The red dot pulsed on her minimap like a heartbeat.
Xiyue followed it through the morning gray, past collapsed buildings and overgrown paths, her body protesting every step.
The boar meat had helped—she felt stronger today, less like a stiff wind would knock her over—but her heart still did that skip-thing when she pushed too hard.
Just a little further, she told herself. Whatever it is, it's food. It has to be food.
The dot led her to the eastern wall.
Not the main wall—that was still ahead, separating the Cold Palace from the rest of the complex. This was an interior wall, crumbling in places, half-hidden behind a mountain of debris.
Rotting wood. Broken tiles. Trash, basically. Years of trash, piled up and forgotten.
And at the base of the wall, something gleamed.
Xiyue approached slowly, knife ready. Old habits from the rat night.
It was a bowl. Wooden, turned upside down, half-buried in mud and leaves. She knelt, heart pounding, and lifted it.
Underneath: rice.
Not much. A handful, maybe. Stuck to a wilted cabbage leaf, covered in dirt, crawling with tiny insects.
But rice. Actual rice.
She stared at it for a long moment.
Then she looked up.
The wall. Someone had thrown this over the wall. From the other side. From the part of the palace where people actually lived, where kitchens actually cooked, where food was so abundant that leftovers got tossed into the abandoned section like garbage.
Garbage, she thought. I'm eating garbage.
Her stomach didn't care. Her stomach was doing backflips just looking at the rice.
I'm going to die anyway, the survivor part whispered back. In sixty-something hours. Unless I have energy to reach the emperor. Unless I have strength to bond with him.
She picked up the cabbage leaf.
The insects scattered. The rice stayed.
Back at the kitchen, she worked with focus.
First: sort the rice. Grain by grain, picking out the ones that looked least contaminated. It took forever. Her back ached. Her eyes burned.
But she kept going until she had a small pile—maybe two tablespoons worth—of rice that didn't have visible dirt or bugs.
Second: wash it. Three times, using her precious boiled water, pouring it through the cloth filter to catch any rice that escaped.
The water ran brown the first time, gray the second, almost clear the third.
Third: boil it. In the same pan she'd used for everything, with more boiled water, watching the grains soften and swell until they became something almost recognizable as food.
When it was done, she had a paste. Grayish, mushy, unseasoned. Nothing like the rice she used to eat from takeout containers.
She ate it slowly. One spoonful at a time. Letting each bite sit on her tongue before swallowing.
It was the most delicious thing she'd ever tasted.
[Nutrient intake detected.]
[Recovery: +2% vital stability.]
[Current stability: 18%.]
Eighteen percent. From zero, a few days ago.
Xiyue finished the rice, scraped the pan clean with her finger, and licked it.
Then she sat back against the wall and just... breathed.
For the first time since waking up in this nightmare, she wasn't actively dying of hunger.
The sun was higher now—midday, maybe. Warm light streaming through the broken windows. Almost pleasant.
Xiyue should rest. She knew she should rest. But the minimap was still active, still showing unexplored areas, and now that she wasn't starving, she was curious.
What else did people throw over the wall?
She went back to the spot. Searched through the debris more carefully this time, moving aside broken wood and rotten fabric.
Found nothing at first.
Then, buried deeper, a clay jar—cracked, empty, but intact enough to use for storage.
Then a piece of cloth, too rotten to save.
Then—
Her hand closed around something smooth.
She pulled it out.
A hairpin. Wooden, simple, but carved with a small flower. Not valuable, not fancy, but pretty.
Someone had owned this. Someone had cared about it. And then they'd lost it, or thrown it away, and it had ended up here.
Xiyue turned it over in her palm. The original owner—the real Lin Xiyue—had probably owned something like this once. Before the Cold Palace. Before being forgotten.
She tucked it into her robe pocket.
While she searched, her eyes kept drifting up.
To the top of the wall.
To the piece of red fabric caught on a loose stone.
It wasn't trash. It was too high up for that—no one threw something and had it land perfectly on a stone ledge.
It was caught there, snagged, like someone had climbed the wall and lost it on the way down.
Or the way up.
Xiyue stared at it. Red silk. Real silk, the kind that caught light and held it. The kind that only people in the main palace wore.
Someone from the other side had been here.
In the Cold Palace.
Recently enough that the fabric hadn't rotted or faded.
Why?
The minimap pulsed. The red dot was gone—she'd already collected the food—but now she noticed something else. A faint line, almost invisible, leading from this spot toward the main complex.
[Path detected: Recent foot traffic.]
[Source: Unknown individual. Destination: Imperial Palace.]
Someone had walked this path. Recently. From the Cold Palace to the main palace.
Or from the main palace to the Cold Palace.
Xiyue looked at the red silk again. Then at the faint trail on her minimap. Then back at the silk.
Someone comes here, she thought. Someone from the other side comes to this abandoned place. Why? What's here? What do they want?
She didn't have answers.
But she had a trail.
And she had sixty hours left to live.
She followed it.
Not far—just to the edge of the Cold Palace, where the buildings stopped being abandoned and started being... less abandoned. Servants' quarters, maybe. Storage buildings. Places that saw occasional use.
The trail ended at a small structure—a shed, really—built against the inner wall. Its door was closed but not locked.
Xiyue pushed it open.
Inside: gardening tools. Hoes, rakes, a rusted spade. Nothing special.
But in the corner, something covered with a cloth.
She lifted the cloth.
Basket. Filled with vegetables. Real vegetables—greens, radishes, something that looked like garlic. Fresh. Recently picked.
And on top, a note.
Not paper—she couldn't read the characters anyway. But symbols. Marks. A message meant for someone.
This is a drop point, she realized. Someone leaves food here. Someone else picks it up. A secret exchange.
The red silk. The trail. The hidden food.
Someone in the palace was smuggling supplies into the Cold Palace.
But why? Who's receiving them?
The original owner's memories flickered—brief images of other forgotten concubines, servants who'd been punished, people sent here to die.
Had any of them survived? Was someone else living in this wasteland, hiding, receiving secret deliveries?
Or was this meant for her?
No. Impossible. The original owner had been forgotten for years. No one left food for her. No one even knew she was still alive.
Xiyue took one radish. Just one.
If someone else needed this food, she wasn't going to steal it all. But one radish—fresh, full of nutrients—could make a difference.
She tucked it into her pocket next to the hairpin.
Then she covered the basket again, left the shed, and walked back toward her kitchen.
Someone else was here. Someone from the main palace was helping them.
And that someone had left a trail.
Back at the kitchen, she ate the radish raw. It was spicy, crunchy, glorious. Better than the rice. Better than the boar meat.
[Nutrient intake detected.]
[Recovery: +1% vital stability.]
[Current stability: 19%.]
Nineteen percent. Almost a fifth of the way to not dying.
She sat by the fire, chewing slowly, and thought about what she'd found.
A secret supply line. A hidden ally. Someone who cared enough about the Cold Palace's forgotten residents to risk sneaking them food.
Maybe I'm not as alone as I thought.
Or, a darker voice whispered, they're the reason the original owner died. Maybe they took her food. Maybe they let her starve while they ate.
She didn't know. Couldn't know.
But she had a trail. And she had time.
Tomorrow, she'd follow it further.
Tomorrow, she'd find out who else lived in this graveyard.
As darkness fell, Xiyue sat by her fire and held the hairpin in her palm.
The simple wooden flower caught the firelight, almost pretty.
Who owned you? she wondered. Were you happy? Did you cry? Did you die alone like the original owner?
No answers.
Just the crackle of flames and the distant howl of wind.
And somewhere, in the darkness beyond her walls, the soft sound of footsteps.
Xiyue's head snapped up.
She listened. Held her breath.
Nothing. Just wind.
Just wind, she told herself.
But her hand found the knife anyway.
And she didn't sleep for a long time.