Chapter Text
To my husband,
Yingying will be taking a brief trip to exercise her cultivation. Many apologies for the inconvenience.
Please take care of yourself, A-Luo.
- Ning Yingying
It has been 845 days since Ning Yingying last saw her husband.
847 days since "Luo Binghe" had emerged, confused and inexplicably younger-- if not by his physical appearance then by the lack of weight on his shoulders-- from a portal slashed into the wall of her bedroom. Even more inexplicably, he'd asked for shizun.
846 days since her husband, the Luo Binghe that coaxed her open gently on her wedding night with those same calloused hands that tore the limbs off Shen Qingqiu, returned bloody and broken through that same portal with no explanation.
Circumstances aside, it had almost felt nostalgic-- the way he'd stumbled onto her bed and she'd bandaged his wounds, fretting at the gashes so like their usual routine on the old Qing Jing Peak. But decades had passed since then, and as much as the couple put on the masks of their old selves for fun romps in bed, they'd both changed. She hadn't seen a spark in his eyes since before they were married, but the Luo Binghe on her bed somehow seemed to have lost the remaining light he had left. He was silent through the entire process, uttering only simple thanks when she tied knots off, and never once looked towards her. It was as if he was a boat lost at sea, unmoored with no stars in sight.
For his sake, Ning Yingying faked positivity. She turned down her sickly sweet act enough to not overwhelm him, but kept just enough to set him at ease. By this point in her marriage, it was easy enough for her to hide behind her carefully manicured masks.
It was near impossible to keep your soft edges through the cutthroat harem politics of the inner palace. Shen Qingqiu had prepared her for this, she thought sometimes, in those hours of the night where it feels as though time stops and that not a single being in the world exists besides you. Shen Qingqiu had invited her into his private study and instructed her on the correct way to pour the assassin's teapot and tighten her guqin strings into garrotes, warning her to never trust any man for as long as she lived. When she left, he swore her to secrecy and pressed a small knife into her hands.
She'd lost it in the time since, of course. It was lost far before she had even made her choice, when A-Luo had risen from the ashes of the Endless Abyss and exposed their teacher for the abusive, irredeemable criminal he was.
She'd thought the warning was a moot point, now that Luo Binghe was her one and only. And in some ways, it was: he'd never raised a hand against her and never would. However, as all-powerful and omniscient as the demon emperor was, he couldn't control all 3,000 of his wives.
Or, 2,000-something wives now, 845 days later. The newer ones hadn't lasted more than a month in his absence, succumbing to the cunning of the demonesses and ex-cultivators that liked the power and bloodsport of hierarchy. More of them had made it about a year in before growing frail of heartbreak, or spiritual energy deprivation. It was difficult to tell when their husband was both the only lover many of them had ever known and a veritable ocean of spiritual energy. A few more had left for greener pastures: returning to their family homes or, in the case of Sha Hualing, conquest wrought by her own hands. The rest, Ning Yingying included, remained waiting.
It was almost fascinating, how many of her fellow wives still listlessly wandered the palace halls. All of those she had been close with were long gone– Liu Mingyan had left to pay respects to her brother's grave ages ago and never returned, Qin Wanrong had hopelessly set off after their husband less than a week into his leave and succumbed to the elements, and so on. The rest seemed to mindlessly repeat their daily tasks, as though they were wind-up toys for children that had been wound up and left running even after playtime was over.
Ning Yingying wasn't exactly sure why she'd stuck around for this long. Maybe she felt responsible, as the highest-ranked wife left in the palace. Maybe she felt scared, of the unknown world outside the walls of the only place she'd called home for so many decades. Maybe she'd spent so long as a wife, waiting unwaveringly for her doting husband to return, that that was all she knew anymore. And maybe, most likely, she just wanted A-Luo to return and explain just why, when he left her bedroom for that last time, he'd silently mouthed "sorry".
But as much as Ning Yingying didn't understand why she remained, she couldn't exactly explain what pushed her to finally dig out her dusty traveling cloaks and wrap them around her abandoned sword. What led her to step out, for the first time in well over 845 days, into a world completely unknown.