Yin Wujou followed half a step behind her. The bushes on both sides of the mountain path were covered with dew, and his trousers were soaked up to his knees as he walked. The morning light filtered through the gaps in the tree canopy, shining beams of light on the path piled with fallen leaves, making the smell of decaying leaves warm and cozy. They walked for about two miles when Snow Empress suddenly slowed down and turned to look at him.
"After you activate your Spirit Vision, notice anything different about the surrounding scenery."
Yin Wujou thought for a moment. He raised his gaze and swept it around. The bushes, the rocks, the mountain path, and the rooftops faintly visible in the distant valley—all were there, sitting as green and gray-brown as before. But he could see something else. Beneath the roots of every tree, a faint light flickered as if breathing. The textures inside the rocks concealed subtle, surging lines. Even the soil on the mountain path, worn down by footsteps, retained traces of moisture left by last night's dew. It was like an extremely thin, transparent net spread across the surface of everything.
"I can see a lot of lines," he said. "Underground water veins, the paths through which tree roots absorb water, the air currents left by the wind as it passes through the branches and leaves. You can see them all a little bit."
"Can you see it clearly?"
"Not really," he said. "It's like looking at something through water; the outline is there, but the details are blurry."
The Snow Empress nodded. "That's how it is when you first develop Spirit Vision. It will become sharper with use. Once you cultivate your Spirit Vision to the point where you can see the thickness and direction of all the Spirit Line within a ten-foot radius, your knife-like finger technique will be able to injure only the lines and not the flesh."
Yin Wujou looked down at his right hand—the hand that held the willow-leaf blade. He hadn't been entirely confident when he made that move last night. The outline of the slipknot in his Spirit Vision was blurry; he relied on his memory of the structural diagram on the parchment to fill in the trajectory of the blade. The instant the blade tip flicked out, he was actually looking at two things simultaneously—the blurry blue line in his Spirit Vision, and the curved line he had drawn dozens of times in his mind. Only by combining the two could he pinpoint the exact position.
"I will practice," he said.
Snow Empress remained silent. The two continued down the mountain path, and after rounding a bend, the view suddenly opened up. At the bottom of the valley lay a town with blue tiles and white walls, smoke rising simultaneously from dozens of chimneys, standing straight in the windless morning sky like a bundle of white chopsticks carefully inserted into the ground. A river flowed along the edge of the town, its water gleaming in the morning light like a stretched tin foil, winding its way around a small vegetable patch to the north of the town before flowing eastward.
After entering the town, Snow Empress didn't stop. She walked south along the main street, through the narrow alley between the vegetable market and the cloth shop, and around a half-collapsed earthen temple. Finally, she stopped at the end of an even narrower alley, barely wide enough for two people to pass side by side. There was a wooden door with peeling black paint, and most of the plaster above the lintel had fallen off, revealing the yellowish-brown mud bricks underneath. The door wasn't locked; it was ajar, and a smell of old tea and paper wafted from the crack.
Snow Empress reached out and pushed open the door.
The courtyard was very small, so small that there was only a small, three-steps-square patio in front of the main house. In the center of the patio stood a low bamboo table, on which sat a purple clay teapot and two upside-down cups. The door to the main house was open, and the interior was dimly lit. One could vaguely see that the shelves against the wall were piled high with scrolls and books. A thin figure sat among the scrolls, his back to the door, writing something with his head down.
"The debtors from Yanbei Circuit have come to our door," Snow Empress said, standing in the courtyard.
The figure stopped writing. He didn't turn around immediately; first, he placed the brush on the inkstone, picked up the half-written paper, blew on the ink, and carefully set it aside to dry. Only then did he slowly turn around. The moment he turned his face, Yin Wujou saw clearly—this person was extremely thin, with high cheekbones and sunken cheeks, but his eyes were unusually large, the pupils so light they were almost transparent, like two faded glass beads placed in their sockets. When he saw Snow Empress, those light-colored eyes clearly brightened for a moment.
"A rare guest." His voice was unusually deep, completely at odds with his gaunt appearance. "I've been hiding here from Yanbei for ten years, and you're the first old friend to come knocking on my door."
Snow Empress walked to the bamboo table and sat down, then reached out and turned over an upside-down cup. "What you wanted, message for message."
The man stared at Snow Empress's cup for a few moments, then got up and picked up the purple clay teapot on the table to pour her a cup of tea. The tea was extremely dark, almost black, and the steam carried a strange aroma of herbs and charcoal. After pouring the tea, he glanced at Yin Wujou again, his light-colored eyes lingering on Yin Wujou for a couple of moments, his eyebrows twitching almost imperceptibly.
"And this is," he said.
"My knife." Snow Empress picked up her tea and took a sip. "You just focus on your work; he can listen in."
The man turned the other cup over, poured tea into it, and pushed it in front of Yin Wujou. Then he sat back down on the threshold of the main room, facing Snow Empress across the low bamboo table. "What are you looking at?"
Snow Empress reached out and pulled her collar open a little. The pink line below her collarbone, which was healing, was revealed. The entrance from last night's blade cut still left a very shallow mark, but what was truly important was that, under her Spirit Vision, a faint, dark blue mark remained like burnt paper ash on the spiritual vein foundation deeper within the wound. Yin Wujou saw the person's eyes narrow slightly, and something deep within the pupils was spinning rapidly, like a miniature gearbox being turned.
The man stared at Snow Empress's collarbone for a long time. So long that the tea in the purple clay teapot went cold, so long that the cup of tea in Yin Wujou's hand had completely lost its heat. The light and shadow that had been swirling in his light-colored eyes finally stopped. He leaned back in his chair and let out a long sigh.
"A slipknot," he said. "The knot is finished with a double-strand, three-loop braid. The person who made this knot—"
He paused, exhaled completely, and then continued, "You've offended the Imperial City Bureau."
Snow Empress's hand, holding the teacup, remained perfectly still. " Imperial City Bureau."
" The Spirit Vein Bureau," the man said, lowering his voice even further. "Under the Imperial City Bureau is the Spirit Vein Bureau, which specifically manages matters concerning the mutations of spiritual roots in cultivators. The technique used on this thread is the third move of the ' Flood Dragon Suppression Weave ' technique from the Spirit Vein Bureau's secret files: a double-strand slipknot with three loops. I've only seen this technique once in the files; it's used by the Spirit Vein Bureau to seal the heart meridians of cultivators whose spiritual roots have mutated and gone out of control—locking a runaway Spirit Line with a slipknot, causing it to shrink back into the depths of the heart meridian and stop expanding outwards. The price is that after it's locked, the person locked will continuously weaken and won't live past ten years."
Snow Empress placed the teacup on the table very gently, so that the bottom of the cup touched the bamboo surface without making a sound. "But I've lived for more than ten years."