Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Without realizing it, I had cried until the sleeve covering my face was soaked through.

And as the air around me gradually grew colder, I couldn’t help tugging more fabric over myself. Then, without warning, a clear voice sounded by my ear, carrying a chill utterly devoid of warmth.

“Where is that book?”

At those words, I snapped awake from my drunken stupor.

Looking down, I realized half of someone’s robe was draped over me.

I hurriedly tossed it aside. The man was sitting amid the clear light scattered across the floor, dressed in red. The garment shrouded his tall, elegant frame like smoke, like clouds, as though he might ride the wind away at any moment.

Exquisitely beautiful, and exquisitely eerie.

I couldn’t help rubbing my eyes. “Yan Luoxi, are you human or a ghost?”

Noticing the subtle tone in my voice, a faint ripple passed through his eyes. “What, are you hoping I’m dead?”

I was unimpressed.

“You abducted me here, yet you’ve never treated me sincerely for even a single moment. Isn’t that right?”

“Haven’t you done the same, Sister?”

Ha.

Little brat.

At that moment, Yan Luoxi looked down at me from above, his face completely expressionless.

Strange to say, the sweet smile he used to wear had always looked as if it had been pasted onto his face from someone else, stiff and false. This sinister, cold-blooded expression suited him far better.

Beautiful even in his heartlessness.

That was Yan Luoxi: a rakshasa with a jade-like face and cinnabar-red lips.

“Yu Xuzhen, if you hand over the second volume today, I will plead your case before His Majesty and ask him to show leniency.”

I spread my hands helplessly. “Brother-in-law, when someone wants to condemn you, they never lack a pretext.”

“Is that so?”

Perhaps because the mask had been torn away, he no longer called me Sister this and Sister that. The gentle, respectful smile he wore on ordinary days had vanished as well. He stared at me coldly for a long while, then suddenly took something from his sleeve.

“It seems you won’t shed tears until you see the coffin.”

The moment I saw that manuscript, I scrambled up from the icy floor and begged in the humblest voice I could manage, “Please give it back to me.”

He lifted his hand, making me grab at empty air. “Records of Qingming, printed by the Eastern Palace in the twenty-fourth year and written by Master Yu. To this day, only the first volume has been found. The second volume remains missing.”

“Yesterday, when you went to the bookshop, was this what you delivered?”

“How can you slander an innocent person out of thin air?”

Seeing that I was still stubbornly resisting, Yan Luoxi spread the manuscript out on the desk. His lips moved, as though he was about to read the words aloud and force me to confess. I was so frightened that I immediately dropped to my knees and clung to the hem of his black lower robe.

“Don’t read it! I’m begging you!”

What kind of place was the Northern Pacification Office? A perfectly healthy person could go in and come out as nothing but a sack of skin.

One could only imagine how iron-hearted Yan Luoxi had to be to thrive in a place like that and sit firmly in the second-in-command’s chair.

He remained unmoved. Instead, he faced the words and began reading in a measured cadence.

“On a youthful night, beneath crimson light, cap cords undone, flowered hairpins about to fall…”

As if something seemed wrong, he paused in puzzlement. Meeting my tear-bright eyes, he gave a cold snort and continued, “Passing through the Vermilion Bird, gathering up the red undergarments, lifting the pale foot, caressing the jade waist…”

When he read to this point, the rims of his ears suddenly flushed red, as though someone had splashed them with a cup of rosewater.