At Mishui Pass, lanterns and colored silks hung everywhere, and Feng Xiuyun was brisk in her work: before long Si Yunxiang had been dressed up beautifully by a gaggle of soldier-girls and crowned with the phoenix crown and bridal veil, and Shen Mu, a great red flower pinned to his chest, had his head pressed down by main force and was made to bow through the wedding rites with Si Yunxiang. "That little Feng girl is quite good too — quick in her work, and she spares me the trouble." Blind Grandpa was so pleased his mouth would not close, and he thought, 'I wonder whether she's married yet...' At the wedding feast, the little girl Xue Hu'er had turned into wept until it was a very rain of pear blossoms, clinging to the wine jar and unable to straighten up, sobbing again and again that Blind Grandpa's word did not count and that he was a lying old man. The many officers and soldiers of Mishui Pass who had come to offer congratulations only looked at one another, at a loss to know why a little girl of six or seven should cry so bitterly. After all the merriment, the bride and groom entered the bridal chamber; Si Yunxiang had quietly hidden a dagger on her person, waiting only for Shen Mu to come and lift her veil, and then she would stab him and fulfill the long-cherished wish of a Holy Maiden — to assassinate the lecherous, tyrannical Cult Master. She waited a good while, but Shen Mu never came, and her heart turned rather bitter: 'Am I not even the equal of that plump girl Ling Yuxiu? Blind Grandpa is blind in the eye but not in the heart, yet some are blind in eye and heart alike — and don't they just favor the ones plumper in the chest?' She waited a while longer, and still Shen Mu did not come to sit beside her, nor did he lift her veil. Stealing a look from under it, she saw Shen Mu seated at the table, poring over a book. Si Yunxiang was sorely aggrieved: on her wedding night a beauty lovely as a flower sat by the bed, and the fool was reading — truly a spring night thrown away! She pulled off the veil, tossed it aside, stepped forward and said with a smile, "What book has the Cult Master so engrossed?" "The Mystic Maiden's Classic of Calculations." Shen Mu looked up, asked her to sit, and said with utter sincerity, "Blind Grandpa is forever up to his mischief, and it has dragged you into marrying me. I know he fears for my safety — he wants me to take a wife and beget sons, to hobble me with a wife and child, so that I won't go back to Jingping, so that I won't have to face the dangers to come. Sister Xiang, I've made you suffer along the road with me, and I beg your pardon for it." With that he rose and bowed. Si Yunxiang hurriedly returned the courtesy and said gravely, "All along the way you treated me with the respect due a guest, and never once took advantage of the peril the princess and I were in; I saw it all, and I know well enough what manner of man the Cult Master is. You are the Cult Master, half a generation above me — there's no need for such ceremony." She was younger even than Shen Mu, a girl of a little over fourteen, with bright eyes and white teeth. Si Yunxiang had always borne herself with a certain flippant, world-weary air, but grown serious she showed instead a poised and stately grace; for the Holy Maiden of the Si family was heir presumptive to the Nether Demon Cult Master, and should the Cult Master meet an untimely end, the Holy Maiden would take the seat — hence her uncommon bearing. "The Cult Master still has not said why he reads the Mystic Maiden's Classic of Calculations," she said, smiling. Shen Mu read on, and said, "If I mean to escape Blind Grandpa's palm, running for it is useless — I could never outrun him — and poison is out of the question; he is my grandfather. So I mean to use the Teleportation divine art." Si Yunxiang said in astonishment, "Has the Cult Master's attainments in divination reached such a height?" The difficulty of this art was no less than that of the Daoist school's Dao Sword. To use Teleportation, one's spatial calculations had to be cultivated to the utmost; otherwise, at best a miscalculation would send one to some perilous place, and at worst — dreadful to think of — it would fuse one into stone, flesh and rock made one. Yet most terrible of all was a slip that would scatter a man, whole, into the void of space. The hardest part of all: Teleportation demanded that countless transfer nodes be calculated in a single instant, not one of them wrong, with the calculations continuing ceaselessly the whole way through — a volume of computation, and a precision, that were well-nigh impossible to achieve. In the history of the Nether Demon Cult, no few mighty men had been crippled, killed, or simply lost by practicing Teleportation, and the number of the strong who had been scattered apart was great as well. More frightening still, every one of those mighty ones had possessed terrifying attainments in divination. Shen Mu read the classic and calculated without pause, testing one spatial node after another. "Dao Lord Lin Xuan gave me the Mystic Maiden's Classic of Calculations some months ago, and these months I have studied it without letup; the Grand Mystery Classic of Calculations, too, I have all but mastered entire. The Daoist school's attainments in divination may be called the finest under heaven; with the two classics joined, the secrets of Teleportation can be unraveled. Set your mind at ease — tonight I shall master the Mystic Maiden's classic through and through, and at first light tomorrow, when the darkness of the Desolate Ruins withdraws, I can depart by this art. When Blind Grandpa sees that I am gone, he will not make things hard for you." Si Yunxiang's face turned complicated, and she said softly, "Why must you drive yourself so? Blind Grandpa did seize us by force and force us to marry you, and you think only of us — but have you ever asked whether we were willing to marry you?" Shen Mu stopped his calculations and raised his head in surprise; under the lamplight the Holy Maiden Xiang seemed to refuse and yet to invite. "Sister Xiang, are you willing to marry me?" Shen Mu asked, eyes wide. Si Yunxiang's eyes fell; she bowed her head in shyness, the pearls of her phoenix crown swaying faintly, shimmering in the candlelight with a jewel's allure. "I don't believe it." Shen Mu bent his head to his book and read on. "Just now you had a dagger hidden in your sleeve, waiting for me to come to your side so you could run me through. I don't believe a word of it." Si Yunxiang's two fists clenched until the knuckles cracked, her teeth ground audibly, and all at once she whipped out the little dagger and hurled herself at Shen Mu. Shen Mu laughed aloud, sprang up, dodged the blade and flicked it with his finger; Si Yunxiang spun round and round, the red robes and wide skirts of a new bride turning like a red lotus, cold gleams flashing in her hand as she attacked him madly. In the bridal chamber came a crackling din, and every kind of furniture was smashed to splinters. "What a racket." Blind Grandpa set down his wine cup, his ears twitched, and utterly unruffled he asked Feng Xiuyun, who was keeping him company over the wine, "Has General Feng married?" Shen Mu fought Si Yunxiang a while, and at last gained the upper hand: he seized the dagger, flipped the Holy Maiden onto the bed, and smacked her bare bottom several times over — settling the score for her plundering of his private coffers — then went back to his book. Si Yunxiang, fuming, burrowed under the quilt and turned her back on him. Unnoticed, the sky began to pale, though the world of the Desolate Ruins remained in an unutterable darkness. Shen Mu had read the whole night and was still full of vigor. Si Yunxiang woke to find that at some point she had turned on her side to face him, and gave a little hmph. Shen Mu turned and smiled. "You snore in your sleep — not loudly, more like a cat. There's likely some disorder in your