On his third day at the Bureau, Zhu Li was given his first real assignment.
"The West Market," said Pei Du, sliding a case file across the table. "Over the past two weeks, five people have fallen into mysterious comas near the West Market. Same symptoms every time: they mutter to themselves, reciting names and places that don't exist, as if trapped in someone else's dream. When they wake, they remember nothing."
"Something supernatural?"
"Unclear. There's no obvious connection between the five victims — a cloth merchant, a foreign dancing girl, a cart driver, a melon seller, and a down-on-his-luck scholar lodging at a temple. The only thing they have in common is that all of them visited the West Market before losing consciousness."
Zhu Li leafed through the file. The notes were sparse — the Bureau's investigative style evidently didn't place much stock in paperwork. Most of it was in Chu Ci's scrawl (that familiar, crooked hand), interspersed with a few lines of Pei Du's precise annotations.
"Go with Chu Ci today and have a look." Pei Du snapped his folding fan shut. "Get a feel for things first. Don't tip anyone off."
"Understood."
"And —" Pei Du glanced at him, his gaze lingering on Zhu Li's face for just a moment. "Chang'an hasn't been safe after dark lately. Be back before nightfall."
Zhu Li nodded without asking further.
But his mind was on something else.
The painted lady he'd seen during his night watch the evening before — he hadn't told anyone about her. And he didn't intend to. Not yet.
---
The West Market was bigger than he'd imagined.
And louder.
If daytime Chang'an was a pot of porridge at full boil, then the West Market was the hottest log burning under it. Voices, camel bells, the ring of a blacksmith's hammer, the twang of a Persian lute from some tavern — every sound churned together, thick as paste, impossible to separate one from another.
Chu Ci was in his element. He darted from stall to stall, striking up friendships with the flatbread vendor before sidling over to charm the spice merchant. He claimed to be "gathering intelligence," but his hands had already acquired a bag of candied dates and two sticks of sugar-coated hawthorn.
"Want one?" He waggled a hawthorn stick at Zhu Li.
"No."
"Is there anything you actually want?"
"I'm thinking."
"About what?"
Zhu Li didn't answer. He was looking at something.
At the south corner of the West Market, along a narrow side lane, stood an unremarkable apothecary. Above the door hung a small wooden sign: *Returning Bloom Hall*.
He'd noticed it because of a scent drifting through the air — sweet, faintly bitter, like the body heat of a flower at the precise moment between bloom and decay.
Identical to what he'd smelled in that alley on his first day.
"Come on," he said to Chu Ci — just two words — and started toward the lane.
"Hey — wait for me!"
---
They never made it to Returning Bloom Hall.
Not because Zhu Li didn't want to — but because halfway there, a scream cut through the lane from the other end.
An old woman who sold water was screaming. In front of her stall, a young man had collapsed rigid to the ground.
Zhu Li ran over.
The man was still breathing, but his eyes were half-open and unfocused, his lips moving around something. Zhu Li leaned in to listen —
"...Green Hill Town... Li Sanniang... don't go..."
A place that didn't exist. A name that didn't exist.
Victim number six.
"Go get help!" Chu Ci shouted to the old woman, dropping to his knees to examine the man.
Zhu Li didn't kneel. He straightened up and scanned the surroundings.
The victim had just collapsed — the scream had come perhaps thirty seconds ago. If this was the work of something supernatural, the one responsible couldn't have gotten far.
The Illusion-Breaking Bell gave a violent shudder at his waist.
Not a tremor — a sound. Brief, clipped, like a cry muffled by a hand over the mouth.
Direction: Returning Bloom Hall.
Zhu Li didn't say a word to Chu Ci. He turned and ran.
---
The door of Returning Bloom Hall was half open.
No lamps were lit inside. Daylight sliced through the gap in a narrow column, illuminating a floor strewn with crushed herbs and an overturned stone mortar.
Someone had been fighting.
He pushed the door open. The shop was small. Behind the counter, a cloth curtain led to the rear courtyard — half of it had been torn away, the fabric hanging limp.
Sounds came from the courtyard.
Not the sounds of a struggle — a low, droning vibration, like hundreds of bees beating their wings in unison, or something churning deep underground.
He stepped through the curtain.
The courtyard was a small open-air well, planted with herbs and flowers. But now the ground was covered in red — not blood. Petals. Dense, countless red petals carpeted the stone, as if someone had gathered an entire autumn's worth of fallen blossoms and laid them here.
In the center of the petals lay a figure.
A man. Wearing an ordinary cloth tunic, face-down on the ground, limbs rigid. A layer of black mist clung to his face — and Zhu Li recognized what it was.
Gu.
At the back of the man's neck, a black flower-shaped gu-worm was writhing. Its tendrils had already burrowed through the skin and into the skull — it was feeding on memories.
And beside the man — someone was crouching.
Her.
A woman in a plain-colored dress, dark hair half pinned up, a deep crimson sash tied at her waist. Her back was to Zhu Li. One hand pressed against the victim's nape, a faint red glow emanating from between her spread fingers — some kind of power flowing from her palm, working to pry the gu-worm free from its host.
Red petals drifted around her, as though they were shedding naturally from her body.
The air was saturated with that scent — sweet, faintly bitter, the body heat of a flower between bloom and decay.
Zhu Li's mind made its judgment in a fraction of a second:
A flower-shaped gu-worm. Petals. The fragrance of flowers. Her hand on the victim. Supernatural energy radiating from her — the Illusion-Breaking Bell was shaking wildly at his waist.
It fit. All of it fit.
— She was the one planting the gu.
He bit his fingertip.
The instant blood welled up, the index and middle fingers of his right hand were already tracing a sigil in the air — a Binding Talisman. A slip of talisman paper shot from his sleeve, transforming into a chain of scarlet light that flew straight at the woman's back.
She heard the wind.
What came next was so fast Zhu Li barely saw it — she twisted sideways, her waist bending like a willow branch, the crimson sash tracing an arc through the air. His talisman chain grazed past her shoulder, struck the wall behind her with a hiss, and embedded itself in the stone.
She turned around.
Zhu Li saw her face for the first time.
Striking, austere beauty. Skin impossibly white — not pallor, but porcelain, the kind of white produced by the finest glaze, so fine that pores simply did not exist. Open, elegant features; eyes that tapered slightly upward at the outer corners, irises that in the light appeared, for just an instant, not quite black — more like the deepest shade of reddish-brown, like red spider lily petals settled at the bottom of dark water.
The look she gave him held no fear. No anger, either.
Cold. Quiet. Like watching a rainstorm she had known was coming.
"You missed," she said.
Her voice was like well water in late autumn.
Zhu Li's second talisman was already drawn — right hand raised before his chest, the blood-ink on the paper still glowing, ready to fly at a word.
"Who are you?"
"You should look before you strike." She didn't answer his question. Instead she tilted her head, directing his gaze to the victim on the ground. "Look."
Zhu Li held his stance, eyes darting down for a quick glance —
The hand she'd had pressed to the victim's nape — her fingertips were stained with black fluid. The gu-worm's ichor. She had already pulled the creature most of the way out; it now writhed on the ground, tendrils flailing wildly in the open air.
She hadn't been planting the gu.
She'd been extracting it.
Zhu Li's hand stiffened, just slightly.
And in that instant of hesitation, the gu-worm on the ground exploded — black mist scattered in all directions as the creature shattered into dozens of tiny fragments, each sprouting small, malformed wings. Like a swarm of grotesque black butterflies, they buzzed upward toward the open sky above the courtyard.
"It's escaping." For the first time, a note of urgency entered her voice.
Zhu Li didn't hesitate. He flung the talisman paper upward — not a Binding Talisman this time, but a Netting Talisman.
The paper burst open in midair, unfurling into a fine mesh woven of cinnabar light that swept over the bulk of the gu-worm fragments. Red light flared. Everything caught in the net crumbled to ash.
But a few pieces slipped through the gaps, beating their twisted wings as they fled deeper into the lane —
A hand reached out from beside him. Five fingers spread wide, and in the center of the palm a small crimson flower bloomed — it spun half a turn, then silently burst apart into a ring of red pollen.
The pollen chased down the fleeing fragments.
The instant it touched them, the pieces dissolved like ice under boiling water — hissing, smoking black, shrinking to pinpricks before dropping to the ground, finally still.
The courtyard fell silent.
The victim remained unconscious, but his breathing had steadied. The gu-worm's wound at the back of his neck was still visible, but the black mist had dissipated.
Zhu Li slowly lowered his right hand.
She lowered hers. The pattern on her palm was fading, sinking back beneath the skin like ink being reabsorbed.
The two of them stood across from each other in that unfamiliar courtyard, a carpet of petals between them, and held each other's gaze for roughly five seconds.
"Who are you?" he asked again. His tone was no longer as hard as before. But his fingers still rested on the talisman paper inside his sleeve — not trust, just vigilance dialed down one notch.
"The proprietor of Returning Bloom Hall," she said flatly. "You stepped on my mortar."
Zhu Li looked down. When he'd burst through the door, he had indeed put his foot straight through the overturned stone mortar by the entrance. Three clean pieces. Thoroughly crushed.
"...I'll pay for it."
"Don't bother." She crouched beside the victim to check his condition, her movements practiced and unhesitant — clearly not her first time doing this. "The gu-worm has been removed. He'll need two days' rest and three doses of calming tonic, then he'll recover."
"How did you —"
"I was saving him." She cut him off, lifted her head, and looked at him squarely. "You nearly mistook me for the culprit, and then your talisman work nearly caused the gu-worm to shatter and scatter. If I hadn't stepped in, it would have split into dozens of seeds and dispersed across the West Market. Within a month, half of Chang'an would be falling into comas."
Her tone wasn't heavy. She was simply stating facts.
But each fact landed like a small, precise needle in Zhu Li's pride, leaving no room to maneuver.
He was quiet for a moment.
"...I'm sorry."
She didn't acknowledge the apology. She stood, brushed the dust from her skirt, went back inside the shop, and returned with a medicine bottle. She tapped some powder onto the victim's lips.
"The source of the gu-worms isn't the West Market." She spoke as she worked, as though talking to herself, or perhaps simply not minding that he could hear. "I've been tracking them for two weeks. They were planted deliberately — organized, systematic. This isn't the work of some minor spirit."
"You've been tracking them for two weeks?"
"This is the ninth victim I've found." She sealed the bottle. "However many your Bureau has turned up, I couldn't say — but the ones that went unreported, the street beggars and drifters in back alleys, no one speaks for them."
That shut him up.
He was an investigator, dispatched by the Bureau to work a case. She was an apothecary — or perhaps something more than an apothecary — and she had been tracking this alone for two weeks before they even arrived.
She had been doing what he was supposed to do. And the first thing he'd done upon walking through her door was hurl a Binding Talisman at her.
"Have you seen these gu-worms before?" he asked. This time his tone was entirely different. He was asking to learn.
She looked at him. In her gaze was the faintest flicker of something — barely perceptible surprise. She probably hadn't expected him to concede so quickly.
"Black Bloom Gu. They feed on memories and emotions. A very old form of gu-craft — no one has used it in at least a century."
"How do you know all this?"
She didn't answer.
Footsteps sounded at the mouth of the lane — Chu Ci's booming voice carried in well ahead of him: "Zhu Li! Where'd you run off to? That victim woke —"
Chu Ci appeared at the courtyard entrance, took in the scene — petals everywhere, an unconscious man on the ground, Zhu Li and a strange woman standing face to face — and froze for two solid seconds.
"...What's going on here?"
"Case is half solved," said Zhu Li.
"Which half?"
Zhu Li glanced at her.
"I've established that she's not the culprit."
The corner of her mouth moved, just barely. Not a smile — more like an acknowledgment that this person was, at least, honest.
Then she picked up her medicine bottle, turned, and walked back into the shop. At the doorway she paused for one step, without looking back.
"Your bell is ringing."
Zhu Li looked down. The Illusion-Breaking Bell was indeed still trembling faintly at his waist. Not the urgent, warning-like shudder of before, but a low-frequency, continuous pulse, steady as a heartbeat.
It wasn't sounding an alarm.
It was... confused.
Like a hound that had caught a scent it had never encountered before — not prey, not another of its kind, nothing from any known category — and had no idea what to do with the information, so it just kept sniffing, kept circling.
She disappeared into the shop. The door closed halfway behind her.
Through the gap drifted that fragrance — sweet, faintly bitter.
Identical to the scent from the alley on his first day.Identical to the faint floral trace that had lingered near the painted screen in the old storage vault.
Zhu Li stood where he was, fingers resting unconsciously on the bell, his thumb feeling the subtle, persistent pulse traveling through the copper.
What was she?
He didn't know.
But he knew two things:
First, she was not an enemy — at least, not this time.
Second, he owed her a mortar.