In the winter of Yongning Year Thirteen, Regent Ye Jinghe casually pointed at someone on the execution ground and saved Ye Weilan, the daughter of a disgraced minister from the previous dynasty.
Back then, she curled up in the snow like a wolf cub. Back then, he was a player of black stones, ruthless in killing, never imagining that this single move would trap him for ten years.
“I saved you because you’re useful.”
He taught her politics, taught her to “survive first,” taught her to dance on the edge of a blade. She counted the days waiting for him in the palace, while he plotted in Jiangnan, counting the hours. When their 365-day agreement ended, all she got was his declaration that she was “just a chess piece.” She burned the notebook she had hidden beneath her bed for ten years. Its pages were crammed with everything he had taught her, everything she had calculated, and all the evidence of how they tested each other and could never quite let go.
“I lied because I was afraid that if you knew I cared about you, you’d become my weakness.”
The Empress Dowager used white stones to force a coup. The emperor risked his life as bait to set a trap. Xie Xiaoman died with her identity as a hidden operative, while Ye Weishuang’s legs were broken on the torture frame in the entertainment house. The game of chess stretched from the capital to Jiangnan, from life and death to the ordinary days that followed. At last, they learned to grow vegetables, teach, and play chess beneath the moon without caring who won. But they could not learn how to truly become nothing but themselves.
“Weilan, I want to be a teacher. In Jiangnan, we could rent a house and teach three or five children. No court, no weapons, no… no one I have to use.”
But when the game ended and the realm was at peace, they realized that the cruelest strategy was sincerity, and the deepest obsession was letting go. He spent forty years proving he couldn’t bear to part with her. She spent a lifetime learning how to be nothing but Ye Weilan.
