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“Lady Wen, I have a request of you,” Jin Guangyao asks.

Very polite and formal, as she always is. She looks so different these days from the small girl with the braided hair who used to stand by Uncle’s side, but that polite smile hasn’t changed. There’s something more than usually brittle about it today, though, and Wen Qing drinks her tea slowly, struggling to suffocate the sudden stab of hope. 

The tea is very fine and perfectly warm, as always. Jin Guangyao has poured herself a cup, but she doesn’t drink it, just sits demurely across the table. The black-clothed teenager is lounging against the windowless wall, tossing a knife between her fingers. She never sits. 

“What is the request?” Wen Qing asks, flatly. 

She is not particularly surprised when Jin Guangyao says, “I have a patient for you.” There is little value she has to offer these days, besides her skill and knowledge of medicine. She assumes it is the only reason she is still alive. 

“What is the ailment?” she asks.

“We recovered the Yiling Patriarch’s notes,” her visitor says, instead of answering, which is inauspicious. And then she says, “In one margin he makes a reference to your apparent ability to transfer a golden core from one cultivator to another,” and the breath freezes in Wen Qing’s lungs. 

She does not dare to say anything, not when she does not know how much they know, how much is still a secret. She only sips her tea, and avoid’s the other woman’s gaze. 

“He was insane,” she says, too late, after the silence has dragged on too long. “I am sure whatever truth his journals might contain would need to be extracted from pages of meaningless ravings.”

“Lady Wen,” Jin Guangyao says, “If you do not agree to assist me in this manner, I will unfortunately have no choice but to apply all my skills to convince you.”

Wen Qing looks up, and meets Jin Guangyao’s wide and gentle eyes. She smiles, just a fraction. “You know I will not submit to that, Lady Jin.”

It would be trivially easy for her to stop her own heart. She has wondered, many times, why she hasn’t done it yet. There’s some resistance in her still. It isn’t hope, hope hurts too much. Curiosity, perhaps, or stubbornness. 

Jin Guangyao’s fingers drum on the table for a moment, and then she says, “If you do this, and the patient survives, I will let you and your sister go free.”

She makes a tsking sound, in the back of her throat. “You surely can’t expect me to believe that, Lady Jin. You know I have no reason to.”

Jin Guangyao closes her eyes, and when she opens them again, they’re no longer wide and gentle mirrors. “The reason,” she says, “is that I am begging.”

It can’t be. It must be a lie. She knows this. And she knows that she cannot allow this woman to learn this, her most secret, most guarded technique. The miracle that she always feared would become an atrocity. Which would most certainly be turned to evil in the hands of the Jin. 

But the hope is stabbing her chest so sharply now she almost expects to see blood on her robes.

“What exactly do you wish me to do?” she asks.

“I want you to extract the core from a cultivator who has undergone a qi deviation,” Jin Guangyao says, “and I want you to replace it with mine.”

She is brought into a new room in the dungeon. Not the one she’s been brought to before, the one where they keep A-Ning, a different one. There’s a woman chained to a table. She appears to be unconscious for the moment. 

Wen Qing hasn’t seen Chifeng-zun since she was fifteen years old. Chifeng-zun was a girl then, awkward and gangly. The woman on the table ought to be massive, but there’s a ropy look to the body under the ornate robes, a gauntness to the sallow face. 

Every time a procedure is performed successfully, the process becomes vastly more predictable, much safer. However, what Jin Guangyao has proposed she do here is also immensely more complicated than her prior success. To remove one core intact and insert it into a foreign body is one thing. To do it with two cores simultaneously seems close to madness.

“What would you estimate the odds of success to be?” Jin Guangyao asks, and Wen Qing says,

“Twenty percent chance you both die. Fifty percent chance one of you dies. Only a ten percent chance the implantation takes for both of you.” 

She watches Jin Guangyao stare off into the distance for a moment, as though doing some mental calculation, and then her attention flickers back, and she says, “Very well.” 

Wen Qing should say nothing. Whatever responsibility she might owe to a patient would be cancelled out one thousand fold by what this woman has done to her, to her family, to everyone she has ever loved. Standing by and letting her destroy herself is the least of the vengeance Wen Qing’s ancestors might demand. 

Well. Uncle, certainly. Her mother and father would not ask for vengeance, she knows that. Granny Wen and Uncle Four and A-Yuan would not. And part of her still believes that Wen Mao himself would support her continued adherence to the principles she has been taught. 

“Lady Jin,” she says. “Even from this distance, the corruption and degradation of this person’s golden core is obvious. Even if the transplantation is a success, you are likely to quickly die of a qi deviation.”

“It is a risk, of course,” Jin Guangyao agrees. “But I have consulted with experts I trust, and I believe that an extended period of secluded meditation, aided by powerful calming music, will stabilize the core.”

“Even if that is the case,” Wen Qing says, “you would never be able to use a spiritual weapon without risking a deviation.”

“I understand,” Jin Guangyao says. “It is still preferable to being coreless, and thus, utterly defenseless.”

Wen Qing looks at the woman on the table. Even unconscious, her body twitches, her face pulled into grimaces of some nightmare of rage and pain. Wen Qing tries bluntness. “But what is the benefit to you, in replacing a weak but functional core with a powerful but useless one?”

For the first time, Jin Guangyao turns her head, so that she can also look down at Nie Mingjue’s body. Her mouth twists, just a little. “Whoever your first patient was,” she says, “I assume they had their reasons too.”

Maybe that’s what pushes Wen Qing to her decision. The stabbing flicker of hope, the burning curiosity to see if something so risky could work, the hunger for knowledge, the desperate relief of simply being out of the single room where she has been imprisoned for years- all of it adds up, but in the end, maybe it’s that reminder of a very different room, and a boy barely into manhood looking at her like she held the world in her hands. It's not a thing she loves about herself, the rush it gives her, to know how powerfully she can affect a life, with the skill in her hands. To grasp the power to change a fate, and maybe not only for one person, if she can establish a technique that will write her name across history.

After all else is gone, somehow, that ambition remains.

“I will do it,” she says.