Qin Zheng glanced at the rabbit lantern, then at Shen Ci's fleeing back, and shook his head, laughing.
He'd likely provoked some young miss again.
Setting the lantern aside, he took up his brush and went back to the letters his customers had ordered.
Down by the lake, men and women strolled in pairs—laughing, bickering, every manner of bearing. But when the moment came to set their river lanterns on the water, a single shared devotion settled over every face.
No one tried to peek at what the other lanterns had written inside, and no one cared where any of them would finally drift. They looked only to what Heaven would hand them.
Qin Zheng believed in neither ghosts nor gods. He was alone in the world, with nothing much to ask for anyway.
The little cat he'd rescued once was long gone now—but he liked to think it lived better away from him.
Straining hard, you could not find a second soul in all of Yulin as poor as he was.
With every river lantern written, he propped his chin in his hand and studied the rabbit lantern.
Lanterns like this were a different creature from river lanterns, which came in one plain shape with a flat bottom, made to float. Festival lanterns took all forms—rabbits, fish; a deft craftsman could even make a pair of mandarin ducks.
But he had never seen craft like this one. What family set actual gemstones into a lantern's eyes?
Truly a rich house, the Shens—even their lanterns had to flaunt it.
He was still musing when a shadow fell across the stall.
Qin Zheng looked up, dazed, and met a pair of smiling eyes.
"We meet again." Li Funing wore the same white robes as the night Shen Ci first saw her—white as fresh snow, her lovely face bare of any paint, and under the moonlight she looked like an immortal descended from the ninth heaven.
She planted both hands on his table and said, word by deliberate word, "This time, you will tell me your name!"
She'd decided, once and for all, that this was the man sent to save her.
A clean fragrance washed over him. Qin Zheng's ears went scarlet.
"May I ask… how should I address you, miss?"
Li Funing blinked. Hadn't he just sent her a letter? How could he not know her name?
But she decided he simply wanted to hear her introduce herself.
"Li Funing."
"I am called Qin Zheng."
And so the second meeting promised between Shen Ci and Li Funing became the first meeting between Qin Zheng and Li Funing.
Fate misfired by a single thread. The Star of Destiny gave only a light wave of the hand—and for the mortals beneath, it wrote in bold, unrepeatable strokes.
Would Li Chen ever have let his daughter marry a penniless scholar? Never. But Li Funing had set her heart on Qin Zheng and was prepared to wreck her own name to have him.
With that, her father's dream of climbing through marriage came crashing down.
And crashing down with it went Shen Ci's whole heart.
He wanted to go to Li Funing—and he wanted to go to Qin Zheng. He could not understand how things had come to this.
Qin Zheng was the one in the wrong, yet on the matter of Li Funing he yielded not one inch.
Li Funing knew nothing at all. She had merely mistaken one man for another. And none of it was something Shen Ci could ever say to her face.
In her heart, he was nothing but a philanderer.
So later, Shen Ci became one. He squandered the family fortune freely, turned away no woman who offered herself, and when he met one with eyes like Li Funing's, he'd go so far as to toy with her a little.
The town's verdict on him swung from "promising young man" to open cursing.
What no one knew—what no one ever bothered to learn—was that he had never once entered those women's rooms.
The Shen Ci who had once shone too brightly, the man every girl in Yulin dreamed of, stayed behind on that day, forever.