Bright morning sunlight filtered through the paper-lattice windows of Willow-Breeze Courtyard at 7:15 AM, casting neat golden squares across the scrubbed flagstones and the long elm-wood breakfast table under the veranda.
In the courtyard well, Xiao Qing—the [24-Hour Automatic Laundry & Dishwashing Spirit]—was cheerfully humming a folk tune as she hung a line of fresh, sun-dried bedsheets. Envoy Zhao swept the front gate path in his Pink Chore Apron and bowed politely to the South Canal dockworkers changing night-watch shifts outside.
At the breakfast table, however, ten-year-old Ye Xiao sat on the very edge of his wooden stool with his spine as stiff as a spear shaft.
Washed clean of three years of street grime and dressed in a crisp, sky-blue juvenile scholar’s robe that Auntie Qin had tailored for him. Dawn, the ten-year-old boy was actually remarkably handsome—with sharp, delicate eyebrows, pale porcelain skin. A pair of calm, ink-black eyes behind his silver-rimmed [Clear-Sky Scholarly Glasses].
Yet despite the peaceful morning light and nine-year-old Gu Nian happily swinging his legs beside him, Ye Xiao’s eyes darted toward the front courtyard gate every three seconds.
And beneath the table, tucked inside the wide right cuff of his blue scholar’s sleeve, his right hand remained clamped around that jagged. Two-foot strip of rusted barrel-iron from Coffin Alley—ready to slash anyone who burst through the door to drag him back to the operating slab.
