NOVEL WEB Chapter 265: The Shape Of My Name
Sun Longzi
Sun Longzi was a man who believed in clean lines and the idea that there was a place for everything and everything should be in its place.
Spears were stacked in the same corner every night. Maps were weighted down so that the edges didn't curl. Arguments needed to be ended where they should without being drawn out.
Controlling his environment meant that the world was less likely to surprise him.
And when his very life depended on the control he had, it was very hard to get him out of his comfort zone.
When a messenger from the Red Demon Army came to tell him what the rumors were, the news did not surprise him.
Technically, Mingyu and Xinying had been married for a year; the day of their coronation had only been waiting for its hour to arrive. Still, when the runner reached his office and bowed until his forehead nearly touched the floor, Longzi said nothing for a long time after the boy left. He stood with his palms on the table and looked at the pins marking the river fords north of the capital.
"Problem?" Deming asked from the doorway, a slight smirk on his face like he knew the answer without having to even ask the question.
Longzi didn't turn. "Just deciding where to move the men we don't want anyone to know we moved."
Zhu Deming came in without needing permission and set a sealed packet on the edge of the map. "Mingyu wants the guest compounds watched tighter. Not loud. Just… tighter."
"Bai Yuyan?" Longzi asked, already rearranging three counters in his head and two on the table.
"And whatever the Baiguang loyalists call themselves this month," Deming shrugged. "They don't take losing well."
"Does anyone?" Longzi asked mildly amused. He slid one of the counters half a finger's breadth without looking down. "Heirs. Envoys. Merchants who reinvent themselves as patriots when the tax man arrives. It will all come."
Deming watched him a moment. "You're surprisingly calm."
"I'm standing still," Longzi shrugged in response. "Calm is a luxury. We can afford discipline, and anyone who has ever stepped on a battlefield knows that life rarely goes the way you want it to."
He allowed himself an exhale when he realized he'd been keeping his breath on a short leash since the dawn bell.
He wasn't grieving anything. He wasn't jealous of anyone. He was simply adjusting to the fact that the woman who had changed the shape of the war, and his life, had now been placed at the center of the room where wars were prevented or invited with a sentence.
And all that much further out of his reach.
"Do you think they'll test her?" Deming asked, though he already knew the answer.
"They'll test him through her," Longzi replied. "It's more polite and therefore more dangerous. They don't understand that they are simply poking at a tiger for the fun of it."
Deming's mouth twitched. "And you?"
"I'll do what I always do," Longzi said, finally lifting his hands from the table. "I'll make sure the knives they think they're hiding are the ones we handed them in the first place."
He broke the seal on the packet. Inside were stacks of papers…lists.
They contained the names of men who still owed favors from a winter three years gone.
The names of women whose kitchens fed more mouths than the palace liked to count.
The names of boys who ran messages faster when their sisters had medicine.
Not a single one of them were soldiers… but they were threads. He would knot them where they needed to hold and cut them where they frayed.
"And if she decides to walk out of the silk room and back into the mountain one morning?" Deming asked, not because it was likely but because it was possible.
Longzi looked up then and let the piece of truth show in his eyes. "Then we'll follow," he said. "Or we'll get out of the way."
Deming nodded once. "Good answer."
"It's the only one," Longzi shrugged, going back to the maps and information in front of him. There was no second option. Zhao Xinying might not know it yet, but she had just inherited an army and two men who would never let her out of their sight again.
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Xinying
By afternoon, the palace had sung itself hoarse and settled into the quieter business of remembering how to keep an empire standing. I sat with a stack of petitions that thought they were more urgent than they were and signed my name where ink mattered.
A girl from the kitchens brought tea without trembling. I liked her immediately. She set the tray down and didn't stare at my eyes, which means she'll live long and well if no one teaches her bad habits.
"Thank you," I said, and she startled at being seen, then smiled like a secret she'd decided to keep.
When she left, Yaozu leaned a shoulder against the doorframe in that way that tells anyone paying attention that the person inside the room is not alone.
"'Untouchable,'" he quoted, because sometimes he collects words the way other men collect coins.
"They'll get used to it," I said.
"And if they don't?" he asked.
I signed another line that would set someone free or bind them tighter, depending on whether they deserved it. "Then they'll learn the way everyone else did," I said, and let the pen rest.
He didn't answer, which was its own agreement. I closed my eyes for a heartbeat and let the quiet find me. Outside the lattice, a bell marked an hour that belonged to no one important. Somewhere in the guest compound, a woman whose name will not be remembered tried a new tactic in an old game.
Somewhere beyond the borders, a man I don't owe anything to decided wanting was the same thing as deserving.
Here, in the small square of space the palace thinks it owns, I set my palm flat on the table and felt the wood answer—solid, stubborn, mine.
They could whisper.
They could watch.
They could even write essays about what they thought an Empress should be.
I would be the one to decide what I am.
And then I will be it, until the world learns the new shape of my name.