The dining table in the central pavilion was carved from a single slab of black ironwood. It was polished so heavily it looked like standing water.
Xiao Mei's hands were shaking. She held a ceramic teapot with both hands, trying to keep the spout steady as she poured. A single drop of hot green tea splashed onto the black wood. It sounded like a drum strike in the massive, quiet room.
Xiao Mei stopped breathing. She bowed her head, waiting to be reprimanded.
Bai Qian didn't look at the spill. She didn't look at Xiao Mei. Her eyes were fixed across the table.
Wei Tian picked up his chopsticks. He hadn't touched the carved jade set laid out by the kitchen staff. He had brought his own cheap bamboo ones from his room. The tips were stained slightly brown from soy sauce.
He reached out and picked a sliver of white meat from the steamed river carp in the center of the table.
Bai Qian watched him chew.
She was running a low-level physiological scan. It was invasive. It monitored the dilation of his pupils, the microscopic shifts in his breathing rhythm, and the exact beats per minute of his heart. She had spent the last twenty-four hours dissecting a soul pattern in her own foundation that shouldn't exist, put there by a mortal who registered as an absolute void.
She needed data. She needed to find the edge of the performance.
Wei Tian swallowed. He looked at the fish.
"The draft is gone," Wei Tian said.
That was his first sentence. It wasn't a greeting. It wasn't an inquiry about her day managing three thousand violent disciples. It was an observation about the Eastern Pavilion.
Bai Qian logged the data point. She had sent no carpenters to his quarters. Xiao Mei's reports mentioned no repairs. A warped ironwood wall had simply fused itself together.
"Xiao Mei tells me you spend your days entirely within the pavilion," Bai Qian said. Her voice carried the ambient chill of the high peaks. It was a voice used to giving orders that resulted in casualties. "What do you do?"
Wei Tian picked up a piece of pickled radish. "I read."
Sentence two. Two words.
Bai Qian's eyes narrowed a fraction. His heart rate had not elevated. Normal mortals spiked to at least ninety beats per minute when she directed her full attention at them. Wei Tian was sitting at a steady, lazy sixty.
"The outer archive holds ten thousand manuals," Bai Qian pressed, leaning slightly forward. The silver ornament in her hair caught the lantern light. "Histories, low-tier cultivation methods, regional geography. Which ones occupy a mortal's time?"
"The dusty ones."
Sentence three.
He wasn't evading. He was answering the literal boundaries of the question, offering absolutely zero surface area for her to grip.
"The Elder Council met this afternoon," Bai Qian said. She picked up her tea but did not drink. She let the steam curl around her fingers. "Shen Mu spent two hours detailing how your presence invalidates the dignity of the White Jade Sect. They want you dead."
Wei Tian ate the radish. It gave a loud, satisfying crunch. "Yes."
Sentence four.
Bai Qian stared at him. "You don't seem concerned. I could assign guards to your door. Two Core-layer disciples would be sufficient to deter a quiet assassination."
"No."
Sentence five.
"If they send someone in the dark, you have no qi to defend yourself. You will die."
"They won't."
Sentence six.
Bai Qian set her teacup down. The porcelain clicked against the ironwood. She searched his posture. He was slouching slightly, leaning on his left elbow, completely focused on separating a fish bone from the meat. There was no arrogance in his shoulders. No hidden smirk of a master playing a game.
Why wouldn't they? Did he calculate that she needed him alive as a political shield and would protect him? Or did he know something else? The void signature she had scanned last night echoed in her memory.
"You understand the geometry of your position here," Bai Qian said. Her tone shifted, dropping into the register she used for hostile negotiations. "You are a piece on a board. You exist to block Shen Mu from seating his nephew beside me."
Wei Tian finally looked up from the carp.
"You needed a shield."
Sentence seven.
It was a completely flat statement of fact. He looked back down at the fish.
Dinner concluded in silence. Xiao Mei cleared the plates, moving so fast she nearly tripped over her own robes, desperate to escape the suffocating, heavy air between the Sect Master and the mortal.
When they stepped out of the central hall, the night air was biting. Frost had already formed on the edges of the jade paving stones. The sky was clear, the stars hard and aggressive against the black.
Wei Tian walked with his hands tucked into his opposite sleeves. His cheap cloth shoes made a soft, dragging sound against the stone.
Bai Qian walked beside him.
She usually took the high bridge back to her sanctum. Tonight, she took the long path toward the Eastern Pavilion. She justified the detour mathematically: proximity testing. She needed to observe him in an uncontrolled environment, outside the formal structure of a dinner table. If she walked close enough to him, perhaps his suppression would slip.
It didn't. He just walked. He didn't shiver in the freezing wind.
They reached the divergence in the path. The right fork led to his neglected pavilion. The left led back up the mountain.
Bai Qian stopped.
"Wei Tian," she said.
He paused, turning his head slightly. The moonlight caught the sharp angle of his jaw.
She abandoned the indirect probing. She discarded the political maneuvering. She looked directly into his face, ignoring the vertigo that threatened to spike at the base of her skull from looking too closely at the void.
"Why did you agree to this marriage?" she asked.
It was the core question. Her father had signed the contract to settle an ancient debt with a dead family, but Wei Tian could have taken a buyout. He could have taken gold and vanished into the mortal kingdoms. Instead, he had walked up nine thousand steps into a sect where half the elders wanted to break his neck.
Wei Tian didn't answer immediately.
For three seconds, the lazy slouch vanished. He looked at the jagged peaks of the Qinghe range, silhouetted against the stars. He looked like he was reading the sky the way he read his dusty books.
He turned back to her.
"I wanted somewhere quiet to read."
Sentence eight.
It hit Bai Qian's chest with a strange, heavy resonance. She processed the audio. She processed his micro-expressions. She ran the statement through every analytical filter she possessed.
It wasn't a lie. It was, impossibly, the most honest thing he had said all night.
The corners of Bai Qian's mouth twitched upward. A microscopic, millimeter shift. She almost smiled.
She caught it instantly, suppressing the muscle movement before it could fully form. She categorized the warmth in her chest as a strategic victory. She had finally provoked a genuine human response from him. It was a data point. Nothing more. She filed the interaction under 'psychological baseline.'
She didn't realize she was lying to herself.
Wei Tian turned toward the dirt path leading to his pavilion.
"Goodnight."
Sentence nine.
He walked away.
Bai Qian stood on the jade tiles, watching his white robe disappear into the shadows of the pine trees. Nine sentences. She had spent an hour trying to dissect him, and she was leaving with less certainty than she arrived with.
She turned to head back to her sanctum.
BONG.
The sound struck the mountain like a physical blow.
Bai Qian froze.
The heavy bronze bell at the outer gates rarely rang. It was forged from deep-earth iron, designed to cut through ambient qi.
BONG.
The vibration traveled up through the soles of her boots. Two rings. Formal approach.
BONG.
Three rings. Sovereign arrival.
The ambient qi in the air shifted instantly. A heavy, suffocating pressure rolled over the outer walls of the White Jade Sect, crushing the mountain wind. It wasn't an attack, but the sheer, unsuppressed arrogance of the aura made the air taste like burning copper.
Celestial rank.
Bai Qian's hand dropped to the hilt of her sword. Her eyes snapped toward the eastern valley.
Mo Zheng.
The Iron Blood Sect emissaries were not due for six days. They weren't supposed to bring their Sect Leader. They certainly weren't supposed to bring an aura that felt like a localized apocalypse.
In the distance, halfway down the path to his pavilion, Wei Tian did not turn around. He didn't look toward the gate. He just pulled a lint ball off his sleeve, adjusted the book in his robe, and kept walking.