He Nanzheng guarded Yan Hui Pass on the frontier for twelve years.
He kept away from women, drank no wine, and amassed no private fortune. His soldiers feared him as they feared a mountain and revered him as they revered a god.
No one knew that an old vanity mirror lay hidden in his tent, its frame worn smooth as satin. No one knew that every new moon, he climbed to the highest point of the pass and gazed toward the capital all night.
He looked at the moon in the northwest, but thought of the crescent moon in Jiangnan: curved like someone's brows.
His subordinates thought him as hard as iron. He thought so himself, until one day he received a letter with no signature.
There was only one character on the letter, and it carried the cool fragrance of plum blossoms.
He clutched the paper, his fingertips turning faintly white.
Shen Moyu
He owned three pleasure houses and four gambling dens, with music houses scattered across thirteen provinces. He moved his abacus beads like plucking a zither string. When the powerful men of the capital spent a fortune for a smile from him, he smiled as he accepted their banknotes, then turned around and added them to someone else's military funds.
No one could fathom his true background. He was like a kite he had sent soaring himself, its string hidden somewhere no one could find.
Except for one string: every year, with the first snowfall, he personally brewed a jar of osmanthus wine and stored it in the deepest cellar of the Sleepless Tower. The red label on the jar always bore the same name.
He never drank it. He only waited.
People said that Boss Shen had a cold heart, that even the hottest feelings froze into frost before they reached him.
But who knew that frost was merely hot blood turned to ice?
Now the general had come to the capital to report on his service.
In a private room on the top floor of the Sleepless Tower, Shen Moyu leaned against the armrest, idly turning a small bronze mirror between his fingers. It was a rough trinket from beyond the pass, its surface already cloudy.
The sound of hoofbeats drew closer from beyond the curtain.
He lowered his eyes and quietly slipped the bronze mirror into his sleeve.
Theme: A story born from a spark of inspiration
