The Witch in the Woods: The Transmigration of Hazel-Anne Davis-Chapter 337: The Warmth Of Ordinary Days

Mingyu paused at the lattice only long enough to catch the tail end of Yizhen’s voice and the quick, amused answer it drew from Xinying.

It wasn’t intrigue this time; no couriers folded into shadows.

Instead, he heard the measured comfort of two sharp minds sketching a future that didn’t require torches—ports, salt, honest ledgers, quiet hands. And that pleased him more than he’d expected.

He moved on before the moment noticed it was being watched.

The east veranda held a strip of sun just wide enough for a teacup.

Deming stood there with a small plane and a curl of cedar lifting from the sill. The Left Prime Minister didn’t look like a minister; he looked like a man determined to keep a draft from troubling a woman he loved.

He tested the hinge, wiped the blade, tested again.

"Three years I walked past this and thought it was someone else’s problem," he muttered, not to Mingyu so much as to the wood.

The sash settled tight without complaint. He grunted, satisfied, and only then glanced over. "Warm enough here if you want your tea out of the wind."

"I’ll steal your sun later," Mingyu returned.

He set a slim stack of slips by the rail. No edicts today, just approvals for brass hooks, garden repairs, a request from the kitchen to increase ginger by a pound each week because the Empress had started to eat it like candy.

Deming’s eye caught the last line. "Good," he murmured. "She sleeps easier with it."

He rolled his shoulder once and looked past Mingyu toward the inner rooms, the way men look when they know what they want and refuse to bark about it.

Beyond the veranda the sound of practice lifted, light and disciplined.

Longzi had taken the north court for drills, not the parade square—too large, too public.

Instead, he worked the Emperor’s guard in sets of four, quiet feet, short commands, a rhythm you felt in bones before ears.

Half a dozen new lanterns had been mounted on brass instead of rope along the colonnade; he’d overseen it himself at dawn, approving the angle with a nod that carried more weight than a paragraph.

Mingyu watched the turn-and-break, the quick pivot at the arch, the way Longzi’s attention never left the places where a knife might think it could learn to hide.

That was love, in his language.

To anyone else, it looked like work.

By the inner screen a loop of hair caught light—river-dark, lifted with a comb Mingyu hadn’t seen yesterday.

Pear wood, small phoenix tucked into the spine, the carved line of a mountain path along the edge. Deming’s hands, then.

Of course.

He took in the sight and realized that it didn’t bother him as much as he had thought it would. It didn’t bruise his ego at all to know that someone else was able to make his wife happy.

In fact, it made him relieved.

It was a reminder of the bargain they had made and how cleanly it held: protect her, hold her, feed her, make room for each other to do the same.

Zhao Xinying knew blood and survival, she had been born to it and for it. But that wasn’t life... that wasn’t the life that he wanted for her or that she wanted for herself.

He might not be able to send her back to the mountains... but he could bring the feeling of the mountains here.

If she wanted gardens, he would have the servants dig up everything that she didn’t like so that she could plant what she did.

If she wanted the freedom to come and go as she liked, then he would be the first Emperor in history to give that to his Empress.

Whatever she wanted, he would give it to her because she taught him the most important lesson of all.

Having power didn’t make you a monster. Having the ability to kill didn’t make you a demon.

Everyone was the villain in someone else book, so holding yourself back would never make you the hero.

The only thing that mattered was knowing when to bend, and accepting the fact that snapping was part of bending.

Shadow padded across the threshold and bumped his nose into Mingyu’s knee as if to mark him present.

In the corner, Lin Wei held a wooden sword like something that might, at last, be trusted not to turn on him.

Xinying guided his feet with a toe to the floor, nothing forceful, just the geometry of safety taught back into small bones.

Yizhen leaned where a chair would have been in another house—furniture with a heartbeat, eyes on exits while the child counted breaths between steps.

When Lin Wei’s grip faltered, Yizhen murmured a nonsense line about chestnuts marching in pairs; the boy’s mouth twitched, and he took the next stance.

This, Mingyu thought, is what the throne buys when it is worth anything at all. And the funny thing was that while he always wanted the throne, he never understood what it meant to truly have it.

"Your Majesty," a voice offered, soft and competent.

Aunt Ping.

She passed with a basket and a broom and the faint expression of a woman who had already made three small problems vanish before breakfast.

Beyond her shoulder, steam rose from the laundry court.

A girl with a branded cheek bent to lift a wet length of cloth from a tub, jaw set, wrists strong. The brand had healed clean; Aunt Ping kept salve on it and pity off it. Meiling worked like a woman who’d decided to survive. Mingyu did not linger. Mercy was the work, not the theater of it.

Yaozu slid along a shadow and stopped only long enough to deposit a square of paper on the veranda rail.

"Markets quiet," he reported, eyes on Xinying the way a hunter checks the wind. "Temple quarter learned a new doctrine: brooms." A spare twitch might have been humor. "The butcher who sold fat to a clerk brought lean this morning. He’ll repeat the behavior."

"Good," Mingyu returned. "Collect the rest of the day in an hour, and then pretend you didn’t." Yaozu vanished in the direction of the kitchens, where pretending usually began.

The palace breathed on with practical dignity.

Gardeners sanded a bench edge that had taken a splinter to Xinying’s hand last week. A scribe in the corner practiced characters until wrist and ink both obeyed. Deming’s plane made another soft whisper as he eased a second hinge into usefulness.

Across the court, Longzi dismissed his squad with a nod and stepped aside to correct a recruit’s stance with two fingers at the shoulder and one at the hip, the correction gentler than his reputation promised.

He caught Mingyu’s glance, and the acknowledgement passed between them: corridor clear, corners mapped, the Emperor could walk without calculating how many turns he’d need to die well. Longzi shifted his attention back to the men as if he hadn’t noticed he’d been noticed.