Chapter 2: The Villain Doesn't Smile

Jiang Yun was standing in the receiving hall with his back to the door, which Shen Yao decided to read as either supreme confidence or supreme rudeness. Possibly both. The novel had described him in exactly one paragraph, early on, and Shen Yao had skimmed it at the time because the character wasn't important enough to memorize.

He regretted that now, looking at the actual, three-dimensional result.

Tall. Black robes with no embroidery at all, which somehow read as more expensive than every gold thread in the room. Hair pulled back hard enough to make his face look like it had been carved rather than born. When he turned at the sound of footsteps, his eyes did a single, unhurried pass over Shen Yao — head to foot — with all the warmth of a man doing inventory.

"You're late," Jiang Yun said.

"I was sleeping," Shen Yao said. "In my own house. Which, last I checked, doesn't run on your schedule."

Something flickered across Jiang Yun's face — not quite surprise, more like a man recalculating a math problem that had just returned an answer he didn't expect. In the novel, this was the part where Lu Zhou apologized. Groveled a little. Lu Zhou always apologized; it was practically his personality.

Shen Yao held his gaze instead and waited.

"Your father sold you to my family for a trade concession on the southern route," Jiang Yun said, each word placed like a blade set down on a table, edge out. "I'd think you'd have the sense to be punctual for the man holding your future."

"You say that like it's supposed to hurt my feelings." Shen Yao walked past him toward the low table at the center of the room and sat, uninvited, which he was fairly sure was also not something the original Lu Zhou would have done. "I already know I was sold. I was there. Threatening me with information I already have is just a waste of both our mornings."

Silence.

He could feel Jiang Yun's attention on the back of his neck, sharp and assessing, and forced himself not to fidget. This was the moment. In the story, Jiang Yun's cruelty was never really about cruelty for its own sake — it was a test, over and over, of who would break first. Shen Yao had read enough of these three-hundred-and-eighty chapters to recognize a pattern when it was staring him in the face: everyone around Jiang Yun either flinched or flattered, and he despised both in roughly equal measure.

So Shen Yao did neither. He picked up the teapot that had been left on the table, decided it was still warm, and poured two cups without asking permission.

"Are you always like this," Jiang Yun said, "or is this a new performance for my benefit?"

"Like what?"

"Difficult."

"I prefer 'unafraid of you,'" Shen Yao said, and pushed one of the cups a few inches in his direction. "It tests better in focus groups."

He had no idea where that last sentence had come from — some scrap of his old life leaking through, a joke that meant nothing in this world — and he watched, with something close to fascination, as it landed on Jiang Yun like a foreign object he didn't have a category for. The corner of his mouth twitched. Not a smile. Adjacent to one. A smile's shadow, cast from several rooms away.

He didn't sit. He didn't touch the tea. But he didn't leave either, and in a story where every named character orbited Jiang Yun out of fear or ambition, Shen Yao suspected that not leaving was, for him, already an unusual amount of interest.

"You tried to run from this engagement three times," Jiang Yun said. "My men reported it. Your father was humiliated in front of the Wu family the last time you were dragged back."

So the original attempts still happened before I woke up in here, Shen Yao thought. Good to know the timeline's consistent, at least.

"I did," he said, out loud. "It didn't work. So I'm trying something else."

"Which is?"

"Being someone you'd actually want in the room." Shen Yao said it lightly, like it cost him nothing, though it was very possibly the most honest thing Lu Zhou's mouth had said since Shen Yao had taken over the controls. "You're stuck with me either way. I figure we can spend the next however-many years as enemies who happen to share a bed, or we can not do that. Your call. I'm flexible."

Jiang Yun looked at him for a long moment — the kind of look Shen Yao imagined he usually reserved for opponents whose next move he couldn't quite predict, which, judging by the novel, was a very short list of people.

"You're not what I was told to expect," he said finally.

"What were you told to expect?"

"A spoiled child who cries when he doesn't get his way and spends his family's money on things that don't matter."

"Rude," Shen Yao said, "but not wrong, historically speaking. I contain multitudes." He took a sip of his own tea, mostly to give his hands something to do that wasn't shaking. "Consider this an upgrade."

For a moment — one single, unguarded moment — Jiang Yun almost laughed. Shen Yao watched it happen and not happen, watched him catch it and put it away like a man closing a drawer on something he didn't want found, and felt a strange, unexpected pull of triumph that had nothing to do with survival math at all.

There you are, he thought, and didn't examine too closely why the thought felt like relief.

"I have business in the capital," Jiang Yun said, turning toward the door, robes settling around him like something with its own gravity. "Don't attempt to run again. It reflects poorly on both our houses, and I dislike cleaning up messes that were never mine to begin with."

"Duly noted," Shen Yao called after him. "Try not to conquer any provinces without me."

Jiang Yun didn't turn around, but he paused — just for a second, hand on the doorframe — before continuing out into the corridor without another word.

Shen Yao exhaled slowly once he was alone, both hands flat on the table to stop them from trembling. He'd survived the first meeting. More than survived it — he'd gotten a reaction the source material had never once described. Not fear. Not disdain.

Something closer to curiosity, if he wasn't imagining it. Which, given that his life currently depended on interpreting a fictional villain's microexpressions correctly, he really hoped he wasn't.

He picked the teapot back up, refilled his own cup, and allowed himself, for the first time since waking up in this body, something that felt almost like a plan.

Chapter twelve, he thought. You'll have to try a lot harder than that to kill me.

Somewhere just beyond the edge of his vision, the number ticked down by one, and Shen Yao — not yet knowing to look for it — went on smiling into his tea.

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