Song Liangxue shifted in his arms until she found a position she liked, her back settled against his chest, and let out a small contented breath before she began.
"My story isn’t as exciting as yours," she said. "No betrayals, no assassins, no hounds. I had a comfortable life, honestly. I almost feel guilty saying it out loud after hearing both of yours."
"Trust , comfortable sounds wonderful," Ye Jun said, resting his chin lightly on the top of her head. "I would take boring over my childhood any day."
"Sa," ihui added quietly, still tucked against his other side.
Liangxue smiled at that and continued.
"My mother was the eldest child of my grandfather, the Patriarch of the Song Clan. His only daughter, too. When she ca of age, she was married into the Imperial Clan, to the Emperor’s younger brother. It was a political match, ant to bind the Song Clan and the North closer to the Empire. My grandfather wanted the alliance, and my mother went along with it because that was what daughters of great clans did back then."
"The Emperor’s younger brother," Ye Jun repeated. "So you’re technically Imperial."
"Technically," she said with a faint dryness. "Though you would never know it from how I was raised. The marriage didn’t work out. My parents divorced when I was very young, and my mother ca back to the North. I don’t actually know what happened between them. She’s never told , and I’ve never pushed. All I know is that whatever it was, she decided she was done, and she left."
Ye Jun felt the slight stiffness in her shoulders and rubbed her arm gently. She relaxed again.
"She brought with her when she left," Liangxue went on. "That part she was very deliberate about. She didn’t want growing up in the Imperial capital, tangled in the Throne Gas. The politics there is a vicious thing, and a child with both Imperial and Song Clan blood would have been a useful piece for a lot of people. So she took back to the Song Clan and raised far away from all of it."
"A wise woman," ihui murmured.
"She is," Liangxue agreed. "The Song Clan is large, but it’s almost all Branch Clans. The main branch has only three living mbers. , my mother, and my grandfather. So I grew up as the only heiress of the main line, which ant I was loved very, very much, and watched very, very closely."
"Spoiled?" Ye Jun teased.
"Thoroughly," she admitted, and he could hear the smile in her voice. "My grandfather could refuse nothing. My mother pretended to be strict and then folded the mont I looked sad. If I had had a weaker character, I would have grown into an absolute terror."
"And yet here you are, only a mild terror," Ye Jun said, and earned a light elbow to the ribs for it.
"I saw things clearly, even as a child," she said, more seriously now. "I knew what my position ant. I knew the love I was given ca wrapped around responsibilities I’d have to carry one day. Being the sole heiress of a Great Clan isn’t only privilege. So I let them spoil , and I still made sure I understood my duties. It kept humbled and grounded."
She paused for a mont, her fingers idly tracing along Ye Jun’s forearm.
"I had a few friends when I was small," she said. "Other children from the Branch Clans, mostly. But they drifted away as we grew older and they started to understand the gap between us. One day you’re playing together, and the next they’re bowing and calling you Young Miss and choosing their words carefully around you. I didn’t bla them as I had known it would happen. And the truth is, I liked solitude well enough that it didn’t wound the way it might have wounded soone else."
Ye Jun listened quietly. He recognized the shape of what she wasn’t saying, the loneliness folded inside the acceptance, but he didn’t say it. He knew she would hear it as pity, and she had never wanted that.
"Then there’s the part you both already know," she continued, glancing between them. "When I was ten, I awakened my Heavenly Yin Physique and with it, my emotions started to go cold, distant and suppressed. The physique pulls a person inward, away from feeling, away from warmth. If I’d been raised sowhere else, with a colder family, I think I would have beco sothing close to ice by now."
"But your family anchored you," ihui said softly. It was sothing Liangxue had told them both in their earlier days together.
"They did," Liangxue said, and there was real gratitude in it. "Every ti the physique tried to pull away, my mother and grandfather pulled back. They loved loudly enough that the cold could never fully take hold. I still feel its weight sotis, but I’ve never lost myself to it. That’s entirely because of them."
Ye Jun tightened his arm around her a fraction, and she leaned into the warmth without comnt.
"So where do I co into this tragic tale?" he asked lightly.
"You co in during my late teens," she said. "My family sat down one day and told about the marriage arrangent. Apparently my grandfather had arranged it years before, when I was still a child. A betrothal between and the young master of the Ye Clan." She tilted her head back to look up at him. "You."
"And your reaction?"
"Confusion, mostly," she said honestly. "Followed by a little repulsion, I won’t lie. I had never t you, after all. I knew nothing about you except a na and a minor clan. The idea of being promised to a stranger didn’t sit well with . My family told I could back out if I truly disliked it, that they wouldn’t force into anything."
"But you didn’t back out," Ye Jun said.
"I didn’t," she confird. "Partly to keep our family’s reputation intact. My grandfather had given his word, and breaking a betrothal he had personally arranged would have reflected poorly on the Song Clan. But honestly, the bigger reason was that I simply didn’t care very much. The marriage felt like a small footnote in my cultivation life. Sothing that would happen eventually, sowhere off in the distance, that I didn’t need to think about. So I let it stand and went back to my training."
Ye Jun was quiet for a mont, sothing nagging at him.
"That’s the part I don’t understand," he said. "The Song Clan is one of the Seven Great Clans. The Ye Clan was a minor house in a single city. The gap between us is absurd. Why would your grandfather ever arrange a betrothal like that? What could the Ye Clan possibly offer the Song Clan?"
Liangxue shook her head slowly. "I asked the sa thing, and I never got a real answer. All my grandfather would say was that his old friend and my grandfather had been close once. That the betrothal was a promise between friends." She shrugged lightly. "Your grandfather, the previous Ye Clan Patriarch, and mine. Apparently they were friends. Beyond that, I genuinely don’t know."
Ye Jun noted the answer away. It didn’t quite add up, a Great Clan Patriarch binding his only heiress to a minor house over an old friendship, but he had no thread to pull on, so he let it sit for now.
So quiet instinct told him there was more underneath it, the sa instinct that had kept him alive through two lives, but instinct without information was useless.
"Anyway," Liangxue said, drawing him back. "Things changed when the news reached . Word ca that the Ye Clan’s young master had broken ridians, that you were trash, useless and a cripple who would never cultivate."
"Charming reputation I had," Ye Jun said dryly.
"It was the talk of certain circles for a while," she said. "And that’s when I decided to co and annul the arrangent myself. Quietly. In secret."
ihui raised an eyebrow. "You wanted to call it off?"
"For his sake," Liangxue said, surprising her. "Think about it. A so-called trash young master, married into one of the Seven Great Clans. He would have beco a target for everyone. People would have mocked him, sched against him, used him to get at the Song Clan. Half the cultivation world would have wanted to know why we had lowered ourselves to such a match, and the other half would have wanted to humiliate the cripple who had climbed above his station. I didn’t want to put a stranger through that. The kindest thing I could do was dissolve the betrothal so quietly that no one would ever know it had existed."
She turned her head and smiled up at him, warm and a little amused.
"So I slipped away from the Song Clan, made my way to Bright Star City, and went to find the trash young master of the Ye Clan to politely end our engagent before it could ruin his life."
The smile widened.
"And we clearly know how it went down."
Ye Jun laughed, the sound rumbling against her back. "You ca to break up with and ended up marrying instead."
"I ca to save you from a terrible fate," she corrected primly, "and discovered that the terrible fate was far more interesting than the rumors suggested."
"Interesting," ihui repeated, smirking. "Is that what we’re calling him?"
"Among other things," Liangxue said, and the three of them settled deeper into the quiet warmth of the room, the weight of three lifetis set aside for a little while longer.
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