By the time we leave the Comet Tail, the Azure Prime night has already swallowed half of plaza number eighteen.

The facade runes glow in discreet shades of gold and blue, reflecting in the suspended channels that cut the pale stone like threads of water trapped in the air. Zhang Xi walks beside me in silence, her gray tunic swaying slightly, the hood resting on her shoulders. After Leona Hartwell, anyone would seem quiet. Zhang Xi, though, seems quiet by choice, not by lack of presence.

I open the communicator before we reach the main street.

"Meeting moved to early tomorrow. Southwest plaza by the Academy. Go together. Oliver, stay at the factory."

Veric’s answer comes almost instantly. "You treat the prince of Azure like your subordinate. More than my own father does."

"I’m training to get good at it."

"Bastard..."

Rhayne comes on right after. "Are you okay?"

The communicator is loud enough for anyone close to hear. I glance sideways at Zhang Xi. She watches me as if the question belongs to her too.

"I’ve got a monk, a contract, and a headache. Relatively okay."

Zhang Xi raises an eyebrow. "You speak very disrespectfully about blessings."

"I have a complicated relationship with blessings."

Oliver takes a bit longer to surface in the chat. "I’m surrounded by new workers, Drowneds asking where they sign, where they sleep, and whether someone’s going to dock food from their pay. I’m not leaving here anytime soon."

"That’s why you’re excused."

"Is that a promotion or a punishment?"

"Yes."

"’Yes’ isn’t a choice."

"Exactly."

The night is too long to explain that he’s technically the responsible adult of the factory now. Some men only discover their greatness when they’re abandoned with paperwork. Oliver is the best at that, and I’ll make it up to him later.

The Bear Pelts doesn’t have the cold luxury of the Comet Tail, but maybe that’s why it’s easier to breathe there. The owner recognizes us without too many questions. I rent a room with two narrow beds, a small window facing a clean alley, and a weak runic lamp fixed to the wall.

Zhang Xi takes the bed by the window. I take the other.

For a few minutes, only the distant city enters the room. Carriages passing far off, footsteps in the hall, a muffled laugh downstairs. After Red Squid Slums, Garen, Leona, contracts, impossible tokens, and cold fingers on my neck, the silence feels almost irritating.

"Do you trust her?" Zhang Xi asks.

"Leona?"

"Yes."

"I trust her interest. Her good behavior, no."

Zhang Xi turns her face to me. The lamplight softens her features, but her eyes stay alert.

"She’s better than she looks."

"That isn’t hard."

"But worse than she pretends."

I look at the ceiling and let out a short breath through my nose. That’s more useful than any formal report on the leader of the Silver Fang. Leona is a storm with good publicity, and Zhang Xi knows it and stays at her side anyway. Maybe because healers get used to working with people broken in different ways.

"You’re not what you seem either," she says.

"That sentence usually comes before an accusation."

"It isn’t an accusation." Her voice drops. "It’s an observation."

I don’t answer.

Zhang Xi stays quiet a few seconds, as if choosing between sparing me and being honest. Honesty wins.

"Dryden Sands, you don’t belong to this timeline."

I turn my head slowly. "Plenty of people in Thirstfall don’t seem to belong anywhere."

"I’m not talking about loneliness."

That closes the escape route. She doesn’t say it the way Leona or Oliver would, shoving the door open just because they can. She says it like a monk facing a blade: calm, but aware that one wrong move cuts someone.

"My skill doesn’t read thoughts," she continues. "It doesn’t reveal the future. I observe inner constellations. Every life has its own design in the OXI flow, like stars trapped under water. Some clear, some confused, some wounded, some incomplete. But almost always they belong to the body that carries them."

The runic lamp crackles once.

"Almost always?"

"Yes." She’s looking at the ceiling now. "Your constellation doesn’t belong to this life."

My first impulse is to deny it. My second is to lie better. Neither feels worthy of the silence she offered before speaking. Zhang Xi isn’t trying to corner me, or pry loose a secret to sell. She saw a door that shouldn’t exist and decided to tell me she knows where the handle is.

"Maybe you’re right," I say.

The silence that follows isn’t comfortable, but it isn’t hostile either. It sits between the two beds like a third person, patient and heavy. I think about the first life, the years Thirstfall taught me trust was too expensive to spend. I think about how many times I survived because I expected the worst of someone and was right. And about how, this second time, things have slipped off the script in ways I can’t pretend are only calculation.

Ingrid and Lili are still alive. Rhayne stayed. Veric chose to fight without me having to leash him. Oliver is building a factory with Drowneds who, in another line, might never have seen clean wages. Richard protects Zoe. Lia has enough Shards to breathe a day without Thomas Vale at her throat. And Zhang Xi, a monk who barely knows the size of the lie inside me, is lying on an inn bed telling me I might still get it right.

What hurts most is Lola.

Lola. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

I breathe deep.

"But I think," she says, breaking the silence, "this time you’ll do the right thing."

There’s no answering that without ruining it. I still don’t know if what I do is right. Too much political blackmail, too many hard contracts, too many secrets. I still manipulate people and call it strategy when I need to sleep at night. But it’s better than the first life. In two months, I’ve learned more about the good side of humanity than in two years surviving alone.

For now, that has to be enough.

"Good night, Zhang Xi."

"Good night, Dryden Sands."

We sleep without another word.

The next morning, the Bear Pelts serves hot bread, salty broth, dark tea, and a thin-skinned sea fruit that looks like a pear until you bite it and find it tastes of salt and honey. We eat fast.

At the Academy gate, two porters try to do their job and bar Zhang Xi until I hand over the government representation authorization. Their posture changes at once. Not out of respect for me, but for the seal.

"She comes with me," I say.

The porter checks the gray tunic, the seal, and decides a problem-free life is a respectable ambition.

I also hand him a folded paper. "For the person named on it. Now."

He opens it just enough to see the name, closes it again, and sends for an assistant without a word. Zhang Xi watches with too much serenity for someone witnessing a power move.

"Leona was right," she says. "You’re insufferable."

The smile she gives saying it makes me smile too.

The southwest plaza is the farthest from the main routes. Low trees, stone benches, a dry fountain at the center, old enough to look like decoration and new enough to still fake usefulness. Veric and Rhayne arrive together. Oliver, as agreed, doesn’t.

Veric looks at Zhang Xi, then at me. "You went out for a meeting and came back with the Silver Fang’s monk?"

"Temporarily."

Rhayne approaches carefully. "Is she staying with us?"

"For a while. She’ll learn our plans, observe the LDP, share medical experience. It fits, because we’re going to need a healer."

Rhayne tenses at once. "Why do we need a healer?"

Before I can answer, footsteps cross the side entrance of the plaza.

My plan arrives with three followers at her back, all equipped, all chosen by the way they don’t glance around for permission. She comes with the same arrogant air as always, like the whole Academy is a stage someone forgot to clean before her entrance.

"So this is where," Freya says, looking from Veric to Rhayne, then to me, "you’re gathering the students who still think they’ll walk out in one piece?"

Zhang Xi sighs softly.

For the first time that morning, I think she understands why Leona sent her with me.