It was noon, and Shen Qingqiu was already irritated.

Sunlight filtered through the paper windows of his office in thin, accusatory slats, illuminating stacks of essays spread across his desk like evidence of a crime. Mediocre handwriting. Mediocre arguments. Mediocre thinking. He marked them with ruthless efficiency, red ink slashing through pretension and empty flattery alike. Qing Jing disciples had the audacity to believe elegance compensated for substance. It did not.

A knock came.

Ming Fan entered with the posture of a man approaching his own execution.

“There is a visitor, Peak Lord,” he said, eyes fixed firmly on the floor.

Shen Qingqiu did not need to ask who.

Again.

Yue Qingyuan.

Again.

Ming Fan lingered for half a breath too long, clearly bracing himself. The past few months had taught everyone on Qing Jing Peak the same lesson: Shen Qingqiu’s response to Yue Qingyuan’s visits was a gamble. On good days, he acknowledged the sect leader with a curt nod and sent him away bleeding dignity but intact. On bad days—truly bad days—his irritation radiated outward, and his disciples paid the price in copied manuals, rewritten essays, or thirty-page treatises on cultivation theory they would never survive finishing.

Today hovered precariously between the two.

Shen Qingqiu’s brush snapped cleanly against the inkstone.

His scowl deepened, sharp and reflexive, but he nodded once and flicked his hand in dismissal. Ming Fan did not hesitate. He all but fled.

Shen Qingqiu rose slowly, smoothing his robes with mechanical precision. He could already feel it—the familiar tightening in his chest, the prickling along his meridians like static before a storm. His qi–ge had been getting bolder. More elaborate. Less restrained. As if sheer persistence could erode something that had calcified years ago into resentment and bone-deep mistrust.

No doubt Yue Qingyuan was using sect funds again.

That, too, irritated him.

The office stood deliberately apart from his bamboo house—close enough to the main halls to remind everyone he belonged here, far enough to ensure no one mistook his living space for a place of welcome. He stepped outside, expression already schooled into cool disdain.

Yue Qingyuan was waiting.

He always was.

Shen Qingqiu took him in with a single cutting glance. The posture—careful, respectful. The hands—not empty. They never were anymore. Some new offering, no doubt rare, no doubt expensive, no doubt chosen with painstaking thought and an optimism that bordered on delusion.

The sight of it made something ugly coil tighter in Shen Qingqiu’s chest.

He hated this part most: not the gifts themselves, but the intention behind them. The quiet, relentless insistence that time, wealth, and contrition could be stacked high enough to bridge what abandonment had hollowed out. As if the past were a debt that could be repaid in installments.

Shen Qingqiu’s expression did not change.

Without looking back at the sect leader, he lifted his hand and snapped his fingers sharply. A nearby disciple stiffened at once.

“Tea,” Shen Qingqiu ordered coldly, already turning away from the gifts, from the expectation hanging in the air. “Properly prepared. Don’t embarrass Qing Jing.”

The command cut cleanly through the courtyard. It was not an invitation. It was a test—of patience, of endurance, of whether Yue Qingyuan would understand what was being offered and what was not.

Shen Qingqiu moved toward the stone table beneath the shade of the bamboo, robes whispering with restrained tension, and seated himself without ceremony.

If Yue Qingyuan wished to stay, he would sit.

If he wished to atone, he would wait.

And Shen Qingqiu would make him do both.