The Jade Wind Pavilion had no formal rules against attachments, but everyone understood the unwritten ones. That was the lesson written into its stone: wind, not roots; distance, not attachment.
The sect lived on contracts and reputation. Nobody wanted the Ministry of War to see them as a nest of tangled romances.
Jinx had grown up with that distance in her bones: a life spent above things, never with them.
Her Qi stayed level, like a steady, controlled current, but she felt the small disturbances in it. The glances. The tension. The way talk shifted around her.
Her build drew the city's gaze. Tall for a woman, all long, quick lines. Her springy legs left faint shadows of muscle when she pivoted or bent her knees when she landed from a jump. Her back stayed straight even when she thought no one was looking: the posture of someone who had spent years treating herself as a weapon first, a body second.
Dark brown hair, usually pulled into a high, no-nonsense tail that swung when she changed direction. Light chestnut eyes with threads of gold near the centre, always measuring: exits, roofs, footwork, terrain, who could reach her and from where. A decisive face: high cheekbones, full lips that rarely relaxed, a chin with the hint of a point, as if even her jaw refused to be anything but stubborn.
The few times she let curiosity or loneliness pull her close and had short affairs with fellow disciples or a bold city guard, she ended things herself. Always before anyone could mistake proximity for claim. Leaving first was easier than being left. And safer. Attachment gave other people a leash on you. Pavilion Master Yun Fang didn't say it aloud, but the Ministry of War had a long reach when it needed that leverage on a sect.
That night, she was in Yunzhong. And the city did what it always did at that time: negotiated with danger.
A pair of men turned a corner too slowly to be lost. A guild watchman stared at a woman's shadow too long. A teahouse door opened, and warm air spilled out, smelling of sweet tea leaves.
Jinx stayed above all of it. Literally. She took the roofs, where streets couldn't close around her.
She had learnt early that the city punished women twice: first for being caught alone, then for wanting to name it for what it was.
Yan Hui, another Saffron Yellow Junior Ascendant and also her best and only friend, had covered for her again. Sharp eyes, sharper tongue: the kind of friend who could read your silence and still choose to stand beside you.
Jinx had not smiled. She had only pressed her forehead briefly to Yan Hui's and left before the sun fully cleared the rooftops.
Now the light was fading again.
The dye house always smelled faintly of heat and water, even after dark. The kind of heat that sank into wood and cloth and never quite left.
Tonight the front shutters were only half closed. A sliver of lamplight cut across the alley. The painted characters on the signboard Cloud-Soft Silks looked sleepy.
Jinx slipped sideways through the gap.
Bolts of fabric hung from ceiling racks in long, swaying lengths: pale washed silks near the door, deeper dyes farther in: blues like evening, smoke-grey, blood-plum. Lanterns behind the cloth turned each sheet into a soft, glowing wall. When she moved, the fabric brushed her shoulders and hair, whispering along her sleeves. If you needed distance, this place wouldn't give it.
"Three weeks," a voice said from somewhere among the colours, "and no word. Then you walk in like you were just here yesterday."
Jinx followed the voice, sliding aside a length of tea-olive silk. Wei Liang stood behind a low sorting table, sleeves rolled up, hands stained faintly pink from the day's dye vats. He was tying off a bolt of cream-white, the exact shade she favoured for tunics.
He looked tired. And annoyed. And pleased to see her, all at once.
"The mountain doesn't send advance notice either," she said.
"That's the mountain," he said, tugging the knot a touch harder than he needed to. "You're not a mountain."
"No," she admitted. "I come down more often."
His mouth tried not to smile. Failed.
He wiped his hands on a cloth and stepped around the table. The lantern behind him lit the silk from the back, throwing reddish light along the edge of his face. Warm. Rooted. A man who knew exactly where he would be ten years from now: hands in dye, feet on this same floor.
"You know," he said, eyeing the cut of her current tunic, "if you stopped running along roofs, men wouldn't glare at you so much. You'd look good in something… settled."
He reached up and unhooked a bolt from a higher rack: deep red, almost wine-black at the fold. When he shook it out, the silk fell in a heavy, perfect line. Formal. Rich. The kind of cloth that made people think of weddings and promises.
Jinx's shoulders tightened, just a little.
Her Qi rose in a light, defensive flare: not enough for him to notice. He wasn't trained for that the way she was. But enough for her muscles to ready themselves, as if the cloth itself were a hand closing around her.
"Too much," she said. "I'd trip just looking at it."
"You?" He snorted. "You'd find a way to climb in it. You would."
"Then it would catch on a roof tile," she said, "and I'd end up hanging by my hem while some dock boy laughed himself sick."
She let her hand skim the edge of the cloth. Dense. Too dense.
There it was: that small pinch behind her ribs.
Wei Liang wasn't wrong. This was how people tried to root you: silk too expensive to bleed on, colours made for rooms instead of streets, fabric that assumed you would stay where it hung.
A nice life, she thought, offered like a cage with pretty hinges.
"Show me the lighter bolts," she said. "The ones your mother complains about because they don't fetch enough coin."
He rolled his eyes, but he set the wedding-silk aside.
He led her into a narrower aisle where softer, thinner fabrics waited. The hanging lengths brushed her cheek when she turned, cool and soft, like the ghost of someone's fingers.
He pulled out a bolt of jade green, barely heavier than smoke. "This suits you," he said. "Moves fast. Easy to wash."
She lifted it, testing the give, the way it would fall when belted. Easy to run in. Easy to climb in. Nothing that would tangle at her ankles at the wrong moment.
He watched her hold it to her front. His eyes flicked, just once, to the line of her waist, to the muscle along her thigh where the tunic ended. Something warmer moved under the irritation.
"Always climbing," he murmured. "One day you will get tired of that. Everyone does."
She folded the bolt instead. "How much for five arm-lengths?" she asked.
"Five?" His brow lifted. "You usually take only three."
"I need five, today," she said. The more she took, the fewer reasons she had to come back.
He named a price that was generous in her favour. She didn't argue. It wasn't about coin.
He took the bolt from her and set it on the table to measure.
"You could stay tonight," he said, keeping his eyes on the measuring cord. "I asked my mother not to rent the upper room this month. Thought…"
He trailed off.
Thought of you. Thought you'd come back. Thought we might be something other than this. Thought I'd keep you safe from the men in the streets.
She set her fingers lightly on the table, over the jade-green silk.
"That's a lot of empty nights," she said quietly. She felt guilty.
"You make the ones you come worth it," he answered. There was no anger in it, only something rawer. "And I'm tired of guessing when the next one is."
Her throat tightened, just a little. This was exactly why she didn't do "next" very often.
"You knew what this was," she replied, almost with a whisper.
"I knew what it could be," he shot back. "If you ever let it." His voice softened. "You don't have to keep slipping through alleys like you're doing something wrong."
Silence stretched. Lantern-light swayed, sending faint shadows trembling along the silk walls.
She could have ended it cleanly, here and now. Hand him the coin, take the cloth, tell him she'd be sending an apprentice next time.
Instead, she inhaled slowly and stepped around the table.
He looked up, his frown still half-formed. She caught it with her mouth.
The kiss was firm, no hesitation.
A flicker of heat pulsed through her Qi.
His fingers found her waist on instinct, tightening. His Qi jumped too, warm, unguarded, rising too close to the surface. He didn't seem to notice the shift, but she felt it against her own, like heat blooming through silk.
Her hands went to his shoulders, pushing him back against a stack of rolled silk. The bolts shifted, soft thumps, swallowing the quiet sounds of their mouths pressed against each other.
They wobbled, then held. He laughed low in his throat, his breath puffing against her cheek.
"Jinx," he began.
"Don't," she said against his mouth.
He went still for a heartbeat. She felt the conflict in him, the urge to argue, to name this, to make it mean something. Then it broke. His hands tightened at her hips, his mouth answering hers with something that bordered on angry before it softened again.
Part of her did like him: the warmth of his hands, the way his laugh sat in his chest, the silk-dyed smell of him. He was gentle in a world that rewarded men for not being gentle. But liking wasn't enough to anchor her.
She took control of the angle, the pace, the distance. Not cruel. Just… precise. Drawing the line herself before anyone else could draw it for her.
Later, when the lantern burned low and his breathing had evened into sleep, she lay on her side in the narrow upstairs room and watched the silks below move in the draft through the gaps in the floorboards: gentle swaying lines of colour, a world meant to be stayed in.
He would wake tomorrow and go downstairs and boil another vat, hang another length to drip dry. The street would stay the same. Festivals would come on schedule. He would grow old inside these walls.
There was a kind of safety in that. The same kind the Jade Wind Pavilion offered if you never stepped past the contracts.
She turned her face into her forearm until the feeling passed.
Before dawn, she dressed in the half-light. She pulled on her tunic, her robe, her Saffron Yellow sash, her knives, rolling her shoulders until everything sat where it belonged. The air was cooler away from his warmth; it woke her properly.
Downstairs, the shop was still. The hanging silks loomed as pale shadows. She found the bolt of jade green he'd cut for her and folded it tight.
She placed the proper price by the scale. Then, after a small pause, she added a few extra coins: just enough to say we're even, not enough to say I'm sorry.
Silk was simple. You could pay for it. You could cut it.
People were different. You left before they started knotting around your ribs. And men, even good ones, were still men in a city that rewarded them for turning a woman into a possession and calling it protection.
Jade Wind gave her freedom the way those men in Yunzhong never could. She would not trade that freedom for a room, no matter how warm.
She slipped back into the alley, the smell of steam and dye clinging to her skin.
Next time she needed silk, she would turn down a different alley. A different shop.
She told herself it was practical: don't mix work, sources, and the soft parts of you that can bruise.
Pavilion Master Yun Fang had praised her for her detachment. Clear sight, she had called it. Discipline. "Wind survives by not settling." She had rested a light hand on Jinx's shoulder: "Remember that." Then, more quietly, so that only Jinx heard: "It passes danger and desire without letting either take hold."
Jinx didn't look back to see if the dye house door was open.
She told herself that moving like wind was enough. That was the sect's way. That was survival.
It should have been enough.
And yet, in moments like this, with dawn creeping in, she felt that familiar restlessness in her bones that no amount of training could sweat out of her. A sense that all she ever did was graze the surface of things, danger, wanting, without ever feeling the heat. That distance was starting to look less like discipline and more like hunger denied.
She wished something would take hold of her for once. Something that would land in her chest hard enough that she couldn't just observe it from a distance, or step lightly away from it.
She had never said it aloud. There was no form to drill it out of her, no correction Wen Yue, her Senior Ascendant, could give to smooth it away.
She didn't know yet that her restlessness would find an answer, and that it would come in Black Lotus colours.