In the middle of the night, at the first quarter of the hour of Zi.
Lu Ying opened her eyes.
She was an extremely disciplined person. Having agreed with Wang Daxia to take turns on watch, she was responsible for the latter half of the night. To ensure she would wake up, she deliberately drank half a pot of water before sleeping, so that she would be awakened by the urge to urinate without needing Wang Daxia to rouse her.
Lu Ying retrieved a Western pocket watch from under her pillow and checked the time by the snowlight outside the window. She was a quarter of an hour late for the agreed-upon Zi hour.
She immediately got up, washed her face with cold water, and felt instantly refreshed. Carrying her blade, she stepped out of Ding Wu’s room to relieve Wang Daxia.
But in the main hall, the candle had burned to its end, flickering weakly. On the table sat an eight-treasure box filled with dried fruits and snacks.
No one was on the heated kang. Since the kang had remained warm, the bedding was still warm too, making it impossible to tell how long Wang Daxia had been gone.
Had he gone to the latrine?
At the time, a pair of Wang Daxia’s leather boots lay beneath the kang. With snow falling and the north wind howling outside, it was impossible for him to have gone out barefoot.
Something must have happened!
Recalling how Zhou Xiaoqi had once kidnapped Wei Caiwei here, leading to a fierce fight with Wang Daxia, Lu Ying grew fully alert.
The candle in the main hall was on its last breath. The hall had only walls and front and rear doors, no windows, so no snowlight shone in. Only the dim, flickering candlelight remained, about to go out.
Fortunately, on the incense table, two candlesticks stood before the spirit tablet inscribed "Spirit tablet of the deceased husband Wang Erlang," both holding fresh candles.
Lu Ying picked up the dying candle from the table and moved to light the two new ones.
But as the candlelight fell upon the incense table, Lu Ying vaguely felt that the mooncakes offered before the spirit tablet were moving on their own!
In the dead of night, it was truly eerie.
With a clear conscience, Lu Ying refused to believe in such strangeness. She picked up a mooncake, sniffed it, and tapped it—it clinked like a rock, hard and seemingly ordinary.
Perhaps her eyes had deceived her earlier. Setting down the rock-like mooncake, she continued holding the dying candle to light the new ones.
But in the time she had inspected the mooncake, the old candle burned out completely. The new candles remained unlit, a wisp of blue smoke rising as the flame died.
The hall plunged into darkness.
Remembering that there was a flint striker on the table in Ding Wu’s room, Lu Ying set down the candlestick and prepared to feel her way back in the dark.
Just then, a whistling sound cut through the air—an assassin! No wonder Wang Daxia was missing!
Years of combat instinct had honed Lu Ying’s ability to pinpoint sound. She dodged swiftly and, relying on memory, grabbed the mooncakes offered before the spirit tablet and hurled them toward the source of the attack.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!
Seven rock-like projectiles flew out, thudding against the staircase. One struck with a muffled impact, followed by a suppressed cry of pain and the sound of a body tumbling down the stairs.
A hit!
Doctor Wei’s cooking might be lacking, but her skill in crafting hidden weapons was impressive. A surge of triumph filled Lu Ying’s heart as she drew a thin throwing knife hidden in her boot and flung it toward the staircase entrance.
The assassin should have rolled down to the base by now.
Thud, thud, thud!
The sound of blades embedding into the wooden floor—she had missed.
Strange, had the assassin not yet reached the bottom?
As she pondered, another whistling object shot toward her face. Lu Ying ducked, and the projectile struck the spirit tablet, sending both clattering noisily to the floor from the incense table.When the hidden weapon landed, there was a rumbling sound—it must have been the stone mooncakes she threw that were hurled back by the other party.
The hidden weapons in her boots were all used up. Worried about Wei Caiwei’s safety on the second floor, Lu Ying disregarded the danger, drew her blade, and charged toward the staircase in the dark.
Just as she stepped onto the stairs, the door to the second-floor bedroom opened, and a sliver of light spilled through the crack.
Lu Ying panicked and shouted, "Don’t come out!"
At the same time, the assassin’s voice echoed, saying the same thing: "Don’t come out!"
Lu Ying froze—wasn’t that Wang Daxia’s voice? Could it be...?
She immediately sheathed her blade. Though she still couldn’t see clearly, the other person also recognized her voice. "Lu... Commander Lu?"
Hearing their voices, Wei Caiwei, who had been awakened, opened the door holding a lantern. She saw Lu Ying standing guard at the staircase with her blade drawn, while Wang Daxia crouched halfway up the stairs like a monkey, clutching two mooncakes in his hands.
It turned out to be a case of friendly fire—family failing to recognize family.
Earlier that night, Wei Caiwei had given Wang Daxia a birthday gift. Overwhelmed with emotion, she confided in him about her past, unleashing long-suppressed feelings. She cried as she spoke, and Wang Daxia held her, comforting her like a mature man for the first time.
Feeling secure, Wei Caiwei let it all out, crying until Wang Daxia’s shoulder was soaked and she finally fell asleep, exhausted.
Wang Daxia carried her from the study to the bedroom. By the faint glow of the snow outside the window, he quietly watched her sleeping face. Since he was on night duty to protect her and couldn’t sleep, he decided to stay by her side.
She was more invigorating than strong tea, sweeter than candied fruit, and the antidote to his troubles—he couldn’t bear to be without her.
When he faintly heard the night watchman’s drum from the Drum Tower strike three times, signaling the hour of midnight, it was time to wake Lu Ying for her shift.
But Wang Daxia couldn’t bring himself to leave Wei Caiwei. He would rather sit by her bedside all night than return to the warm, comfortable heated kang to sleep.
Wang Daxia thought to himself: Commander Lu has been exhausted lately, both physically and emotionally. Let her sleep until dawn. I’ve heard that staying up late ages women easily, and who knows when Lu Ying will get married—she needs to take good care of herself.
So he resolved to continue his watch and didn’t go downstairs to wake Lu Ying.
However, not long after, Wang Daxia heard movement downstairs. In his view, midnight was the deepest point of sleep—even thunder wouldn’t wake someone. Besides, Lu Ying had specifically asked him before bed to wake her at midnight, so it couldn’t be her.
That meant it must be an assassin!
Wang Daxia was only wearing woolen socks, so his footsteps were silent. He grabbed the short dagger Wei Caiwei kept for self-defense and quietly slipped out of the room. Downstairs, a faint light revealed a shadowy figure near the incense table.
Just as he tried to get a clearer look, the candle suddenly went out.
Last time, there had been movement here too—he thought it was a ghost, but it turned out to be a rat. Now, he saw a human figure, and as soon as he appeared, the figure extinguished the candle. It had to be an assassin!
Wang Daxia memorized the figure’s position and hurled the short dagger in his hand, striking true.
But the assassin was highly skilled, dodging the attack and retaliating by throwing discus-like hidden weapons at him. One of them hit his leg, and in pain, he knelt and tumbled down the stairs. Fortunately, halfway down, he managed to grab the handrail, preventing himself from rolling all the way to the bottom.The sound of darts piercing the wooden floorboards echoed from the staircase, sending Wang Daxia into a cold sweat. Had he not grabbed the handrail, those darts would have already embedded themselves in his body.
Sitting on an iron disc that happened to be beneath him, he seized it and hurled it toward the incense table, but missed. Hearing the sound of a blade being drawn and footsteps approaching, he groped around, found two more iron discs, and was about to fling them fiercely at the intruder when Wei Caiwei, awakened by the commotion, emerged with a lantern. Only then did they realize they were fighting among themselves.
After confirming with a glance that it was his superior, he noticed what he held were not iron discs but mooncakes.
Wang Daxia immediately dropped the mooncakes, clutched his thigh, and cried out in pain, "Commander Lu, why did you sneak around in the dark in the middle of the night without a word? I thought an assassin had broken in!"
Lu Ying sheathed her blade. "I wasn’t deliberately moving in the dark—the candle just happened to burn out. Why weren’t you guarding downstairs? What were you doing in Doctor Wei’s bedroom upstairs in the middle of the night? When it was my turn to take watch, I found you missing from the heated kang, without even your shoes on. I thought something had happened to you."
This left Wang Daxia stumped. He couldn’t reveal his secret relationship with Wei Caiwei, but his mind worked quickly, and lying came as naturally as breathing. "While on night watch, I heard noises in the study and grew suspicious. I didn’t want to make noise on the stairs, so I went up in my socks without shoes. Turns out, the study window wasn’t shut tight, and the north wind was rustling the pages on the desk—a false alarm."
Lu Ying pulled the leaf-thin blade from the floorboards and slipped it into her boot. "Luckily, both our skills and our luck held up, or we might have ended up killing each other."
Seeing Wang Daxia clutching his thigh and moaning in pain, Wei Caiwei went back to fetch a pair of scissors, cut open his trousers, and found a large bruise from the mooncake impact. She reached out and felt his thigh. "No bone injury, just a flesh wound. I’ll get you some medicine."
As Wei Caiwei went downstairs to the pharmacy, Wang Daxia no longer felt any pain in his leg. His mind was filled with one thought: Ah! She touched my thigh! She even squeezed and pressed it! She must have done it on purpose!
After midnight, I’ll be fifteen, so this must be the best birthday gift ever.
Lu Ying looked at him. "What are you smiling about?" Could he have been knocked silly by the mooncake?
Wang Daxia made up another excuse. "Because it’s my birthday today. Surviving a close call at Commander Lu’s hands on my birthday must mean I’ll have good luck all year."
"It’s your birthday?" Lu Ying said. "After we escort Doctor Wei to the Shichahai villa in the morning, I’ll have the servants cook you a bowl of longevity noodles."
"Is that all?" Wang Daxia pointed at the bruise on his thigh. "This was caused by Commander Lu. Shouldn’t the boss offer some compensation?"
Lu Ying looked at her subordinate, who was neither physically nor mentally resilient. "Then take the day off for your birthday. You don’t need to report to the Imperial Guard Office today."
I can spend the whole day with Caiwei! We’ll go to Shichahai to play Ice Games. Overjoyed, Wang Daxia exclaimed, "Thank you, Commander Lu, for the day off!"
Lu Ying paid him no mind, her gaze falling on the mooncake beside his thigh. "Don’t you think the mooncake is moving?"
She saw it wriggling on its own again—it couldn’t be the same hallucination twice."How could it possibly move on its own—" Wang Daxia fixed his gaze and let out a sharp yelp, immediately limping downstairs to hide behind Lu Ying. "The mooncake has come to life! There's a monster here! It's a mooncake spirit!"
"There are no such things as ghosts or monsters in this world." Lu Ying, refusing to believe in superstitions, promptly drew her blade and slashed at the writhing mooncake.
Her sword, forged from meteorite iron, was exceptionally sharp, capable of slicing through metal as if it were mud. The blade cleaved the hard mooncake into two halves, forming two semicircles.
Two clusters of white maggots, as thin as strands of hair, wriggled and squirmed out from the cut surfaces.
This was a five-nut mooncake, its crust as hard as iron. However, the gaps and oils between the walnuts, melon seeds, and sesame seeds inside had created spaces. After being left for four months, maggots had bred within. The outer crust remained iron-hard, but the maggots, resilient and tenacious, struggled to burrow outward, aiming to break free and transform into flies.
Gradually, the crust grew thinner from the maggots' relentless tunneling. Countless maggots squirmed and writhed inside day and night, making it appear as though the mooncake was moving on its own.
Wei Caiwei emerged with medicine and, upon seeing this scene, felt a chill run down her spine. "Uh, I'll go outside and build a fire to cremate the mooncake."
Wang Daxia pointed at the memorial tablet on the ground inscribed with "Spirit Tablet of the Deceased Husband Wang Erlang" and said, "Doctor Wei, please don't cook anymore. If you keep cooking, I'll end up like that."
While the three held a mooncake cremation ceremony in the courtyard, a "supernatural" incident also erupted in Prince Yu's residence.
The night watch guards saw a mass of green light in the snowy night. The green light charged straight toward them—a canine-shaped green glow. Wasn't this the rumored Dark Spectre? It had just caused trouble in the palace, reportedly frightening the favored consort, Consort Shang, into illness!
"It's the Dark Spectre! Run!" The guards fled in panic.
Author's note: I bet you can all guess the mystery behind this.
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