Who said the eldest daughter is crazy? She's clearly a woman of high rank and influence in the

The snow was still falling outside, and the wind was blowing in through the cracks in the door, making the flames flicker wildly. She stayed by the fire, watching over him, without closing her eyes all night.

He had a fever again just before dawn. He had a high fever; his face was flushed and burning hot, and his lips were cracked and bleeding. But even in his feverish state, he uttered a sentence in his sleep.

Fu Yuan leaned closer to listen, but the words were muffled and he couldn't make them out.

She soaked the cloth strips in cold water and applied them to his forehead. When she bent down to change his dressing, she glanced at his face again. The high fever had softened his brow bone and jawline.

The snow stopped after daybreak. He was still unconscious, but his pulse had stabilized. She placed the remaining half-pot of water and a dry biscuit beside him, and wrote a note under the pot, indicating the location of the nearest town and how long it would take to get there.

She stood up, adjusted her black robe and face covering, pushed open the temple door, and stepped into the snow outside.

After taking three steps, she paused, turned her head to take one last look at the silhouette of the figure illuminated by the firelight in the temple, then looked away and continued north along the mountain path through the snow.

All of these thoughts surfaced in Xi Yueli's mind.

She went through it again and suddenly felt something stuck in her chest, a sour and swollen feeling, she couldn't tell if it was feeling sorry for Fu Yuan or feeling resentful for herself.

For four years, that man searched for Fu Yuan, traversing thousands of miles from Beishuo to Daying, examining all the dark web files from the Daying court to the martial arts world, even finding that the Tian Shu Division's spies had been planted in the corners of the Beishuo royal court.

He was looking for Fu Yuan, the woman in black robes who sewed forty-seven stitches for him in the dilapidated temple, but now he was with her, Xi Yue Li.

Fu Yuan's memories revealed too many things she shouldn't have known. She knew the focus Fu Yuan was when he inserted each needle, and she knew that in the half-breath pause before Fu Yuan pushed open the door and walked into the snow, something in his heart stirred slightly.

That half-breath movement was exactly the same as the sudden pang in her heart when she curled up in his arms on the ground of Jinxian Courtyard and smelled the fir scent on his cloak.

But now that she knows all this, the first thing that surges in her heart is that he has been looking for Fu Yuan for four years. If the person who saved him in the dilapidated temple that night was another woman in black, would he have also been looking for her for four years?

The moment the thought popped into her head, she was choked by its absurdity.

She didn't dwell on her own absurdity for long, because Xi Yueli felt a pain seeping from the very marrow of her bones, so painful that she opened her eyes.

Before she even opened her eyes, she curled up, digging her fingers into the cracks in the ground until her knuckles turned white.

Those memories flooded in like a tide, no longer fragments, but a complete scroll, carrying body temperature, scent, and timeline.

She remembered that the flame of the bronze lamp on her desk would flicker three times every day after midnight.

I remember there was a jar of snow water buried under the old locust tree in the back garden of the Northern Shuo King's Court when she was eighteen.

I remember the first time the young king wore men's clothing and sat on the throne, she folded two fingers into his cuffs. The girl glanced at her and said nothing, but the corners of her mouth curved into a smile for the entire afternoon.

Xi Yueli slowly opened her eyes. The candlelight in the underground chamber had gone out, and only a sliver of hazy moonlight leaked in through the crack in the door. She looked down and saw that she was wearing a large black robe, with dried dark red bloodstains on the cuffs.

She mentally repeated Helian Jing's name three times.

He took the real Fu Yuan away and left her here disguised as Fu Yuan.

Even though she knew it was the best option—Fu Yuan was poisoned and needed the antidote every month, and he had to leave the area suppressed by the formation to survive—she still couldn't help blaming him.

Xi Yueli leaned against the wall and stood up. Her body swayed slightly the moment her toes touched the ground, but she steadied herself. She looked down at her hands; they were still the same slender hands, but the feeling of her knuckles exerting force when she clenched her fists had changed.

Footsteps came from the stone corridor outside the door, pressing in from the end of the corridor. Xi Yueli pressed her ear against the wall and listened for a moment, then retrieved the complete picture of the underground structure of Ci'en Temple from Fu Yuan's memory.

This temple was specially built by the Empress's people to imprison Fu Yuan. There are seven underground chambers arranged in the shape of the Big Dipper. The passage between each underground chamber is equipped with a talisman array mechanism. If a non-caster touches it, an alarm will be triggered.

The underground chamber she is currently in is the Tian Shu position, the core of the formation.

The footsteps stopped three inches from the iron gate, and then someone said in a low voice, "The lock is open, the person is inside."

The iron gate was pulled open from the outside, and moonlight poured in, illuminating a small area of ​​grayish-white light in the basement. Two figures stood in the doorway, their armor silhouettes reflecting a cold light in the shadows; they were the Empress's personal guards.

One of them bent down and peeked into the doorway, his gaze sweeping around the underground chamber before finally settling on the figure huddled in a black robe in the corner.

The figure remained motionless, the hood of the black robe hanging down to cover most of the face, revealing only a thin jawline and a chin tip that was slightly whitened by the moonlight.

The only sound in the entire underground chamber was extremely shallow breathing, steady and slow, like a stone statue forgotten in a corner.

"He's there," the man at the door said, turning to the person behind him in a low voice, "Still unconscious. Go after him and report, but don't alert him—"

"It's too noisy." Xi Yueli spoke in a low voice, her tone cold and aloof, just like Fu Yuan's speaking speed and pronunciation.

When the voice came from under the black robe, the two people at the door froze simultaneously.

She slowly raised her head, the brim of her hood still covering the area above her brow bone, revealing only her eyes.

Moonlight streamed in through the doorway and fell on her face. Her almond-shaped eyes were now clear as black jade and calm as a deep, still stream, without a trace of the confusion and pain she had felt upon waking.

She glanced at the two people at the door, her gaze sweeping over them indifferently, as if they were two objects that didn't need to be remembered.

"Get out," she said, her voice light and steady, the last syllable ending cleanly and crisply.

The guard at the door bobbed his Adam's apple. He didn't have direct fear of Fu Yuan, but the name "National Preceptor of Beishuo" had been circulating in the Northern Territory for more than ten years. Even the fiercest soldiers would instinctively hunch their backs when they heard that tone.

The guard's lips moved as if he wanted to say something, but when he met those eyes that were still as cold as frost in the shadow of the hood, all the words stuck in his throat.

He took two steps back, the iron gate closed again, the sound of the lock clicking shut came from outside, and then the sound of boots quickly faded away.

Xi Yueli sat in the darkness, listening to the sound of boots disappear at the end of the stone corridor. Her back was still against the wall, her breathing was steady, and her posture was not moving. However, her hands clenched and unclenched under her black robe.

She mentally went over Helian Jing's name again. He probably expected her to scold him when he made this decision, but his judgment was right in an instant.

If the Empress's men saw that "Fu Yuan" was still in the underground chamber, they would not immediately launch a full-scale attack on the real Fu Yuan.

She knew that it was her turn to play Fu Yuan next, but this time, she was no longer Xi Yue Li, who was just clinging to fragmented memories.

All of Fu Yuan's memories were in her mind: the Northern Shuo Grand Preceptor's thirteen years of planning, the methods of court politics, the investigation records of all the Empress's hidden agents, and the results of three years of tracking the secret techniques.

She even remembered every fork in the road and the pattern of every rune stone arrangement in the dark pit beneath the Ci'en Temple.

New noises came from outside the iron gate, and a few more footsteps appeared. One person walked particularly far ahead, and the rhythm of his boots hitting the stone surface was half a beat slower than the others, as if he was deliberately trying to make his presence less noticeable.

The lock on the iron gate was turned from the outside, and a white figure stood in the doorway.