Princess Lian had taken up cultivation in secret, three months now, and told no one except the elderly instructor she paid handsomely for his silence.
She practiced in the walled garden behind the old ancestral shrine, well past midnight, when the palace slept and no one remained to witness a princess doing something so far beneath her station that her own mother would have fainted at the mere suggestion of it. Her instructor, a retired sect elder from a minor southern lineage that had survived the old purges by keeping quiet and asking nothing of the crown, taught her the basic forms with a patience that never once questioned why a princess wanted this, only whether she was willing to work for it.
