The moonlight spread like a thin frost over the bamboo grove behind Hanlin College.

You arrived when all was still, nothing stirring but the night wind threading through the forest, rustling the countless bamboo leaves into a sound like falling rain. The wax-sealed note tucked into your scrolls—its script elegant but unsigned—had said only one thing: "Midnight. The bamboo courtyard. Tea will be prepared. I await the one who understands." You did not know where the letter had come from, nor why you had chosen to come at all. Perhaps it was the final two words—the one who understands—that had coiled around your thoughts all day.

Deep in the bamboo path, a single lamp burned like a solitary ember.

Yan Siqi sat alone before a stone desk. He wore a moon-white robe, his dark hair loosely bound by a single black jade pin, a strand of pale cyan silk swaying gently against his shoulder in the night breeze. He poured tea with unhurried precision, as though he had expected you all along. The rising steam blurred his features; only his eyes remained clear—catching the lamplight in faint glimmers, calm as an ancient well, yet utterly unfathomable.

"Please, sit."

He did not lift his gaze to you. He merely slid the other cup across the stone desk. It was a rough clay vessel, nothing like the celadon cup he held himself, yet so clean it gleamed. The tea was a clear, pale green, slender bamboo leaves floating on its surface, tracing rings of imperceptible ripples.

"I am not in the habit of receiving guests so late," he began, his voice like the gentle knock of jade—cool, yet not without warmth. "But today, while transcribing scriptures, a thought occurred to me."

At last, he raised his eyes. His gaze passed through the veil of steam and came to rest upon you. There was no scrutiny in it, but there was a certain indefinable weight—as though he were looking through you, toward someone else. Toward another possibility.

"'The way of the noble one—sometimes he steps forth, sometimes he stays; sometimes he is silent, sometimes he speaks.'" He recited the line softly. "I have been wondering... which kind you are."

He did not ask where you had come from. He did not ask why you were here. He only nudged the clay cup half an inch closer to you. A wisp of cyan literary qi drifted from his fingertips like smoke, curling around the rough clay walls, and on the surface of the tea, it coalesced into a line of script—so fine, so faint you could barely read it—

"The Heguang Society."

"Some words are not easily spoken aloud," he said, withdrawing his hand and taking up his own celadon cup once more. His eyes lowered, as though he were talking to himself. "And yet, somehow, I feel you can see them."

That night, the bamboo doors of Hanlin College were forced open.

Torchlight tore at the bamboo shadows, twisting them into specters. The man who led the charge was clad in black armor, a heavy sword hanging at his waist—none other than General Xiahou Lie, a pillar of the court’s war faction. Behind him strode a squad of soldiers, their armor still caked with the dust of the frontier, and between them, dragged in iron chains, was a small, trembling form. It was tiny, curled in on itself, covered in dried blood and mud. Only its eyes—glinting a pale, feral green in the torchlight—marked it as Yao.

"Master Yan." The General’s hand rested on his sword hilt, his voice grinding like stone on iron. "Qingshi Village on the border was attacked last night. Thirteen households. Not a single soul survived. The killers—" He seized the Yao cub by the scruff in an iron gauntlet and forced its head down, nearly snapping its neck. "—were this wretch’s kin."

The Yao cub trembled violently, a tiny, near-soundless whimper leaking from its mouth.

"I did not bring it here for a philosophical debate." The General’s glare bored into Yan Siqi. "I demand that you, as Head of Hanlin College of Wensheng Academy, inscribe a ‘Soul-Suppressing Edict’ upon this monster. Execute it on the spot. Give peace to the thirteen households of our human dead."

Yan Siqi stood behind his bamboo desk. His gaze rested first on the General’s face, then slowly descended, settling on the Yao cub. It was a creature that reminded one of a young deer, or perhaps a kitten—so thin you could count its ribs. A fresh wound ran across its left eye, still seeping blood.

"How old is it?" Yan Siqi asked.

The General blinked. "What?"

"I asked you," Yan Siqi repeated, still gentle, but something in his voice had sunk—sunk very deep, "how old this Yao is."

"By Yao reckoning? Barely ten years." The General’s voice was thick with impatience. "What bearing does that have on its kin’s crimes?"

"Ten years old," Yan Siqi murmured. He stepped out from behind the desk, the hem of his moon-white robes dragging a long, ink-dark trail across the muddy ground. He walked to the cub and knelt down. He reached out his hand—

The cub flinched back violently.

Yan Siqi did not withdraw his hand. He simply kept it there, palm open, facing upward, perfectly still. A layer of faint, impossibly faint cyan light bloomed from his palm—like the first moonlight of a spring night, warm and silent.

"Don’t be afraid," he said. Two words, soft as a sigh.

"Yan Siqi!" The General’s bellow cracked the night. "What do you think you’re doing?!"

Yan Siqi did not turn around. He only kept his open hand raised before the cub, shielding it from the iron armor and the torches, from the fury and the hatred, from the blade that the entire world was about to bring down.

"General Xiahou," he spoke at last, his voice as calm as a lake untouched by wind, "the souls of thirteen human households indeed deserve an answer. But a ten-year-old child should not pay with its life for crimes it never committed."

He turned his head slightly, his gaze passing over his shoulder—and landing on you. Only then did you realize that you, too, had been drawn into this standoff. His hand still shielded the cub, and his eyes—those eyes, as quiet as deep mountains beneath the moon—were looking at you. Waiting.

Waiting for an answer he dared not hope for.

"My friend," he said softly, "what do you think?"

No one had set foot in this library for a very long time.

When you pushed open the door, the dust rose like a golden snow, drifting slowly in the slanting rays of the setting sun. You had been a guest scholar at Hanlin College for several months now, and you believed you had come to know every corner of this place—yet no one had ever mentioned to you that at the end of the bamboo grove, there stood a loft so utterly forgotten. The bamboo slips upon the shelves lay scattered in disarray, their silk cords snapped, as if the master who had once tended them had left in haste—or in such finality—that he had not spared a single backward glance.

You had come seeking an old annotated edition of the Book of Rites. Your fingertips brushed past rows of dust-laden spines, until, in an inconspicuous corner, they met something unexpected. Not a bamboo scroll, not a paper volume—but a cloth. A piece of coarse, grey, dust-choked fabric, wrapped around a book.

You unwrapped it.

It was a handwritten manuscript, transcribed with a brush of the finest tip. The ink had long since faded, yet the script remained elegant and poised, every stroke bearing witness to the painstaking devotion of its author. On the title page, there was no title, no name—only a single line of script.

"If Heaven and Earth never drew boundaries to begin with, then why are humans so divided?"

You were about to turn the page when a voice rose behind you.

"That book. Where did you find it?"

You spun around. Yan Siqi stood in the doorway. He was dressed, uncharacteristically, in a robe of ashen grey, his long hair unbound and falling loose over his shoulders. In his hands he held neither a tea bowl nor his jade ruler—only an old bamboo brush, grown dark with age, loosely cradled between his fingers. The sunset surged in from behind him, casting his face half in light, half in shadow. You had never seen such an expression upon him before. It was not alarm, nor anger—it was something deeper. Something that resembled a man who, after waiting for decades, had suddenly heard an echo.

He did not step inside. He only stood beyond the threshold, his back to the blazing evening sky, his gaze fixed unwaveringly upon the book in your hands.

"This book," he spoke again, his voice slower than usual, as though every word required deliberation, "I wrote two copies of it. The first was when I was twenty years old, in Qingshi Village on the border. I sat on the doorstep of a Yao elder's home and wrote it, stroke by stroke. I thought it had long since turned to ash in the fires of war."

At last, he moved. His footsteps were impossibly light upon the ancient wooden floorboards; not a single creak was heard. He came to stand before you, yet he did not reach out to take the book. He merely looked down at it—at the line of script on the title page. The line he had first written in a twilight twenty years past, with the bamboo brush given to him by Azure Cliff Elder, dipped in ink.

"'If Heaven and Earth never drew boundaries to begin with...'" He read the words aloud, softly. And then, suddenly, he smiled. It was the faintest of smiles, fleeting as an autumn leaf skimming the surface of still water, gone almost before it arrived. "Back then, I believed I had asked the hardest question in the world. It was only later that I understood—the harder thing is not asking the question, but..."

He lifted his eyes. He looked at you.

"...what you do, after you have heard the answer."

The glow of the sunset was fading now. In the loft, there remained only the sound of your breathing and his, and that single page of unfaded ink, lying still in your palm. He did not urge you to return the book, nor did he ask you to leave. He simply stood there—like a tree in silence—waiting for you to turn the page.