The mud sucked greedily at Luo Feng's boots, a vulgar, squelching sound that seemed to mock him. Each step was a struggle, a far cry from the polished marble floors of the palace he'd fled. The elegant silk of his robes was now a sodden, filthy weight, plastered to his skin with a mixture of rain, sweat, and dirt. The scent of damp earth, pine, and his own fear was thick in his throat.
He was lost.
The thought was a bitter pill. Luo Feng, Second Prince of the Great Ming Empire, heir to the Dragon Throne, was utterly and completely lost. The carefully orchestrated assassination attempt on the road to Qiling Mountain had been a success, not in killing him, but in doing something far worse: rendering him irrelevant. His guards were scattered or dead, his horse had bolted into the mist-shrouded woods, and his wallet, with its imperial seals and gold, was gone, lost in the frantic scramble for survival. He was no longer a prince out here. He was just a man—cold, tired, and prey.
The forest canopy dripped a steady, cold rhythm onto his shoulders. He pushed a low-hanging branch aside, his knuckles scraped and raw, and there it was. A break in the trees. A river, wide and sluggish, grey under the overcast sky. And her.
A figure stood by the water's edge, still as a jade carving. She was just a silhouette against the silver-grey water, her simple, dark travelling robes blending into the landscape. She wasn't looking at the path or the sky, but down into the river's depths, as if searching for something.
For a long moment, Feng just watched. There was a profound peace about her, an unshakeable calm that felt alien in his world of constant tension and deceit. He was a creature of courtly manners and calculated words, but in this moment, instinct overrode training. He was a lost man, and she was another person.
"Guniang!" he called out. The word was rough, stripped of the polished deference usually reserved for addressing a young woman. It was just a sound, a plea.
She turned.
The first thing Feng noticed were her eyes. They were not the downcast, demure eyes of a court lady. They were wide, intelligent, and held a directness that was utterly disarming. They assessed him without fear or judgment, taking in his bedraggled state, his fine but ruined clothes, his obvious disorientation. Her face was not painted with the white powder and rouge of the capital; it was clean, touched by the sun and the wind, and strikingly lovely in its unadorned simplicity.
"Shé?" she replied, her voice clear and curious, carrying over the soft rush of the river. "Is there any problem, mister?"
The word 'mister'—xiānsheng—hit him like a physical blow. You? No one calls me that. The sheer, bizarre normalcy of it left him speechless for a heartbeat. Does she not know who I am? Maybe… maybe she truly doesn't.
"I… I got lost," he managed, the admission feeling strangely liberating. "Can you tell me the way?"
A small, easy smile touched her lips, and it seemed to Feng that the overcast day brightened just a little. "You got lost? It's okay. I know every path around these mountains." She spoke with a cheerful confidence that was both baffling and reassuring. "Where were you going?"
"To the capital."
Her smile widened into a grin. "Capital? I am also going to the capital. You follow me. I will take you there."
She said it with the casual certainty of someone stating the sun would rise. Feng could only stare, his mind reeling. This unknown girl was offering to guide the Second Prince to his own home as if she were showing a neighbour the way to the local market.
He fell into step beside her, his courtier's mind struggling to compute her. "Are you waiting for someone?" he asked, the question feeling inane but necessary to break his own bewilderment.
"Yeah. For the boat."
"Boat?" He looked up and down the riverbank. He saw no dock, no vessel.
She pointed with a slender finger to a weathered, rain-blurred wooden sign half-hidden by reeds. "There are two ways to the next city. One by land, one by water. The land path twists through the foothills. It takes over a week, and then another four days to reach the next proper city from there." She then gestured to the river, its surface rippling. "But by the water path? The current is with us. We'll reach the next city in seven hours."
Feng, a man who had spent his life considering the strategic advantages of roads and armies, looked at this girl who calculated her journey in hours and scenery. She was an enigma. A practical, sun-touched enigma.
He watched her, this strange guide who had found him, and for the first time since the ambush, the knot of tension in his chest began to loosen, replaced by a spark of something unfamiliar: curiosity.
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