CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
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They left the island before dawn.
The extraction was silent, surgical. No running lights. No radio chatter. A stealth carrier materialized from the black water and swallowed them without a ripple on any charted map. Li Xuefang watched the shoreline recede without once turning her head. At three years old in appearance, she already grasped an essential truth: what was left behind ceased to matter.
Marshal Li stood beside her on the open deck, one gloved hand resting lightly on her shoulder. The gesture held no warmth.
It was ownership.
The mansion waited inland—concealed behind layered terrain-masking fields and classified architecture. To the civilian world it passed for a historic estate: old money, weathered stone, ceremonial sentries. Inside, it was a fortress. Surveillance capillaries threaded every wall. AIs audited every breath drawn in its corridors.
Li was assigned a room larger than most city apartments she would one day breach.
She did not marvel.
She inventoried.
Her upbringing unfolded with clinical exactness.
Two years erased by coma. A five-year-old certified as three because that was how she looked—delicate yet razor-edged.
Tutors supplanted parents. Discipline supplanted comfort. Silence supplanted lullabies. Her grandfather made certain she mastered languages before toys, combat sequences before cursive. At five she could field-strip a sidearm blindfolded. At seven she grasped tactical sacrifice equations. At nine she learned the precise price of hesitation.
Xynra spoke very little during those years.
One night, while Li Xuefang slept deeply, Marshal Li had reasoned with her directly. He reasoned with Xynra to minimize interference—to let the girl feel the raw texture of the world unfiltered. Only then, he argued, could she truly survive it.
At six (technically eight), she learned the name of her parents' killers: Ghost.
She vowed absolute revenge.
She grew more composed.
More stable.
Her physical frailty never fully disappeared—her frame remained slim, almost fragile—but her control became unnerving. She did not lash out. She did not rebel. She absorbed every lesson the way cold steel absorbs heat: quietly, efficiently, irreversibly.
By twelve (technically fourteen), her name already drifted through sealed channels.
Not as a child.
As an asset.
She had entered Ghost as an assassin of the Ghost Division—the innermost circle.
It was around then that the Jiang family arrived.
The Jiangs carried old power: financial webs, deep vaults, legacy systems rooted in pre-unification military economies. Jiang Ren accompanied his father, dressed in stiff ceremonial attire that sat awkwardly on his restless frame.
He was three.
Bright-eyed. Untrained. Painfully human.
Li met him in the inner courtyard.
She stood ramrod straight beside Marshal Li, hands clasped behind her back, clad in muted black training wear. The instant Mr. Jiang and the boy stepped forward, her gaze swept them—clinical, instantaneous.
Threat level: negligible.
Emotional volatility: elevated.
Combat potential: undeveloped.
Ren froze when he saw her.
Not fear.
Impact.
She was colder than he had imagined. Paler. Far too composed for any child her supposed age. Those dark, unreadable eyes passed over him like targeting scanners.
He forgot to breathe.
Mr. Jiang: 这是江仁,他将是你的未婚夫.
Li Xuefang: (One brow arching sharply) [这只小狗?]
Xynra: He's a boy.
Li Xuefang: [More like a boy puppy.]
Marshal Li: 雪芳,向你的未婚夫致敬.
TRANSLATION:
Mr. Jiang: This is Jiang Ren. He will be your fiancé.
Li Xuefang: (One brow arching sharply) [This puppy?]
Marshal Li: Xuefang, pay respects to your fiancé.
Li Xuefang inclined her head in a precise bow—first to Mr. Jiang, then to the boy.
To Ren, the word "fiancé" carried no weight.
To Li, it signified terms.
She lifted her chin slightly. No smile.
Li Xuefang: (Calmly) You stand incorrectly.
Ren blinked.
Jiang Ren: What?
She straightened to demonstrate.
Li Xuefang: You cower. You hide behind someone else.
She continued without inflection.
Li Xuefang: 虚弱的.
The courtyard fell silent.
Ren flushed—embarrassment warring with something sharper, unnamed.
Mr. Jiang's laugh shattered the quiet.
Mr. Jiang: 李元帅,您这位孙女真是太棒了!雪芳,您不介意教教江仁怎么站吧?
TRANSLATION:
Li Xuefang: Weak.
...
Mr. Jiang: Marshal Li, what a remarkable granddaughter you have! Xuefang, you wouldn't mind showing Jiang Ren how to stand properly, would you?
Her gaze lingered on the boy one heartbeat longer. Then she stepped forward.
Despite his instinctive flinch, she took his small hand—gentle, deliberate—and guided him upright. Shoulders back. Chin level. Feet balanced.
The faint scent of her hair and skin brushed past him—clean, cool, faintly enchanting. It tickled his nose and lodged somewhere deeper.
She released him and stepped back, hands returning behind her.
Li Xuefang: Better.
That was all.
That was the precise instant Jiang Ren fell.
Not because she had been kind.
Because she was untouchable.
From that day their paths intersected frequently—but never intimately.
He watched her train. Watched her spar soldiers twice her size and put them down without apparent effort. Watched her move through corridors as though the building itself were merely an extension of her will.
She spoke to him rarely.
When she did, it was correction.
"Your stance is wrong."
"You hesitate before you speak."
"You mistake approval for strength."
Each remark cut. He hoarded them anyway. Trained harder. Studied longer. Built himself not for glory, but for the faint, impossible hope that one day she might look at him and see something other than weakness.
Li never appeared to notice.
Or noticed and elected indifference.
Every night, unseen by anyone, she would slip the tiny kitten Jiang Ren had gifted her beneath her covers—despite once telling him, with perfect cruelty, that she would use it for meat.
The engagement stayed hidden from the public—locked behind diplomatic phrasing and classified files. To the world it was a prospective alliance. To the families it was leverage.
The leverage was the vault.
Buried beneath Jiang land, sealed by biometric, genetic, and quantum locks, the Jade Vault held pre-war relics: archives, weapon blueprints, intelligence cores older than Xynra herself. Too dangerous for any single faction to control alone.
Hence the arrangement.
The Li family supplied military protection and clearance.
The Jiang family supplied access—contingent on union.
Jiang Ren was the key.
Li Xuefang was the activation.
Only through affection.
No one else could endure what waited inside.
The formal agreement was signed when she was sixteen (true age) and Ren was five.
One night he approached her, pulse hammering.
Jiang Ren: Do you… dislike me?
She considered the question with gravity.
Li Xuefang: No. Dislike requires investment.
The answer landed clean. Not cruel. Merely factual.
Ren forced a smile.
She looked at him then—truly looked.
Li Xuefang: You are improving. You no longer cower.
His chest constricted.
Jiang Ren: …Is that good?
A faint curve touched her lips—the closest thing to a smile he had ever seen from her.
Li Xuefang turned back toward the darkness.
There it was.
Not love.
Not partnership.
An equation balancing.
Ren remained rooted, staring at the clean line of her profile in the moonlight, understanding something beautiful and terrible in the same breath—
He loved her.
And she belonged to something infinitely more dangerous than his heart.
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