few spirits, they’d always been the low-level sort, walking corpses and wandering ghosts that looked scary but burst with a poke, like fragile little balls.
She raised her eyes, clear gaze full of rebellious fire. “But I, Shen Qing, refuse to be some parasitic vine in a greenhouse. The more they forbid me from doing something, the more I insist on doing it. Right now, I intend to kill a few evil spirits and play the heroine, to prove myself.”
On the surface, it sounded just like the naïve bravado of a pampered girl who knew nothing of the world’s hardships.
Li Daoxuan merely replied, “Oh.” He didn’t believe a word of it.
Soon, she chuckled again. “If Your Highness is willing to take me to exterminate a few more demons, never mind the Glass Heart, I, Shen Qing, will gladly present it to you with both hands. If you want a divorce later, I won’t object either.”
Li Daoxuan lifted his eyelids, his gaze landing squarely on her.
Though only a handful of people knew about his search for the Glass Heart, it wasn’t impossible to find out with some effort.
The problem was that the heart’s owner was Shen Qing, a girl with murky motives and a stomach full of pitch-black water.
He finally voiced the long-standing question in his mind. “If you wanted to slay demons, you could have used the Glass Heart to come find this prince directly. Why agree to this marriage?”
To say the girl before him was in love with him would be as absurd as claiming Gu Yun harbored a fondness for men.
She certainly couldn’t tell him that she had to stick to him like a shadow for three months in order to survive. So she only said, “Isn’t this more convenient for the two of us to roam the land together, punishing evil and defending the innocent?” Her eyes darted away, unable to sit still on his face.
The excuse was flimsy at best, but he had no way to refute it.
Grinding his teeth slightly, Li Daoxuan said, “And for the sake of killing a few demons, you’re willing to throw away your entire future?”
Shen Qing’s smile turned sweet as honey. “Your Highness is handsome and powerful. How is marrying you ‘throwing away my future’? Please don’t tease me.”
With that, she neatly shifted the subject. “I passed another one!”
Li Daoxuan glanced down, and realized that at some point, Shen Qing had only five “horses” left on the board, whereas he still had eight.
He immediately focused and started taking the dice more seriously.
Unfortunately for him, while his Go skills were near legendary, backgammon required both strategy and luck, and his luck in this game was always just a notch below Shen Qing’s. In his last life, and in this one.
Whether their “auras” simply clashed or not, in every backgammon match they’d played in their previous life, Shen Qing had never lost to him.
That was precisely why she’d opted for backgammon instead of Go.
In the end, it was Shen Qing who sent her last piece through the moon gate first.
She grinned, eyes sparkling with mischief and starlight. “You lost.”
Li Daoxuan was just as straightforward. “I lost.”
After a full round, Shen Qing’s hair was still damp. Suddenly remembering something, she pointed to where she’d stabbed him earlier. “Your wound”
Li Daoxuan said, “Thanks to Miss Shen’s kindness, I have already taken care of it.”
With half the great matter on her mind settled, Shen Qing was in an excellent mood. Her eyes curved as she smiled. “That’s good! Then I must trouble Your Highness with one more favor.”
Li Daoxuan: “What?”
“Across from your manor there’s a teahouse. Inside is a maid named Cuizhi, dressed as a little book boy. Please bring her in for me so she can do up my hair.” Shen Qing pointed at her loose, damp hair. “And I must trouble Your Highness to finish drying it. I have to get back.”
Li Daoxuan snorted coldly and pushed the door open to leave.
It was quite a while before he came back, and he’d brought another bath towel with him in passing.
Shen Qing had just lifted her head when something white dropped down over her face. She was about to reach up and pull the towel off when a clear, cool voice said, “Don’t move.”
She immediately understood that he was planning to dry her hair for her, and obediently stayed still.
Li Daoxuan’s large hand hovered steadily over the top of her head as he slowly sent his internal energy into the towel.
Shen Qing felt a comfortable warmth pour down from her crown, and her whole body seemed to sink into the ease of spring sunlight on grass. She simply flopped forward over the low table and let Li Daoxuan wait on her.
No matter how he looked at her, she got on his nerves, but with the Glass Heart dangling at her chest he had no choice but to put up with her for now. He tugged at the corner of his mouth and silently mouthed two words: “Lazy pig.”
Out of his line of sight, Shen Qing’s lips curled up. Aloud, she said, “Your Highness mustn’t curse me in your heart. I’ll be very hurt.”
Given Li Daoxuan’s usual temperament, he was absolutely grumbling about her behind her back right now.
And in fact, she’d guessed exactly right.
Li Daoxuan turned his head away and sped up the flow of his energy.
But after only a short while, a dull wrenching ache began in his chest, pain gnawing up from the very marrow of his bones. His body wavered for a moment.
His gaze fell out of his control to her pale, slender neck. A piercingly tempting fragrance flooded his nose, and Li Daoxuan felt his mouth go dry. He wanted nothing more than to sink his teeth into that skin, drink her blood, worry her flesh between his teeth.
Slowly, wrestling down the craving that rose from the depths of him, he shifted his hand to hover at the back of her neck. A soft sound slipped from his throat.
The pain roared sharper, until he could almost hear the creaking grind of bones in his daze, as if his skeleton were constantly cracking and regrowing. The agony was like a hammer trying to pound him into the floor.
He had long since grown used to this kind of pain.
Just as his internal energy flickered out, the strands of wet hair that had hung in clumps were now smooth as silk, spilling down Shen Qing’s back.
He withdrew his hand, but even after waiting a long moment, she didn’t move. Listening closely, he heard her soft, even breaths, she’d fallen asleep.
He actually let out a short, disbelieving laugh.
Right then, a servant’s cautious voice sounded outside. “Your Highness, the person has been brought.”
Li Daoxuan walked to the door. Every step felt like a knife in his joints. Lowering his eyes, he said, “I know. Withdraw.”
“Yes.” The servant obediently left the courtyard.
Li Daoxuan slid the door open. Standing there was Cuizhi in her little book boy’s outfit.
He didn’t spare her a glance. “She’s inside. Be quick.”
Cuizhi’s teeth were chattering. “Y–yes, Y–Your Highness, Prince Cang!”
Luckily the “fierce as a demon” future son-in-law didn’t make things hard for her. Head ducked, she crept into the room, trembling.
Li Daoxuan did not follow her in. Instead, he went to sit out in the courtyard, enduring the wave of pain alone.
Fortunately, it still wasn’t time for that thing to fully flare up, so the pain only lasted for less than the time it took a stick of incense to burn.
As soon as she stepped inside, Cuizhi saw her lady sprawled over the table with her hair all loose. She rushed forward to shake her. “My lady, my lady!”
Shen Qing lifted her head blearily, and only then realized Cuizhi had somehow appeared in front of her.
She scrubbed at her face. “Where’s Li Daoxuan?”
Cuizhi was on the verge of tears. “My lady, what happened to you, why, why is your hair all loose again! Did you suffer any… any loss?”
Shen Qing could only comfort the girl. “Don’t worry, your lady didn’t suffer any loss. I only came to discuss some business with Li Daoxuan, nothing unexpected will happen.”
Cuizhi still looked deeply troubled.
Shen Qing sighed. “Do my hair first.”
She laid the hairpin and jade coronet out on the table.
Cuizhi had no choice but to accept and set to work.
Though she’d now lived two lives in the Li dynasty, Shen Qing’s habits as a modern person from her previous world were etched into her bones. She didn’t think sharing a room with a man was any great impropriety.
But even if the Li dynasty was open-minded, with a decent status for women and rules that weren’t unbearably strict, it was still, in the end, a feudal dynasty. Men and women could sit together in normal circumstances, but for an unmarried girl to be alone in a man’s room really did harm her reputation.
That was why Cuizhi’s brows had been knotted all this time, she was afraid her lady would be wronged.
For a girl who’d grown up steeped in this era’s air like Cuizhi, Shen Qing could only do her best to gently nudge her perspective.
“My hair only came down by accident,” she said. “Besides, I really did come today about an important matter that only Li Daoxuan can help me with.”
She patted Cuizhi’s hand. “Think about it. Li Daoxuan is your future ‘uncle’, your lady’s closest person from now on. Coming to him for help is only natural. If it were someone else, I’d certainly never behave as I did today.”
Shen Qing promised, “In future I won’t be so reckless as to barge into a man’s courtyard like this again. You can stop worrying.”
Whether Cuizhi believed her or not, she deftly finished tying up Shen Qing’s hair, then slid the coronet into place and fastened it with the hairpin.
Only then did she whisper, “If the matter my lady seeks help with is truly difficult, then asking Prince Cang for aid is understandable. This maid will not say a word.”
“This maid asks for nothing else, only that my lady may live peaceful and joyful, free from distress.”