The bell atop the door of the Burying Ink Pavilion chimed, signaling the end of the day. Luo Jue didn't look up from his ledger. He was busy "fixing" a scroll, though in reality, he was decoding a cipher sent by the Nether-Palace.
"Shopkeeper Luo, the wind is turning cold. My shop brewed too much Dragon-Well tea. I thought you might want some to wash away that ink smell."
Luo Jue's hand twitched—a micro-movement no civilian would notice. Shen Youyu stood in the doorway, draped in pale blue silks, holding a steaming ceramic pot.
"Miss Shen, you are too kind," Luo Jue said, his voice dropping into the practiced tone of a timid scholar. "I was just about to close. These ancient texts are... exhausting."
As he reached for the tea, their fingers brushed. To an outsider, it was a shy, romantic moment.
Internally, Luo Jue's mind was screaming: Her calluses. They aren't from pouring tea. They are from a heavy-hilted broadsword.
Across from him, Shen Youyu smiled sweetly, but her eyes were scanning his throat—specifically the faint, jagged scar hidden by his high collar.
Luo Jue... you claim to be a scholar, yet your pulse didn't jump when I surprised you. Only a master of the Breath-Holding technique can stay that still.
"Is something wrong?" she asked, her voice like honey.
"Just admiring the tea," he lied. "And its brewer."
Three hours later, the moon was obscured by heavy clouds.
A shadow moved across the rooftops of Wuyun. Luo Jue, now dressed in form-fitting black silk with a raven-feather mask, landed silently on the eaves of the Governor's manor. He was after the Heavenly Meridian Map.
Suddenly, a streak of silver light sliced through the air.
Luo Jue flipped backward, his chain-blades whistling out from his sleeves.
Clang!
The blades met a slender, glowing rapier. Standing before him was a woman in white veils, her movements as fluid as falling snow.
"The Obsidian Raven," Shen Youyu hissed, her voice disguised by a spiritual art. "You're a long way from the Underworld."
"And you must be the Frost Lotus," Luo Jue replied, his voice a deep, gravelly rasp. "I heard the Heavenly Pillar Sect only sent their best. I suppose they were all busy, so they sent you instead?"
The fight was a dance of lethal precision. Luo Jue swung his chains, shattering the roof tiles, while Shen Youyu countered with bursts of frost-qi that turned the humid night air into stinging ice.
They slammed into each other, chest-to-chest, blades locked. In the dark, Luo Jue smelled something familiar.
Oolong and Snow-Pear. No, he thought,
it's a coincidence. Half the women in this city use that scent.
Shen Youyu felt the heat radiating off him. This man's internal energy... it feels like the hearth in the bookstore. Dark, but oddly steady.
"You're good," she whispered, kicking him back and vanished into a cloud of silver dust.
"You're better," he muttered to the empty air, feeling a strange thrum in his heart that had nothing to do with the battle.
The Next Morning
Luo Jue sat in his shop, a small bandage on his cheek. Shen Youyu walked in, a small bruise on her wrist.
"Oh dear, Shopkeeper Luo! What happened to your face?" she asked, her eyes wide with "concern."
"A falling shelf," he said, smiling painfully. "Books can be quite dangerous. And your wrist, Miss Shen?"
"A clumsy accident with a tea-tray," she sighed, sitting down and sliding a plate of buns toward him. "We really must be more careful, don't you think?"
"Indeed," Luo Jue said, his eyes meeting hers. "In a city like this, it's the small accidents that get you."
They shared a bun in perfect, suspicious, and deeply romantic silence.