The fine spring rain swept diagonally across the palace walls. Su Mingyue pressed her gilded nail guard against her temple, and the pearls and jade reflected in the bronze mirror shimmered with a cold light in the rainy haze. It was only when the female official urged her for the third time that she slowly rose. Her wide sleeves brushed a piece of plain silk from the desk, and the ink characters "Chenyuan," not yet dry, blurred into two dark patches in the rainwater, looking terribly like the coagulated blood scab on that man's dark armor.
At the autumn hunt seven years ago, sixteen-year-old Su Mingyue had been carried away from the party by a startled horse. She gripped the reins tightly as the wind whistled past her ears, until she crashed into a warm wall of flesh. A dark cloak carrying the scent of blood enveloped her, and the young general Lù Chényuān reined in his warhorse, the blade of his sword still dripping with wolf blood. "Do not be afraid, my lady."
At that time, he was barely twenty years old, yet he was already renowned throughout the world for recapturing the Sixteen Prefectures of Yanyun. Su Mingyue looked up at him, seeing the old scar on his browbone cast a pale red glow in the setting sun, making him look like someone stepped out of a painting. The jade pendants at their waists chimed softly against each other—it was the twin-lotus pendant she had secretly tied onto him that morning.
Chapter 247