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Chapter Text

The air was still, too still.

Silence clung to the apartment like damp cloth, thick and suffocating, the kind that sinks into the walls and drips from the ceiling. Wu Suowei sat curled in the corner of the bed, hands clenched tightly around his phone.

The screen was dark. No messages. No calls. No Chi Cheng. Again.

Suowei’d tried, tried to distract himself with sugar figurines, to watch anything numbing on TV, to not fall into the spiral. But it was past 3 a.m., and Chi Cheng wasn’t home. And Wu Suowei knew exactly who he was with.

Wang Shuo, the drop dead gorgeous and sly ex of his boyfriend.

Chi Cheng hadn’t looked at him the same since. Avoiding him in an awkward "I have meetings" dance.

He remembered that night clearly. He remembered the way Chi Cheng announced the outing like it was nothing, towel wrapped low on his hips, nonchalant as if he hadn’t just cracked open the past.

“We’re hanging out. Just like old times.”

Suo Wei hadn’t asked him not to go. He’d smiled. Said, “Have fun.”

He had wrapped himself in pride, even as insecurity chewed quietly at his resolve, a constant pressure just beneath the skin. He wasn’t stupid. He knew when he was the stand-in, the comfort blanket, the second place.

When the lock finally clicked, Suo Wei didn’t move. He heard Chi Cheng stumble inside, smell of alcohol heavy in the air and something else. Perfume. Not his. Cloying, expensive. The kind that lingered on someone else’s skin.

Chi Cheng’s arms wrapped around him with the ease of practice. “Weiwei…” he murmured, voice slurring against his ear. “Don’t leave me…”

Wu Suowei’s chest ached, but he pulled away. “I’ll stay at the clinic tonight.”

Chi Cheng’s arms tightened. “Don’t, don’t go. I didn’t mean it, it’s just… work’s been rough, and…”

“No,”

Wu Suowei interrupted, voice raw. “You’re not working with any clients, Chi Cheng. You’ve already made your choice, haven’t you?”

Chi Cheng froze.

The air between them snapped taut. He promised Weiwei’s mother not to let him know about her cancer diagnosis. And so, his voice broke as he grabbed his hand again. “But I chose you. I love you.”

“Then why does it feel like I’m always chasing a ghost?” Wu Suowei’s voice cracked, and for a long time, neither of them spoke. Chi Cheng just stared at him, his Dabao with red-rimmed eyes, lips trembling. His own guilt spilling out like wine on white linen.

“I lie. Not the little games you said you knew about. ” Suo Wei whispered.

Chi Cheng blinked.

“I didn’t like you at first. I used you. Because I wanted to hurt someone.” Wu Suowei swallowed hard. “My ex-girlfriend ... you said you don’t want to know her name. But it is Yue Yue.”

Chi Cheng didn’t speak, didn’t breathe. The floor was crumbling underneath him.

“You were Yue Yue’s boyfriend.”

The silence was so complete, it felt like the city outside had stopped breathing too.

“I wanted revenge,” Wu Suowei confessed. “But then I met you. Really met you. And I didn’t expect to fall.”

Chi Cheng shook his head slowly. “All the sugar figures, the mornings, the smiles—they were all... lies?”

“No,” Suowei said, voice hoarse. “At first, yes. But not now. Not for a long time. I love you, laogong.”

Chi Cheng stared at him for a long moment, with clenched teeth and tears finally spilling. “Even if you lied at first, tell me honestly now. Do you love me?”

Wu Suowei looked into his eyes and nodded, again and again, tears running freely now.

“I do. But I know you need time to process everything.”

Wu Suowei didn’t go back.

Not to the condo apartment where Chi Cheng still slept curled on only one side of the bed.

Not to the office.

Not even to his own reflection in the mirror at Xiaoshuai’s clinic.

He burned everything he had with Chi Cheng. Love built on deceit, no matter how tender it grew, always collapsed.

The rain came down in sheets, as if the sky had finally cracked under the weight of everything left unsaid. Wu Suowei sat alone on the steps of a closed storefront, the neon sign above him flickering intermittently like a dying heartbeat. The world blurred around him, water soaking through his hoodie, jeans clinging to his knees, cold fingers wrapped around the useless weight of his phone. He hadn’t moved in hours.

Wu Suowei had broken the truth like glass between them, expecting pain, yes, but not this particular ache. Not this gaping, hollow weight of disappointment. It wasn’t just heartbreak, it was humiliation, grief, the failure of a gamble where he’d bet everything.

He had loved Chi Cheng in the end. That was the worst part. He wiped at his face, unsure whether it was rain or tears.

The phone buzzed in his hand. Unknown number.

His thumb hovered, almost letting it go to voicemail. But something, a hum in his bones, a subtle itch in his instincts, made him answer.

A voice slid through the speaker, clean and sharp as a scalpel.

“Mai Yu. Bloodline reactivation protocol. Priority Echo.”

Every muscle in his body locked. Wu Suowei hadn’t heard that voice, hadn’t heard that name, in seven years.

“...Xiaobao?” he rasped.

“No. Dongyuan.”

A pause, and Mai Dongyuan clinical voice started again with a tinge of anxiety “It’s bad. I’m activating your lineage mark.”

The world around him went deathly still.

“They’ve taken Xiaobao and Lianhua. Last signal was Chengdu. Code black. A-li too, captured in Haiphong. No trace of Zhao Yuanzhou either.”

“We need you,” Mai Dongyuan continued. “You’re closest to the northern line. Huayong and Yuanzhou-ge are en route.”

Wu Suowei closed his eyes. The name, echoed in his skull like a distant gunshot: Mai Yu.

Code Black meant one thing in the Mai family: the bloodline was being hunted.

“Where’s Chunshui-ge?” Wu Suowei - Mai Yu, asked.

“Off-grid. A-qing and Wangye are trying to call him in. Yanchi’s mobilising the Tokyo line for fallback and his Xiao Princess is organising our logistics. We don’t know if this is coordinated, or a power vacuum grab.”

It had been years.

“You know that I burned that identity,” he whispered to the other Mai.

“We do. They didn’t.” Dongyuan said. “And they’re coming for us now. We know you’ve had... distractions. But your blood is still Mai. You don't get to run from it forever.”

Silence.

“And you want me back for what?”

“Bloodline Retrieval.”

Mai Yu's heartbeat slowed. That meant: recover the living, erase the threat, and destroy the trail. It was the final line of defence. The kind of mission that ended in blood, either theirs, or yours.

The rain washed the last warmth from his skin. Wu Suowei stood slowly. His joints ached. His heart ached worse.

He had lost Chi Cheng.

He had nothing left to lose.

“…Send the extraction point.”

“Already done. Welcome back, cousin.”

The call ended.

And something inside Wu Suowei cracked, quietly, with the precision of a blade parting silk.

The identity he had worn like second skin, the clumsy love, the soft jokes, the sleepless nights, burned to ash in a single exhale. He stood, not as the man who once begged for someone to choose him, but as something older, colder, and irreversibly awakened.

Wu Suowei, the loser chasing a Beijing rich playboy, sunk off on that rainy step.

And Mai Yu took his place. He looked up at the sky one last time, as if it could give him an answer. Slowly, he pushed up the sleeve of his shirt, and there it was. A faint silver lotus shimmered under the skin of his shoulder, blooming as if called by the voice alone.

No longer the broken lover curled up on the couch waiting for someone to come home. No longer a heartbroken sugar-maker, waiting for someone to love him enough to stay.

Now he was Mai Yu, the eight shadow of the Mai bloodline.

And war was calling.

Chapter Text

The apartment was still dark when Jiang Xiaoshuai opened the door, rubbing sleep from one eye and tugging down the sleeve of his hoodie with the other. He wasn’t expecting anyone, especially not at this hour. Certainly not Wu Suowei. Or at least, not the Wu Suowei he knew.

He braced himself for the usual: a snot-streaked, heartbroken mess after another explosive fight with Chi Cheng. A lousy Dawei. But the man at the door wasn’t that.

This version of Wu Suowei looked like a ghost dressed for war. Black long sleeves hugged lean shoulders; tailored slacks pressed razor-sharp lines down to polished shoes. No sugar stains. No oversized shirt slipping off one shoulder. No crooked grin or muttered sarcasm. He stood tall. Hair slicked back. Eyes hooded and calculating. The boyish slouch was gone, replaced with a coiled, deadly stillness.

"...Dawei?" Shuai asked, voice cautious.

A flicker of a nod. Barely there. But the man’s eyes were colder than winter glass—too calm, too aware. Not apathy. Strategy.

Jiang Xiaoshuai could feel it in the silence between them, like the hum of a sniper’s breath. This wasn’t someone you could scold or joke back to normal. This was someone who had already mapped every exit, memorised your heartbeat, and filed you under “non-threat” before you'd even opened your mouth.

"I’m leaving," the man said, voice low and final. It was Wu Suowei’s voice, but cleaner. No stammer, no defensiveness. No softness.

Shuai frowned, confused and uneasy. “Wait! what do you mean? What happened with Chi Cheng?”

“That doesn’t matter now.”

He stepped inside without waiting for permission.

Dawei the disciple always used to hover at the door, asking if it was a good time. Now, he moved like he owned the space, or like he’d already mapped the exits. Something about it made Shuai's skin prickle.

The stranger - no, Wu Suowei, whoever he was – slipped a small black card onto the kitchen counter. It had no logo. No name. Just a faint string of numbers in silver ink and three words at the bottom: Frost at Dawn.

“If anyone starts asking about me, or about Wu Suowei,” he said, “you call that number. Say the phrase on the card. Nothing else. Then burn the card.”

Shuai stared at it. “What the hell is going on? Why are you talking like, like a character from one of those spy dramas you hate?”

“I’m not who you thought I was” The guy said calmly. “And for your sake, it’s better you never ask who I really am.”

Shuai’s voice cracked with unease. “You’re scaring me. You’re not acting like you…” 

His stomach churned. He took in the way his friend stood, too straight, too poised.

The air around him felt thinner. Lethal. But worst of all was the expression: calm. A type of calm that didn’t belong on the face of someone who’d ever cried over missed birthdays or worried about not making rent. This wasn’t the guy who once freaked out because a sugar pig broke in half before a fair.

“You’re… someone else.” Jiang Xiaoshuai’s voice came out quieter than he liked.

“I’m not Wu Suowei.”

Silence.

The words struck harder than they should have. The man sighed. Then, for just a brief second, his gaze softened. “But I did care. About you. About Chengyu. About him.”

Shuai swallowed. “Then don’t go. Was none of it real?” 

“It was real. In pieces. I have to go. But you need to tell Guo Chengyu and Chi Cheng one thing. I meant it when I said I loved them, in my own way.”

The man finally looked at him, really looked, and for one second, Shuai caught a flicker beneath the calm. Warmth. Regret. That familiar guilt Wu Suowei always wore when he knew he’d crossed a line but couldn't fix it.

“You were my real friend, Shuai,” he said quietly. “Thank you.”

He moved toward the door again. His steps were quiet. Measured.

The doctor followed, voice low. “What should I call you, then? What is your name?”

A pause. The black coat shimmered faintly under the light. “…If you ever hear the name Mai Yu,” he said, “pretend you don’t.”

Then, without waiting for goodbye, he pulled the door open and stepped into the soft grey light of morning, where two figures were already waiting for him at the curb.

The first was tall, impossibly so, with the kind of stillness that commanded attention. He wore a high-collared charcoal coat, sharply cut, every fold falling with deliberate precision. His small, hooded eyes swept the street not with curiosity, but with quiet dominion, watchful, practised, unreadable. There was grace to him, but not the kind that invited; it was the calculated poise of a man who dealt in secrets and moved through shadows like second nature.

Mai Yuanzhou. Eldest of the Mai bloodline. The man others whispered about but rarely saw coming.

Beside him stood a contrast that took Xiaoshuai’s breath away.

A man with porcelain-pale skin and lips flushed the soft red of summer petals. His black turtleneck hugged the elegant lines of his neck like silk armour. Orchid clung to him, not artificial perfume, but something living, ancient. His hair fell just so across his forehead, caught in the rhythm of the wind. He didn’t look up immediately, only turned slightly. Delicate, like a poem in motion.

Mai Huayong. Pure beauty. Pure danger. Pure madness.

Mai Yu walked toward them like a puzzle piece slipping into place. His expression didn’t change. Neither did theirs.

“Was he a risk?” Yuanzhou asked softly as Mai Yu reached the car.

“No,” Mai Yu replied, tone flat. “He was a friend.”

Huayong’s brows lifted just slightly. “Unusual.” He studied Jiang for a heartbeat longer, lips curled in something unreadable. Then he opened the car door for his cousin with a nod. Mai Yu got in without hesitation. The moment the door shut, the tension shifted, like the air itself recognised the presence of the full-blooded Mai.

Huayong followed next, graceful and quiet.

Yuanzhou slid into the front, checked the mirrors once, and pulled the car smoothly away from the curb.

Inside the apartment, Jiang Xiaoshuai stood frozen in the doorway, holding the black card, his heart thudding in his ears.

The name echoed in his mind.

Mai Yu.

He didn’t know what the name meant. Not really. But he now understood what it felt like to stand at the edge of something vast and hidden.

The man who once lived off street food and petty scams now sat in the back of a black car, flanked by strangers who moved like they answered to no one. The doctor stared at the quiet hallway, clutching the card like it might bite, and wondered if anything about Wu Suowei had ever truly belonged to him.

Chapter Text

Chi Cheng hated apologising.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know how. He did. He just didn’t see the point of performing regret for people who didn’t deserve it.

But when it came to Wu Suowei - his Weiwei, his baobei - Chi Cheng would rehearse shame like theatre. If it meant getting back into the warmth of Da Bao's arms, he'd pour honey into vinegar, wear guilt like silk, and swallow the words he never said fast enough.

Unfortunately, Wu Suowei wasn’t answering his phone.

Not once.

Not for hours.

Not even after the storm they left hanging between them.

The last time Chi Cheng had seen him was three days ago.

They'd fought—not screaming, but with jabs and clenched teeth—about Wang Shuo, about Yue Yue, and about the lies both of them had told. But more than anything, Chi Cheng had been terrified.

Terrified about Wu Suowei’s mother and her cancer. He couldn’t tell Weiwei, he had made a promise to Wu-yi, Suowei’s mother. So instead, he left. Slammed the door. Pretended Yue Yue and Suowei’s deceptions were the problem.

The Beijing playboy expected the usual from his petty boyfriend: Suowei crying, calling, playing little games and folding.

But this time, nothing.

It was as if Wu Suowei had vanished. And Chi Cheng, for all his swagger and social detachment, was beginning to unravel.

Guo Chengyu, of course, noticed immediately. "You look like you haven’t slept in a week," he said, lighting a cigarette and tossing the lighter at Chi Cheng's head. "What did you do now?"

"Da Bao is not here. He left me," Chi muttered. "The light of my life left me, Guozi."

As Guo Chengyu mothered his best friend and worked through every contact in Beijing to find Wu Suowei, Jiang Xiaoshuai said nothing.

Chi Cheng never thought of himself as desperate.

But after a week, desperation settled into his bones like winter frost. Every part of him itched with the need to do something. Every cell in his body screamed for contact with his darling boy and yet, he could not track down his partner. Xiao Cu Bao seemed to pick up the stress, and was refusing to eat.

He tried pulling strings. Quietly at first, a background check request to a police contact.

A word with Chengyu, who knew everyone. But nothing. No passport matches. No clinic registrations under that name in any recent databases. Wu Suowei, the man he’d lived with, was a ghost on paper.

Chi Cheng hadn’t touched a cigarette in weeks, opting for liquor instead. He hadn’t slept, either.

Wu Suowei’s face haunted him, in the silence, in the shadows, in the scent of coffee that refused to fade from his shirts.

And then the silence cracked.

Jiang Xiaoshuai’s voice came through the phone one evening, awkward and reluctant.

“He’s not Wu Suowei. He is Mai Yu.”

Chi Cheng sat up. “What?”

“He’s… Look, I shouldn’t be doing this. But you looked like shit and I am sure Dawei would be heartbroken to see you like this. He said goodbye. But if you call this number… you might get someone who knows where he is.”

Chi Cheng didn’t hesitate to say yes.

“I don’t know anything else,” Xiaoshuai added quickly. “He didn’t tell me.”

He typed the name into his secure client system, nothing. No government file, no tax ID, no trace. Either the name was fake, or it was buried so deep it had been scrubbed clean.

So he took the risk and messaged Xiaoshuai again.

“That card. The one he gave you. Do you still have it?”

The reply came quickly. “

Yeah. I memorised the number. You want it?”

The number was a 13-digit encrypted relay.

Chi Cheng tried calling once. It didn’t even ring. Just went silent.

He tried again, this time through a secure line his company used for high-profile client transfers.

This time, the line clicked.

“...Wu Suowei?” Chi Cheng asked.

A soft, amused laugh filled the silence, light, musical, and edged like glass. “Oh, darling. Wrong door.”

Chi Cheng froze.

The voice was unmistakably male, smooth and teasing, but carried an elegance that left no room for doubt, this wasn’t someone ordinary.

“Who are you?” Chi Cheng demanded.

“Oh? No ‘hello’? No ‘please’? Are manners dead now in Beijing?” the voice drawled.

There was a rustle, like fabric, silk perhaps, before he continued.

“Tch. You must be the infamous Chi Cheng. Honestly, I expected you to sound taller.”

Chi Cheng blinked, thrown off balance. “What does that even…”

“Anyway, listen, tall-dark-and-suspicious Beijing playboy.” the voice cut in, deliberately casual. “This number isn’t your personal hotline to him. Mai Yu is busy and, how should I put it? You’re not on the VIP list.”

“Mai Yu…” Chi Cheng repeated, the name tasting unfamiliar and sharp. “I just want to know if any of it was real. Wu Suowei…”

“Ah, Wu Suowei, Weiwei” the voice crooned mockingly. “Cute name. Adorable act. Really, he wore that ‘broke loser with sugar figurines’ skin like a second coat of paint. But you think you knew him?” A small laugh. “Please.”

Chi Cheng gritted his teeth. “Who are you?”

A theatrical sigh. “Fine, fine. Introductions bore me, but I’m feeling generous. Ruan Lanzhu. Head of Obsidian. Gorgeous, terrifying, and tragically underpaid. You’re welcome.”

“…Obsidian?” Chi Cheng echoed.

"Mm-hm. We don’t do fan clubs, sweetheart. And no, I’m not telling you more.” Lanzhu’s voice softened suddenly, still teasing, but there was an edge underneath. “Look, if he didn’t tell you himself, it’s because he still cares. That means something in our line of work.”

Chi Cheng’s grip on the phone tightened. “He cares?”

“Oh, please, don’t make me sentimental. It’s exhausting.” Lanzhu’s tone turned sassy again. “But listen carefully: stop digging, Chi shaoye [young master]. You’re not built for this. And if you are stupid enough to keep trying? Try not to die in a ditch. He’d sulk, and I’d have to hear about it.”

Before Chi Cheng could respond, Lanzhu added cheerfully, “Oh, and for the record, I look better in heels than your ex ever did. Bye darling.”

Click.

The line went dead.

Chapter Text

In another city, a black sedan moved through the dawn mist like a blade slicing fog. Its matte finish absorbed the weak light, and its tinted windows made no apology for secrets. Inside, silence reigned, not of neglect, but of intent. Heavy, cultivated, rehearsed.

Mai Yu sat in the back seat, one leg crossed precisely over the other, fingers resting atop a file he hadn’t opened. The careless slouch of Wu Suowei had been excised—surgically removed. In his place was Mai Yu: razor-straight spine, angular jawline tight, his eyes unreadable behind the sheen of dispassion. No more pretending.

Beside him, Mai Huayong leaned an elbow against the window. His posture was deceptively lax, but every inch of him was styled: hair in a soft wave, turtleneck hugging the elegant slope of his throat, skin pale like porcelain. He wore the scent of orchids like a curse and a crown—something both inherited and weaponised.

In the front, Mai Yuanzhou drove with a surgeon’s precision. One hand on the wheel, the other resting loosely, a study in calculated calm. Dressed in slate wool and cold restraint, he was all sharp lines and silence. His eyes, hooded and deliberate, moved between rearview and horizon, always calculating.

Then, without preamble, Yuanzhou spoke. “Your Beijing playboy called the dead line.”

Mai Yu didn’t blink. “Lanzhu intercepted?”

Yuanzhou nodded once. “Fed him a breadcrumb. Enough to satisfy. Not enough to trace.”

Huayong’s lips curved, not into a smile, but into something quieter, knowing. “Lipstick said something ridiculous, didn’t he?” He tilted his head toward Mai Yu. “Closure makes fools of men. He’ll keep digging.”

As if summoned, the dashboard screen blinked to life. A sigh echoed over the speakers.

“Ridiculous?” drawled Ruan Lanzhu’s voice, honeyed and sharp. “I’m deeply wounded, Huayong-didi. I am the embodiment of restraint.”

Unbothered, Huayong murmured, “You once threatened a vice-minister over discontinued lipstick. You also told Dongyuan he looked hottest bald.”

“It was discontinued!” Lanzhu objected. “And I stand by both statements. That shade was my signature. And my Dongyuan is always hot.”

Yuanzhou didn’t react. “Focus.”

Lanzhu’s tone dropped instantly. The flirt vanished. Obsidian’s director spoke. “Haiphong node is gone. Not just shut. Wiped. No logs. Relay burned clean.”

Mai Yu’s gaze sharpened, jaw taut. “The Mai operative there?”

“No signal from A-Li or Zhao Yuanzhou. If they’re alive, they’re deep under.”

Yuanzhou’s hands tightened on the wheel. “Then we move. Fast. Xiaobao was first. Traced through a parliamentary proxy. Lianhua followed the lead. Both disappeared in Chengdu. Last ping—emergency power drop at their hotel.”

Lanzhu added, “I sent the last trace. Encrypted under ‘ShameAboutTheEx.’” 

The screen blinked out.

Huayong glanced at Mai Yu. “He’s spiralling again. Where is Xiao Se's sharp tongue when you need him cooling down Lanzhu?”

Mai Yu said nothing. But his mind was already moving. Mapping corridors, files, shadows. Tallying the price.

Mai Yuanzhou continued. “Haiphong team was tracking a stolen archive from the Eastern Network. Someone wanted it enough to burn three identities and vanish two of our own.”

Huayong spoke softly. “Four family members in twenty-four hours. That’s war.”

Mai Yu’s voice was a blade. “I’ll go.”

Yuanzhou didn’t look away from the road. “Six hours.”

There was no sun in that place. No windows. No clocks. No words. Only stillness, and the quiet language of disorientation.

Mai Duobing sat on a steel chair, wrists bound. Not cruelly, but efficiently. His fingers twitched when Li Lianhua stirred beside him on the cot, breath shallow, eyelids fluttering.

Across from them, Mai Lilun sat shackled but upright. Bruised. Silent. Watching.

He looked untouched by time, elegant even in suffering, long black hair tangled over bloodied silk. His skin was pale beneath the flickering lights, and even now, the faint scent of scholar blossoms clung to him, as if defiance were something floral.

"This is a ghost facility," Lilun muttered, voice like a snapped branch. "No guards. No chatter. Just... watchers."

Duobing nodded. “We’re not being tortured. We’re being recorded. Must be loaded with money for a project like this.”

Lianhua stirred, voice ghostly. "They’re not human. Probably aiming at you both." His implication hung in the sterile air. Yao-blooded Lilun and hybrid Duobing, both anomalies worth dissecting.

Lilun hummed in agreement. His posture was that of a rooted tree, an old soul carved into delicate limbs. Of all the Mais, he was the most immovable, the hardest to sway once set. There was no greyness in him. He loved with terrifying clarity and hated with the same.

His Zhu Yan, however, was all grey. The other yao was soft where Lilun was sharp, watchful where he was swift to strike. A man who moved like mist, moral by instinct, calculating by necessity. And Lilun loved him with a quiet desperation, precisely because Zhu Yan always tried to forgive what Lilun could never forget.

The room was clean. Frighteningly so. Sterile trays, citrus antiseptic. Lights that never dimmed. Cameras that never blinked. Four visits in three months. Each identical: a gloved hand, a needle, a tray of food. No questions. No names.

Something about the silence felt like vivisection.

Duobing finally whispered, "Do you think Yuanzhou knows?"

Lilun’s voice rasped with faint humour. "Which one, cousin? Yours or mine?"

Duobing rolled his eyes. "You always call your husband Zhu Yan. Obviously I meant da-ge."

Lilun’s bruised face softened. "Zhou-ge always knows. The Mais are coming."

Duobing glanced at his elder cousin, then lowered his voice to a name they hadn’t dared utter in years. "And Yu?"

That earned a pause. A long one.

"If Yu is alive," Lilun said quietly, "they’ve made a grave mistake."

"Why?"

"Because he’s not built for forgiveness."

And neither was Lilun, not truly. He could bear pain. He could wait in silence. But if you hurt his family, he would burn down cities to balance the scales.

The hum of agreement vibrated against the sterile walls.

The lights flicked on. Footsteps. Keys. The door opened.

Lianhua stirred. "A Li... your Zhu Yan is here."

Zhao Yuanzhou was carried in. Unconscious. Bruised. Breathing. Still breathtakingly beautiful in Lilun’s golden eyes.

And for the first time in weeks, Lilun’s fingers curled into fists. In his world, nothing on earth was good enough for Zhu Yan. Nothing, except Lilun himself.

On the ninety-first day, something shifted.

Mai Lilun sat still as stone, blood crusted in his hair, food tray untouched. At least they hadn’t figured out that yaos didn’t need food. Yet.

Across the room, Li Lianhua lay curled on his side, the curve of his spine elegant even in stillness. His breath was steady, shallow. His lashes trembled against translucent skin. He looked less like a prisoner than a fading dream, still, untouched, untouchable. Like a lotus blooming through filth, aloof from all things worldly.

“They’re studying us,” Lilun said at last. His voice was dry bark. “Not breaking us. Just… learning.”

Duobing stirred. His posture was slouched, deceptively casual, but his eyes were alert. Large, luminous, too honest for their surroundings. “They want blueprints,” he muttered, jaw tense.

“They’re testing bloodlines.” Lilun said. “They’ve taken samples from Lianhua four times.”

Lianhua opened his eyes, soft and amused. “Idiots. I’m the only human here.”

His voice was like wind brushing temple bells. Distant, peaceful, tinged with something ancient. He didn’t hate the place. He didn’t even resist. It was as if he had already made peace with pain, already floated beyond it.

“They want to understand the Mai. From the inside out. Yet somehow, they got interested in a Mai-by-marriage.”

Duobing grinned, bruised lips splitting. “Joke’s on them. They’ve got the most stubborn yao in the family, a bodhisattva, and me.”

From the corner, a dry voice added, “Don't forget the pretty one.”

All three turned. Zhao Yuanzhou, still half-slumped against the wall, lifted two fingers weakly.

“Half-dead and still vain,” Lilun said, unimpressed.

Yuanzhou blinked. “I suffer beautifully.”

Lianhua gave a soft laugh, faint and warm.

Duobing shifted closer to him on the cot. Even in chains and dark circles, he radiated sunlight. He had given away food in the first week, shielded Lilun in the second, and still whispered jokes at midnight in the thirteenth. Some people couldn’t be bent. His heart refused to rot.

Then the lights dimmed. Just slightly.

Lilun straightened. Duobing sat up fast, eyes narrowing. He felt it, something in the air, pressure humming through the vents. He reached for Lianhua instinctively, half-shielding him with a too-thin shoulder.

The wall exploded.

Smoke. Light. Shrapnel.

The air sucked into a vacuum. And through the haze, a figure emerged. Coat torn, blood blooming like ink down his left flank. Chin lifted. Eyes blisteringly clear.

“Yu-ge!” Duobing’s voice cracked in half.

Mai Yu looked barely alive. Gaunt. Pale. But his stance was iron-forged. A blade in human shape. Cold, sure, breathing fury.

“On your feet,” Mai Yu barked. “Sixty seconds.”

Lianhua blinked slowly. “You came…”

Mai Yu didn’t pause. “Of course I did, Xiaohua.”

Lilun hauled himself upright and pulled Duobing up by the arm. “Move, Xiaobao. He’s not running on logic. This is adrenaline and spite.”

“Seven minutes,” Mai Yu added, slicing through restraints. “Then lockdown triggers.” He moved fast. Checked pulses. Handed a blade to Lilun, another to Zhu Yan.

Zhao Yuanzhou took the knife with a wry smile. “Finally. A spa day with party favours.”

Mai Yu grunted, then bent and scooped Lianhua up with one arm. Blood from his own wound spread across his side.

Duobing reached to steady him. “A-yu, you’re bleeding…”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re leaking, you psycho…”

“I said I’m fine, didi.”

Yuanzhou exhaled, deadpan. “Classic Mai response. Bleeding to death but emotionally repressed.”

They cleared the cell and entered the corridor. Alarms shrieked in the distance. Then Mai Yu stumbled. His boot slipped. He hit the wall hard, shoulder first, blood streaking across white tiles.

Duobing caught him. “You idiot,” he whispered. “You tracked us with a bullet wound?”

Mai Yu managed a wolf-ish grin. “Three months. Six safehouses. Two dead ops. One hell of a car chase.”

“You’re joking?”

Mai Yu’s voice dropped. “That’s what Wu Suowei would do, right?”

And he collapsed.

Gunfire cracked two floors down. Lilun listened without flinching. Mai Yanchi and Mai Huayong.

Zhao Yuanzhou sighed. “I really hope someone brought a car. A dramatic entrance is only worth it if we don’t walk out on foot.”

Lianhua closed his eyes again, like a lotus slipping beneath still water.

Duobing tightened his hold on Mai Yu. His face was raw with grief, relief, awe. Then he glanced sideways and whispered to Lilun, “Told you he’d come.”

The mission succeeded.

Barely.

Lianhua, Duobing, Lilun, and Zhu Yan were extracted. The archive retrieved. The facility razed to concrete dust.

Mai Yu slept for six days.

The bullet hadn’t pierced anything vital. But it had been laced. Something engineered. Something made to whisper through the blood of a Mai like poison-ink on parchment.

When he finally woke, it was to the scent of orchids. And to the soft rustle of paper.

Mai Huayong sat beside his bed, legs folded beneath him, folding a crane with fingers that looked too slender to have ever touched a gun.

"You dream loudly," Huayong murmured.

Mai Yu blinked. His mouth was dry. "What did I say?"

"Chi Cheng. Five times. Wu Suowei. Once."

He didn’t smile. But his hands moved with effortless grace, folding another bird into shape, one wing already stained with blood from the basin beside him.

Huayong offered him tea. It was perfectly steeped. No scent of bitterness. But the cup was porcelain-thin, hairline cracked.

"You’re still wearing him," Huayong said gently, almost tender.

Mai Yu drank. "Some days I don’t know where he ends and I begin."

Huayong's lips curled into a soft smile, too delicate to be sincere. "Then let him stay. Why erase the ghosts that help you survive?"

He set the crane beside the others on the nightstand. There were dozens. All folded to perfection. All white, except for one. That one was black, glossy, and held together with surgical thread.

Mai Yu recovered. Slowly. Bitterly. Reluctantly.

Huayong visited every day.

He never spoke of his own war. Never mentioned the husband cloaked behind layers of diplomatic immunity and national secrets. But once, Mai Yu heard him humming a lullaby in a language no longer spoken. And once, he watched Huayong press a needle into his palm just to stay awake for his dearest’s phone call, serene as ever, smile never slipping.

Duobing visited once. Walked in, slapped a palm against Mai Yu’s chest, and muttered, “You’re an idiot.”

“I got you out,” Mai Yu rasped, wincing.

“At what cost?”

Mai Yu didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

Behind the curtain, Huayong lifted a black crane from the table. Turned it once between elegant fingers. His voice was soft. “The cost is always blood. The only question is whose.”

Then he smiled. A porcelain smile. Calm, composed, terrifying.

Mai Yu held his gaze.

Because he knew. Under the silk and orchids, behind the poised manners and quiet hands, Huayong was not gentle.

His wu-ge [5^th brother] was a storm in velvet.

And someday, someone would bleed for waking him.

Chapter Text

The city hadn’t changed after four months. Beijing still breathed its hot, dusty wind through alleyways tangled with neon and grey-tiled rooftops. The night sky glowed a dull orange under the weight of smog and sodium lamps. Somewhere in the haze, a siren wailed.

Jiang Xiaoshuai’s apartment felt smaller.

Mai Yu stood at the edge of the rooftop. Nothing sharp. He looked thinner, paler. The scar beneath his ribs had faded, but the way he moved betrayed that it still hurt.

He didn’t knock right away. He wasn’t sure he deserved to.

Just as his hand lifted, a voice spoke from behind.

“I knew you’d come back.”

The voice was low. Rough. Too familiar.

Mai Yu turned.

Chi Cheng leaned against a parked SUV, arms crossed, cigarette burning low between his fingers. He wore all black. Still absurdly handsome. Still cuttingly present.

“You’re hurt.” Chi Cheng said. His eyes flicked toward the hand resting near Mai Yu’s ribs.

“Old scar,” Mai Yu answered. His gaze drifted away.

Chi Cheng gave a quiet sound. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a scoff. Even now, he noticed when Mai Yu lied.

They stood a moment longer, drinking each other in. The wind picked up, dry and restless, kicking grit across the rooftop. Far below, Beijing murmured in late-night traffic. Horns and voices. The language of a city that never slept.

Chi Cheng broke the silence. “Not here. We’ll talk at home.”

Mai Yu nodded.

The apartment hadn’t changed either. Still smelled like tea leaves, Chi Cheng’s cigarette and motorcycle oil.

The past four months, Chi Cheng hated coming back to their apartment. And tonight, his thoughts were sprinting circles as he shoved open the apartment door with a flick of his wrist, the cigarette between his lips trembling slightly from the wind.

The man behind him walked in without hesitation. He moved straight to Xiao Cu Bao’s enclosure, lifted Erbao with practiced ease with a whispered hello. The snake flicked its tongue at him in lazy recognition and nibbled his fingers. Then he walked to the leather couch and sat, legs crossed. Calm. Unbothered.

Not Wu Suowei.

This man was dressed in black, like Chi Cheng himself. But the resemblance ended there. Chi Cheng wore black like a threat. Mai Yu wore it like absence. Understated, calculated, invisible when needed.

Mai Yu looked up. For a moment, something tender flickered through the veil: that old, boyish Wu Suowei softness, the one that used to hum off-key in Chi Cheng’s car and fall asleep mid-rant about their takeouts. But it slipped away too quickly, crushed beneath whatever weight he was carrying now.

“Don’t light that,” Mai Yu said quietly, voice calm but anchored with steel. “You only smoke those when you’re angry.”

Chi Cheng exhaled, lips parting just enough for the cigarette to waver. His eyes raked over Mai Yu. “You’ve been gone four months,” he said, and it came out harsher than he meant, low and ragged.

Mai Yu’s gaze didn’t waver.

“I know,” he replied. Curt. Controlled. But it was the kind of control that trembled if you touched it too hard, fragile in the way glass is right before it shatters.

And Chi Cheng felt it. The old, maddening urge to close the distance, to grab him, shake him, kiss him until neither of them could speak. He didn’t. Not yet. His fingers twitched anyway.

Because no matter how much he hated this silence, hated not knowing what the hell this man had become… it was still him.

Still his Weiwei. Somewhere underneath.

“You did not appear at your mother’s funeral.”

Mai Yu looked at him then, really looked. “I was in a coma,” Then quieter, “I would do anything to bring her back, Chi Cheng. But I had the power to save my cousins. So, I did.”

And for the first time that night, Chi Cheng saw it, his baobei, emerging through the cracks. That familiar ache bloomed in his chest, sharp and cruel, as his Dabao’s heart broke all over again.

Chi Cheng walked forward slowly, flicking the cigarette into the sink without looking. “And what now, you just show up? After everything?”

“I didn’t say I’d stay away forever. I came back to visit Mum. And to make sure everyone’s still breathing.”

“Chi Cheng. Chi shaoye.” Mai Yu said his name like a thread pulled through silk. “Do you want an apology or the truth?”

Chi Cheng gave a humourless laugh, closing the distance in one fluid step. He caged Mai Yu in, palms flat on the back of the couch, face close enough to catch his breath. “Depends. Do either change the fact I was in love with someone who didn’t exist? What happened to the loser in knockoff hoodies who stuffed my glovebox with jelly snacks and bitched about shampoo samples?”

That landed. Mai Yu didn’t flinch, but his fingers twitched. Just enough.

“I didn’t fake all of it,” he said, voice low and uneven. “Didn’t even fake most of it. Wu Suowei was real. Is real. But I couldn’t afford to let him take the wheel.”

“You’re still beautiful,” Chi Cheng said. “Goddamn annoying. But beautiful.”

Mai Yu gave the faintest breath of a smile. “Even when I was bleeding out, in a room full of screaming cousins and spent shells, I thought about your stupid diamond bracelet. Your awful bedroom décor. That agonising waterbed.”

Chi Cheng blinked. “Not the frog ashtray you said was ugly?”                                                                                            

“That too, laogong.” His voice didn’t smile, but something in his eyes did. “I missed you. And the snakes. Even though I know that might spell disaster for us both. You were the only thing I ever wanted to keep.”

The room held its breath.

Chi Cheng didn’t speak. His gaze traced the familiar constellation of moles, the line of his jaw, the soft curve of his lover’s mouth. Finally, his hands moved slowly, cupping Mai Yu’s face with a reverence that almost hurt. His grip was steady, but the silence around it crackled like thunder behind glass.

“You’re still bleeding,” Chi Cheng murmured. “I can see it in your eyes.”

Mai Yu leaned into the touch like it was a mercy. “I’ll stop,” he whispered, “if you let me stay.”

After he tossed Mai Yu his old pyjamas and watched him disappear into the bathroom, Chi Cheng lit another cigarette and opened the balcony door wider. The night breeze carried with it the scent of hot stone and far-off engine oil.

Mai Yu returned with damp hair and bare feet, shirt hanging off him like memory. Those damned flowered shorts, still with the hole in them, clung to his hips like a ghost from easier days.

“You never said goodbye,” Chi Cheng murmured, his eyes flicking down to those slender legs.

“I didn’t think I could do it without breaking,” Mai Yu replied.

“Coward.”

Mai Yu stood just inside the doorway, hands tucked into his pockets, the pyjama top slightly askew. Chi Cheng, sleeves rolled up, was at the stove, preparing tea with that same rigid deliberateness he always used when trying not to feel too much.

“You want jasmine?” Chi Cheng asked without turning.

“You still remember that?”

Chi Cheng didn’t answer, just poured the hot water. The scent unfurled slowly through the room. Sweet, grassy, and almost unbearably nostalgic. They sat at the small table. The same one where Suowei used to perch cross-legged, licking sugar off his fingers, half-listening while Chi Cheng ranted about company mergers and bad traffic.

Except tonight, the silence between them was heavier.

Mai Yu sipped the tea. “You shouldn’t want to know,” he said finally.

Chi Cheng looked up. “I do.”

Another pause. Then: “My name is Mai Yu,” he said quietly. “Wu Suowei was… not a lie. But he was never the full truth.”

Chi Cheng nodded slowly. “I figured.”

“I come from a family that doesn’t exist on paper. The Mai family isn’t a household. It’s a network. A powerful structure. An inheritance of training, secrecy, responsibility.”

“Spies?” Chi Cheng asked.

Mai Yu smiled faintly. “Of sorts, and more. Every cousin trained in a different domain. My specialty was social mimicry. I was trained to be disarming. Forgettable.”

He glanced down at the cup in his hands. “And I was good at it. Too good. I lost track of where Mai Yu ended, and Wu Suowei began.”

Chi Cheng spoke softly. “And you fell in love.”

Mai Yu didn’t hesitate. “Yes. As Wu Suowei.”

There was a pause, filled only by the soft clink of ceramic against wood.

Chi Cheng’s face darkened. “And yet you still made time to lecture me about toothpaste brands.”

“Had to keep in character,” Mai Yu smiled faintly. “Wu Suowei wasn’t fake. I liked being him. He liked you.”

“So did I,” Chi Cheng said. “More than I should have.”

He paused, then added, voice low:

“Suowei… I’m sorry. For what happened with Wang Shuo. You didn’t deserve to get dragged into my mess. I should’ve stayed and should’ve told you the truth, about the messy parts with Guozi and Shuo, about your mother.”

Mai Yu blinked. That truth clearly wasn’t expected. Chi Cheng’s voice was raw now. “I was careless. Arrogant. I wanted you, baobei, but I didn’t know how to protect you from myself.”

“I lied about Yueyue too,” Mai Yu said. Quietly. “I let it hurt you.”

“I still would’ve chosen you,” Chi Cheng replied. “Even then. Even broken. I don't want a golden nest, I need you, us.”

[Refering to the proverb 金窝银窝不如自己的狗窝 – “A golden nest or a silver nest is not as good as one’s own doghouse.”]

He reached across the table, touched Mai Yu’s wrist.

“And in my eyes,” Chi Cheng whispered, “you’ve always been Xi Shi.”

[Refering to the proverb 情人眼里出西施 – “In the eyes of a lover, a beauty like Xi Shi appears.”]

“I was reactivated when Duobing was taken. It wasn’t random. They hit three branches of us at once. There are enemies, old ones, that don’t care what burns along the way.”

Chi Cheng stood up and walked over to the window and leaned against the sill, looking out at the soft smear of headlights far below. “I used to know how to read you,” he muttered. “Now I don’t even know what language you’re in.”

Mai Yu tilted his head slightly. “You still read me. You’re just scared of what you see.”

“Don’t start with your spy-speak.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Mai Yu murmured. “You’d throw something.”

“I wouldn’t hit you,” Chi Cheng snapped. Then, softer, “I never would.”

“I know.”

The quiet returned. But it was no longer hollow.

“You think I can’t handle the real you?” Chi Cheng’s voice dropped, low and dangerous. “The one who’s bleeding and sarcastic and dangerous and still makes sugar pigs with too much food colouring?”

“I fell in love with my Da Bao,” Chi Cheng said. “That stubborn little shit who was so bad at his little games but always made me want more. I’m a rich playboy, not an idiot.”

Mai Yu turned. His eyes were glossy, but his smile, rare and broken, tugged at the corner of his lips.

“I didn’t expect you to still call me that.”

Chi Cheng stepped forward, close enough to smell blood and rain and that faint cedar-lavender mix that always clung to Wu Suowei’s shirts. “You don’t get to take it back. I branded it into my damn bones.”  He exhaled through his nose. “You look like hell.”

A pause, and Chi Cheng leaned in, forehead to forehead, voice low and hot with every ache he'd bottled for four months. “Tell me you’re still my Da Bao.”

Mai Yu’s breath hitched. “I never stopped.”

They stood in the hush of flickering city lamps and a train's far-off whistle. Chi Cheng felt himself unravelling, stitch by silent stitch.

Then Mai Yu stepped back.

“I can’t stay,” he said. “They’re still watching.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should.” He handed over a black card. Plain. Ominous. “If anything happens to Jiang Xiaoshuai. Or someone asks about Wu Suowei. Call this.”

Chi Cheng took it. Didn’t look. “And if something happens to you?”

Mai Yu’s smile was worn thin. “Lanzhu will reach out. Tell him I want my wine back.”

Chi Cheng raised a brow. “The crossdresser?”

“That’s how he likes it.”

“Charming.”

“If he sends Dongyuan, don’t run.”

“Who?”

“My fourth cousin. Lanzhu’s pet.”

“Of course. What will your crazy cousins do to me when they see all the marks I left on you?” Chi Cheng drawled, slipping the card into his wallet with lazy precision. His grin was wicked. “File a complaint? Challenge me to a duel? Recommend aloe vera?”

Mai Yu tilted his head, cool as ever. “The Mais are animals, predators. Not monks. They won’t mind. They’ll just mark you back. Maybe somewhere more creative.” He had accepted that Chi Cheng would not let tonight pass easy for him.

Chi Cheng narrowed his eyes. “You’re bluffing.”

Mai Yu’s lips curved, just slightly. “Try me. You’ll know when one of them shows up with a cleaver and a charm bracelet.”

Chi Cheng gave a soft, almost exasperated laugh. It didn’t reach his chest. “You’re leaving again tomorrow.”

“Early morning,” Mai Yu said. “I have to.”

“You always have to from now on.” Chi Cheng muttered, voice low with restraint. “There’s always some ghost you have to chase. Some code. Some cousin.”

There was silence. Then…

“Want me to leave a shirt behind?” Mai Yu asked, deadpan. “Something to cry into while you reorganise your sock drawer?”

Chi Cheng blinked. Then barked a short, disbelieving laugh. “You little shit.”

“Still your little shit. Even if I’m the crow on your roof.” Mai Yu replied, stepping in close with that maddening calm. “Even if I’m also the one your enemies warn their kids about.”

[Refering to the proverb 爱屋及乌 – “To love the house and also the crow.”]

Chi Cheng grabbed the front of his shirt, knuckles white, breathing shallow. “Just one thing,” he said. “Say it.”

Mai Yu tilted his head. “Say what?”

Chi Cheng didn’t blink. “The name. Mine.”

There was a pause.

Then Mai Yu leaned in, slow and devastating, his fingers brushing Chi Cheng’s chest. He kissed him, deep, searing, like it had to last a lifetime. And in that kiss was memory and ache, storm and solace. When he finally pulled back, he whispered, “Da Bao belongs to you, Chi Cheng.”

He lingered for a beat longer. Then, barely audible, Wu Suowei, not Mai Yu, sang with trembling voice husky and threadbare, not quite in tune, but all heart. His voice cracking on the last line.

腦袋都是妳　心裡都是妳
You’re on my mind, you’re in my heart

小小的愛在大城裡好甜蜜
A little love in a big city is so sweet

唸的都是妳　全部都是妳
You’re everything I read, my everything is you

小小的愛　在大城裡只妳傾心
A little love in a big city, I only have a soft spot for you

[Big City, Small Love - Wang Leehom]

Mai Yu walked away at the break of dawn, coat fluttering, back straight, vanishing into the storm of shadows and neon. Chi Cheng stood there a while. He lit another cigarette, eyes glinting.  “You’d better come back to me, Wu Suowei,” he muttered. “Because next time, I’m not letting you leave.”

Chapter Text

Six hours and a red-eye flight later, Mai Yu returned to the Mai Operational Base.

The rain had ceased, and the air outside the compound trembled with a clarity too honest for the life he led. Overhead, sprays of jasmine hung from the rafters, their scent threading the corridor like silk through a needle’s eye. In the atrium, moisture clung to the stone like breath on a mirror. Below, the hum of server cores pulsed like a buried heart. He entered through the greenhouse door, which was coded to bloom only for kin. Through the retinal scan chamber, past the biometric gate, and down the lift that required the recitation of a Tang poem at perfect meter, perfect tone.

Quiet Night Thoughts
by Li Bai

Before my bed, the moonlight gleams,
As if it were the frost of dreams.
I raise my eyes to yon cold light,
Then bow my head in homesick night.

A few guards nodded, careful not to meet his eyes. He removed his gloves in the antechamber, each movement clean, methodical. His coat whispered as he moved through the hush of the lacquered halls.

Here, old world and new warred in elegant silence. Calligraphy scrolls whispered against walls lined with modern surveillance nodes. Floor-length silk screens painted in sumi ink, mountains, cranes, pine. A guqin rested untouched beneath the window’s filtered moonlight. Red lacquer trays balanced beside stacks of encrypted tablets. Somewhere above, hidden vents exhaled agarwood. The past was perfumed; the present burned beneath it.

At the centre of it all sat Xiao Se, sprawled like a wilting magnolia on a velvet chaise. He wore indigo silk robes, loosely belted, the folds whispering against the floor like secrets. His black hair was tied in a lazy knot with a silver ribbon, one lock falling deliberately across his pale temple. He looked like an aristocrat in decline, or a ghost who had stayed too long out of spite. His fingers fluttered across a black jade abacus, flicking bone counters with idle precision.

“Look who blew half a million yuan on theatrics and still managed not to die. Our Golden Saviour.” Xiao Se drawled, eyes never lifting from the device. “Try not to track blood across the walnut floors. Mai Yanchi just refinished them.”

Mai Yu raised a brow. “Should I remove my shoes?”

Xiao Se looked up, expression alight with impish amusement. “No. Just your pride. As always.”

“Good evening, Se-se.”

“Evening? You are twenty-seven hours late. I deducted your delay from your operations budget. With interest.” He waved toward a floating ledger screen that shimmered into existence beside him. “I also added a surcharge for unnecessary heroism. It is itemised under ‘flirtation with mortality.’ You are welcome.”

Mai Yu exhaled through his nose. “You do not look sick.”

“Rude.” Xiao Se said gravely. “I am always a little sick. It adds gravitas.”

Mai Yu dropped a weathered folder onto the low table between them. “Three nodes swept. South trail confirmed.”

Xiao Se tapped his teacup, brows faintly lifted. “You bring me nothing but ruin and bloodstains. If you were anyone else, I would have invoiced your next of kin.”

“I do not have next of kin.”

“You do. I married him.”

A twitch ghosted across Mai Yu’s expression. “Still bullying Yanchi, are we?”

“Please.” Xiao Se exhaled, as if affronted. “He thrives on torment. Sulks for three hours, then tries to bribe me with candied hawthorn and confessions of valour. Last week he threatened to arm-wrestle my accountant in defence of his honour.”

“Did he win?”

“He kissed the ledger and begged for mercy. I let him carry me around like a fainting bride for two hours. He earned a medal. I received three foot rubs and a monologue on honour. It was a productive day.”

“You have domesticated a soldier.”

“I’ve polished him.” Xiao Se said, with a trace of pride. “He is a righteous ox in battle armour, loud as thunder, soft as steamed buns. He brings me sugar water before I ask. Flinches when I cough.”

Mai Yu gave a soft breath of laughter. “Where is your husband now?”

“Drilling new recruits. Probably shirtless. Probably shouting about glory. Moral outrage builds his triceps.”

“Hot-headed and honourable. A perfect match for you.”

“Yes. I am the snake. He is the spear. People say we are an allegory.”

Silence settled. Then came work. Xiao Se, beneath the affectation, was a tactician to the bone. His hands danced across projections like a musician tuning dissonance into harmony. Mai Yu said little. He was good at silence. Xiao Se appreciated that. Noise annoyed him.

Eventually the screens dimmed, replaced by pale reflections of their tired faces. Xiao Se stood, catlike, and wandered to the ledger board. He brushed aside a few petals that had drifted from an overhead branch, then said, lightly:

“I heard you returned to your Pan An.”

[Refering to poet Pan An (潘安)]

Mai Yu’s spine did not shift. “Briefly.”

“Define briefly. Four hours? One night? An eternity disguised as forgiveness?”

“…One night.”

Xiao Se nodded solemnly, like he was officiating a wedding. “Did he try to strangle you first, during teatime or after the bedroom?”

“No comment.”

“How tender.” Xiao Se murmured, tracing a faint crack in the screen. “They say passion is a blade. Yours is just sharper than most.”

There was a long pause. Then, softer: “You know, I’ve studied eight thousand divorces. The fault is always silence. Or socks. Abandoned on the floor.”

“He’s not my divorce,” Mai Yu murmured.

“No. He’s your original sin. And the worst kind of poetry.But some mistakes come with heated sheets and unspoken forgiveness.”

“Are you advising me to go back?”

“I am suggesting that even swords need a sheath. And even gods need temples. You know what happened to me.” Xiao Se gave Mai Yu a side glance.

Mai Yu studied him for a moment. “Did you love Yanchi before or after he took a grenade for you?”

“From the moment he ate plain noodles at my Snow Villa guesthouse without paying. The grenade just made it official.”

“Love at first sight for the prince. And if someone tried to take him from you?”

Xiao Se didn’t blink. “I’d invite them to a banquet, ask you to poison their wines while I play the guqin, and then bankrupt their province.”

“I see.”

“If Chi Cheng breaks your heart again, I shall invoice him for emotional damages.”

Mai Yu’s lips quirked. “Make sure it includes hazard pay.”

A soft ping interrupted the air. A new map bloomed. Coordinates pulsed in red.

Mai Qing’s cell. North quadrant. Their window was closing.

Xiao Se gestured with a faint sigh. “Let us cease romantic philosophy and reconvene in the war room. Yanchi, darling, your thunderous morals are required.”

The war room was carved into the earth like a secret. Soft-lit from beneath the floor, it cast the appearance of moonlight on cold jade. At the centre stood a circular table carved from black pine, lacquered to reflect the holographic maps above. Along the perimeter, incense curled slowly from dragon-headed burners, and the sound of distant wind bells echoed faintly from the upper ventilation shafts.

Three chairs were already filled. The eldest cousins.

Mai Yuanzhou sat at the head, wrapped in black robes embroidered with flying dragons. His eyes were slow and precise as if carved from riverstone. To his left lounged Mai Chunshui, dishevelled as always, silver hair loose, paper crane embroidery half-undone. He sipped from a porcelain cup that absolutely contained something flammable. Mai Yu was sure that it was stolen tequila.

Mai Yanchi remained standing, shoulders square, the ever-watchful sentinel. His eyes locked on Xiao Se immediately as said man moved through the door.

“You are late.” Yuanzhou said without glancing up. “The logs confirm the northern breach. But well done. The southern node is extinguished.”

Chunshui leaned back and grinned. “And the rats?”

“Dealt with.”

“Pity. I would have set the place aflame and left a poem.”

“Please, er-ge. You wouldn’t be able to spell out any proper line from Li Bai.” Xiao Se said with a smirk before switching to a clipped tone. “They wanted the vault coordinates. Dongyuan they could bargain with. But A-Li… they wanted the Black Vault.”

Mai Yu set his jaw, guilt flickered through his dark brown eyes. “They found Qing’s cell before I could stop them.”

Yuanzhou nodded, face unreadable. “We planned for fallout. This is not yet collapse.”

Chunshui leaned forward, eyes sharp beneath the wine-glow of his cheek. “You look paler, ba-di [8th brother]. Scar still burning?”

Mai Yu tilted his shoulder. “Not enough to bleed.”

“Good. Collapse with elegance if you must. Brides do not faint in the mud.”

Mai Yanchi finally stepped forward. “Dongyuan?”

“Recovering.” Yuanzhou answered. “Already coding. A-Qing and Peacock are with him.”

“I spent half the night negotiating Dongyuan’s release,” Mai Yu added quietly. “He did not blame me.”

“He would have accepted no less.” said the third Mai as he gave his baby cousin a tight squeeze on the shoulder.

Chunshui’s gaze lingered. “You returned, didi. Again. Even when the maps betray you. A Mai saving another Mai like we all agreed.”

Mai Yu’s throat tightened. “I will not let my cousin die for a miscalculation.”

“You saved his life.” said Yuanzhou. “That is enough.”

The medical wing was unusually quiet—sterile white bathed in soft blue light. No alarms. No rush. Just the low, rhythmic sound of filtered air and monitored heartbeats.

Mai Yu stood outside the door for a long time before entering. His hand hovered above the handle, fingers curled as if bracing for impact. These were not fellow agents today. Not targets or assets. Just family.

Inside, Mai Dongyuan sat upright with the defiance of someone who had never truly known how to rest. One hand was immobilised in a sling, the other typing with steady fury across a worn laptop balanced on his knees. An IV line fed into his arm like it had been part of his body forever. He sported the unintentional buzzcut like a champion.

Ruan Lanzhu, seated beside him, had been mid-complaint about the feng shui of the chairs when Mai Yu entered. The complaint died on his lips. His painted lashes lowered, and the tilt of his head grew quieter. The silence that followed was not awkward, just taut, the kind that formed in the presence of old blood and unfinished sentences.

It was Dongyuan who broke it.

“You didn’t have to come back.”

Mai Yu turned slowly, meeting his cousin’s gaze. “I did. You’re alive. So is Lunzi.” A pause. “That’s all I care about.”

“You were bleeding.” Dongyuan said, tone soft but edged.

“Still am.” Mai Yu replied. He didn’t sit.

Lanzhu leaned back against the headboard, one leg crossed neatly, his expression unreadable.

From the doorway, Mai Qing strolled in as if arriving at a press conference, not a secured medical ward. His dark sunglasses, clearly unnecessary indoors, perched high on his nose, and his blue-streaked hair shimmered beneath the sterile lighting. He looked like a Vogue editorial that had accidentally wandered into espionage.

“Yes, as you can see, dear Yu-yu.” he said in his fangirl-facing sweet voice, “Dongyuan is quite alive. And tragically bewitched by our Lanzhu, as usual.”

Mai Yu gave him a flat look. “So, nothing’s changed.”

“Oh, I’m merely the trophy spouse.” Lanzhu said cheerfully, twirling a jade ring on his thumb. “They know better than to come for me now. Last time someone tried, I mailed them their own fingers, neatly vacuum-sealed with pu’er bricks.”

That drew a twitch of amusement from Mai Yu. Brief, but real.

Mai Qing yawned, entirely unconcerned. “Apparently, my cell was exposed. Such a shame, I rather liked that base. The lighting was flattering. My selfies there had great engagement.”

“Do you have a plan?” Mai Yu asked.

“Oh, always, didi.” The actor replied breezily. “I just haven’t decided whether to fake my own death or leak false coordinates and see which rats bite. Maybe not the death angle though, my fanclub moderators would have a collective breakdown and Ye-er said he’s not attending another fake funeral. Also, the media company would suffer a stock crash, and I do have dividends.”

Mai Yu raised a brow. “You already moved the core assets?”

“My gorgeous Wang Ye insisted,” Qing replied with a modest shrug. “He suspected something. I love a man who listens to my paranoia.”

“You seem unbothered.”

The sixth Mai flashed him a grin. “You forget. I was trained to lie before I could write my own name. By the time I was reading bedtime stories, I was also editing surveillance transcripts.”

“And when was the last time you were honest?”

“The day I said my own Beijing rich boy’s cooking wouldn’t kill me.” He gave a theatrical sigh.

Lanzhu rolled his eyes. “You fainted mid-mission from low blood sugar and your Wudang priest still made you congee for a week.”

“That, dearest Lipstick, is called emotional manipulation. My Wang shaoye loves me.”

Mai Yu crossed his arms. “And the attackers?”

“I’ve already left them a decoy trail in Xi’an,” Came the reply. “Filed a shadow report. Redirected all auxiliary nodes. They’ll think they’re closing in. Meanwhile, I’ve updated our contingency vaults and changed the internal call signs. If they want a show, I’ll give them fireworks.”

“Like a good actor,” Mai Yu said softly.

Mai Qing gave a crisp bow. “Typecast, as always. Famous actor Zhuge Qing, now starring in ‘Catch Me If You Can.’” A pause, “Do you think I am more Moriarty or more Mycroft Holmes?”

“Chi Cheng asked about you again,” Lanzhu said, unprompted. His voice was half-lidded, deceptively gentle. “Your baby boy does not know how to give up.”

Mai Yu did not flinch, but the silence that followed curved around him like frost.

“Of course he did,” he said coolly. “Are you mates now? Trading horoscopes and blood types? How often do you call my boy these days?”

Lanzhu tilted his head, lips curling. “Only when he threatens to chain-smoke himself into a ghost. He rang the hotline twice. This time, he didn’t even bother pretending anymore. Said, and I quote, ‘Tell me the bastard’s still breathing.’”

He paused, letting the silence draw out like smoke from a lit match, then added with a slow, indulgent grin, “Honestly, he sounds like a Slytherin who accidentally imprinted on a Hufflepuff and now has no idea what to do with the tenderness leaking out of his ears.”

Mai Yu blinked, dry as salt. His ears started to turn pink. “He is not a fictional character.”

“No.” Lanzhu said sweetly, voice syruped with theatrical pity.

“He is worse. A Hufflepuff in a Slytherin trench coat. Loyal like a kicked dog, mean like a snake on tax day. The tragic romance writes itself.”

Dongyuan made a sound that sat delicately between a cough and a laugh, the kind lovers make when they try not to pick sides.

Mai Yu turned his gaze away. “He should stay out of this.”

“You,” Lanzhu murmured, stepping closer, “are in deeper than you realise, cousin.”

He tilted his head, lashes casting shadows as dramatic as stage curtains. His gaze was sharp, but not unkind. Twin moles rested beneath his right eye like ink drops left behind by an impatient poet. Eyes like dusk before a thunderstorm: violet, rimmed with gold, soft in light but devastating in clarity.

Mai Yu didn’t look at him.

“It does not matter,” he said, voice thinning at the edges. “I made a choice.”

Dongyuan’s voice came, quieter still. “Then at least say goodbye properly.”

Mai Yu did not answer. He could not.

Chapter Text

The air in Urumqi was dry as parchment when Chi Cheng stepped out of the taxi. He wore black and nothing about him was dishevelled. Not the fall of his tailored coat, not the set of his shoulders, not even the immaculately pressed shirt beneath. No dirt. No haste. But his fingers trembled faintly around his fourth cigarette of the morning. The filter was sour on his tongue. The nicotine didn’t help.

It had been two weeks since he’d last seen Mai Yu.

He had tried calling the infuriating Ruan Lanzhu. The man’s reply had been as clipped as a sword through silk, a tone that made even Chi Cheng want to pace.

“He’s alive. You’re not invited.”

So Chi Cheng had done what he always did when something mattered too much, burn through every rational instinct and barrel straight toward the fire.

Da Bao was his. That had never changed.

Chi Cheng was sick of the cold. Sick of pretending. Sick of secrets and silence and the knife-edge calm that passed for self-restraint. Thus, he followed the trail.

It wasn’t easy.

Obsidian was a ghost. Its tracks were buried in the bones of old networks: blacklisted brokers, expunged IP logs, scrapped satellite codes, shell corporations that didn’t even bother to hide well. But Chi Cheng had teeth, and time, and the kind of burning focus that made Gangzi and even Li Wang vanish the moment he touched a keyboard.

He peeled back every layer, one by one, until all the strands converged.

On a florist. In Urumqi.

It was so audacious it made his teeth ache.

Chi Cheng booked a red-eye flight that night and kept the rage tucked deep inside his chest.

“You are dead meat, my dear Weiwei.”

The boutique sat on a quiet corner, pressed between a dumpling stall and a jade antiques dealer. Ivy curled lazily along the eaves, and the air smelled faintly of plum blossoms and ancient dust. The sign read “Lotus & Stone” in delicately brushed ink. Polite. Unassuming. Forgettable.

The door chimed as he entered.

Behind the counter stood a man too poised and too handsome to be retail. Tall, narrow frame, sharp cheekbones, waist-long black hair streaked faintly with white, like ink diluted by age. He was arranging lisianthus with precise fingers.

Chi Cheng said nothing at first. He was calculating. Watching.

“Can I help you?” the man asked, voice smooth as lacquered tea but the underlying tone of mischief and chaos was not contained.

“I’m here for a bouquet.”

The florist didn’t look up. “We are all booked out. Would you mind leaving your contact details?”

“White peonies.” Chi Cheng said, his head dipped a little before a whisper. “For Mai Yu.”

A pause.

Then a subtle shift in posture, like a blade being quietly unsheathed. The man glanced up, one brow raised and his thin lips curved into a smirk. “Oh? We have a Beijing visitor. That explains the brooding aura and expensive cologne.”

Chi Cheng’s jaw tensed. “Are you a Mai?”

The man gave a soft snort, using his left hand to slick back his own hair. “Heavens, no. Chi shaoye, we're on the same sinking boat. I’m one of the married-in-flowers. We get less blood on our hands but more on our taxes.”

Chi Cheng took a step forward, the lines of his shoulders tightening and eyes still scanning the place. “And you let strangers just walk in?”

“Only the reckless ones. I like watching them make mistakes in real time.”  The man smiled with a feline laziness. Chi Cheng was sure he saw a tint of red in the guy’s eyes. “Besides, any idiot who comes in asking for peonies and Mai Yu is clearly here to cause drama.”

“Who are you?”

“Zhao Yuanzhou.” he said, dropping the last lisianthus into place. “Or Zhu Yan, depending on how old-school you are. Husband to a very cranky Mai. My résumé is long and emotionally inconvenient.”

Chi Cheng’s glare didn’t budge.

Zhao rested his chin in one palm, sighing theatrically and continued on with an almost sing-song tone. “Chi Cheng. Rich, volatile, smokes like it's a contest. The infamous Hufflepuff in Slytherin leather. Or so I’ve heard.”

Chi Cheng’s nostrils flared. “Where is he?”

“Inside.” Yuanzhou said cheerfully. “Where everybody is. But be warned, handsome, this is the part of the movie where trespassers lose limbs.”

“I don’t care.”

Zhao gave a slow blink, like a predator mildly impressed by its prey. “No, I suppose you don’t. Follow me then, we are just in time for A-Li’s bandage change.”

They moved through the shop and past a barely-there velvet curtain. The back corridor was nothing like the storefront. Silent extravagance yet practical. Slate stone underfoot, filtered skylight overhead. Walls lined with layered security panels; calligraphy etched into the doorframes like prayers.

静 (stillness). 策 (strategy). 守 (watch).

Chi Cheng’s pulse ticked in his throat. He didn’t speak. He wouldn't give this silver-tongued gatekeeper the satisfaction of seeing the worry crack through the steel. But it was there, beneath the veneer. A barely leashed tension. He walked like a blade waiting to strike.

Zhao glanced sideways. “You really haven’t slept, have you?”

Chi Cheng didn’t answer.

“I must say, I admire the trench-coat rage,” The guy continued breezily, as if commentating on weather. “That whole ‘brooding antihero on a collision course with fate’ look. Very noir. Very vintage revenge.”

He let the moment stretch, amused. “Tell me, did you storm through customs; or did you suffer the indignity of queuing?”

They stopped before a set of dark-panelled double doors, lacquered and silent.

“Here.” Zhao said, hand poised. “But just so you know, if you start shouting, I’m kicking you out. My A-Li only enjoys theatrics when he’s the one directing the scene.”

With a casual flick, he pushed the doors open.

Inside, chaos halted like a tableau.

All heads turned in unison. Paper maps rustled. A screen flickered. Somewhere, a kettle whistled and was promptly silenced.

Chi Cheng’s gaze swept the room. Like a blade, cutting without warning. He didn’t blink.

He had imagined this moment a thousand different ways, each more volatile than the last. Storming in. Demanding explanations. Breaking something on the way out.

But reality, as ever, betrayed the script.

This wasn’t a battlefield. It wasn’t even a trap.

It was a council chamber.

A lair.

A home.

At the far end stood a man with sleeves rolled neatly to the forearms, hands steady, gaze sharper than command steel. Chi Cheng recognised him from security footage, the one who picked Mai Yu up on that first extraction. So this was the infamous Mai Yuanzhou. He looked like he belonged in a war tent, somewhere between snowdrifts and banners.

To the left, a man in training blacks sat with military stillness. Shoulders squared, legs braced apart. His skin glowed bronze beneath sterile light, and when his eyes met Chi Cheng’s, it was with the cool appraisal of a battlefield scan: threat. Potential. Burden.

Behind the nearest pillar, someone whispered solemnly, “Drama alert.”

Zhao Yuanzhou didn’t bother to lower his voice. “That would be my lovely husband.”

Across the table, a figure reclined in violet robes, draped in a shade reserved for emperors and very high-maintenance drag queens. Lacquered nails caught the light with flecks of gold.

Clearly, Ruan Lanzhu.

“I told you not to come,” Lanzhu said in lazy amusement.

“I wasn’t listening,” Chi Cheng replied. His boots echoed once on the marble floor as he stepped fully into the room. Shoulders squared. Mouth drawn tight. But his hands, if one looked close enough, were curled slightly at the edges, as if gripping something not there.

And then he saw him.

At the centre of the long table. Half-shadowed beneath the filtered skylight. Clad in black from throat to wrist.

Wu Suowei. Alive. Standing.

There were bandages circling his neck, and Chi Cheng was sure they ran lower, beneath the clothes, across the ribs he once kissed and broke.

But it was him. The same face he’d held against his chest that night. The same lips that had once murmured, “Chi-ge, don’t leave me.”

The room tilted.

Chi Cheng’s cigarette slipped from his fingers and landed with a soft hiss in the vase beside him. The scent of scorched orchid and ash curled in the air.

He inhaled, sharp. Cracked.

Everything he’d rehearsed – the speeches, the fury, the control – shattered in his throat.

He raised a hand and pointed, voice rough with restraint. “You. Outside. Now.”

Nobody moved.

Zhao Yuanzhou put on his most saccharine commercial smile. “Hey now. I didn’t sneak you in just to have you start barking orders. I only vet for mildly threatening charm.”

Across the table, Mai Yuanzhou raised a hand, barely a flick of the fingers, but it carved silence from the air.

“Let him speak.”

The quiet returned. Tighter now. Like bowstrings being pulled.

Chi Cheng exhaled again. His voice shook despite the steel in it. “I waited. I was good. I didn’t even track your phone. Do you know how impossible that is for me?”

He couldn’t look directly at Mai Yu when he said it. Not yet.

But Mai Yu moved. Slow, deliberate. He didn’t say a word. Just walked, graceful, quiet, and motioned for Chi Cheng to follow.

The doors closed behind them with a hush like falling silk.

Outside, under the white glow of corridor lights, the silence stretched again.

“You said you’d stay away,” Mai Yu said first, gaze steady but unreadable.

“You said you weren’t Wu Suowei.” Chi Cheng snapped back through clenched teeth. “But I’m still the idiot who wants to be the one you run to.”

There it was. The fracture in the dam. The raw truth.

Chi Cheng hated how fragile his voice sounded, hated how his entire body felt like it was about to lunge or collapse. But it didn’t matter. He’d spent two weeks rehearsing fury. And the moment he saw Mai Yu standing upright and breathing, it had all disintegrated into this: longing.

And love.

And fear.

Mai Yu stepped closer. No warning. No performance.

Then slowly, he reached out and touched Chi Cheng’s cheek. Fingers cool. Thumb grazing the edge of his jaw like one might brush dust from a photograph. Chi Cheng could see scabs healing on his lover’s hand.

“Then don’t call me Mai Yu.” he murmured.

Chi Cheng blinked. The words hit harder than they should have.

“What?”

“Call me Da Bao.” His voice was a breath. “I missed the way you say it.”

That was it. The restraint snapped.

Chi Cheng surged forward and kissed him. His hands gripped Mai Yu’s small waist in all his might like he want to see bruises.

The kiss wasn’t long. But for Chi Cheng, it landed like a thunderclap. He tasted salt. And time lost. And something achingly familiar. The press of that quiet mouth against his, the faint way Mai Yu tilted his chin.

This was not memory. This was presence.

This was his.

When they broke apart, Mai Yu’s eyes searched his face. His pink lips swollen.

“You didn’t have to come.” he said, softer now.

Chi Cheng scoffed, the sound sharp, trembling. “I didn’t come. I barged in. On purpose. Like a damn protagonist because my Weiwei is avoiding me.”

Mai Yu huffed. “You ruined the briefing.”

“Good. You don’t brief your boyfriend with bullet points, 3D maps and clearances. You talk to him.”

Mai Yu stared at him for a long beat. Then his shoulders relaxed just slightly, and he turned toward the hallway again.

“Come on,” he said. “Might as well meet the family.”

Chi Cheng blinked. “Wait. Now?”

But Mai Yu was already walking.

And Chi Cheng, who had torn across the country like a storm, followed without a word.

They stepped back through the carved mahogany doors. The atmosphere hadn’t relaxed. If anything, it had sharpened. As if the room itself had held its breath in their absence.

Chi Cheng walked in just behind Mai Yu. He didn’t try to soften his presence. He didn’t apologise. He simply returned, hands loose by his sides, eyes like polished obsidian. He didn’t know what he had expected from the infamous Mai family. What he found were twelve variations of beautiful men, split evenly between boardroom deities and theatrical villains.

Chi Cheng had been kissed, the softened jaw, the undone posture, the faintest ghost of unspoken relief.

And it showed.

Twelve pairs of eyes clocked it instantly.

Zhao Yuanzhou fanned himself with a florist’s receipt. “Well. That answers that.”

Lanzhu tilted his head, violet sleeves rustling like theatre curtains. “Pity. I was hoping for more fireworks.”

Chi Cheng, to his own surprise, didn’t rise to it. He looked at Ruan Lanzhu for a long moment, then let his gaze drift to the others. “I didn’t come here to impress any of you.” he said, voice quiet but clear.

“I came because I don’t want to lose him. That’s it.”

The room, full of veiled daggers, stilled. The kind of stillness that came not from shock, but from recognition.

As if on cue, Zhao Yuanzhou began passing out a stack of post-it notes like communion wafers.

“You’re joking.” Chi Cheng muttered, watching in disbelief as each cousin scribbled something and stuck it to their own forehead with the weariness of long-suffering professionals.

“Absolutely not,” said Zhu Yan the host, handing him a pen. “Family protocol. We don’t do formal introductions. We do passive-aggressive labelling.”

A rustle of dry paper. A faint sigh from the eldest corner. Then, in unison, the table intoned with flat, choreographed deadpan:

“Hello. How do you do.”

Chi Cheng blinked. “Is this hazing or group therapy?”

Zhao grinned, tapping his own note. It read:

Zhao Yuanzhou – Not a Real Mai. Still indispensable.

He gestured broadly, the conductor of a wildly dysfunctional orchestra. “Welcome to the great dysfunctional tea party. Let’s meet the cast.”

He pointed toward the man lounging across two chairs, cradling a thermos of rice wine as though it were an offering. His white hair cascading like molten pearl.
“That’s er-ge, Mai Chunshui. Drinks more than he speaks, which is saying something. Likes his enemies like he likes his liquor: aged, expensive, and begging for mercy.”

Mai Chunshui raised the thermos slightly in toast, not bothering to sit up.

“The one beside him, arms folded like he’s hosting a funeral for optimism? That’s firstborn cousin Mai Yuanzhou. Information king, a tax audit made flesh.”

Yuanzhou’s stare was glacial. Zhao ignored it.

“Military statue over there, san-ge Mai Yanchi. Don’t spar with him unless you want your spine relocated.”

Yanchi didn’t react. He was watching Chi Cheng the way wolves watch fences: with quiet patience and a faint edge of challenge. His post-it note had a terrible scribble:

Mai 3 – Married.

“And in violet velvet, licking his nails, that’s Ruan Lanzhu. Chaos incarnate.”

Lanzhu blew Chi Cheng a kiss without moving his lips.

Next to him, seated like a sunbeam armed with knives, was a younger man with eyes so big Chi Cheng had to blink looking at them.

“This angelic one? Mai Duobing. Youngest cousin. Sunshine weaponised. He makes good cupcakes but tends to be in stupid hero mode too often.”

The guy beamed. “Hi! I like your eyebrows. Your mole is also very pretty.”

Mai Xiaobao – Sherlock to Lianhua’s Watson.

“…Thanks?”

Beside Duobing sat an almost ethereal man dressed in scholar’s white, face composed like water over stone. There was a gentle lotus scent around the guy. He gave a small, courteous nod towards Chi Cheng. His fingers were ink-stained, and Chi Cheng spotted the edge of dried blood beneath one fingernail.

“Li Lianhua.” Zhao-MC supplied. “Duobing’s monk. Sews wounds better than he speaks. His cooking is poison.”

Li Lianhua – I like to experiment with food.

“Over there is Xiao Princess. Our court jester. Fragile like plutonium, dressed like poetry, will bankrupt you.”

Chi Cheng turned. The obviously-posh-and-delicate man in question sat with one leg crossed over the other, robes the colour of rainclouds, an eyebrow arched in disdain. His post-it read:

Xiao Se – Married to Mai 3. Richer Than You.

“Forgive me,” Xiao Se said with great care, “for not leaping with joy at your entrance. I assumed you were just another tragic ex-boyfriend with boundary issues. But now I see you’re A-Yu’s tragic ex-boyfriend with boundary issues.”

Chi Cheng narrowed his eyes. “And you are?”

“Someone with better taste.” Xiao Se replied sweetly. “But welcome. Your drama has brightened our morning more than the 9am espresso.”

Zhao Yuanzhou continued on, getting louder and more theatrical. “That leaves Mai Lilun. Our silent sword. Drop dead gorgeous, breathtakingly beautiful but emotionally constipated. Good thing he has me – Zhu Yan.”

Lilun stood near the pillar, arms folded, gaze unreadable. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.

The Zhao da-yao slid across the floor, pecked his husband noisily on the cheek, and said, “Time for another bandage, darling. That stab wound isn’t going to close itself.”

Mai Lilun – Hates drama and monkeys.

Mai Duobing gagged.

“And over there,” Zhao added, pointing toward a half-dozing figure robed in navy linen, “is sleeping beauty. Perhaps you will say hello when he decided to come back to us Earthlings.”

Chi Cheng squinted at the post-it note someone stuck onto the guy:

Wang Ye – Not Sleeping.

Chi Cheng’s gaze flicked across the room again. The post-it notes were absurd. But they worked. Each character now had a name, a face, a legend stitched behind their posture.

It was a family.

A tapestry, stitched from crisis, eccentricity, and an unlikely kind of loyalty.

To Chi Cheng’s left sat Mai Yu, expression unreadable, eyes like dusk before storm.

Chi Cheng’s own note, written hastily, now read:

Chi Cheng – Uninvited. Not Sorry.

He caught Mai Yu’s glance. The faintest crack of something warmer passed between them, like light beneath ash.

Mai Yuanzhou, still seated but very much in command, finally raised his voice again. “Now that theatre’s over, can we return to why we were actually here?”

Chi Cheng gave a faint nod and moved toward the back wall, folding his arms. He didn’t speak. He didn’t interrupt.

But he stayed.

Mai Yu stepped forward again. There was a shift in him, small but real. His shoulders didn’t carry the same weight. Not entirely. He didn’t glance back, but Chi Cheng could feel it. That faint, silent acknowledgment between two people who had once made each other bleed and still chose not to look away.

The war room resumed its rhythm.

Holograms flickered to life. Maps reappeared on tablets and scrolls. Names and codewords filled the air like wind-chimes in a storm. It was an orchestra of tension: strategies, disagreements, alliance maps, enemy call signs.

Chi Cheng understood none of it.

But he watched the way Mai Yu moved among them with grace from experience. Precise, quiet, exacting. He wasn’t used to this version. This composed, calculating Mai Yu. He had known Da Bao the firecracker in flowered shorts. Wu Suowei the smart-mouth. The blanket-thief. The boy who once cried in his arms and cursed him in the same breath.

But this, this was a man.

And Chi Cheng, who had never known how to say I’m proud of you without breaking something, pressed his palm flat against his leg and tried not to ruin it.

He sat there for another half-hour.

Saying nothing. Not interrupting.

But present.

Eventually, the meeting adjourned. People drifted; some stepping out to argue or smoke, others vanishing without ceremony. Zhao Yuanzhou disappeared entirely, muttering something about “overexposure to competence” and the urgent need for espresso.

Chi Cheng turned, then squinted.

The supposedly “Not-Sleeping” figure had begun to stir. Slouched in a reclining armchair, prayer beads tangled near his elbow, sat a Wudang priest with his long hair tied into a loose topknot. His robes were creased, his posture unbothered, but even with eyes still closed, the delicate face was unmistakable.

“…Wang Ye? Beijing Wang-san?”

[Referring to the fact that Wang Ye is the 3^rd son]

One eye slid open, slow and amused. A familiar half-smile tugged at his lips. “Chi Cheng. Been what…five years?” he said, voice as smooth as temple stone. “How are your parents?”

Chi Cheng blinked and exhaled through his nose. “Rich. Boring. Disappointed.”

Wang Ye nodded with mock solemnity and rose to stretch, long limbs unfolding like silk. His crumpled Wudang robes hung off him like a meditation-themed fashion spread, effortlessly composed. “Consistent, then.”

From across the room, Xiao Se called out without looking up from his scroll, “Ye-ye daoshi clearly slept through the entire briefing. What a shame. Beijing Rich Boy One and Two, reunited at last. Small world. A-qing would have enjoyed this.”

Chi Cheng frowned. “Who’s A-qing?”

Mai Yu, still hunched over a glowing scroll, didn’t look up. “Mai Qing. Sixth cousin. Wang Ye’s partner.”

“Zhuge Qing,” Wang Ye added, rotating one shoulder. “Actor. National treasure, allegedly. Starred in too many soap dramas. Had the humility not to deny it. Lives off green tea and Korean BB skincare. Pain in my ass.”

“Oh. That guy.” Chi Cheng’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Jiang Xiaoshuai wouldn’t shut up about his shoulders.”

A faint breath of a laugh passed through the room.

Mai Yu flicked the edge of the scroll with one ink-stained finger, noncommittal. “Reasonable critique.”

Chi Cheng leaned in, lowering his voice. “Are all the Mais… bent?”

Mai Yu’s expression flattened, teetering between scandalised and deadpan. “No. Da-ge and Er-ge are straight. Straight as chopsticks. Their girlfriends could dismantle a government.”

Chi Cheng gave him a sidelong glance. “You were straight too, Weiwei.”

Mai Yu didn’t reply. But he didn’t flinch either.

His gaze dropped for a moment, a slow breath catching just beneath the collar of his tunic, as if something old and long frozen had stirred but not yet cracked.

Chi Cheng stepped closer, hand brushing his shoulder with careful weight.

“Still angry?” he asked, voice barely above a breath.

The room had grown quiet again.

Then, “I’m too tired to be angry. But not too tired to be glad you came.”

The words hovered, suspended in the hush. Delicate as mist, heavy as forgiveness.

Chi Cheng let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

In the background, the room had dissolved into something less formal.

Mai Yuanzhou was sketching new defence lines over a touchscreen with quiet intensity, stylus tapping in rhythm. Mai Chunshui poured himself another round of something that smelled strongly of ethanol. Mai Duobing was perched on the arm of a chair, massaging Li Lianhua’s temples while yapping non-stop into his husband’s ears. Ruan Lanzhu examined a nail file with the exact focus of someone preparing for either seduction or sedition.

The kettle whistled louder, then abruptly stopped.

And for the first time in weeks, Chi Cheng was exactly where he needed to be.

Chapter Text

The rain never reached this far inland, but the world wept in its own way.

"Subject 8 is entering the breach zone”.

Wind bit across the ravine with a scream thin enough to split bone. Ochre sand blurred every outline. Visibility was no more than a prayer. In the monochrome mess of shadow and shale, Mai Yu moved like ink on scorched silk. Low, fast, fleeting. Boots kissed ground soaked not in rain, but in ancient memory. The earth here remembered fire.

He paused behind a crumbling outcrop, fingers grazing the vibrating crust, attuned to the hum beneath. Something old breathed here. Something waiting.

His voice broke through the static of the comms.

“Position zero. Holding.”

In the Obsidian war room, arcs of blue-green light pulsed against the screen in grainy night-vision. Silhouettes darted like ghosts. Xiao Se sat behind the controls, sleeves rolled, the picture of measured elegance, calm as a monk. His fingertips danced between dials, as if stirring tea leaves. To his right, Lanzhu leaned forward, posture coiled, eyes half-lidded but alive with fire.

Behind another screen, Mai Dongyuan – still pale from the last mission’s wounds – spoke without moving his gaze. “Three hostiles, northwest ridge. Forty seconds.”

“They’re converging,” Lanzhu added. “Thermal confirmed.”

“Don’t take the ridge.” Dongyuan continued. “Dead drop. Circle east. There’s a cistern embedded in the outer wall. Left side. Panel marked in cobalt.”

Mai Yu’s reply was faint. “Copy.”

He moved.

At the rear, Chi Cheng stood motionless, watching the tiny figure on screen dart between rocks. He had no right to be here. Chi Cheng knew that.

No training. No military background. No clearance. And yet, after the last dramatic entrance, he had remained. Lanzhu had tried to chase him off twice. Xiao Se had given up and offered him a teacup instead. Mai Dongyuan merely nodded, still half-recovering, but too precise to let weakness distract from the mission.

“Stop.” Xiao Se murmured.

On the screen, Mai Yu had reached the cistern wall. He stood perfectly still, one hand lifted, facing a faded utility panel half-buried in grit. His shoulders rose, fell. Then he turned away. Faced it again. Stillness.

Something was wrong.

“Why’s he hesitating?” Lanzhu asked, frowning.

Dongyuan’s eyes narrowed. “That marking’s cobalt. It should be visible.”

“No.” Chi Cheng said suddenly. Voice low. Distant. “He can’t see it.”

All heads turned.

Chi Cheng hadn’t moved in nearly an hour. Now, his whole frame had shifted forward, gaze fixed to the trembling figure on the screen.

“He’s green-blind. Deutan.” Chi Cheng continued, more clearly this time. “He thinks cobalt is grey. If the paint’s sun-bleached or covered in dust, it’ll blend with the stone. He’ll miss it.”

Xiao Se narrowed his eyes. “That’s absurdly specific.”

Chi didn’t look away from the projection. “When we first met, I thought the soft pink underwear and lilac pyjamas were some flirtatious seduction tactic. Then I realised he thought they were grey.”

No one laughed.

On screen, Mai Yu’s chest was rising faster. His stance had lost its tension, legs almost locking. His left hand hovered above the wrong tile. Not yet pressing, but close.

Beyond the camera’s view, a patrol’s infrared signature flared along the ridge. Twenty seconds, maybe less, before visibility.

Chi Cheng stepped forward, fingers curling over the console edge. “He’s panicking.”

He pressed the comm open with the side of his knuckle.

“Weiwei.” he said softly, with none of the command bark of the others, only breath. “You’re two metres off.”

There was a static delay. Then a reply, ragged, nearly a whisper:

“I can’t see green, Chi-ge.”

“I know.” Chi said. His voice barely touched the room. “So trust me not to ride blind on a blind steed. Don’t look for colour. Look for the stone with the curved base. There’s a seam. You won’t see it, but light bends differently there. Left palm. Then sweep two feet right. Press.”

[Referring to the proverb “盲人瞎马” – Blind man riding a blind horse ]

On screen, Mai Yu hesitated. Then moved.

He dropped his hand to the curved stone. Traced right. The wall clicked.

The door slid open with a soft exhale of air.

Chi Cheng let out a slow breath. His knuckles were white. His whole body was locked in the aftershock. In his mind, he was no longer in the war room.

He was back in their apartment in Beijing, spring light dappled across parquet flooring, their shadows cast long over the kitchen bench. He’d sat across from Da Bao with a tray of colour-coded beads – red, green, grey, three shades each – and watched his baobei squint at them in frustration.

“Left hand is red.” he’d said gently, placing a glossed bead in Suowei’s palm.

“Right hand is green.” A matte one, cooler in shade.

“You’re not looking for colour, Da Bao. You’re looking for the way light bends.”

 

Mai Yu had scowled at him back then. Called him an annoying know-it-all.

But he’d learned. He’d memorised the textures. The subtle differences in sheen. The glint of light. The cues invisible to most.

The training had been mundane. Ridiculous, even.

And yet here they were.

On the edge of death and saved by the memory of matte and gloss.

“Rerouting internal feed,” Dongyuan said. “Movement detected. Subsection 4B.”

Xiao Se narrowed his eyes. “A-Qing was right. The base wasn’t cleared.”

On the secondary screen, a red alert blinked.

“Motion sensor triggered.” Dongyuan murmured. “He’s not alone.”

“Qing is holding the leyline.” Xiao Se said, scanning the camera feed from the north entrace. “We’ve got a two-hour shield window. After that, we’re blind.”

Inside the cistern vault, Mai Yu pressed into shadow. He drew a boot knife, hugging the curve of the water tanks. The concrete skin smelled of rust and spell-fire. Something moved beyond the tanks.

Three figures. Breathing. Talking low.

He inhaled.

Lunged left. But it was too late.

A trap triggered. Steel snapped from the floor like coiled vipers. One wire looped his ankle. Another lashed his ribs. His back hit the ground. The pain bloomed late.

The wires were colour-coded. Red for danger. Green for bypass.

He had turned toward green.

The wrong way.

In the war room, alarms screamed.

“He didn’t dodge the red wire.” Dongyuan said.

“He couldn’t see it.” Chi Cheng muttered, already reaching for the mic.  “Wei. Listen. Back left. Shoulder down. Crawl counterclockwise.” Tone clipped but even.

On screen, Mai Yu rolled. Groaned. Moved.

Darkness bloomed on his ribs.

Dongyuan swore. “We need a medic.”

“No time.” Lanzhu snapped. “Mai 9’s nearby.”

In the lower corridors, a smaller figure sprinted down the incline like gravity did not apply, hacking coordinates into a wrist unit.

“Copying distress beacon,” Mai Duobing said brightly. “I’m on it.”

“You’re closest. Take west shaft. Avoid thermal grid.”

“I brought cupcakes!” Duobing added cheerfully.

Xiao Se muttered, “This child is going to get us all killed.”

But Mai Duobing moved with uncanny precision. He had mapped the grid. He’d rerouted the ventilation. And now, as he dropped into the side corridor, he murmured:

“Trap logic, series of five. Reset on loop. Third arc fails the reset, those who rush will not arrive. Time to exploit.”

[Referring to the proverb "欲速则不达" - Haste makes waste.]

He moved with the calculation of a surgeon. Traps missed him. Lights flickered past. When he reached Mai Yu, the older cousin was half-slumped, braced against a wall, breathing ragged.

“Hi Yu-ge!” Duobing beamed. “I brought you a cupcake. But I sat on it.”

Mai Yu gave him a flat look, bordering on homicide. “I’m bleeding out.”

“Yes, and I have gauze.” Duobing knelt, applied pressure with frightening expertise that would have made his husband proud. “Also three painkillers, a glucose tab, and an exact replica of Xiao Se’s signature in case we need to forge an evacuation.”

Mai Yu blinked. “How did you get that?”

“I watched him sign his fan mail. Obviously.”

He hoisted Mai Yu upright. “Come on, ge. Let’s limp out with dignity.”

The war room let out a collective breath.

Lanzhu pressed fingers to his temple. “Remind me never to underestimate the youngest again.”

Chi Cheng didn’t speak. But his gaze hadn’t left the screen since the bleeding began.

They didn’t make it far before the corridor stuttered. A pressure tremor rippled through the sand, subtle but deliberate. Duobing halted mid-step, arm tightening around Mai Yu’s ribs to steady him.

“Wait.” he said, eyes scanning the walls. “Glyph alignment just shifted.”

Inside the war room, Xiao Se's fingers flicked across the interface. Symbols realigned on-screen.

“They rerouted the perimeter.” Dongyuan said. “Someone’s trying to redirect them.”

“Probably toward the vault,” Lanzhu muttered. “Looks like a funnel.”

“Not a funnel.” Duobing corrected over comms. “A loop. Whoever set this wants us circling the drain.”

Mai Yu’s breath was shallow. He leaned on Duobing, sweat tracking down his temple. “We don’t have time for puzzles.”

“We always have time for puzzles.” Duobing replied brightly, then tilted his head. “Here. This wall. Look closely.”

He pressed his palm to a section where the tiling was uneven. A faint click answered.

“Vault access uses mirrored logic,” The young Mai explained, already guiding Mai Yu sideways. “They thought we’d look for the front seal. But the real entry’s hidden: civilian plumbing schematics, pre-collapse. They reworked the utilities into trap arrays.”

“How do you know that?” Mai Yu asked.

“I read the blueprints. While you were bleeding. Houses of gold, A-Yu.”

[Referring to the proverb "书中自有黄金屋" – In books, there are houses of gold.]

The vault’s inner seal groaned open with a hiss of steam and ozone.

Inside, the chamber was spartan, reinforced walls, hexagonal floor plates, a magnetic core in the centre. Embedded deep within the stabiliser, a prism-shaped box pulsed in low amber light.

The black box.

"One more minute." Duobing murmured. "Don’t let me get shot."

The youngest cracked his knuckles. “Magnetic lock, triple-echo ward, time-delay curse. Paranoid, delightful.”

“You scare me.” Mai Yu muttered.

Duobing smile was sweet as if there was a dagger behind it, overriding the sequence with a code he wasn’t supposed to know.

“I scare everyone. But I read through liu-ge (Mai Qing)’s notes.”

The moment the box unlatched, the ground trembled.

Back in the war room, the satellite feed cracked.

“Ground shift detected.” Dongyuan said sharply.

“Not natural.” Lanzhu added. “That’s arcane interference.”

Xiao Se’s gaze narrowed. “Mai Qing’s leyline stabiliser just dipped. Only slightly.”

“Which means something’s trying to punch through it.” Dongyuan finished grimly.

On-screen, dust began to fall in slow spirals from the vault’s ceiling. In the war room, Dongyuan’s voice darkened.

“Heat spike. Multiple hostiles converging.”

“We can’t reach them in time,” Xiao Se muttered. “Tunnel’s sealed.”

“They’ll be overrun.” Lanzhu said.

Chi Cheng clenched the console. “Then what…”

“What’s Wang Ye doing?” Lanzhu asked.

“Positioning.” Dongyuan murmured. “He’s going into the tiger’s den.”

[Referring to the proverb “不入虎穴，焉得虎子” – You must enter the tiger’s den to catch his cubs.]

Back in the vault beneath Mai Qing’s outpost, Mai Yu stepped in front of Mai Duobing without hesitation, one arm braced to shield, the other drawing his blade with the precision of a man already resigned.

“Give me the box, Xiaobao.” he said hoarsely. “You run.”

The younger blinked once. Then smiled.

“Option three.”

And the world shivered.

Far across the satellite uplinks, every screen on the Obsidian base war table faltered. Glyphs scrambled, realigned. The Qimen compass rotated.

It began with a sound.

Chimes, not synthetic but real. Ancient brass notes rung from some hidden quadrant of the world. They were deep-throated, discordant, and perfectly clear. Not played, but resonated. Like an answer to a cosmic call.

Mai Yu’s breath caught. He could feel it. Not magic in the theatrical sense, but presence. As if space itself had been peeled back to reveal an older rulebook underneath. One he was never meant to read. His skin prickled. His lungs filled too fast, as if the oxygen itself had learned a different rhythm.

His cousin’s power, Mai Qing’s power, had unfurled across the leyline grid like a net made of calligraphy and light. It didn’t ask for permission. It simply was.

To the south, the fire of Lí Huǒ (离火) flared – explosive and consuming, igniting corridor seams in a vertical blaze. Flame coiled into glyphs, etching themselves into metal with the weight of myth. Mai Qing’s next call on Kūn (坤) had slabs of stone driving upward in a tidal wall, shifting the very architecture into a new defensive geometry. Then came Kǎn (坎) – water, spectral and sharp, not gentle but weaponised. A thousand pressurised bursts cannoned through the air, tracing ward lines in one smooth sweep.

Mai Yu staggered back as the storm crescendoed.

And then, silence.

No static. No rumble. Not even breath.

Just a single, deliberate pulse.

From the western edge of the array, a ripple tore through the vault’s projection, like silk sliced by a blade.

A figure stepped forward through the tear.

Lean, unassuming, robed in cheap navy linen faded by sun and wear. No weapon adorned him; no glyph glowed at his back. Yet each step he took in his worn shifang shoes fell in perfect accord with something far older than maps, older than language – something buried in the marrow of the cosmos.

Wang Ye.

He did not enter the Qimen formation.

He was the array.

Not its master. Not its servant.

Its pivot. Its fulcrum.

Behind him, the Qimen compass spiralled – not as a diagram of paths and tactics, but as a living mandala of causality. Past nestled beside present. Probability collapsed into action. Space bowed its head to a deeper principle: inevitability.

The sacred Fenghou Qimen (风后奇门). The divine root from which all modern techniques merely borrowed light.

Wang Ye was not traversing space.

He was rewriting it.

Repositioning fortune. Threading cause through consequence. And the world obeyed.

Back in the war room, Chi Cheng’s breath stuttered. The grid before him twisted, not with confusion, but with compliance. Not data, but design.

In the centre of that shifting truth, Wang Ye extended one hand.

And reality unfolded.

A portal bloomed. Inside the collapsing vault, a rift cracked open before the two youngest Mais.

Space turned inside out. The air bowed. Glyphs burst outward in radiant arcs, pulsing like breath through bone.

Mai Yu blinked against the light.

Then he heard his cousin-in-law voice – measured, solemn, striking with the weight of old temples and older laws.

“Two souls, one breath. Come forth.”
[èr rén tóng qì, gòng chū/ 二人同气，共出。]

“The clouds have parted,” Wang Ye said softly, “and the moon has not forgotten its own.”

[Referring to the proverb  “守得云开见月明” –  To watch till the clouds part and see the moon's brightness]

The Taoist stepped into the fold.

And vanished.

With him, Mai 8 and Mai 9.

The vault imploded behind them.

They rematerialised in the reserve quadrant of Obsidian base.

The black box hit the ground. Duobing collapsed beside it. Mai Yu followed, gasping.

In the war room, silence rippled.

Then Xiao Se reached for the kettle. “Tea?”

Lanzhu sat down. “Yes. And perhaps a nap.”

Chi Cheng, still pale, walked to Mai Yu’s side. He didn’t speak. He simply knelt and pressed a hand to his forehead. His other hand held the gauze Mai Duobing had forgotten to use.

Mai Yu, still half-faint, whispered, “You remembered the beads.”

Chi Cheng nodded.

“Left hand red,” he said. “Right hand green.”

Mai Yu let his eyes fall closed. “I hate you.”

“I know.”

Later, in the quiet aftermath, when Mai Yu had been dragged off by medics and the youngest Mai was busy recounting every move like it was a circus act, Chi Cheng lingered at the doorway to the gymnasium, watching a blur of motion through the glass.

Mai Chunshui was training. His form was loose but lethal, silk sleeves floating like shadows as he moved through sword drills.

Chi Cheng waited until the older cousin paused, wiping a wrist against his jaw.
“I want you to train me.” Chi Cheng said.

Mai 2’s brows lifted, but he didn’t scoff. “You?”
“Yes.”

“Why?”

Chi Cheng’s voice was steady.

“Because I stood on safe ground while the one I love bled alone, and I could offer nothing but speech. Even a master carpenter cannot build without tools.”

Chunshui studied him, eyes dark and unreadable. Then, with a nod like the swing of a blade:
“Come back tomorrow. Five a.m. Don’t dress pretty.”

Chapter Text

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”

Stephen King,  Different Seasons

Dawn had not yet broken when Chi Cheng stood alone on the training deck, breath pluming in the cold, metallic air. The war room still slept. Only the soft churn of the ventilation fans reminded him that the base was, in fact, a machine – that beneath its quiet walls, a thousand unseen cogs turned with ruthless precision.

He was dressed simply: loose black cotton, sleeves pushed to the forearms, feet bare against the padded floor. His hands bore no rings, no calluses, yet there was something in his stance – a slowness to his breath, a readiness in his spine – that marked him no stranger to violence.

Mai Chunshui arrived precisely at five.

He paused. And Chi Cheng received an incredulous look over from the second oldest Mai.

“What are you wearing?”

“Black comfortable clothes, you said to dress not pretty.” Chi Cheng replied. He was long-limbed and lean, the fabric too tight across his hips, too short at the ankle. A compromise between apathy and stubbornness.

Chunshui stared. “Those pants are offensive. Black pants. How do you make black look bad?”

The Beijing native’s voice remained neutral. “Weiwei bought them. On sale.”

A slow sigh. “Whipped by a man who dresses like a children’s cartoon. You look like a retired fishmonger.”

“Camouflage.” Chi Cheng said evenly. “Old uncles don’t get shot first.”

Chunshui grunted. Then tossed a wooden blade onto the mat. It skidded, slow and deliberate, coming to rest at Chi’s feet like a drawn line in the sand.

“Pick it up.”

Chi obeyed.

The older man rolled his shoulders back, loose robes rustling faintly. “I don’t train amateurs,” he said. “But I make exceptions for those who bleed for family.”

Chi nodded once. “I’m not asking for mercy.”

“You won’t get any.”

And then, they began.

The first clash was exploratory. Chunshui’s blade moved like wind cutting stone – fluid, circular, deceptively light. Chi Cheng blocked it with both arms, absorbed the weight, then pivoted, low, with a movement so sudden and brutal it nearly caught Chunshui’s hip.

“Ah,” the elder said, stepping back. “Not just a bodyguard.”

Chi said nothing. His eyes were sharp, calculating. Not like a soldier trained in lines. Like a man who had learned violence from the soft cruelties of people, not war. There was restraint in him. Coiled. Patient.

They circled.

Steel whispered as wood met wood. Chi ducked a wide arc, twisted on his heel, and lunged, turning his blade sideways in a disarming grip.

Chunshui blocked with ease but narrowed his eyes. “You drive.”

Chi gave a sharp exhale, halfway between amusement and breath control. “Raced.”

The older man barked a short laugh. “Manual?”

“Six-speed. Clutch tuned. Triple clutch drop on S-curves.”

Chunshui barked a laugh. “Show-off.”

Chi Cheng smirked.

The second round came without warning.

Chunshui struck low, then high, then twisted and faked a feint. Chi Cheng parried the first, dodged the second, but took the third across his ribs with a grunt. He staggered, not from pain, but from anger – at himself.

“Balance.” Chunshui snapped. “You’re thinking too much. Your body already knows the answer. Let it speak.”

This time, Chi Cheng came at Chunshui like a tide breaking through stone – relentless, and all-consuming. No theatre, just clean, mechanical force.

Wood cracked against wood. A flurry of motion. Then a missed beat. The next strike caught Chi Cheng on the shoulder - hard. His arm dropped, numb.

Chunshui didn’t look smug. Just satisfied. “Soldiers don’t hate deceit, 8-prime. There’s always someone older, dirtier, and more disappointed in you than your own dad.”

[Referring to the proverb “兵不厌诈”- Soldiers don't hate deceit; and also the mathematical concept of derivatives]

Chi grunted, rolling his shoulder. “No daddy issues. Already sorted. Paid him off.”

And they continued.

Chi Cheng ducked the training sword aimed for his ribs, barely evading the arc of Mai Chunshui’s swing. It whistled through the air and struck the padded floor with a dull thud. “Fucking hell.” Chi Cheng exhaled. “That was my spleen.”

“Then your spleen needed a lesson.” Chunshui said, tossing the bokken from one hand to the other, spinning it lazily like a disenchanted god of war. “You’re lucky I like you. If I didn’t, I’d have used the steel one.”

Chi wiped his brow, jaw tight. He was covered in sweat, shirt sticking to him like regret. “Thought you weren’t allowed to kill civilians.”

“I’m not.” Chunshui said with a wink. “But they say rules are made for sensible people. You don’t seem particularly burdened by sense.”

By the time the first light filtered through the frost-lined vents, Chi Cheng was soaked through. His breath came sharp. His arm trembled. But he didn’t fall behind. Didn’t ask for pause.

Strike. Parry. Lunge. Return.

No words.

Just motion.

On the mezzanine, Mai Yuanzhou arrived like a shift in weather. He said nothing. Just observing, arms crossed, gaze unreadable. He descended the stairs only when the silence permitted.

He looked Chi Cheng over once. Then: “What are those pants?” The oldest Mai then tossed Chi Cheng a towel. “Rest. Then we’ll drive.”

Chi arched a brow. “Drive?”

“You’re good with vehicles. The Beijing files mention a Lotus Exige. Embassy roads. Three in the morning.”

Chi tried not to smile. “That was one time. And I won.”

“Good.” Mai Yuanzhou said. “You’ll be assisting with vehicle manoeuvres tomorrow. Surveillance, evasive loops. No one here’s immune to fieldwork, not even you.”

As they exited, Mai Chunshui lingered a moment. Watching the uninvited Beijing guest’s stride – slightly uneven but holding. The way he rotated his shoulder, subtly testing the bruised joint without complaint. The square set of his spine.

“He’s not hopeless, Zhou-ge.” Chunshui murmured, flicking a glance sideways. “Still bleeding sincerity like a nosebleed, but he’s got bite.”

Mai Yuanzhou did not turn. “No. But he’s brittle.”

“Porcelain cuts, too.”

Yuanzhou let out a quiet breath. “And it breaks.”

There was a pause – drawn long with history. The kind of silence only shared by men who had buried too many comrades and too few ghosts.

Yuanzhou’s voice dropped, worn at the edges. “I trained every single one of them. Yu Shisan, Sun Lang, Qian Zhao … and even Yuan Lu.” A twitch at his temple, a swallowed breath.

Chunshui didn’t interrupt.

“I trained my Liudao members.” The elest Mai continued. “Not to be the strongest. But to be clever. To know when to run and when to listen. I told them intelligence would keep them alive.”

A beat.

“I was wrong.”

Chunshui’s tone softened, not gentle, but less acerbic. “They weren’t stupid.”

“No. They were young.”

A silence stretched.

“So,” Chunshui said finally, tone folding back into dry assessment, “you’re saying we keep the porcelain.”

The leader’s lips moved, not quite a smile. “So long as it learns how to cut without shattering.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

Mai Yuanzhou met his cousin’s gaze at last. There was no anger in his face. Just the bone-deep fatigue of men who outlasted the best ones.

“Then we clean up the shards. Like always.”

They walked on. Two men carved hollow by loss, still learning to wield grief like a blade. Their footsteps muffled by the corridor’s padding.

The lights in the medical wing had that sterile, headache-white hue that made everything look worse than it was.

Mai Yu had refused to stay overnight.

By sheer bureaucratic violence, Xiao Se had wrangled a three-hour observation window. But by nightfall, the room was empty – except for Mai Yu, upright in one of the chairs, peeling the bandage from his side with surgical precision and the obstinacy of a man who thought dying was less embarrassing than resting.

Chi Cheng stood in the doorway.

He did not knock.

“You’re not supposed to be out of bed, Wei.” he said evenly.

Mai Yu didn’t look up. “And you’re not supposed to be in sick bay.”

“Well, I know I should sleep in your bed every night.”

Mai Yu moved to stand in front of the mirror in the bunk quarters, brushing his teeth in absolute silence. He was dressed in light pink pajamas, the sort with a duck print. Hideous by all conventional standards. A small concession to comfort. Or rebellion.

Chi Cheng walked closer to his lover, face unreadable.

“Those are pink.” he said at last.

“I know.” Mai Yu replied.

“They don’t match your eyes.”

Mai Yu rinsed and spat. “I wouldn’t know.”

Silence, then:

“I meant... they’re atrocious, Weiwei. Even for your standards.”

“You’re free to leave.”

“No, but I will get those off you in a minute, baby”.

But Chi Cheng didn’t actually move after the threat. Not yet. He just stood there, gaze heavy. “You almost died out there.” he said quietly.

Mai Yu turned back toward the mirror, his eyes staring at Chi Cheng’s. “I didn’t.”

“You couldn’t see the cistern panel.”

“No.”

“You followed the wrong trail.”

“I survived.”

Chi Cheng took another step. His hand twitched at his side, like it wanted to reach out but didn’t trust the moment yet.

“And I couldn’t help.” His voice was calm, but only because he had used up all his other tones in the hours prior. “All I had were words. And you were slipping.”

He crossed the space between them in three slow steps. Close, but not touching.

“I’m not asking for what we had.” he said.

“No?” Mai Yu’s voice had that old scoff curled at the end of it, brittle and defensive. “Then what are you asking for?”

“For you to stop pretending that I don’t know you, Da Bao.” The Beijing native said. “That I haven’t memorised every flick of your mouth when you lie. Every hitch in your breath when you’re about to crack.”

Mai Yu blinked.

“Chi Cheng,” he said, his voice unguarded, “I am your Da Bao, and you are my Chi-ge. Yes, you are a protected Beijing playboy, but you also are home to me. You stayed – for me. For my mother. Your voice quiets the storm in my chest, laogong. The Mais can walk with me, train me – but none of them can calm me like you do. I don’t need perfection. I need you.”

There was a long silence. Then:

“I saw your flower tribute at my mother’s grave.” Mai Yu said softly.

Chi Cheng froze.

All my life, I cry only for those I love.
No green grass can bury my mother’s soul.
From your son, Chi Cheng.

Chi didn’t speak for a long moment. When he did, his voice was low. Flat with effort.

“I didn’t go on the day. Parked near the alley and watched from the car.” He exhaled like it hurt.

“The funeral procession moved so slowly. Like it didn’t want to leave her behind, Da Bao. The whole road seemed to mourn with her. And I…” His words faltered. “I just sat there. I couldn’t breathe. Every turn of the hearse felt like another knife in the ribs.”

Grief did not shout in that room.

It sat between them like a third body.

Uninvited, unrelenting. The kind that doesn’t knock, just dissolves the walls around you.

Mai Yu turned. And for a moment, he looked exactly like the boy his mother had raised.

His face changed – not with shock, but surrender.

Then the tears began, the way a dam does when it cannot hold.

No sound. Just water.

Mai Yu was crying. Wu Suowei was crying.

Tears slid from his lashes, over the moles on his face, down the curve of his nose. One by one, they dropped.
And with each drop, a memory shattered open.
Her soup. Her worn hemline. Her soft reprimands. Her hands that stitched more than fabric – stitched him whole.

The way she called him “Da Qiong” like it meant the world.

Chi Cheng leaped forward and then gripped the back of Mai Yu’s neck.

Hard.

He tilted Mai Yu’s head upward, the way a man desperate to stop bleeding might press a wound shut with his bare hands.

“Don’t cry, Wu Suowei.” Chi whispered, furious and broken. “Don’t you dare…”

Mai Yu’s tears fell faster.

The words, the gestures.

None of it stopped the grief.

Mai Yu cried like the world had finally given him permission. Like grief was a house that had finally let him in.

A full wail, sharp and helpless, as if the very marrow of him had snapped.

And Chi Cheng’s composure shattered as the love of his life crumbled like salt beneath rain. He pulled his Da Bao in, held him like a man bracing against a storm. Arms locked, cheek to temple.

“Baobei, don’t cry. Chi-ge is here.” he whispered, over and over, a mantra stitched from bone and regret.

He held him through the wave. Through the ache that never seals. Through the limp that never quite lets you dance the same.

The world blurred.

Time receded.

There was only this: salt, skin, silence. And the ache of two people trying not to drown in each other.

Eventually, the sobs dulled into tremors. Mai Yu’s face pressed into Chi Cheng’s shoulder, his breath hot and uneven. Chi Cheng reached up to brush away a tear – but his own fingers were wet too.

“You know your er-ge [2^nd brother] threw shade at my pants today. The ones you brought me.” He held onto his lover, slightly scratching his own nose against Mai Yu’s.

Mai Yu sniffled. “Ha. He shouldn’t talk. Have you seen him peacocking in his pink monstrosity?”

“Tomorrow. Don’t forget your training,” Mai Yu murmured, voice hoarse.

Chi Cheng paused. A sly smile curved his lips.
“Does that mean you’ll be watching?”

Mai Yu didn’t answer.

Chi kissed his temple and, with slow care, scooped him up. Carried him to bed.

They fell asleep like that – limbs tangled, breath easing.

And Mai Yu laughed.

Quiet. Bitter. Real.

For the first time since the funeral.

I'll be your safe, I'll be your only way
And when you break, I'll be your warm embrace
And I'll be your bed so you can lay your head
I'll be that place, you hide all your mistake.

[Jess Glynne, Enough]

Beneath the charred bones of Mai Qing’s former base, Mai Huayong moved like silk through soot. His figure was slender, almost ethereal, but never frail. There was a grace to the way he stepped over shattered tile and arcane debris – too fluid to be human, too measured to be careless. His skin was ghost-pale, untouched by sun or sin, like snow fallen in a courtyard no one dared to cross. But it was his eyes that arrested: bottomless black, framed by lashes so long they brushed the rims of his mask. At first glance, they seemed dreamy – soft, even indulgent. But look again, and they were glass. Still, gleaming, and cold, like the surface of a well poisoned long ago and sealed with silence.

His coat was a tailored shadow. Gloves immaculate. The soles of his boots traced deliberate lines between shattered glyphs and leyline fractures still faintly pulsing with the afterburn of sorcery. Around him, the ghost of Qimen sorcery lingered like smoke – scorched geometry and warped sigils carved across the floor in sacred disarray.

His voice crackled over comms, honeyed and amused.

“Fenghou Qimen” he said. “Divine-tier. And visible.”

Back in the Obsidian war room, Mai Yuanzhou stood alone, arms folded, gaze trained on the silent feed. He was the only handler trusted to manage Huayong when fieldwork was necessary. Not for lack of skill among the others, but because the fifth Mai was, in their words, a charming psycho. Too manipulative to be trusted unsupervised. Too clever to be predictable. And far too willing to enjoy himself in the ruins of a cleanup.

The Mai leader’s tone was calm, neutral. “Remove all traces. No signature.”

The assignment was clear: clean up the remains of Wang Ye’s spatial manipulation before any foreign sects detected what the Mais had used. Fenghou Qimen was something no mortal lineage should possess.

“No improvisation.” Yuanzhou warned.

“Where’s the fun in that?” came Huayong’s immediate reply, touched with theatrical whine. He was smiling. You could hear it.

“No self-assignments.” The oldest Mai reiterated.

“Ruin all my hobbies, why don’t you.”

Even through static, Huayong was unsettling. He never fidgeted. Never blinked too quickly. Never adjusted his collar or glanced away from the camera. Stillness, for him, was not passivity but discipline – an eerie control honed to precision. Every movement was curated, like a dance performed on a razor’s edge. And yet, that elegance masked something reptilian beneath. He was too graceful to be trusted. Too beautiful to be safe.

“Report.” Yuanzhou said, voice sharp now.

Huayong sighed, mock-offended. “Your baby brother tore open causality like wet paper. Breadcrumbs everywhere. I expected better.”

“They’re your brothers too, didi. A Qing and Wang Ye.”

“They’re messy.”

Mai Yuanzhou’s tone didn’t shift. “Next time, fewer corpses posed like interpretive sculpture please. This one looks like he died mid-sneeze.”

“He was mid-scream.” Huayong replied, pleased. “I interrupted.”

He stood then, coat settling around him like ink dispersing in water.

“Done. Threads cut. Perception barriers in place. Anyone sniffing will find echoes. No substance.”

“Good.” Yuanzhou’s voice softened by a hair. Then came the final note, almost conversational: “Tell your Sheng baobei I said hello.”

There was a pause.

Huayong didn’t respond. His eyes darkened, but his lips parted slightly, as if preparing a smile that never came.

Then the comms went silent.

Alone in the ruin, Huayong did not move for a long time. Ash settled at his boots. Wind stirred the edges of a broken glyph. He tilted his head – just a fraction – as if picturing someone standing behind him. Someone taller, sun-warmed, blunt-fingered and clever-mouthed. A certain handsome CEO who kissed him like a threat and once said, Don’t lie if you can kill instead.

Huayong missed him.

Not in the ordinary sense. In the way fire misses oxygen.

There were no medals. No diary entries or souvenirs.

Just silence. Competence.

And exits clean enough to be mistaken for never having happened.

Chapter Text

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.” – Bernard M. Baruch

It had been a month since the clean-up at Mai Qing’s old cell. The desert dust was an old rumour now; Beijing’s winter air had a different bite – coal, iron, the faint chemical tang of overworked radiators. Roads gleamed black under a low, pewter sky. Neon bled across wet tarmac. In place of sandstone ravines and burning ley-lines stood ring roads, viaducts, and the particular chaos of capital traffic: a million small aggressions masquerading as courtesy.

The tea shop was one of those places in Beijing that pretended not to be old until you looked up and saw the beams. Half a dozen tea canisters lined the wall in neat soldier’s ranks; the light was filtered through a gauze curtain that had not been washed since before the last change of mayor. Outside, a narrow hutong exhaled the smell of sesame oil and dust.

Guo Chengyu sat with his back to the door, posture loose yet calculated, like a man who just happened to take the most defensible seat in the room. Chi Cheng dropped into the opposite chair without preamble.

“You’re tanned, Chizi.” Guo Chengyu observed, not looking away from the teapot as he poured.
“You’re pale, Guozi.” Chi Cheng replied.

“That’s called staying out of trouble.” Guo’s eyes flickered. “You’ve been in it.”

Chi Cheng didn’t answer. The silence was not unfriendly; they had been friends long enough to leave gaps.

“You’ve been driving more.” Chengyu said, watching the steam fade.

Chi Cheng lifted an eyebrow. “You are tailing me now?”

“Only when it’s educational. And only in Beijing. Don’t flatter yourself.” Chengyu’s mouth curved. “You take corners cleaner than you used to. That’s not just practice. That’s someone knocking the bad habits out of you.”

Chi’s fingers drummed once on the table, a rhythm too sharp for idleness.

“And here’s the thing.” Guo continued. “I know that ‘someone’ isn’t me. And it isn’t your father.” His eyes glittered. “So that leaves… interesting possibilities.”

“You don’t want to know.” Chi said.

“Oh, I already know enough to stay alive.” Guo’s voice was mild. “Which is why I don’t want the rest. Knowledge is like liquor – you think you can hold it, then it spills somewhere you didn’t mean it to.”

[Referring to the proverb "者不言, 言者不知" – Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know.]

He slid a cup across the table. “Your father’s well,” he added, as if noting the day’s weather.

Chi’s mouth curved faintly. “You see him more than I do.”

“That’s what godsons are for.” The warmth under the quip was unfeigned. “He’s still the same – a man who could out-stare a statue, but will still pour your tea before his own.”

Chi’s jaw shifted. “He means well.”

The words stayed between them, heavy but not hopeless. Outside, the hutong swallowed the sound of a passing tricycle, and the light through the gauze curtain shifted as the sun moved on. The tea had cooled, which was usually when Guo Chengyu started circling the real subject. He had that habit: let the surface conversation run thin until the other man was ready to grab for the next thread – and then make sure it was the thread he wanted.

Guo nodded once. “He does. So does your mother. They both love you, more than they know how to say. But they were raised in a world where happiness meant something… tidy. A life without whispers at the dinner table. They think they’re protecting you.” His voice softened. “In their own way, they are.”

Chi said nothing. The clink of porcelain felt too loud.

“And Suowei?” Chengyu asked, without the slightest change in tone, as if he were inquiring after the weather again.

Chi’s eyes flickered. “Alive.” This time it was not the flat report it had been; it carried weighted adoration, as though the word itself was an anchor.

Guo Chengyu leaned back. “Then I’ll tell you something you already know, Chi Cheng. Your parents will need time. They might never say the right words. They might even say the wrong ones. But they will watch, and they will measure. And if they see him at your side when you’re steady – not reckless, not trying to bleed for the sake of it – they might decide he belongs there.”

Chi Cheng’s gaze was steady. “And if they don’t?”

“Then it changes nothing,” Chengyu said simply. “Because you’ve already decided they don’t get the final say.”

Chi Cheng smiled faintly, though it was more a baring of teeth. “That’s why I keep you around. To state the obvious.”

“Someone has to. And someone has to remind you that the next time they come for him…” Guo Chengyu’s gaze was sharp now “…you’d better be faster.”

Chi Cheng’s expression did not shift, but the weight in his eyes deepened.

“I’m not your keeper. But I see the shape of things when you’re too close to them. This isn’t just about you two walking into a room together, Chizi.” Guo said. “It’s about what happens when that room has your family in it, and half of Beijing watching through the keyhole. If you’re going to stand there, do it in a way that leaves them nothing to whisper about except how untouchable you both looked.”

There was a pause, the sort that carried both warning and benediction.

Guo’s smile returned, faint but unyielding. “Drink your tea, Chizi. And remember, if you get him hurt, I will make sure that even as your godfather’s son, you’ll wish I was a stranger. In the end, I am Xiaoshuai’s partner and your beloved Suowei’s friend.”

They left the tea shop together, stepping into the narrow artery of the hutong where the air was heavy with the scent of sesame oil and damp stone. Guo Chengyu walked with his hands in his coat pockets, unhurried, as if their destination mattered less than the time it took to get there. Chi Cheng kept his stride matched, though his eyes scanned the cross-alleys the way a soldier might watch tree lines.

“You’re restless.” Guo observed.

“You’re nosy.” Chi replied.

“That’s called knowing when the ground is shifting.” Guo glanced at him sidelong.  “You’ve been different since you came back from Urumqi. Not calmer – just more certain. And Suowei… he’s in the centre of that certainty.”

They stopped at the mouth of the next hutong. The light was thinning further, the first hints of evening pushing shadows into the corners.

“Whatever’s coming,” Chengyu said, “it’s going to ask you to choose between how your parents raised you and the life you’re already building with him. You’d better be ready.”

Chi Cheng’s eyes narrowed slightly, not in offence but in thought.

Guo smiled faintly, as if satisfied with the tension he’d planted. “I’ll see you at the other end of this, Chizi. Just try not to make me say ‘I told you so.’” He turned down the side street without waiting for an answer, his figure blending quickly into the slow tide of pedestrians.

Chi Cheng stood a moment longer, the wind tugging at the edge of his collar. Somewhere in the city, his Weiwei was moving – perhaps across a darkened street, perhaps inside their own Beijing apartment – and that quiet pull in his chest urged him forward. He started walking.

By the time Chi Cheng reached the garage ramp beneath the Obsidian’s Beijing front, dusk had pulled the colour from the streets. The sky was flat and silver, the kind of light that made even glass towers look carved from old jade. This was the heart of Jingpai – orderly, grand, and unhurried in its convictions. Beijing forgave neither slouching nor asymmetry; its bones were still set by the private geometry of the old Siheyuan. Even the traffic flowed along invisible axes, as if some ancient hand still pressed the city into shape.

[Referring to Bejing faction 京派 and Beijing courtyard houses 四合院]

The sedan waited where Mai Chunshui had left it – low, dark, and tuned for quick work. Chi Cheng slid into the driver’s seat, adjusted the mirrors, and let the leather wheel settle under his palms. The hum in his chest was not excitement but a kind of taut readiness, like the moment before a sparring partner moved. In Urumqi, roads had been wide, dry, and edged by mountains. Here, Beijing compressed everything: cars nosed inches from each other, scooters brushed your side mirrors, pedestrians spilled into the road like they owned it. The city had its own rhythm – stop, surge, squeeze – and Chi Cheng had been born knowing to ride it.

Over the comms, Ruan Lanzhu finished a yawn, , a feline sound. “Left in two hundred metres. Don’t wake the civilians. Or me, Chi didi.”

“Copy. And you are younger than me.” Chi Cheng murmured, shoulders square, breath level. Hands at nine and three. The weeks had slapped polish over instinct. Mai Chunshui’s drills had burned out his bad habits – the gratuitous flick, the showy downshift. Now his movements were small and mean, like a knife hidden under a napkin.

The job was simple, on paper: run a decoy drive for a courier carrying a wafer case, shake the tail by the third district loop, drop the car two hutongs from the extraction point. Intelligence over muscle – The eldest Mai’s domain.

“Follow the rules, Chi Cheng. They build shapes and good habits.” – Mai Yuanzhou’s mantra to the Beijing native as spare and precise as calligraphy.

[Referring to the proverb “无规矩不成方圆” – Without rules, nothing holds shape]

He pulled out into Jianguo Road’s late-afternoon stream, letting the tail think it had a steady view. A battered Number 728 bus lumbered past, cutting their line of sight. Chi Cheng eased behind a sedan. The sedan blinked right, then didn’t turn. Beijing in winter and its choking greyness. Everyone indicating for God.

“Neat.” Ruan Lanzhu said. “You’re almost employable.”

“High praise from you, Lipstick.” Chi Cheng replied, dry.

The tail was competent but not Obsidian-trained. At a fork, they hesitated. Chi took the right without signalling, a local’s shortcut.

His comm clicked. “Yellow ahead.” Lanzhu’s voice murmured.

The light changed. Chi Cheng rolled through without a break in speed. In Urumqi, amber meant hurry. In Beijing, it was a moment to think.

“Yellow means contemplative. Very Beijing.” Lanzhu remarked, approving.

“I’m showing you my culture.”

Another block. A legal U-turn where no sane driver bothered. The car’s weight rolled into his hips, clean, controlled. For a moment, he could almost hear Chunshui’s voice in his ear - hips, not hands; centre, not edges. It worked with a blade, and it worked on the capital’s roads, where symmetry was the invisible architecture behind every move.

The tail didn’t take the turn.

At the extraction point, the courier slipped into a noodle shop that prided itself on serving in thirty seconds or less – Haipai speed in a Jingpai frame. Tonight, the shutters were lowered halfway, the front locked for a “private event.” Chi Cheng waited, engine idle, watching a cat stretch across the sun-bleached step.

[Referring to Bejing faction 京派 and Shanghai faction海派]

When the courier reappeared, lighter by one wafer case, Chi Cheng pulled away without hurry. Xiao Se’s voice came through, mild as tea steam.

“That was clean, Chi didi.”

“Almost.” From Mai 4’s joy-of-life. “He flinched at the van.”

“Next time I’ll invite it to dinner. And once again, both of you are younger than me.” Chi said lightly, though the skin between his shoulders was still tight. His palms were damp. The training had held. The old flash – watch me – had stayed locked where it belonged.

A third voice came through the comms. Casual as a bar tab. Typical Mai Chunshui.

“Shoulders. You’re carrying them like guilt.”

“Thought that was your aesthetic.”

“Mine’s jaded grace, with a hint of alcohol.” The second Mai voice had a half-grinned mixed in. “Yours could be … ‘surprisingly functional’.”

“I am green to your blue.” Chi shot back with a straight face.

[Referring to the proverb “青出于蓝而胜于蓝” - Green is from blue, and better than blue.]

The Mai snorted. “Try not to surpass me before lunch. It’s tacky.”

Back at the Beijing base, Mai Yuanzhou stood waiting, precise as a palace eave, his gaze moving from the sedan to Chi Cheng’s shoulders before sliding away.

“You didn’t improvise. I’m impressed.”

“Deeply. Give me more compliments, Zhou-ge.” Chi Cheng replied.

“Don’t get used to it.” The leader’s voice carried the same weight as the city around them.

“Again in two days. Shorter route, tighter tail. Bring a hat. Cameras love hair.”

Almost a smile from the Mai. Almost a salute from the Chi. Almost.

Still, as he hung up the keys, he thought of Guo Chengyu’s words. The next time they come for him… you’d better be faster.

The thought didn’t unsettle him. It anchored him.

Their apartment was quiet when he keyed in. Beijing quiet – which meant you could still hear the hum of the ring road pressing faintly through double glazing, a mechanical tide against glass.

Mai Yu was on the sofa, one knee drawn up, a stack of worn paper maps spread like a fan across the low table. A black pen balanced between his teeth, his head bent in a half-frown as he marked a route. Beside them sat a chipped porcelain teacup, steam long gone, the faint fragrance of second-brew Tieguanyin clinging to the air. He had clearly poured it twice over the same leaves; that was his way. Around him, the signs were small but telling. Threadbare cushion covers neatly mended, a lamp switch re-taped rather than replaced, an old fountain pen whose gold nib had been polished to mirror brightness.

He was in the soft grey pyjamas Chi Cheng had bought him, white socks loose at the ankle. And his legs - slender, pale, the muscle fine and clean as calligraphy strokes- were bare from mid-thigh down. They were, Chi Cheng thought with treacherous honesty, more beautiful than supermodels'. Two tiny moles sat at the centre of both cheeks, perfectly balanced like deliberate brushstrokes. Another, darker one rested at the tail of his right eye, a mark that drew attention to the doe-shaped eyes: wide and luminous, not quite as big as his cousin Duobing’s, but carrying a quieter kind of mischief.

“You’re back early.” Mai Yu said, without looking up.

“Tail shook quicker than expected.” Chi Cheng shed his jacket over the armrest, crossed the room, and hooked a finger under the pen to pull it free. “You keep those maps lying in the open, someone’s going to think you’re hiding from satellites.”

Mai Yu gave him a look – the flat, unreadable one that only cracked when he wanted it to. “Some things you don’t digitise.” His tone was mild, but his thumb smoothed the edge of a folded bank statement tucked under one of the maps. Chi Cheng caught the motion without comment. The name on the corner was his, the numbers in the top right precise enough to have been memorised.

Chi sat on the low table, close enough that his knees touched Mai Yu’s. “Some things you don’t leave on the table either, baobei.”

For a few seconds, they stayed like that, the maps between them, the city pressing faintly at the windows. Chi Cheng studied his Da Bao’s face in the low lamplight – the stillness that looked like calm until you knew how much calculation sat underneath. The slight jut of Mai Yu’s chin was half-defiance, half-dare, the exact posture that made Chi Cheng want to kiss him senseless. Wu Suowei had been like this too, and Chi knew the brat lived on inside Mai Yu - clever enough to bend, stubborn enough to never break. The sort to keep a quiet reserve - part precaution, part habit - yet would empty it without hesitation if the cost of keeping someone safe outweighed the comfort of keeping himself secure.

“Ran into Guozi today.” Chi said.

The pen paused in Mai Yu’s hand. “And? ‘Ran into’ doesn’t seem like the right phrase.”

“He asked about you,” Chi replied evenly, though each word felt deliberately placed. “Told me to be faster next time.”

Mai Yu didn’t smile. He reached for another map. “He’s not wrong.”

Something in Chi Cheng’s chest tightened, not from agreement but from the bluntness. “He also reminded me that my parents aren’t likely to send you mooncakes anytime soon.”

This time, the corner of Mai Yu’s mouth did lift. “They don’t have to like me. You do, laogong. Mais only care about what we care about. When a roof is sound, we don’t ask who built it; only that it keeps the rain out.”

It was not arrogance – it was fact, spoken without apology.

Chi Cheng leaned in, voice low. “They’re not villains. They’re good people who want the life they think is safe. That’s not the same thing as wanting what’s right.”

Mai Yu’s eyes flicked up, steady. “And you?”

“I want what’s mine, Da Bao.” Chi Cheng’s hand settled over the maps, covering his. “Which means you walk into every room with me, and we both walk out. I chose you. You don’t get to back out.”

The lamplight carved a gold line across Mai Yu’s cheek. He set the pen aside, shifted forward, and in one smooth motion straddled Chi Cheng’s lap, his arms looping around the Beijing playboy’s neck. A soft kiss followed. Then an almost too-sharp bite against Chi’s collarbone, punctuated by a low, mischievous laugh.

“Chi shaoye," Mai Yu murmured. "I know I am beautiful in your eyes. However, I must remind you not to give yourself a black eye.”

[Referring to the quote “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.” – Jim Henson]

Chi Cheng laugh deepened, eyes crinkling as Mai Yu traced the moles on his face with feather-light kisses. “You’re starting to enjoy this, Weiwei.”

“I enjoy staying alive.”

Outside, a horn blared somewhere down the avenue, swallowed by the night. Inside, the air shifted, lighter, though the weight of Guo Chengyu’s warning still hung behind Chi Cheng’s ribs.

He would be faster next time.

Not for pride.

For him.

The Chi family house wore the season like a fur coat: thick curtains drawn against the glare, carpets deep enough to swallow footsteps, silence heavy enough to press against the ribs. The air carried a faint scent of sandalwood and something older, like books kept closed too long. Chi Cheng had grown up knowing exactly how to read the air in this house. Here, voices rarely rose. Even disagreements arrived dressed in tailored language, the kind that could pass for conversation if overheard.

Chi Jiali swept in that afternoon with two children, three opinions, and the unerring aim of a missile. She kissed their mother’s cheek, deposited her offspring with military efficiency, and steered her brother toward the door before anyone could object.

They went out under the polite fiction of shopping.

In the mall’s bright, over-conditioned air, she watched him the way a hawk watched a moving shadow. A blue T-shirt he lifted and put back. Shoes far too loud for the Chi Cheng she knew, turned over in her brother's hands and returned to their shelf. She didn’t ask why – yet.

It took her precisely six minutes to decide.

“Do you have a man again?” The Chi daughter asked, her eyebrows sharp enough to slice paper.

Chi Cheng looked at his sister as if she had just guessed the ending of a story halfway through.

She groaned. “Should I just call you Sherlock and have ‘Consulting idiot – specialises in impossible cases’ stamped on your forehead? You know exactly what Mum and Dad are like. Why not save everyone time and knock on their door holding a lit torch and a signed confession?”

“Because I’m not the one trying to hang me.” Her younger brother said mildly.

The retort slowed her. In the polished floor, their reflections stretched – tall, lean, cut from the same mould but filled with different weather: his, winter-still; hers, a summer storm. She exhaled through her nose, plucked the loud shoes from the rack without asking.

“These.” she said. “For him. Whoever he is.”

“He’ll pretend they’re grey.” His tone carried a faint ache, like warmth travelling from a distant fire. She wondered, fleetingly, if the man in question was one of those who could look at Chi Cheng and refuse to yield – someone stubborn enough to match him, yet fragile in unexpected places.

“Colour-blind?”

A small hum.

“Perfect.” she muttered. “Men are easier to manage when they’re slightly broken. You, unfortunately, are not slightly.”

At home, the storm waited in a suit.

Chi Yuanduan sat behind his desk with the posture of a man who had never once slouched, the same stillness he had worn in diplomatic chambers, treaty halls, and state banquets where the wrong glance could tip the balance of a decade’s work. His love for his children had always been real – just not the kind that tolerated the public’s whispers. He feared what gossip could do, how it could strip a life bare before the people living it had a chance to defend themselves.

He dismissed his secretary with a nod and faced his son as if they were comrades in a trench neither had chosen.

“Sit.” he said to his heir. His fingers tapped once, measured as a metronome

Chi Cheng did.

“This isn’t a speech.” The Chi elder began. “It’s arithmetic. When you are young, they call it romance. But life is not fuelled by romance. Chi Cheng, a harmonious family prospers. At forty, what will you have? No child, no future. Tell me who applauds that.”

[Referring to the proverb “家和万事兴” – If a family is harmonious everything will go well.]

The words were polished, the tone without malice, but the angles were sharp. They came not from cruelty, but from that old-world conviction that a life’s worth could be tallied like a merchant’s ledger. A love that didn’t fit the column headers was a liability.

Chi Cheng’s mouth curved – not in mockery, but in something colder, steadier. “I’ll take the applause from those who matter,” he said, each syllable clean as porcelain. “And for the rest, let them keep their harmony. I’ve never needed the whole table to dine well.”

Chi Yuanduan’s gaze sharpened.
“You speak like a detective convinced the case exists only in your own mind. How many years do you think this heat will last? Wait until you are middle-aged. Skin loosens. Work wears down. Will this still exist?”

“If I train hard,” Chi Cheng replied, “I can cultivate him into an old goblin.”

“Can you not speak about him when you speak to me?” The control in the older man’s face wavered.
“What ability do you have to make me believe any of this? Give me one reason to accept it.”

“Would you dare,” Chi asked, “to let me prove it?”

His father studied him for a long moment, as though testing whether the deductions matched the evidence. Finally, Chi Yuanduan said, “Son, I respect your feelings, but I do not accept them. Is there any possibility you will end this? One month. Six. A year. I will not interfere. You will see for yourself.”

Chi Cheng stubbed out the cigarette he had never lit.
“Unless his parents are resurrected.”

They stared at each other, two continents refusing to drift.

Later, in the hallway, Chi Jiali thumped a heavy leather binder onto the console with the same finality one might use to serve divorce papers. She flipped it open, riffling through a minefield of neat ink and questionable logic, until she found the page she wanted.

“Here. From Father’s ‘Book of Wisdom’ – the one he thinks is a legacy but really reads like a witness statement from a lunatic asylum.” She tapped a paragraph with a scarlet nail.

Back then, my judgment of Wu’s inferiority complex was wrong and arbitrary. After observation, I found he has a tendency to lick his own nose. Therefore, the best way to deal with him is: DON’T TALK TO HIM.

She looked up. “Can you imagine? The man probably wrote this wearing that silk dressing gown with the dragons.”

Chi Cheng skimmed the page. “It’s almost poetic. Like a haiku for interpersonal avoidance.”

“Chi Cheng, I believe you should live your life,” Jiali said, her voice rough but softened at the edges. “He’s good for you. Tell him a woman in a terrible dress approves.”

“Your dress is fine, jie.”

“It’s appalling, and I wear it to punish men.” She plucked a pair of offensively loud shoes from a bag and shoved them into his chest. “Go. If he hates them, I’ll return them and strangle you with the laces.”

Chapter Text

The Beijing night hung with an unnatural stillness, as if the city itself were holding its breath. Over Chang’an Avenue, the winter air carried the faint, acrid tang of coal smoke – a scent Chi Cheng had known since childhood. Streetlights cast pale gold onto the frost-dark pavement, their glow stretching Chi Cheng’s and Mai Yu’s shadows long and lean, merging in rhythm despite the five-metre gap between them.

To a passerby, they were just two men skirting the city’s arteries, taking a quiet shortcut after a late meeting.

To anyone who knew better, they were a unit – one so in sync they no longer needed words.

But beneath Chi Cheng’s composed exterior, nerves simmered. He still felt like his head was just barely above the water after his training, and the weight of every lesson pressed at the edges of his thoughts. His senses sharpened, tuned to every detail – the crunch of his boots, the flicker of a neon sign, the hush of a passing bicycle. He fought to keep his steps steady, his breathing calm, as he clung to routine and drilled responses.

When they reached the narrow service lane running behind the National Art Museum, Chi Cheng didn’t look at Mai Yu. He didn’t need to. A slight flex of Mai Yu’s fingers near his own coat pocket – a gesture barely visible – confirmed the handoff was done. A minute hesitation at a blind corner: someone else was in their periphery. Neither changed their stride. Their communication was all in micro-signals – muscle memory honed on missions like this, in cities like Beijing, where every side street could be a stage.

Elsewhere, their team was scattered across the city, linked by encrypted comms and invisible trust. Yuanzhou’s spotters kept watch from an office high-rise opposite the museum rooftop; Duobing blended seamlessly with the late-night crowd outside Dongsi Station, two blocks away. Lanzhu and Dongyuan worked the radios from their Obsidian base, orchestrating the whole thing with the kind of precision that made even the hairiest operations seem inevitable.

A Beijing bus – a familiar fume-belching, blue-and-white Route 103, electric now but still rattling – hissed past at the intersection, momentarily masking the faint metallic click of a camera shutter from somewhere across the street.

Mai Yu’s gaze flicked toward the sound. Chi Cheng, without moving his head, shifted his stance just enough to block the angle. To an outsider, it was nothing. To him, it was a vow – you’ll have to get through me first.

This had been their rhythm all night – trading blind spots, stepping into each other’s shadows, matching pace without conscious thought. By the time they reached their waiting car, the museum’s pale marble had faded into the rear-view, just another ghostly building among many.

The car door shut with a barely-there thud. Chi Cheng caught his reflection in the window’s black glass – sharp, unblinking, but beneath the surface, tension knotted his jaw. He forced his hands to remain steady as Mai Yu adjusted his cuff, outwardly casual. But Chi Cheng knew the gesture’s meaning: that cuff hid the fine wire of the tracker they’d planted earlier in the evening. He listened to the silence behind them, attuned to the faint, irregular rhythm that didn’t belong.

Someone was following.

A single headlight flickered in the side mirror, vanishing as their car slipped onto Dongsi South Street – a broad thoroughfare lined with night markets and neon dumpling stalls. Not close enough to force a chase, but close enough to mean intent.

“Still there?” The Beijing native asked, not moving his lips. Even his whisper felt shaky in his own ears, though he kept his face still.

Mai Yu’s eyes flickered to the mirror, then away. “One set of footsteps. Now on wheels.”

The driver took them east, away from the bright sweep of Chang’an into the labyrinthine lanes of Dongcheng, where old Beijing persists: steamed bun vendors, repair shops lit by single yellow bulbs, bicycles stacked in tight rows.

“Southern ramp.” Dongyuan’s voice cracked in over the comms, crisp and precise – a welcome anchor in Chi Cheng’s storm of thoughts.

They took the ramp toward the Third Ring Road, merging with the sleepless flow of traffic. As the car levelled out, a slant of light fell across the dash and caught on the small thing he kept there now, tucked under the lip of the vent: a single glass bead, glossy red.

Left hand is red.

Right hand is green.

He didn’t need the reminder. But he kept it anyway.

“Home in five.” Lanzhu reported. “You’ll pass the fruit market. Don’t buy lychees from the man with the suspicious moustache.”

Mai Yu exhaled. It was the sort of breath you only noticed if you’d been holding it all night. Chi Cheng let out a breath of his own, careful not to let it tremble.

“Clean exit.” Dongyuan’s voice came through the earpiece, dry with satisfaction. “And for once, A-Yu is not bleeding.”

“Six out of ten.” Lanzhu said, generous for him.

“Eight.” came Mai Yu’s voice, sudden on a private sub-channel.

Chi Cheng’s jaw unclenched, a rare admission of relief. “Listening in on my career highlights, are you?” The words came out lighter than he felt.

“I like to make sure you’re not trying to reenact Mission Impossible.” came Mai Yu’s reply, soft with humour and something gentler beneath.

It should have ended there.

But in Beijing, the city that never truly sleeps, nothing is ever finished for long.

Airports have a special talent for turning people into luggage. By the time they reached the domestic gate, their names were already tags, their faces already printed in some system that claimed to prefer order to mercy.

Mai Yu drifted closer to Chi Cheng, careful not to touch. “Boarding in twenty,” he murmured, his voice gentle as dusk. He checked his maps – the real kind, paper and pencil, no cloud to betray them.

Chi Cheng leaned closer, swept thumb to jaw in a gesture too small for the cameras. “You’re tired, clever bird. Ready to fly back to the nest?”

[Referring to the proverb “鸟倦知返” - When a bird grows weary, it knows to return.]

A small smile flickered at the edge of Mai Yu’s lips. “I just want Se-ge’s plain noodles.”

They were four steps from the gate when the officials appeared. Polite black. Polite expressions. Polite insistence.

“Mr Chi,” the first one said, “please come with us. There appears to be a discrepancy in the tax filings of your former art installation company.”

The airport’s low hum seemed to thin into silence.

Mai Yu shifted to step between them, but a third man was already there, blocking his path without touching him. “Sir, this is a matter of tax investigation. Not your concern.”

The words were polite, almost deferential – the kind you used when you wanted the refusal to sound like a formality.

Chi Cheng’s gaze didn’t waver. “Tax?” His tone was almost amused. “You’ll have to be more creative.”

They didn’t rise to it. “Documents will be presented at the station.”

It was clean. Too clean. There was no raised voice, no unnecessary force, only a chain of gestures that pulled him away from the queue and into the controlled silence of the side exit.

“Back in thirty minutes, Wei.” Chi Cheng softly said to his lover, the way a man tells a boy to wait outside the barber’s. “Tea. I’ll call.”

“Hhmm.” said Mai Yu. He did not reach. It would have been a tell. He folded his maps instead, precisely.

At the curb, Guo Chengyu appeared from thin air, leaning on a motorbike and pretended to be a stranger when Chi Cheng was escorted pass.

“Keep your face bored.” His best friend said, not moving his lips. “I’ve got three law firms and a monk lined up. Don’t improvise. Don’t confess to anything except the human condition. And if anyone hits you, we will buy the prison.”

Chi Cheng nodded once. The last thing he saw before the car door shut was Mai Yu standing perfectly still in the middle of the concourse – expression unreadable, but shoulders squared like a man who had already decided the fight would be his.

Back in Beijing, the knock at the holding office’s side door came at nine in the morning and sounded just as polite. Papers were handed over with exquisite courtesy. The wording was flawless:

“Would Mr Chi Cheng mind assisting in connection with tax anomalies arising from a supplier audit?”

Of course he would not mind.

In the interview room the air was museum-dry. Numbers, signatures, dates. A supplier’s books that now said different things. A hole shaped like him.

“Lawyer.” he said. Calm. “Now.”

Phones vibrated in rooms Chi Cheng could not see. In a hutong not far away, Guo Chengyu’s eyelid twitched. At the Mai’s Obsidian base, Ruan Lanzhu swore watching the camera feed, Xiao Se’s mouth tightened, and Mai Yuanzhou simply exhaled as if he’d expected the weather to break.

At the gate, someone told Mai Yu, “Your flight will be rebooked”.

The Mai didn’t move. When his phone lit, he lifted it without looking down.

“He asked for counsel,” Xiao Se said, smooth as glass. “We’ll ride this quietly. Go home. Don’t be bait, ba-di.”

“I’ll be bait when I choose,” Mai Yu replied, gentle as a blade wrapped in silk. He ended the call, turned, and walked back into Beijing with steps of a man who had already chosen.

By the fourth day, the rhythm of the holding office settled into a kind of mechanical grace: the scrape of trays against linoleum, the clipped syllables of questions repeated and refined, the endless ritual of signatures and stamps. Chi Cheng kept his gaze level and his answers clipped, neither hostile nor obsequious, a man who had read enough chess books to know when to let the clock do the talking.

The guard assigned to him had the apologetic air of a man who’d wanted a desk job and been handed a whistle. He checked the file twice, then brought the Chi family’s troublesome son an extra blanket without explaining why.

Inside of two hours, the quality of chow improved.

Inside of six, a notoriously spotless wing developed a fault and had to be closed for “maintenance”; Chi Cheng was moved to a quieter block where the call bell worked and the heating didn’t clank like a sick mule.

Inside of twelve, the night guard stopped calling him “Chi shaoye” and began calling him “ye [sir]” in a way that implied both respect and terror.

Another day: another interview, this time with two officials and one silent observer whose badge was tucked just out of sight. They asked about suppliers, invoices, the fate of a single painting whose provenance had shifted like sand. Chi Cheng listened, nodded, and returned each question with another – small, precise, the way Li Lianhua would test living tissue before the cut.

He was given a notebook, brand-new, its blue cover unmarked but for a stamped serial. “For your recollections.” said the intermediary, voice butter-smooth, eyes flickering from the page to the watcher behind the glass. Chi Cheng uncapped the pen, drew a single line down the first sheet, and closed it again. He would write nothing in a place where even silence had witnesses.

At midnight, a guard – not the apologetic one, but a younger man with shoes too clean – slipped Chi Cheng a thermos of tea. “Don’t drink it too fast.” he murmured, more warning than kindness. Chi Cheng inclined his head. In places like this, even the flavour of tea could mean something.

He slept little, but dreamed in fragments: cities dissolving into rain, a mantis frozen on a branch, a river of green water running through black stone. Somewhere in those dreams was the face of a man who could not sit still in grief – his Weiwei – and the knowledge that absence was its own form of cruelty.

The days unfolded, not with drama but with a bureaucratic poetry – each player reciting their lines, waiting for the moment when the stage directions would change. In the silence between questions, Chi Cheng counted his dumplings and waited for the next move, heart steady as a metronome, mind sharp as the oriole’s eye behind the cicada.

[Referring to the phrase “哑巴吃饺子，心里有数” – When a mute eats dumplings; he knows the count.]

[Referring to the phrase “螳螂捕蝉，黄雀在后” – Even the mantis stalking the cicada should remember the oriole behind.]

Across the city, Guo Chengyu finished a breakfast of steamed buns he did not taste. He stared at the ceiling until the cracks ran into each other like tributaries. Then, at the exact minute the second kettle boiled, three messages arrived: one from a junior lawyer, one from an accountant’s ghost profile, the last from a number he did not recognise but knew to trust.

“He’s safe,” said the first.

“He’s stalling,” read the second.

The third held only a fragment of a poem:

“Wind turns, shadow learns

We Mais will quell concerns.”

[Referring to the phrase “风转山影移” - When the wind changes, so does the mountain’s shadow.]

In Urumqi, Lanzhu watched the camera feed glitch once – a flicker that told him more than an hour of conversation.

“Our Beijing boy is not cracking; he might yet polish into a fine jade for A-Yu.”

Mai Dongyuan rerouted three calls and erased two emails with the casual neatness of a man trimming bonsai. Xiao Se began tugging at his own web of strings, reaching both sideways through his network and upward toward Wang Ye.

By the time the tea in Lanzhu’s cup had cooled, word had reached Yuanzhou. The eldest Mai listened without interrupting, the phone cradled loosely in his palm, his silence deliberate as the pause before a river shifts its course.

The news was simple enough to state and hard enough to swallow: Mai Yu was preparing to liquidate certain holdings – quietly, decisively, in a way that suggested not mere caution but farewell.

“Selling to survive.” Lanzhu murmured. “Or selling to run?”

“Both.” Yuanzhou replied. His tone was level, but the knuckles on the teacup whitened. “And neither.”

In the world of the Mais, one did not simply stand by while a cousin sold the bones of his house. Wang Ye was summoned – not as a hammer, but as a hinge – before the door closed for good.

Beijing knows anger and fear. It wears them under a pressed suit and silk tie, smiles for photographs, answers to formal titles, and lets the wound breathe only in private. Wu Suowei, the ever-reckless persona, detonated quietly.

By the fourth morning of Chi Cheng’s arrest, the Chi-Mai apartment had become a field clinic: maps folded into orders, calls that began with weather and ended with war. The scent of cold tea sat in the air like unspoken arguments.

At the table, Mai Yu wrote figures with a pencil until the ferrule flattened. Not to calculate – he already knew the numbers – but to feel something splinter under his hand that wasn’t bone.

He made a list. Then he made another.

• His secret stash of cash: respectable in amount, insulting in context; enough to start a fire, not enough to keep it burning.

• The old house his mother left him: grey brick wrapped around a courtyard of loquat trees, their dark leaves holding winter rain, their pale blossoms smelling faintly of honey in January. Worth more in memory than in market terms, and yet the people would pay handsomely given the city’s steady creep into the countryside.

• The central Beijing studio: three rooms of light and a north wall thick enough to keep secrets, paid in full with Chi Cheng’s money. Windows caught the morning like it was a guest to be honoured. Saleable in a week if you called the right agents, the kind who valued discretion above paperwork.

• Bonds and slow money: patient as winter wheat, quick as a tortoise.

He stared at the handwriting until the columns blurred.

His mother’s voice was in his ear – not words, but the sound of her folding fabric before spring festivals, each crease sharp enough to hold a year together. That voice had kept him upright when he first left home. It was the same voice that had told him, once, that dignity was not for sale.

And then there was Chi Cheng.

The thought came with its own weather.

He could still see the way Chi had looked at him in the Obsidian war room, as if every breath between them was already shared. That look made him want to be unreasonable in the most reasonable way possible: sell everything, clear every obstacle, so that nothing – neither his family’s enemies nor his own pride – could make Chi Cheng a target for loving him.

He considered going to Chi Cheng’s father for a loan.

He imagined Chi Cheng finding out.

He thought: No.

One broker. Then three. Valuations booked. Timetables drawn with the precision of a field commander who didn’t believe in retreats.

The message got out.

By dusk, a knock came that sounded like a decision dressed in courtesy.

Wang Ye stepped in with his usual absence of drama: navy linen, salt-dry humour, a presence that rearranged the room without touching a thing. In one hand, a file; in the other, a box of almond cookies from Mai Qing’s most persistent fanclub.

“You’re selling.” he observed.

“I’m converting,” Mai Yu corrected. “Assets into time.”

Wang Ye’s mouth tilted. “You could have asked.”

“I’m not begging the Chi family for mercy.” The words were clean, but they cost something. His thumb pressed so hard against the pencil it left a ridge in the skin.

“Good. Don’t.” Wang Ye set the file on the table. “Sell to me. I am a local.”

Mai Yu’s eyes lifted – dark, unamused. “You haven’t been back to Beijing for three years, and you are a Wudang priest full-time.”

“Under market by one per cent,” Wang Ye continued, ignoring the jab. “Publicly it reads as a safety consolidation for a Wudang martial centre. Privately, it becomes a base. Your base. If you ever need a fallback, you walk down your own corridor and lock a door only you can open.”

“Why?”

“Because wolves don’t let a pack member fend for itself.” Wang Ye said. “And I can blow, but I prefer to buy. Also – my dad is obscenely rich.”

Another voice came from the doorway, gentle but edged. “Also, because pride is expensive when you’re paying in blood.”

Mai Yanchi stepped in, charcoal coat buttoned with military neatness. Behind the third Mai, in a blue coat cut like a decision, stood Xiao Se, smiling like the entire north wind had joined the conversation.

“We know exactly why you’re selling.” Yanchi said, crossing to the table. “We also know you don’t want to owe the Chis, that you want to prove a point. So don’t. Owe us. We collect in dumplings and your continued existence.”

“We’re not here to move into the light.” Xiao Se added, eyes warm and iron at once. “We’re here to keep you in it, A-Yu. Let them think a wealthy friend is consolidating his portfolio. The papers like a tidy story.”

Mai Yu’s jaw tightened, and for a heartbeat, his control faltered. He saw Chi Cheng’s charismatic face in his mind – the kind of face that could unsettle you just by holding still. It was not that he didn’t trust Chi Cheng. It was that he trusted him too much. Trusted him enough to know that, if the debt came due in bullets, Chi Cheng would pay it himself.

“I can manage this.”

“No one doubts it.” Mai 3 replied. “But we watch after each of our own, didi. It’s how we work. Family holds together.”

Wang Ye set a fountain pen on the contract and said nothing. That was the persuasion.

Mai Yu looked at the paper. The figures were neat, the ink crisp. After a breath, he signed. The pen scratched like a lock turning.

“Good boy.” Xiao Se said mildly. “We’ll file tonight. And then we’ll go say hello to your future in-laws.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Before anyone convinces themselves they own you.” Xiao Se replied, sweet as arsenic.

In the quiet that followed, the smallest change came in Mai Yu’s face – not relief, not surrender. The particular easing of a man who realised that insecurity had no rightful chair at his table.

“Chi Yuanduan thinks you are a powerless boy from the countryside, a fling his boy won’t end.” Yanchi said without looking at anyone. “Let them see who appreciates you.”

[Referring to “爱不是占有，而是欣赏”– Love is not possession, it’s appreciation.]

“And who protects you,” Wang Ye added, as if discussing the weather.

Chapter Text

The papers were still warm when they left the apartment.

Xiao Se set the pace – unhurried, as though Beijing’s avenues had been lent to him for the afternoon. Mai Yanchi followed, a silent gravity that made bystanders straighten without knowing why. Wang Ye drifted at the rear, hands in pockets, mouth tilted in a faint curl – the kind of smile that suggested he already knew which doors were worth opening and which were better left sealed.

They didn’t take the direct road to the Chi residence. In Beijing, straight lines are for tourists and fools. They wove instead through two tea houses, a discreet bookshop, and a courtyard where Wang Weiguo – Wang Ye’s father – had once hosted private conversations with men whose names were never printed but always remembered.

By the time the Chi gates opened, their arrival had already been noted in the city’s invisible ledger.

The Chi residence smelled of cedar and rank – old wealth that believed its own lineage proof against erosion. Curtains heavy enough to make sunlight hesitate. Carpets that demanded whispers. A winter bouquet stood on a console table, perfect in posture. Somewhere, a clock ticked with the authority of a judge clearing his throat.

Chi Yuanduan stood in the reception room as if history itself might take attendance. His wife, Zhong Wenyu, sat in her silk like a blade sheathed in etiquette. They had expected one young man, awkward with affection. Instead, they received a procession:

• Wang Ye, linen calm, son of the richest man in Beijing – a connection Yuanduan could not ignore.
• Yanchi, wordless but radiating the pressure of a command post. In uniform.
• Xiao Se, the you-know-who diplomat’s son who handled language like a sword, his teacup an accessory to strategy.
• And finally, Wu Suowei – soft grey clothes, eyes unreadable, the mole by his right eye glinting like a punctuation mark in a sentence no one else could finish.

Introductions were a study in temperature. Xiao Se handled the air the way a pianist handles dynamics. He spoke first, his tone as warm as tea steam and just as hard to catch.
“Secretary Chi, Madam Zhong. Thank you for receiving us on short notice. We believe in solving matters at the table before they sour on paper.”

“You’re friends of…?” Chi Cheng’s mother trailed, the way an orchestra fades into tacit rest.

“Of your son.” Xiao Se answered smoothly. “And of Xiaowu here. We keep our circle small and our dinners smaller.”

Tea arrived. It wasn’t a casual pour. The porcelain cups breathed out the unmistakable aroma of Huangshan Maofeng, pale liquor, floral and faintly fruity – the sort of leaf gifted to foreign dignitaries, not bought by the kilo.

Xiao Se allowed Wang Ye to praise the leaves with the exact sincerity his father had perfected, while Yanchi murmured about the refinement of the room. Then Xiao Se shifted the temperature by half a degree, subtle as a hand turning a chess piece.

“We’re here because we respect your house,” he said, voice polite but without the faintest hint of deference. “And because Beijing’s air carries rumours faster than dust.”

Zhong Wenyu’s smile was polished steel. “I have no rumours.”

“No,” Xiao Se agreed, eyes bright with Slytherin amusement. “You have conclusions. Which is more efficient.”

Her gaze landed on Mai Yu. “Wu xiansheng, you should spend more time with your own parents,” she said lightly, though the line was sharpened to an exit. “Not with strangers.”

Mai Yu’s answer came without pause, smile feather-light. “I did, a-yi [auntie]. Stopped by their graves on the way here. Traffic was better that way.”

The words landed without theatrics, but with the kind of weight that made the room remember itself. Even the clock seemed to hesitate. Wenyu’s knuckles tightened once on her saucer. She recovered in the space of a blink. Xiao Se’s mouth didn’t shift, but his eyes smiled, sly as a serpent satisfied with the first cut.

Yuanduan’s eyes narrowed slightly, watching the exchange with the flat gaze of a man calibrating instruments. He turned to Mai Yu as if choosing a scalpel.

“My son,” Yuanduan said at last, “is a difficult man. Poison, sometimes. You seem intelligent enough not to drink too deeply, Wu Suowei.”

Mai Yu’s eyes brightened, reckless mischief sparking. “I believe in public service,” he said, solemn as a priest. “I’m sacrificing myself for the greater good – keeping him locked down so he doesn’t bring any exotic diseases home.”

The line rode in like humour, but the current beneath it was territorial. Wang Ye coughed, failing to smother a laugh. Even the older Chi’s mouth faltered, remembering humour for a heartbeat.

That was when Xiao Se placed his cup down with deliberate care.

“Secretary Chi,” he said, all surface civility, “allow me to be clear. We don’t treat proximity to your son as a social experiment. We stand with him. Which means, by extension, we stand with the man he chooses. This isn’t charity, and it certainly isn’t whim. Weak men don’t survive in our circle – they get eaten. The fact that Wu Suowei is here should tell you exactly what he is not.”

A pause.

“We prefer shadows. But should any… administrative misunderstandings persist around your son’s affairs, we know people who delight in tidying. Even when the mess was swept under the rug by well-meaning hands.”

The sentence glided by like silk, but its edges could cut.

Wang Ye stirred, his voice low and almost lazy. “Harmony is prosperity, shushu [uncle]. My father always said strength and harmony are twins. I think you’ll find Dawei speaks both languages.” The reminder hung there – not a threat, but a fact written into the geography of power.

[Referring to the phrase “家和万事兴” – Harmony is prosperity.]

Yanchi finally spoke, his voice steady as iron. “We don’t carry dead weight, Secretary Chi. We carry those worth carrying. And we are not asking permission. We are claiming space.”

It was enough. Chi Yuanduan did not apologise – pride still had a mortgage on the house – but he didn’t ask them to leave, either. That, in his dialect, was concession.

The head of the Chi household set his cup down with care. He looked at his son’s boyfriend with an assessment that slid, almost against his will, into a grudging respect. Then he turned that gaze on the trio who had flanked the boy without fanfare. It took no more than twenty minutes for the point to lodge: this was not a fling. This was armour, and it was inconveniently built to last.

Wenyu glanced at her husband. She had spent a lifetime reading the air around state dinners and sanction tables; she heard what was not said. These men were not bluff. They were also not brag. They were what people became when they had nothing to prove and an entire network behind them.

As they left, Wenyu surprised herself. “Do you eat lotus root, Xiaowu?” she asked Wu Suowei.

“I do.” he said.

“Good.” she replied, a truce in the language of soup.

By the time they slid back into the black sedan, the taste of expensive tea still lingered like an unfinished chord. Silence stretched – until Wang Ye cracked it with a lazy sigh.

“I think we showed enough teeth today. But truth be told, I’d still rather a cup of proper Da Hong Pao.”

Xiao Se’s voice was dry as Fujian rock itself. “Of course you would. Lanzhu’s sermonising has infected you. He treats Da Hong Pao like it’s a religion – mother trees, purebreds, commodity blends. He’d auction his own shadow for a tin if the Wuyi government let him.”

“Please,” Yanchi laughed, “he guards his stash like it’s nuclear material. Last time I asked for a pot he handed me Tieguanyin and said my soul wasn’t ready.”

Mai Yu, curled like a spoiled cat in his seat, made a noise of theatrical disgust.

“Amateurs, the lot of you. Everyone bangs on about Da Hong Pao because it sounds dramatic. Orchid aroma, nine infusions, blah blah. But most couldn’t tell a decent rock tea from flavoured bathwater. Madam Zhong, at least, passed the test today.”

“You’re bratty when you’re right, just like A-Qing.” Wang Ye muttered, his eyes soften at the mention of his lover.

“I’m bratty when I exist.” Mai Yu corrected primly, kicking his cousin-in-law’s ankle. “Market prices are for gullible civil servants. I have cousins and boyfriends who bring me the good leaves.”

Wang Ye let out a bark of laughter. “Bloody hell. You’re lucky your mouth comes with an entourage.”

“Correction,” Mai Yu’s grin was wicked, “you’re lucky I keep things interesting. Otherwise, you’d just be another bored Wudang priest arguing over steeping times.”

Yanchi snorted. “Careful, A-Yu. Keep talking like that and you’ll get banned from half the tea houses in Beijing.”

“Excellent,” Mai Yu said smugly. “Fewer philistines stealing the dumplings.”

“Radishes and greens, ba-di [8^th brother]”

[Referring to the phrase “ 萝卜青菜，各有所爱” - Radishes and greens, each has those who love them.]

The car filled with laughter – Wang Ye’s low and sharp, Yanchi’s bright, Xiao Se’s velvet and dangerous. Mai Yu’s laugh, albeit still tight, is starting to bear more of Wu Suowei’s carefree one.

Behind them, in his cedar-walled study, Chi Yuanduan was writing a note to himself. In neat, precise characters: Stay away.

He would never admit it. But he was.

They processed Chi Cheng in the early morning, that pale, bureaucratic hour when men in offices believe themselves gods. Papers slid, stamps thudded, and a neutral voice recited neutral words, each one leaving a faint smear across the day.

“There was a mistake. A misunderstanding. And we will address the person who made the mistake.”

A haphazard promise: precise, bloodless, entirely unbelievable.

Outside, air. Not freedom – air. Chi Cheng took it into his ribs like a man storing fuel.

A suspiciously ordinary young woman leaned against a pillar. At ten steps away, her eyes flickered gold. The illusion slipped. Mai Lilun was doing his pick-up.

Bloody yaos and their habit of possessing other people’s skins.

“Car’s around the corner.” Lilun said, low. “Don’t wave.”

They walked. Half a block. The Mais kept to the shadow, as though the street itself were an accomplice.

The car smelled faintly of locust flowers and peach liquor. Lilun drove with one hand, eyes steady, voice flat as the road.

“Cousin tried to sell the old house a-yi left him. And other assets. Would’ve gone through, too. He’s stubborn like a true Mai.”

Chi Cheng’s eyes blown wide, and his throat tightened. “No. He tried to…”

“Mm.” Lilun didn’t look at him. “We stopped him. Politely but firmly. Wudang boy’s name on the papers now, which means no one else can get claws in. Poetic solution. But don’t get sentimental at him, Chi. If A-Yan had been cornered, I’d have done the same. The world is chaos without him.”

A beat.

“I actually did.” Lilun continued, his tone never shifted. “Nearly cooked myself to ash just to buy him one more breath on the field.” His delivery was arithmetic, not confession. A smile – half maniac, half memory – tugged at his mouth as he recalled agonising months of recovery in Peach Blossom House, under the weight of Zhu Yan’s crimson gaze. Until suffering turned to bloom.

[Referring to Lilun’s OST in Fangs of Fortune]

The comm crackled, and Mai Dongyuan’s voice slid in, calm as polished wood.

“A-Li’s right, Chi Cheng. I’ve done the same. Once, Lanzhu asked me to lend a hand with Jiushi’s door. Nothing grand, something I could have cleared in an afternoon. But because it was his request, I went. And when the wrong enemy appeared, I bled dry to drag Qiushi back alive. He was Lanzhu’s family. And once you let someone into your eyes, you stop counting down time. For my Mengmeng, I would play the fool a thousand times over”

[Hints at Ling Qiushi’s 4^th Door and that Ruan Lanzhu’s alias was Zhu Meng in the Spirealm]

“Oh, beautiful. Engrave it on a teacup, sell it at the lovers’ market.” Lanzhu’s voice cut through, sharp enough to sting even with static. “Do you people ever hear yourselves? Idiots in love, idiots in uniform – same species, just wrapped in different fabrics. You think martyrdom is a strategy? Extreme psychos, the lot of you.” He hissed, then the line snapped to silence.

Inside the Obsidian base, softer than smoke curling off a dying flame, Lanzhu spoke – not into the comms, but to the man seated beside him.

“Mai Dongyuan,” he said, the name weighty with all the times he hadn’t dared use it, “don’t ever think almost disappearing on the other side was funny. I was desperate. I was devastated. I can’t let you go, even if the world insists I must.”

[Referring to Ling Jiushi’s OST in Spirealm, I Know by Gao Jiayi]

The car rolled on.

Outside, Beijing hurried past: breakfast stalls steaming, cyclists leaning into the cold, children running with half-zipped coats.

Inside, Chi Cheng sat very still. His eyes were a silent storm.

He saw it now – how extreme all the Mais could behave when cornered, how far Mai Yu had been willing to go. Selling not just possessions but the bones of his life, the house of his mother, the walls that had sheltered him since childhood. Not a gesture of despair, but of love sharpened to the edge of recklessness.

The thought twisted him. Pride in Mai Yu’s independence. Fierce gratitude that the cousins had stepped in, protecting him without cutting that pride to ribbons. Possessive relief that he hadn’t been forced to watch the man he loved dismantle himself for his sake.

Chi Cheng had seen this kind of loyalty before, reckless and uncompromising. It mirrored his own, and it terrified him. He turned his face to the window, expression careful, because if he let it slip, he would unravel.

The streets blurred by, and Chi Cheng closed his eyes for one beat too long – just long enough to admit to himself that Weiwei’s wild, unreasonable loyalty was the closest thing he had ever found to home. His breath scattered.

At last he said, voice pitched low, almost to himself:

“He loves me.”

Lilun shifted gears, unbothered. “Of course he does. Else why bother with the days?”

“I am glad he has you.” Chi Cheng nodded towards Lilun. “My dad likes to deliver his blows in a Taiji manner.”

“Talk Taiji later,” The Mai said. “Eat first. He’s waiting.”

“Love bears all and bares all.” 

Abhijit Naskar, Amor Apocalypse: Canım Sana İhtiyacım

At the base, the door opened before Chi Cheng could lift his hand. Mai Yu stood barefoot with a sweater that wasn’t his and a mouth that had been pressed into control for too many hours.

For a moment neither spoke.

They stood – the world’s shortest ocean – then crossed it.

They did not break.

They held with bone-crushing force.

“You win.” Chi Cheng murmured into his Dabao’s hair, “I accept my defeat.”

“Next time,” Mai Yu replied into his collarbone, “I’ll sell you first and buy you back for more.”

The Chi heir huffed out something that began as a laugh and ended as a vow.

That night, they sprawled on their obnoxious waterbed, sharing a single cigarette and kisses of smoke. The window looked out on a slice of grey sky. Mai Yu’s pink pyjamas glowed gently in the low lamp; the duck print was ridiculous and correct.

Mai Yu took the cigarette from Chi Cheng’s lips without asking, voice low. “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”

Chi Cheng pressed his mouth to his hair, steady as oath. “Then let’s live this one well, Weiwei.”

“Deal.”

He inhaled hard, twice, then leaned forward and blew the smoke back into Chi Cheng’s mouth. The cloud tangled between them – half challenge, half seduction – and for a dizzy moment it felt as though both of them were breathing from the same lung.

“And when the weather turns cold, and your leg aches due to old age, Chi-ge….” Mai Yu’s grin was wicked, bratty, but his eyes carried the weight of too many unslept hours.

“I’ll dance with the limp.” Chi Cheng caught his wrist.

 “That’s my charismatic idiot.”

And after a beat, with that same reckless mouth that had already earned him enemies and armour alike: “The Chis will come around. They’re slow, but they bend. Don’t give up on them, laogong. They’re your roots, even if they scratch.”

Chi Cheng closed his eyes, torn between pride and weariness. “And if they never do?”

“If they won’t have me at the table, I’ll sit in your chair, smoke in your mouth, until they realise there’s no room left for ghosts.” His lover said simply, eyes glittered, equal parts defiance and devotion.

In the week that followed his release, their art company restarted – smaller, cleaner, as though rinsed in rain. To Beijing, the Mais receded into rumour and late-night jokes. Guo Chengyu stayed a phone call away, a man playing chess with someone who only respected checkmate.

Chi Jiali began shopping for her brother and his gorgeous-bratty-dearest without apology. Chi Cheng’s mother learned to call ahead before visiting. His father, reluctantly, learned to ask questions he did not want answered – and to endure the answers.

One evening, with steam fogging the kitchen window and two bowls of noodles scorched almost beyond salvation, Mai Yu watched his boyfriend lift a pair of shoes from a bag.

“They are loud, Dabao. But jie [sister] thinks they suit you.” The Beijing native warned.

The Mai examined them. “They are pink.”

“They are grey.” Chi Cheng replied, deadpan.

His baobei’s mouth twitched “Hideous”. He tried them anyway. They fit like inevitability.

“Walk.”

Mai Yu walked. The shoes squeaked. They both laughed.

Later, they carried bowls to the table and ate in companionable silence, broken only by commentary on scallions. Chi Cheng washed, Mai Yu dried; their elbows bumped; they made room. The apartment breathed with them – the smell of soap, the hush of coats drying, the pulse of a city past midnight.

Ordinary. Which was to say, hard-won.

They met Jiang Xiaoshuai at a dumpling shop that had outlived five redesigns and two revolutions. He brought beer and a grin sharp enough to saw wood. They spoke about everything except the important things. That was the point.

At the end, the doctor clapped Chi Cheng on the shoulder. “I prefer you in boring, Chi Cheng. It’s a good colour.”

“Grey?” Chi Cheng deadpanned.

“Pink.” Mai Yu corrected.

All three laughed over steam and vinegar, like a door opening on a warm room.

When they walked home, the night air stung and their breath lingered like small ghosts. Chi Cheng’s grin stayed wolfish as his Dabao tucked a hand into his pocket without hesitation, not even glancing around.

“Chi shaoye, do you ever get tired of being brave and suave?” Mai Yu asked.

“Yes, dear.” Chi squinted one eye, mock-smouldering. “Whenever you put on those atrocious pyjamas.”

The cemetery felt older than the village that leaned against it, as though stone had taken root before wood. Cold slabs shouldered names into silence. Patient pines bent with the weight of frost, their needles whispering above a pond green with winter algae, an oval mirror bored by time. Somewhere unseen, children’s voices rose in song, sparrows of sound darting in and out of the air.

Mai Yu knelt first, the way sons do. His fingers brushed the carved characters, reverent but unflinching.

“Ma, your Daqiong is here,” he said softly, to the woman who had taught him stubborn grace. “Pa – hope you’re not laughing too much with Ma beside you.”

Chi Cheng stood a pace behind, a man in a place that had made room for him without asking anyone’s permission. His voice was low, careful.

“Ma, I’m sorry we didn’t get much time. Pa, I’m sorry we never met. But I am here. I am taking care of Weiwei, you don’t need to worry.”

He reached across the grey and clasped Mai Yu’s wrist. Mai Yu’s mouth trembled – not weakness, but agreement.

“We’re here.” Chi Cheng continued. “We’re staying. People who matter don’t mind.”

Wind moved in the tall grass. A magpie landed near the pond and examined its own reflection like a critic. From beyond the willow, a children’s song found them. Old words carried by new throats, bright as water over stone.

The rich heir knelt at last, shoulder to shoulder with his person. He didn’t ask the dead for permission. He told them the truth.

“I will keep him.” Chi Cheng said. “I will bring him back and I will walk out with him, every time. We will walk a thousand miles with this first step.”

[Referring to the phrase “千里之行始于足下” - A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.]

Mai Yu laid a chrysanthemum against the stone. His fingers found Chi’s, weaving tight, refusing to let go. A real smile broke across his face at last, earned and unguarded. The twin moles on his cheeks caught the pale light; the tail-mole at his right eye glinted like a full stop at the end of every previous sentence.

Under the quiet blessing of stone and sky, the insecurities rose like smoke. Mai Yu’s voice was taut, almost bitter.

“Sometimes I think you still dream of Wang Shuo. He’s safer. Cleaner. Not weighed down by being a Mai. Not dragging storms behind him.”

Chi Cheng stilled, then turned him gently, pressing his palm against his jaw until dark eyes met his.

“Weiwei, you idiot. I don’t dream of ghosts when I have you in my arms. And as for the storms, you think I don’t see them? I choose you anyway. Every day, every step. Not out of pity. Not out of desperation. Because without you I’d be living in a house with no roof, open to the rain.”

The words landed like a vow, plain and unornamented, which was why they held. Mai Yu’s breath hitched. His mouth twisted into a smirk that couldn’t hide the relief. “You’ll regret it one day. Trouble is written into our name.”

Chi Cheng’s laugh was low, wolfish. “Then I’ll buy better roofs. And when they break, I’ll build again.”

As they walked back down the path, the landscape seemed to shift with them: reeds bowing like witnesses, plum branches like promises still waiting to blossom. Smoke curled from village chimneys. It smelled of rice and soup, of kitchens where families argued and laughed and forgave.

Chi Cheng thought of his father, already stepping back if only slightly; of his mother, offering lotus root like a flag of truce across a battlefield table. The image steadied him.

Home, he realised, was not a fortress that kept the weather out. It was this – walking side by side, through cold and thaw, with someone who made you want to come in from the wind.

I long to tell you true,
Of more than stars or mountains too.
Though sunrise fades beyond my sight,
With you I’ll face the quiet night.

 

On earth’s last night I’ll stay,
And hold you close till break of day.
Though waves may sweep the wrecks away,
With you I’ll wait that day.

[Zhan Xuan, The Last Night on Earth]

Chapter Text

“The earth is vast, life a rolling tide,
Yet I exist where day and night divide.
The years won’t cut, the mountains rise, rivers flow,
A thousand boats can’t bear the single bond I know.”

Yan An, Heaven and Earth Without Lun

Some weeks after, the mountains remembered how to be quiet again.

The villa announced itself the way Xiao Se liked to announce himself: with understatement that dared you to blink first. A crooked sign dangled from a single rusted nail – Villa of Fallen Snow – its calligraphy as thin and deliberate as a master’s breath, each curve betraying a hand schooled in the strict etiquette of the brush. Years of frost and thaw had feathered the black ink to soft grey. The cedar plank was warped at one edge, still faintly perfumed with camellia oil. If you didn’t know how to read the precision behind its fading, you might think it was just old.

Three low Han-style buildings crouched against a granite shoulder, timber frames darkened with age, mud-plastered walls veined with marble inlay. Rooflines curved in restrained sweeps; courtyards held the smell of pine and rain. Inside, the lobby was a rectangle of cold light and clean stone, one bamboo stalk in a clay pot, a ledger fat with years but thin with names. From the terrace, the river stitched silver through black pine and grey rock. The hush was the kind only found when the nearest shop was an overconfident goat and a prayer away.

“It’s… spartan.” Chi Cheng said diplomatically.

“It’s fengya [风雅] – refined, Chi shaoye.” Xiao Se corrected, wafting in like a mild insult in silk. The guy was wearing an expensive fur scarf.

“Elegant. Minimalism is an aesthetic, not a budget.” He paused. “All right, sometimes it’s both. But look at that view. You can’t buy that kind of serenity.”

“You can.” Ruan Lanzhu murmured, clicking across the slate in heels that hadn’t seen a mountain track since birth. “It’s called ‘a helicopter’, Se-ge.”

“Your voice frightens the moss.” Wang Ye added, emerging from nowhere in navy linen that looked morally opposed to creases. He had a wicker basket on his arm, as if he’d just wandered out to collect enlightenment and mushrooms, in that order. “Do be gentle.”

“Ye-ye,” Mai Qing said, following him with sunglasses the size of small shields. “Stop flirting with the lichens. They’re taken.”

[Referring to both the adoring nickname of Wang Ye and also "grandfather"]

The door banged, and in rolled the rest of the clan: voices, luggage, a snake carrier, a thermos that probably contained tea and very probably contained alcohol. The villa filled itself with personalities the way a bowl takes rain – without consent and, somehow, perfectly.

“Shoes off inside.” Xiao Se sang. “Except for er-ge. He will pretend to forget and then I’ll invoice him.”

Mai Chunshui glanced at his boots, glanced at Xiao Se, and did not move. “I brought my own slippers.” he said, producing a pair of tragic hotel disposables from a coat pocket. “Be grateful.”

“Be ashamed, you cheapskate.” said Xiao Se, but he took them and set them neatly by the door anyway.

“First rule,” Mai Yuanzhou said, voice mild and carrying, “no work talk for the first twelve hours.”

“Second rule,” Lanzhu added, slipping an arm around Mai Dongyuan’s waist with faux-indifference and real relief, “no dying. I left my dramatic mourning veil in Urumqi.”

“Third rule,” Zhu Yan offered cheerfully, kissing Mai Lilun’s jaw and earning a glacial side-eye for his trouble, “if anyone mentions spreadsheets, Xiao Se will make soup.”

A collective shudder.

“His soup isn’t that bad.” Mai Duobing said loyally.

“It’s a chemical incident, Xiaobao.” Li Lianhua said, soft as falling ash. “I’ll cook tonight, perhaps with my new spice mix.”

“You will not cook.” Eight voices at once, tight with terror.

Lianhua smiled like a lantern lighting behind frosted glass and quietly put down the knife he’d taken from nowhere.

Mai Huayong turned a slow circle in the main room, his face unreadable in the way a still lake is unreadable. “Not too bad for a struggling business.” he decided at last, which in the Huayong dialect meant: I will tolerate this because my husband seems unarmoured here.

Sheng Shaoyu had arrived with him – rare, soft-stepped, the sort of polished that absorbs light rather than reflecting it. Huayong kept a radius around him the way a falcon keeps a radius around a fledgling cliff edge: nothing overt, everything absolute.

“Snacks.” Wang Ye announced, opening the basket and revealing a scandal of warm buns. “Steamed. Vegeterian. Harmless. I brought them from Wudang Mountain.”

Mai Yanchi inspected one as though it were contraband at a checkpoint. “Steam hides flaws. We’ll see if the filling passes inspection.” He bit into it with the same decisiveness he reserved for field rations, chewed, and gave a curt nod – as if authorising its consumption for the rest of the room.

Xiao Se, leaning against the doorframe like a man about to correct a brushstroke, didn’t miss a beat. “Careful, fujun. Last time you ‘inspected’ something here, I ended up with three broken chairs, a split counter, and a debt ledger thicker than a monk’s scripture. I could’ve handled the thugs myself, but you were so eager. Been working off that damage ever since. Interest included.”

“Still keeping score?” The third Mai asked.

“Always.” Xiao Se smiled, all elegance and grace. “Debts are like brushstrokes, love – leave ’em half-done and they smear all over your good shirt.”

Chi Cheng found a place near the terrace rail, where he could see the river and the impossibly blue winter sky – a sharp, crystalline hue that seemed carved out of ice and light. The air carried a brittle clarity, each cloud a pale cotton blob dissolving into the cold expanse. He felt the familiar itch under his skin that meant do something – and felt it loosen.

The Mais moved around him like weather: predictable in their unpredictability, dangerous in their tenderness, all of them operating on some family rhythm he had never been taught and had somehow started to keep time with anyway.

It was not unlike life with his sister, except the Mais’ storms were more deliberate. His sister’s honesty had always been sharpened with a cunning edge, but her love for him was unshakable – a rare thing in a house where affection was rationed, and reputation was the currency. She had been the first to push back against their parents, the first to insist that he would be accepted as he was, whether the family liked it or not. In Beijing, their conversations had been exercises in restraint, every sentence carrying its own shadow, but under the words there had always been a current of trust.

With the Mais, their truths came with teeth, and their care came without disguise, as if he had been adopted by a pack of wolves who had also decided he needed fattening up.

Beside him, Mai Yu tugged his cuff into place, unbothered by the cold. The colour-blind lover had chosen a jumper that was, in fact, lilac and, in his mind, confidently grey. He smelled like Chi Cheng’s cigarettes. When he caught his Beijing boyfriend looking, the Mai tilted his chin like a dare.

“What?” he said.

“Just taking inventory.” Chi Cheng replied. “Ensuring the mountain air hasn’t stolen anything precious.”

“It did.” His Dabao said, letting Wu Suowei slide briefly to the surface of the same face. “My dignity, when you tried to fold those towels for da-ge.”

“They were minimalist.” Chi Cheng said gravely.

“They were damp origami, Chi-ge.” Mai Yu said, and kissed him, quick as pocketed laughter, before anyone could weaponise the moment.

It had taken Mai Yu a while to notice, but somewhere between the cold corridors and the crowded war room, Chi Cheng had been claimed. Not as an honoured guest, nor as a wary ally, but as something rarer – prey the pack had decided to keep. In the Mai household, this was the closest thing to a coronation: to be dragged into the current and fed alongside the rest, to be teased with the same merciless affection they reserved for their own. Wu Suowei might have spent years surviving in other people’s worlds, but this was the first time he had seen Chi Cheng belong to one without having to fight for the right.

The kitchen was hardly worthy of the name – four walls of flaking plaster long surrendered to smoke stains, a cracked cement floor that remembered a thousand uneven footsteps, and a single enamel-topped table whose legs trembled whenever a knee brushed past. Light seeped reluctantly through a narrow, greasy window, catching dust motes as they drifted like lazy ash. On the lone shelf, mismatched bowls leaned against each other for balance, their glaze worn thin, edges chipped to the bone. The air was dense with the mingled smells of scallion oil, rice steam, and something vinegary that no one claimed ownership of.

Lunch began as it always did in this family – with a minor war.

The congee faction split immediately into sweet, savoury, and “absolutely not for lunch.” Mai Yanchi campaigned loudly for roasted beef despite the obvious lack of cattle in the vicinity; his Xiao Princess, ladle in hand, accused him of crimes against cuisine and swatted him away like a stray thought. Dongyuan and his oldest cousin both made repeated, doomed attempts to prevent Li Lianhua from approaching any raw ingredients.

Across the battered counter, Mai Qing and Ruan Lanzhu debated whether the villa’s Wi-Fi deserved mercy.

“It’s pastoral.” Lanzhu sniffed. “Orphaned goats upload faster than this.”

“You could flirt with the router.” Qing suggested. “Everything else surrenders when you do.”

Mai Huayong and Sheng Shaoyu had taken the small table in the corner, the only island of stillness in the room. Huayong set down a thermos of home-cooked fish broth with the quiet possessiveness of a man who had no intention of sharing with his cousins. His gaze skimmed each doorway, each voice, dismissing the chaos until it returned to Shaoyu – as unthinking and natural as breathing. When Zhu Yan arrived with two cups of tea and an unrepentant grin, Huayong tipped his head in that spare, courtly way.

“Just bringing you tea and my wonderful company.” Zhu Yan said, flicking his white hair strands back in place. His eyes sparkled with hints of crimson. “Shaoyu, it’s wonderful you joined us. I hope we don’t scare you off.”

“You won’t. I already ended up with the psycho one.” The Sheng CEO replied dryly. “My spouse keeps me away from his family as if I can’t protect myself.”

A beat. Polite laughter. Then the kind of small, sharp silence that holds the outline of a joke’s truth.

Huayong’s fingers brushed Shaoyu’s sleeve once – a reassurance both given and received.

By the stove, Rich Boy 1 Wang Ye was teaching the youngest Mai how to fold scallion pancakes without profanity as Rich Boy 2 Chi Cheng watched on.

“It’s like Taiji.” The Wudang priest said, turning the dough. “Yield. Turn. Return. Don’t chase.”

“But the pan is running away, ge.” Mai Duobing protested, wide-eyed.

“That’s because you’re attacking the pan, didi.” Wang Ye said serenely. “Seduce it.”

“I’m telling Xiaohua you said that.” Duobing announced, gleeful. Li Lianhua, across the room, listened with his whole face and pretended not to.

Mai Lilun leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, radiating the kind of beauty that was both unapproachable and unwilling to leave. He watched Zhu Yan move through the kitchen’s narrow chaos – a theatrical flare of sleeve here, a Loki-inspired grin there – and his expression shifted in a way so small it could only be called devotion. The air smelled faintly of scorched tea leaves and something over-salted; wooden drawers rattled as cousins passed too close, and every surface seemed to hold either a knife, a cup, or an unanswered question.

When Zhu Yan passed, Lilun reached out and straightened a loose thread on his robe, the gesture so precise it bordered on ceremonial.

“It’s crooked.” the Mai yao murmured.

“I’m alive, A-Li.” Zhu Yan murmured back, and the look they shared was almost indecent in its simplicity.

“Good. Stay away from wu-ge. You never know when Huayong might poison you for drifting too close to his dearest. Especially since you’re yao and can recover so quickly from all the toxins.” Lilun’s gaze drifted back to the kitchen’s clutter as if the world had been restored to its correct state.

“Was that why I didn’t have my taste buds and my sense of smell last week?”

They ate in waves on the terrace, plates warming palms, sleeves brushed by the chilly wind. The river a living thread, silver and sinuous, winding through frosted fields and snow-dusted banks, speaking its own language: incessantly, but not unkindly. It did not pause for frost.

Somewhere between the teasing, the clatter, and the comfort of chewing without performance, Chi Cheng realised something startling: he had relaxed, and he hadn’t asked permission.

Afternoon eased into fragrant tea, and tea slipped into the soft haze of naps disguised as meditations. “Rest brings wisdom”, murmured Chunshui, fervently echoed by Wang Ye, as cousins drifted into drowsiness earned by the day’s simple joys.

A sudden gleam of sunlight coaxed everyone outside; the cousins migrated down the track toward the river bend, where a flat shelf of stone offered enough space for a photograph and a small fight.

Lanzhu clapped when the light grew honey-soft. “Photo, before anyone duels with a dumpling.”

They arranged themselves by instinct: couples at the edges, eldest cousins in the centre, troublemakers everywhere. Mai Yuanzhou, ever the patriarch, surveyed the group with the calm authority of someone dividing a house into auspicious zones. “Liu-di, please look a bit more like person”.

“I only do roles, da-ge.” Mai Qing replied, turning down his near-maniac smile.

“Lipstick.” Yuanzhou added cautiously, “less… purple.”

“Homophobic.” Lanzhu sighed, somehow radiating even more violet from a robe the colour of storm bruises. “Dongyuan, straighten my collar or I shall combust.”

Dongyuan, so obviously in love, straightened it. “There you go, gorgeous.”

Zhu Yan half-hid behind Lilun, while Duobing and Lianhua fit together as naturally as paired jade pendants. Qing and Ye stood side by side, one broad, one steady – horizon and anchor. Which left centre: Mai Yu and Chi Cheng, and beside them, Yuanzhou and Chunshui – the bones and the blade; the map and the road.

[Referring to the phrase: “一高一稳” – One stands tall, one stands firm].

Xiao Se installed himself like an empress, then leaned back against Yanchi’s chest as if he’d paid rent for the space. Yanchi’s hand found his wrist. He squeezed twice; Xiao Se rolled his eyes and did not move away.

“Sheng xiansheng.” Huayong said, so lightly it was almost air.

“I’m here.” Shaoyu said, already beside him.

Huayong’s hand found Shaoyu’s with quiet certainty.

“This is ridiculous.” Lilun announced, which meant he would stand where he was told.

“Ridiculousness is civilisation’s pillow, darling.” Zhu Yan said, flinging an arm wide. “Smile, or you’ll summon misfortune.”

[Referring to the phrase “喜幸在笑” – Fortune smiles upon joy].

“Take the picture before I actually conjure A-Yan into a rock.” Lilun grumbled, a protest for form’s sake.

“Smile and say ‘money’ everybody!” Qing said, because he couldn’t help directing even when he wasn’t supposed to. “Not too much. We’re terrifying, not approachable.”

“Three!” shouted the youngest Mai at volume so loud his husband’s eyebrows twitch.

“Two.” drawled Lanzhu, because he was always the second you forgot was sharp.

“One.” said Wang Ye with a near yawn, and the air seemed to listen.

The shutter snapped. Then three more, because insurance was a family value.

“Another pose.” Mai Yanchi demanded. “For the aunties.”

“No.” The oldest Mai said, which meant yes.

The second frame caught laughter – Zhu Yan whispering something outrageous into Lilun’s unwilling ear, Wang Ye looking at Qing like the balance of the world had finally shifted, Huayong’s head bent into Shaoyu’s shoulder. In the front row, Chi Cheng had one arm around Mai Yu without thinking, while his Weiwei’s arms looped around his lover’s neck. There was so much adoration between them it made Mai Chunshui took a swift shot of his tequila.

The last shot was the quietest – no posing, no choreography, just the unguarded breath after being exactly where you belong. If you looked closely, you could see what Chi Cheng saw: not an army, not a cartel, not a legend, but a net – knotted with competence, pettiness, and impossible loyalty.

He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to.
He felt it land in him with the weight of something simple: I am held.

As the sun sank lower, its rays grew diffuse, slanting across the river at improbable angles. Shadows lengthened and fused with the silver gleam, so that water and darkness intertwined. In this hush of sunset, the river became confidante to the world’s quiet thoughts. The wind rustled with only a hint of sound, while the water hummed its endless tune – a dialogue between element and observer.

Evening fell with the efficiency of a theatre blackout. The kitchen regained its bravado. Someone burned garlic; someone else claimed it was intentional – from the group of four monks. On the terrace, a brazier hissed into life and pretended it wasn’t a campfire with a degree. The river darkened to a ribbon you wanted to touch, and the mountains leaned closer, as if curious.

[Referring to the proverb “个和尚没水喝” – Three monks have no water to drink.]

When the first cup was poured, someone invoked an old rule: one story each, true or mostly true, folly or mercy, no rescues. The eldest Mai cousin lifted his cup toward the centre and added, not looking at Chi Cheng but somehow landing on him anyway, “We are not very good at saying so, but we’re glad you stayed for dinner.”

“I brought wine.” Replied Beijing Rich Boy 2, Chi Cheng – capital-speak for thank you.

“Of course you did.” Said Beijing Rich Boy 1, Wang Ye. “We think feelings come in glass.”

The brazier burned low. The mountain exhaled. There were yawns; there were insults about the yawns. Eventually, someone remembered the presence of beds and the human tradition of lying down. The cousins began drifting to their own corners of the house. Somewhere down the hall, the sound of water pipes complained as someone claimed the first shower.

Mai Chunshui passed Chi Cheng in the corridor, gave him a slow once-over, and smirked like a man who’d already decided whether to take a bet. “You survive the first day, maybe you survive the rest,” he said, then shut his door without waiting for a reply.

Mai Yuanzhou emerged from the study with a stack of papers, handed Chi Cheng a pen without explanation. “For next time,” he murmured. The pen was black lacquer, absurdly expensive. An unspoken contract that required no signature.

Near the door, Mai Yanchi slung an arm around the Beijing playboy’s shoulders and let it sit there for exactly two heartbeats. “If you ever need a truck and plausible deniability,” he said, “call me.”

“Noted.” Chi Cheng said as Mai Dongyuan pressed a card into his hand.

“Emergency line. Not the dramatic one. The boring one.” – Said the fourth Mai.

“Boring sounds excellent.” Chi Cheng laughed.

Huayong and Shaoyu passed by, and Huayong paused long enough to look at the newly recruited with that clinical, terrifying care. “If anyone tries again,” he said, “I will ask first before I am… creative.”

“I appreciate the heads-up,” The Chi said.

“That was not a heads-up,” Huayong said, almost smiling. “That was restraint.”

Mai 6 appeared miraculously after his fifth cousin, clapped Chi Cheng on the shoulder and whispered, “If you ever need to fake your death, my lighting guy is a genius.”

“I’ll keep living, thanks.” Chi Cheng said. “Cheaper.”

“Debatable, Chi shaoye.” Mai Qing murmured, then laced his fingers with Wang Ye’s and was gently towed away by the universe’s most persuasive priest.

Duobing popped his head out from behind a doorframe, grinning. “You’ll need thicker skin,” he advised. “And faster reflexes. Especially if you keep kissing him in front of everyone.” Then he vanished, the door clicking shut like a conspirator’s wink.

Lilun paused last, as if he had to confirm to himself he was pausing. “If it is betrayal,” he said, “I will not forgive it.” He glanced at Zhu Yan, at Chi Cheng, at the door. “But if it is fear, I will wait.”

“I’m done with fear,” Chi Cheng said.

“Good.” Lilun said, and gone.

The house settled.

In their room, Chi Cheng set the snake carrier beside the bed. Xiao Cubao coiled, unbothered. He sat on the edge of the bed and watched his two baobeis for a while, letting quiet find him.

Mai Yu leaned against the sill, hair still damp from the shower, watching the garden fall into shadow. “Come here,” his Da Bao said, voice smaller than the room and stronger than the walls.

Chi Cheng came up behind him, hands finding the familiar curve of his waist as if no time had passed. For a while they stood there, listening to the quiet pulse of the house. Acceptance, in the Mai family, was rarely spoken. It was in the absence of further tests. In the way the air stopped bristling.

“You didn’t scare them,” Mai Yu said.

“I wasn’t trying to,” Chi Cheng replied. “Not today.”

“That was you behaving?”

He smirked against the back of Mai Yu’s neck. “That was me… invested.”

“I used to think,” The Beijing native said into the dark, “that if I stood still, I’d be easy to hurt.” He swallowed. “Then I met your cousins, Weiwei. Turns out standing still is when they catch you.”

“Pack hunters.” Mai Yu said, fond with a hint of awe. “Terribly sentimental.”

“It’s not about the hours,” The Mai added, eyes on the river, voice flat to hide the tremor.

“It’s about the rooms. Who you let in. Who you let see you when you’re not…” He gestured vaguely at his face. “Performing.”

He glanced at Chi Cheng, then away, then back, because courage has muscle memory. “So, I’m letting you in, laogong.”

With his eyes burning with love and want, Chi Cheng kissed his Weiwei until even the mountains looked away.

Just before dawn, the rundown villa woke to laughter – the light, high sound of children outside. On the riverbank, a little knot of them had materialised as if the mountain had grown them overnight: red scarves, yellow hats, the glorious palette of donated wool. Someone had strung a line of tin cups and was flicking them with a stick; the crude chime travelled up the slope like a folk song finding its shoes.

The family found the terrace one by one, wrapped in blankets and sleep. Nobody spoke. They stood, the lot of them – kings and knights, monks and monsters, husbands who had survived themselves and husbands still learning how –  and listened to a song that didn’t care who they’d been before they got here.

“There’s a pond before the gate,” one child sang, half-melody, half-shout, hopping in place to keep warm.

“Water runs and won’t be late
birds come down to wash their wings,
magpies tease the lotus rings.”

Another joined, stomping time:

“Girls laugh low with cloth to rinse,
boys beat grain to flour and foam;
look once, look twice, then thrice again
the stone remembers: we are home.
Look once, look twice, then thrice again
the stone remembers: we are home.”

[A Country Scene by Li Qian]

The words drifted up through the pine, gathered themselves, and curled into the eaves where the last snow still clung like shy applause.

“Photo?” Qing whispered, because endings love ceremony.

“Last one.” Yuanzhou allowed.

They gathered again, looser, warmer, less afraid of their own softness. On three, the camera clicked and caught not perfection, not power, but the precise second a fortress becomes a home.

Safety isn’t a castle. It’s a chorus.

You don’t build it alone.

You learn the notes.

You sing.

“Home isn't where you're from, it's where you find light when all grows dark.”

Pierce Brown, Golden Son