The next morning, when Yin Xu awoke from her languor, the person beside her pillow was already gone. She felt a hollow sense of loss, but she was used to it.
He was always like this. His meetings with her were invariably rushed, and he was unwilling to spend any extra time on her.
She knew she was only one of his lovers, and she knew she had no power to demand that he remain faithful to her alone.
Yet she depended on him to live. Of course, it was not that she could not survive without him, but this way she could live better. She had chosen this road herself.
Her life was reasonably good, and it also allowed some of the clanspeople who followed her to live well.
The Qingqiu Fox Clan was the ancestral clan of all foxes under heaven. For someone of her Qingqiu origins, choosing this road might not sound particularly respectable, but to the fox clan, it hardly amounted to bringing shame upon their ancestors. Mainly, foxes did not care much about such things.
Besides, within the clan's little patch of land, the direct line always passed its inheritance to the direct line. Once you became a collateral branch, you were destined to branch off again and again. When that little patch could no longer accommodate so many, those ever-more-distant branches lost their footing and could only leave their homeland.
Those who left could only find their own means of survival. If they amounted to something, the clan might take pride in them. If they did not, they were not even qualified to disgrace the clan. The clan would say that so many branches and leaves had spread abroad, and the world was so vast-how could it possibly look after every one of them?