The Quiet Lake lay to the south of the Midcourt, like a mirror cupped in green hands. Among the ten Demon Kings, Eunice was the weakest, a lone candle in a hall of bonfires. When the others rose to godlike heights, she, with many hands lifting her, reached only the rank of an Ancient God, a pebble laid beside mountains. Yet in this band of jokers, she was the one you could set your back against, a steady stone in a running stream, and the one least hungry for the world’s dust. The Quiet Lake was her handiwork, a lotus carved from still water.

As for the Midcourt, Miracle City floated in the sky like a palace moored to the clouds. Directly beneath that hovering city, the ground was called the Midcourt, a hearth where the first immigrants gathered like birds around one fire. South of the Midcourt, a new Astral Plaza was rising, scaffolds like ribs against the sky, though it wasn’t finished yet. Farther south, after sky gave way to mist, lay the Quiet Lake.

When Xi woke, she insisted on walking this newborn world, a traveler tasting rain. Her first stop was the Quiet Lake, a hush folded in bamboo.

“Hey… Xi, are you sure you’re fine?” Ouyang’s worry fell like a shadow over water.

“I’m fine. It’s already handled.” Her certainty rang like metal, clean and bright. Yet the moment her left foot stepped east, her right drifted west, two oars pulling one small boat, the body moving like two hands writing different letters.

“Really fine?” Watching her stumble where walking should be a breeze, Ouyang’s words tangled like wind in reeds.

Jaw tight, Xi’s face twisted like clouds fighting sun. After a while, the weaker current sank, the stronger tide smoothed, and her steps returned to one rhythm, a river choosing one bed.

They reached the silent lake. Haze unspooled over the water like ghost-silk, giving the lake a dream’s soft edge. Dense bamboo closed around the shore, a green wall of spears holding a single blue eye. Strictly speaking, the Quiet Lake was a pool cradled in bamboo, a secret kept by stalks.

Fireflies flickered in the fog, little lanterns breathing. Xi leaned her weight against Ouyang’s shoulder, like a petal against bark. “Feels like… I missed so much,” she said, her voice a hush like rain on moss. “Blink, and everything’s changed—no, even the familiar things are gone. Familiar faces, familiar objects—most of them have slipped like sand through fingers.”

He could only hold her tighter, an arm like a ring of warmth, telling her with touch that one hearth still burned.

“In hazy mist, hazy firefly light—so beautiful,” Xi murmured, her breath a ripple over still water. Ouyang lowered his head and looked at her face, a moon close enough to touch, and for a heartbeat his mind went blank like a night emptied of stars.

They’d been together so long, yet he had never studied her features, never traced the strokes of that painting. Maybe it was the old knot between the Void Watcher and Lian, a shadow that made him avoid that moon. But the past is a tide that rolls out, and with that benediction given, the story between Ouyang the Void Watcher and Lian, the Queen of Bai, was finished, a book closed like a fan. The characters were the same two stars, but the constellation had changed; now it was the story of Ouyang the Void Messenger and Aurora the Goddess of Aurora, two lights in a new sky.

“Hey… Ouyang, we haven’t really had a proper romance, have we?” Xi’s voice smiled like dawn on water. “We ended up together out of nowhere, skipping every basic step, like a bridge without planks. I hate that. I want a normal love, like ordinary couples. Stroll the streets together, watch a movie together, watch tides rise and fall together, like moons breathing.”

She stared blankly at the lake surface, a calm mirror veiled in fog, while fireflies wrote tiny stars in the air. Ouyang held her close, worried she might drift away like a paper boat. He squeezed her hand and lowered his voice, afraid too loud a sound would shatter this stillness like a pebble on glass.

“Mm, Xi, let’s go on a date,” he whispered, words like warm tea. “We’ll visit the Wishing Prairie and see the Wishing Grass planted by that wishing fiend, and make a wish among fireflies like candles. We’ll stand on the crimson moon and look down at the earth, watching all things shrink like pebbles in a palm. We’ll walk the Land of the Turning Seasons around the Midcourt, and watch spring, summer, autumn, winter that never change—feel spring’s delight like fresh wind, summer’s blaze like hammered copper, autumn’s withering like falling reeds, winter’s snow-charm like quiet bells.” Wrapped in each other, Ouyang spoke of the sights of the Eternal Sleep Continent, a traveler unrolling a painted scroll.

If the Quiet Lake was Eunice’s signature in water, then the Wishing Prairie was the banner of Youlan, the wishing fiend, a charm stuck to the horizon.

“To be honest, when I first saw that endless sea of Wishing Grass, I couldn’t believe that Youlan was still the Youlan I knew,” he said, memory like incense. “In my head, she’d only ever raise a tide of Man-eating Flowers, maybe a whole ocean of teeth and petals. I never thought she’d spread a prairie of wishes like blue flame across the land.

“And Devila—that one hung a crimson moon in the sky like a lantern and built a Blood Kin castle beneath it, a red citadel where the night gathers like wine. Now it’s their nest, a flock of bats around a bell tower. And Glenza? He dug a laboratory into Skull Mountain, a bone caverns of glass and steel. Official name ‘Glenza Laboratory,’ but privately, everyone calls it the ‘Necromancy Institute,’ a frost kept in jars.

“As for Dufei, that chubby menace founded a Gourmet Management Association, crowning himself as president like a king over steaming pots. He swore to glorify dark cuisine, the way a storm glorifies thunder. But the vice president is an old stubborn bull who hates dark cuisine. Now those two clash in bright halls and quiet kitchens, one trying to spread the darkness, the other chasing the true taste, like two knives ringing on one cutting board.”

He told Xi many things, scenes that stained the heart like ink, and laughter that lingered like smoke.

“Xi, the Quiet Lake is lovely at night, like a silk fan, but the Wishing Prairie by night is the finest tapestry. Let me take you.”

“Okay… but… I’m tired. Carry me.” Her request landed like a feather.

Ouyang crouched and lifted her. Her weight was soft on his back, light as a fallen leaf, and he didn’t feel burdened at all, just warmth. “Hehe, so obedient,” Xi teased, her arms looping his neck like a scarf. Cheek pressed to his back, she turned impish, a little devil with a dimple—tugging his hair like bell cords, pinching his cheeks like mochi, playing on his back as if riding a cloud.

The Wishing Prairie lay east of the Midcourt, and the lands ringing the Midcourt were called the Land of the Turning Seasons, a wreath woven of time. Further east, the Ever-Summer stretched like a brass plate, and beyond it, not far, the Wishing Prairie rolled out like a blue sea. Ouyang didn’t travel from the Midcourt at all; he leapt from the Quiet Lake, crossed the southeastern Valley of Dragons like a shadow crossing a bridge, and came straight to the Wishing Prairie. For mortals, that road was a horizon that never comes closer; for Ouyang, it was a few minutes, like stepping across a puddle.

Before the prairie, he saw ranks of Man-eating Flowers with saw-toothed mouths, a border of jaws like a hedge of knives. As far as his eyes could cast a net, the prairie’s edge was lined with those horrors.

“I think I should take back what I said,” he muttered, face twisting like he’d swallowed a fly. “Trust that fiend not to plant Man-eating Flowers? I’d sooner believe Dufei will cook respectable food.”

Xi couldn’t help it—pfft—she laughed, bright as a bell. Ouyang had a shadow in his chest when it came to those flowers. Youlan was his neighbor, and sometimes the Man-eating Flowers multiplied like mushrooms after rain. At dawn, when Ouyang opened his eyes, it wasn’t Nabelia the head maid he saw, but a gaping maw, teeth like a sawmill, with sticky, unknown slime dripping like cold honey…

Every morning, eyes open to those hated flowers—such scenes carved scars into a young heart like a knife into bark.

“Evil things like Man-eating Flowers deserve judgment.” Ouyang’s voice went cold, a wind over graves, as a black fireball bloomed in his palm like a night-blooming flower. He hurled it at the Man-eating Flowers, a raven comet leaving no ash. No smell of char. No crackle of flame. In soundless midnight, the flowers unraveled and vanished, like ink soaked back into paper.

With no more thorny teeth in their way, Ouyang carried Xi into the Wishing Prairie. The prairie ran to the edge of sight, a sea without shore, while dots of glow drifted like embers. He set Xi down, and they lay in the grass, two figures under a low sky, as fireflies rose and fell like a living Milky Way.

Hand in hand, they lay content, two stones warming in the sun. The Wishing Grass was blue, so the prairie was a blue ocean of blades. Under countless fireflies, that blue turned misty and dreamlike, as if painted on fog. In the hush, Xi squeezed Ouyang’s fingers, a pulse on a string. “Ouyang, what’s the Land of the Turning Seasons around the Midcourt?”

“Well…” he said, words pulling a sketch in air. “The Midcourt is like a ring, and the circle’s center is where the immigrants live, a hearth in a wreath. Draw a cross to split the ring into four quarters, and you get spring, summer, autumn, winter—four unchanging domains, four petals on one flower. North of the Midcourt is eternal spring. South is eternal autumn. West is eternal winter. East is eternal summer. In those four lands, there’s no shifting of seasons at all. Only when you step outside the Midcourt do you see seasons turn like pages.”

In truth, with everyone’s hands on the loom, most of this new world had no seasonal change, a quilt stitched to one pattern. Places with changing seasons were rare as meteors. It was a place like a Divine Kingdom, the rules bent like reeds. If it still followed those ordinary-world rules like rails, it would be dull as cold soup.

North of the Midcourt, Skull Mountain lay in eternal night, a cave for stars. To the west, the Land of the Crimson Moon was night without dawn, a red moon forever nailed to the sky like a seal, the haunt of the Blood Kin.

Xi listened quietly to Ouyang’s tales, the new world’s people and their quirks, like shells picked along a shore. The story stretched long, and the Wishing Prairie’s night stretched with it, a river uncoiling. Through the long night, one voice murmured like a stream, and the other leaned in like a willow listening.

At some point, starlight began to drift down like snow of light, and meteors scored the sky like silver knives. Light sprites, palm-sized, flew by and left long rivers of stars in their wake, luminous silk unspooled across the dark.

“They… really went all out,” Ouyang said, smiling like a lantern relit. The drifting starlight was Bai’s mark, no doubt, a signature written in milk-white. The light sprites had threads tied to Moer and Little Night, knots he knew by touch. The meteors, that kind of romance, must be Eunice’s handiwork—roses flung across a night sea. “Xi, see? They’re blessing us.”

“Mm. I see. Then I’m going to make my wish to the Wishing Grass.” Xi’s voice was soft as a vow cut into jade. “My wish is: we’ll be together forever, forever and ever… forever and ever… always together.”

She kneeled on the grass, thighs tucked beneath, and interlaced her fingertips, ten twigs making one wreath. For Xi, wishing was unnecessary—her power outstripped Youlan the Wishing fiend like a storm outstrips a candle. But sometimes wishing isn’t about getting what you want; it’s about laying your heart bare, like placing a cup before the altar.

The wish was a path that led to the words she wanted to say to Ouyang, a lantern lighting a confession.

“Forever and ever… always together… it’s a promise.” Her eyes were two lakes holding stars.

Ouyang mirrored her, kneeling on the earth, interlacing his fingers, two hands weaving one net. Their hearts, in that moment, were a book open to the same page.

No one knows how long “forever” truly is; no one knows whether “always” has a shore. The night held the question like a shell holds the sea.