Chapter 156 — The Illusion Garden

CHAPTER 156

The Illusion Garden

The gate opened into a room Shi Feng knew.

A screen stood beside the bed. His floor mat lay in the corner, folded too narrowly because there had been little space between the chest and the wall. A bowl waited on the table with less food than he remembered being hungry for.

On top of the chest lay the promised spirit-stone bag.

He stopped inside the doorway.

The illusion had been built to catch at things a candidate carried, not to search and record hidden cultivation. Outside, the judges would see whether he emerged within the allotted time. They would not see this room.

That didn't make it pleasant.

Shi Feng walked to the chest and picked up the bag.

Empty.

The weight felt exactly right.

Ling Qingzhu stood beyond the screen in a familiar violet robe. Her face was uncovered because this was the home they had shared, at a moment when nobody else should have been present.

“You should have told me,” the image of Ling Qingzhu said.

Shi Feng looked at her.

He knew it wasn't her. The real woman had begun to understand that he had told her. This image used the old words because those were the ones he still carried easily enough for an illusion to reach.

“I did,” Shi Feng said.

The figure's expression softened.

“Then stay,” the image of Ling Qingzhu said.

That hurt more than the accusation.

For a breath, he wanted the room to be real in a different way. Food on the table, warmth without suspicion, a place beside her where his work didn't need defending before it could be accepted.

Wanting it didn't make the empty bag full.

He set it down.

The floor mat shifted, trying to pull his thoughts back into the old bargain.

Shi Feng didn't linger over the mat or the phantom beside the screen. He had already walked out of this room in Great Liang.

He turned toward the door. When the phantom Ling Qingzhu reached for his sleeve and whispered, “Don't go,” his hand didn't hesitate.

“That room is closed,” Shi Feng said evenly, and stepped straight through the threshold.

The gravel path of the outer garden reappeared around him before the second timing bell had finished its ring.

The exit attendant stamped his plate.

No one asked what he'd seen.

He was grateful for that part of the rules.

Ling Qingzhu entered later through the western gate.

The white veil remained across her face as the garden darkened around her. She heard footsteps in a corridor, then the quiet sound of a door closing.

Shi Feng's inn door.

She stood outside with a bottle in her hand. This time, the paper beneath the stopper was blank.

She knocked.

No answer came.

The illusion didn't need to invent shouting. A closed door was enough.

Ling Qingzhu pressed her fingers against the wood and found herself wanting to explain everything at once. The missing money. The meals she'd failed to count. The work she'd treated as an excuse. The way she'd heard his confidence and thought it could protect him from needing trust.

The door remained closed.

She lowered her hand.

An apology could be offered. It couldn't force someone else to receive it when she wanted relief.

She set the bottle beside the threshold and stepped back.

The corridor dissolved.

Outside, the bronze exit bell chimed after only nine breaths—the fastest clearance of all twenty-seven candidates in the Illusion Garden.

In the upper pavilion, Mu Shuyun rose to her feet, her hand resting on the rail as the recording stone flashed with the top mark of the second trial.

Yet when Ling Qingzhu stepped out beneath the exit arch, her face was pale behind the white veil and her fingers were cold against her cuff. She walked down the gravel path where Shi Feng stood waiting for the third-trial call. As she passed within an arm's length of him, her eyes lifted to his face—and Shi Feng met her gaze calmly, held it for a single unhurried breath without speaking, and looked away last toward the Puppet Array court.

Sima Lan came out with her lips pressed together.

Duan Yichen, waiting his own turn, glanced at the sleeve she had twisted tightly around her wrist.

“Unpleasant?” Duan Yichen asked.

“Predictable,” Sima Lan replied.

Inside, she had seen a throne waiting beneath Great Liang's roof. The steps were empty. No brother barred the way, and nobody told her which marriage could be exchanged for another clan's favour.

She had walked past it.

The throne had followed her voice through the hall, promising that power would make the rest worthwhile.

She knew too many people who had believed exactly that.

At the exit, she loosened her sleeve and checked the time. Better than the pressure stair. Not enough to relax.

Shi Feng remained beneath the tree until Duan Yichen returned. The sabre user looked annoyed rather than shaken.

“Grain accounts,” Duan Yichen said.

Shi Feng stared at him, then laughed once.

“All winter,” Duan Yichen added. “Numbers changing every time I finished a column.”

“Terrifying,” Shi Feng replied.

“It was,” Duan Yichen said. “Don't laugh until you've met my uncle with a missing receipt.”

The ordinary complaint loosened something in Shi Feng's chest. He stood, put the plate away and went with the sabre user toward the water tables.

Zhou Ke collected the stamped plates beside the water tables. A candidate tried to ask which visions had caught the other competitors. The official returned his own plate and refused. The trial ranked their answers to its illusions; it hadn't bought their private memories. Shi Feng put his plate away without joining the questions.

Across the court, Ling Qingzhu watched the second result appear beside her name. Mu Shuyun spoke briefly to an attendant above her, but no image from the garden appeared on the recording stone. Only the time and score were written. Ling Qingzhu straightened her sleeve and went to the next waiting line.

He had only needed to keep walking when the path opened.

At the water table, he filled one cup, then paused before reaching for a second. Duan Yichen took it from him and filled it himself. The small mistake passed without a question.