Chapter 15

“Or else… should we change your name after all?”

By the hour of Xu, this was already the fourth time Lin Zhi had tried to persuade Luo Jiao so.

“Don’t blame me for sticking my nose in, but you saw how things went this morning. Maybe you don’t know this, but we Qingdu folk grow up on Elder Ye’s ghost stories! Elder Ye! The Elder Ye who can stop a child’s night terrors with her name alone!…”

“Although… as far as I know, Elder Ye may be mad, but she’s never actually taken anyone’s life. Still…” Lin Zhi swallowed hard, then suddenly widened her eyes. “Maybe, maybe she’s just waiting for YOU to make an example of!”

Luo Jiao looked down, picking at the vegetable stems on her plate, turning Lin Zhi’s words over in her mind, still utterly baffled.

“I still don’t understand why Ye Qingzhou hates her… hates her Senior Sister so much. I came from Mount Sanqing, and on the way I heard plenty of stories about the two of them…”

“Stop, stop, stop!” Lin Zhi cut her off. “You’re telling me you heard lots of stories about them from WHOM?”

Luo Jiao said hesitantly, “Storytellers… tea sellers…”

“Impossible!” Lin Zhi shook her head decisively. “Are they tired of living or something? Daring to gossip about THEM?”

Luo Jiao pointed out the contradiction. “You said the children of Qingdu grow up on Ye Qingzhou’s ghost stories, and now you say no one dares gossip about them?”

“That’s right,” Lin Zhi nodded. “Ye Qingzhou doesn’t care what people say about her. But she’ll hunt down and beat senseless anyone who talks about her Senior Sister.”

Luo Jiao thought a moment, then looked up suddenly, full of hope. “Ye Qingzhou doesn’t mind what people say about her, but won’t allow anyone to speak ill of her Senior Sister. Doesn’t that mean she actually respects this Senior Sister?”

“…My foot.” Lin Zhi frowned and glanced at Luo Jiao as if she were an idiot. “People who say nice things about her Senior Sister get beaten even worse.” She shrugged carelessly. “Why else would they call it hate? Haha.”

Luo Jiao said, “I still find it hard to…”

Lin Zhi’s eyes suddenly went wide, and she cut her off with feigned anger. “Great-aunt, can you PLEASE stop asking? How long has it been since this morning… Besides, her hating is her business—what’s it got to do with you?”

Meeting Luo Jiao’s mournful gaze, Lin Zhi covered her mouth theatrically. “Oh! You got caught in the splash.” Then she clapped Luo Jiao generously on the shoulder. “Fine, if you don’t want to change it, don’t. Luckily Elder Ye doesn’t teach and doesn’t take disciples. Once the examinations close tomorrow, we’ll be far beyond her reach!…”

Luo Jiao’s expression dimmed, and she said nothing more.

According to the examination schedule, today was rest; tomorrow morning at the Si Hour, the accounting exam; noon, the meal; the Wei Hour, medicine. The day after would be mechanisms, verse, and calligraphy-painting. The topics were few, with free rein given; the actual exam questions were all left to chance.

Luo Jiao reckoned that with an ocean of possible questions, last-minute cramming was useless—better to eat and sleep well and store up strength.

And so, while Lin Zhi burned the midnight oil, Luo Jiao slept peacefully until dawn.

For the next day’s examination, Fengyi Sect dispatched a decrepit old proctor. In the vast lecture hall, seventeen students in all sat scattered about.

A quarter of an hour remained before the exam began; already everyone was seated.

Luo Jiao sat arms-crossed, eyes half-shut, still half in dream, having picked the remotest corner seat.

Her neighbors were whispering back and forth; one of them knocked her desk corner by accident, and while murmuring an apology, watched Luo Jiao’s head bob up like a fisherman’s float.

She opened her eyes, the depths of them a little dazed, just short of a label stamped on her forehead reading “just scraping by.”

At the front of the hall, several others sat clustered around a desk in perfect unison.

Clearly unlike “poor students” like Luo Jiao, they all sat ramrod straight, as if itching to grapple with the exam questions.

The straightest-backed among them was the woman in pink who’d teased Luo Jiao the day before—Zhou Juan.

—Second Princess of the Zhou Qi Dynasty, Princess Changyi, Zhou Juan.

Chatting with Lin Zhi the day before, Luo Jiao had finally sorted out who was who among Qingdu’s powerful. Lin Zhi herself, for instance, was the only daughter of the biggest pawnshop merchants in Qingdu; and though the Lin Family were common merchants, they kept private ties with imperial relatives and nobles. She and Zhou Juan were of the “not close, but always able to exchange a few words” sort of acquaintance.

As for the “Elder Sister” Zhou Juan had mentioned to Luo Jiao yesterday—that was naturally the Eldest Princess, Zhou Kong.

The two were sisters; which was why, meeting her for the first time yesterday, Luo Jiao had still found her familiar.

In the Zhou Qi Dynasty, Crown Prince Zhou Wu was twenty-two, and the Eldest Princess Zhou Kong nineteen—both children of the late Empress Zhaoying.

Second Princess Zhou Juan was fourteen, and Second Prince Zhou Sui eleven. These two were born of Consort An and Consort Rui of the rear palace respectively.

After Empress Zhaoying’s death, Emperor Qing of Zhou fell gravely ill and never recovered—the world whispered he’d sickened of longing—in short, after the Second Prince, the Zhou rear palace produced no more children.

Recalling how Zhou Juan’s smile was nearly identical to Zhou Kong’s, Luo Jiao could only think: the great sects and noble houses truly harbored dragons and tigers—even among mere new students, no exception.

But on second thought, Luo Jiao distinctly remembered that eunuchs’ adopted children and Imperial Family members who wished to cultivate usually went to Longyin Island.

“You’re asking why Changyi would come to Fengyi Sect?” Lin Zhi repeated Luo Jiao’s question, knotting her brows, and answered so: “Her birth mother, Consort An, was originally a Tang Family daughter. Count it up, and she’s practically a junior of Elder Tang Yi’s.”

“Beyond that, one more thing. If you want to build connections for officialdom, Longyin Island is indeed the best option; but if you truly want to advance in cultivation, then Fengyi Sect is the place—”

“Besides, Changyi has real cultivation talent. If she can rise another level from here, so much the better.”

“Oh, right—Miss Qu of the Ministry of Revenue, the young master of Vice Chancellor Zhu’s house… a number of my friends were also keen on cultivation. Ah well, but they all got… eliminated by Elder Tang back at the stone steps.”

At these words, Luo Jiao recalled the earth-shattering collapse of the steps, and felt a fresh wave of awe toward Fengyi Sect: truly fearless of the powerful, treating all alike. Over a hundred reduced to seventeen. By this reckoning, this round of Fengyi Sect’s examination was unquestionably brutal and unforgiving.

“By all rights, of Fengyi Sect’s Five Great Elders, all except Ye Qingzhou take one disciple each—four Inner Sect disciples. The Outer Sect disciples split into four lines—accounting, medicine, artifacts, letters—each taking three or four juniors. Either way, we’ll all have somewhere to go.”

Before the exam, Lin Zhi clapped Luo Jiao on the shoulder. “This young lady’s eyes are torches. I’ve never once misjudged.” The young miss swore it with more confidence than Luo Jiao herself. “You’re Inner Sect material.”

Two days passed.

Of the seventeen examinees, Luo Jiao ranked eleventh. Not high, admittedly, but Luo Jiao was quietly satisfied.

In her scores, medicine was C-lower, dead last; accounting and mechanisms were B-mid and B-upper—middle of the pack; what she was proudest of was the essay—the sole A-upper among all seventeen.

Not that she had any soaring literary genius; she owed it to the exam topic: “Life and Death.”

Everyone here was a green child who knew nothing of life, still less of death. But Luo Jiao had passed through both life and death—she had a few more credentials to speak on the subject than even the elders.

Having lived it, she wrote it most fluently.

‘Though death and life are great matters, they may yet be discerned. The ancients said: regard death and life as one, hold light both going and staying; as flowing water returns at last to the sea, as the setting moon never leaves the sky—only in seeing life and death does one see heaven, earth, and the ten thousand things’—

“Mm. Little Jiao, you should be headed for the ‘Letters’ line.”

Before the red results board, Lin Zhi stroked her chin, smacking her lips. “Elder Xu rarely gives A grades—and anyone given an ‘A’ is, without exception, taken in as an Inner Sect disciple. And you’re an ‘A-upper,’ no less.”

Luo Jiao shook her head. “But I only ranked eleventh.”

Lin Zhi waved a hand. “Irrelevant.”

Lin Zhi herself ranked fourth, with A-uppers in both medicine and mechanisms; in her own words, “Two years of hard study, and this result is only so-so.”

Above Lin Zhi sat Zhou Juan, Fang Lei, and Ji Mingjing. Zhou Juan needed no introduction—Luo Jiao had already tasted, right in the lecture hall, this person’s ferocious self-discipline. As for Ji Mingjing, Luo Jiao learned from everyone’s chatter that she was the cherished granddaughter of Imperial Physician Ji of the Imperial Medical Bureau, and a famed talented lady of Qingdu.

“But this Fang Lei…” Lin Zhi narrowed her eyes. “Never heard of him.”

Outside the Fengyi Sect Council Hall, a young boy walked past—handsome above average, short of beautiful, yet with nothing about him that left any impression at all.

Lin Zhi poked Luo Jiao and whispered in her ear: “There. That one.”

Luo Jiao looked over and recognized at a glance the young boy who had shared their skiff on the Qingshui River.

Luo Jiao was about to speak.

At that very moment, a wind passed.

Meeting that pine breeze, the doors of the Council Hall swung open of their own accord.

Every student looked up in unison, peering into the hall.

The Old Sect Master, long bedridden, rarely attended such occasions; thus, apart from a Divine Maiden Painting hung at the center, the two figures flanking it—one seated, one standing—were Ye Qingzhou and Tang Yi.

Beyond them were the elders of the Letters, Artifacts, and Medicine lines: Elder Xu, Elder Ruan, and Elder Chi.

The hall was magnificent beyond measure. Cloud-light poured from the ceiling; in the courtyard hung the Divine Maiden Painting of the Queen Mother of the West, beneath which golden clusters and gemlike trees ringed a pool of white sand and spring.

At the hall’s edge, scrolls and volumes hung long as banyan roots, draping to the floor like curtains—

But Luo Jiao took none of it in.

She stared only at the left of the Divine Maiden Painting, at the walnut couch, at that head of white hair like snow.

Bright as an immortal moon, wild and beyond compare.

Though separated by a great distance, Luo Jiao knew—

She was looking at her.