Liu Xiyu steps into the dye house, a bamboo-woven cage in hand.
The rising sun filters through drying racks, casting tiger-stripe patterns across the bluestone floor.

Yun Cangyue turns over inside the cage, a claw tip snagging on a ventilation hole—
how is this a rabbit cage for a spring outing?

The clasp is carved with ledger patterns; the lining stitched with compartments for fabric samples—
this is clearly a custom-made “inspection aid” from Liu’s father.

“Father says today we’re learning how to tell silk grades apart.”

She mutters, poking at the seam of the cage.

“I’m not about to yawn over account books.
You have to find me something fun!”

Her gaze locks onto the half-exposed candied-fruit wrapper at the girl’s collar, and suddenly she understands why she’s been stuffed into this cage—

Liu Xiyu’s “learning tricks” have always been absurd:
from hanging brushes on rabbit fur to using tails as paperweights.
This time, she’s probably planning to use her as a living label.

Peering through the gaps of the cage, Liu’s father is bent over a bolt of sky-blue silk, fresh as after rain,
his fingertips rising and falling like taking a pulse.

“Top-grade silk should be like a baby’s skin—
smooth and warm to the touch, without the slightest drag…”

Yawning, Liu Xiyu pokes at the tip of Yun Cangyue’s ear.
When her father turns away, she suddenly flips open the cage lid and lowers her voice:

“Quick!”

“Pretend you’re chewing the cage—
let’s sneak off to the back courtyard and have a cricket fight!”

Yun Cangyue instead springs up onto the shelving, ears pricked, lightly brushing the silk.

The worn-through pages of Tiangong Textiles from her past life’s sickroom finally come in handy—
a claw tip hooks up a tangle in the threads,
the soft pad pressing down on a hidden flaw where warp and weft are misaligned.

“What is Little Snowball playing at?”

Liu’s father approaches with a smile.

Thinking fast, Liu Xiyu dips her finger into madder juice and paints plum blossoms on the rabbit’s ears.

“I’m teaching her to recognize patterns!
Look—this is scrolling lotus, and this is the rolling-cloud motif…”

The dull thud of paw pads striking silk cuts her short.

Liu’s father lifts the cloth and fixes his gaze, his fingertips passing over the skipped thread:

“How odd.
To think this flaw slipped past inspection.”

The dye house falls abruptly silent,
leaving only sparrows outside the window, their chirping pecking holes in the stillness.

That afternoon, Liu Xiyu comes up with a new way to play.

She pretends to tease the rabbit, carrying Yun Cangyue as she makes the rounds of the dye vats,
but in truth she murmurs softly into her ear.

“The third bolt on the left, with the drifting-cloud pattern—
Father says it’s second-rate.”

Yun Cangyue’s nose gives a light twitch.

The dyeing may be uneven, but the warp and weft density is clearly superior—
it’s plainly good cloth that a worker has disguised as flawed for private hoarding.

Dipping a claw tip into indigo dye, she presses a triangular mark onto the edge of the fabric—
their secret sign for “something’s off,” used when they check the accounts together.

“Oh my, Little Snowball is being naughty again!”

Liu Xiyu cries out, tugging the cloth open for display.

“Just look at how delicate this paw print is—
she must be reminding us there’s something off with this bolt!”

The master craftsmen’s beards quiver—
since when does anyone’s rabbit use geometric marks to flag defects?

And yet Liu’s father actually falls for it.
He orders the cloth cut open for inspection at once,
and sure enough, exposes the trick of passing inferior goods off as superior.

Dusk stains the drying racks a burnished gold-brown, and Yun Cangyue’s gaze settles on a sandalwood cabinet in the southeast corner.

Three bolts of “discarded” Moonlight gauze bear cracks along their edges,
yet the fissures run straight and even, as if drawn by a ruler—
clearly the work of sharp shears, not natural wear.

“AYue, look!”

Liu Xiyu suddenly lifts her toward the evening glow.

“Doesn’t it look like the rouge box you knocked over?”

Seizing the moment, Yun Cangyue kicks out and overturns a bucket of cinnabar.

The crimson pigment spills, blooming across the cracked edges
into blood-web patterns like spreading veins.

Drawn by the noise, Liu’s father hurries over.
His fingertips trace the neat cuts before he abruptly pulls over the ledger to compare.

“The ledger lists five bolts as damaged—
but only three are stacked here…”

“Shopkeeper there,”

Liu Xiyu sways the ledger with a sweet smile, frost gathering in her eyes.

“Did the other two turn into silk butterflies and fly away?”

Cold sweat beads on the veteran craftsmen’s brows.

Liu’s father raps the cabinet with his knuckles,
shaking loose two intact bolts of Moonlight gauze from the hidden compartment.

“Well played—cut three, hide two.
Those silk butterflies certainly flew with care.”

On the carriage ride back, Liu Xiyu slips a piece of dried apricot into the cage.

“How did you know to aim for the fabric cabinet when you knocked the bucket over?”

Yun Cangyue chews her pastry and plays dumb.

After all, she’s seen tricks like this more than once in hospital wards—
and she can hardly say she learned it from watching the head nurse catch patients swapping out their medicine packs.

Deep into the quiet of night, Liu Xiyu suddenly lifts the cloth over the cage.

She spreads out the scraps hidden in her sleeve—
each piece pressed with that familiar triangular mark.

“AYue, be honest with me.
Were these marks really pressed at random, just by paw?”

Moonlight slips through the plum blossoms painted on the rabbit’s ears with madder juice,
casting scattered red specks across the scraps.

A paw dips into a tea stain and writes on the low table: “warp three, weft four.”

“That’s… the warp and weft count?”

Her jade-green eyes widen.

“You even know loom specifications?”

Yun Cangyue pats the water marks into a blur, curls back into the cage, and pretends to sleep—
though her tail still gives a faint twitch.

Listening to the girl’s hushed amazement, she recalls the look on her attending physician’s face in a past life,
when he discovered she had been secretly studying medical texts—

that mixture of delight and quiet ache,
now set into Liu Xiyu’s expression,
tastes sweeter than osmanthus honey.

Liu Xiyu rubs her madder-stained fingertips together and sketches a crooked rabbit head in the ledger.

Peering through the gaps of the cage, Yun Cangyue watches the girl trace the numbers “warp thirty-two, weft fifteen” into plum branches—
layering three days’ worth of flawed-cloth records, until the skipped threads unexpectedly line up like constellations.

“AYue… could this be some kind of code?”

She points at the fabric diagrams, candlelight flickering in her jade-green eyes.

“It’s like—
like using the warp and weft of silk as a game board, placing pieces…”

Yun Cangyue extends a claw tip, lightly tapping “weft fifteen” and dragging out a horizontal line across three bolts of cloth.

Liu Xiyu sucks in a sharp breath.

“Inspection every ten days, on the third day—
that’s exactly when Uncle Chen is on duty!”

In her past life, in a hospital ward, she once heard nurses talk about a kind of corruption—
the “boiling a frog in warm water” sort.

Now, that water is already creeping over the threshold of the Liu family’s dye house.

Before the hour of Mao arrives, Liu Xiyu has already slipped into the dye house loft, Yun Cangyue in her arms.

Morning mist drifts over a hundred bolts of Xiangyun silk.
Timing it to Uncle Chen’s approaching footsteps during inspection,
she scatters a handful of crushed peach-pit candy across the floorboards.

“Whoa!”

Uncle Chen steps on the candy shards and stumbles,
the inspection ruler dragging a slanted line across the cloth.

Seizing the moment, Yun Cangyue darts out, ears pricked, sweeping swiftly over the silk.

A claw tip hooks the skipped thread;
the soft pad presses down at the crossing of warp and weft—
a perfect match to the records of the past three days.

“Watch it, Uncle Chen!”

Liu Xiyu lunges to steady him,
her sleeve “accidentally” knocking over the inspection ink.

Cinnabar splashes onto the skipped thread,
bursting like blood from a wound.

“Look—this silk is so delicate.
The slightest touch, and the flaw shows itself.”

Uncle Chen’s whiskers tremble as Liu’s father arrives at the sound.

By the time the final batch of cloth is re-inspected,
thirty-seven bolts of “qualified goods” lie spread across the dye yard.

The veins rise on the back of Liu’s father’s hand as he grips the shears.
At every skipped thread, he snaps a faint mark with an ink line—
exactly Uncle Chen’s signature method of cloth inspection.**

“Warp thirty-two, weft fifteen—
he always strikes where the weave pattern repeats.”

Liu’s father cuts into the silk, exposing the patched seams beneath.

“What a ‘seamless disguise.’
Mended and resold on the black market, while the books report it as loss!”

Liu Xiyu suddenly grabs Yun Cangyue by the scruff and lifts her up before Uncle Chen.

“Little Snowball’s been sharpening her claws on these bolts lately—
she must’ve caught the scent of rats!”

Yun Cangyue plays along, fluffing herself up as a claw tip hooks onto Uncle Chen’s sleeve.

A yellowed work slip flutters down.
Where the ink has bled, a date from five years ago emerges—
the corner of a signed order marked “three years’ wages advanced,”
still stuck with dried medicinal stains.

Liu Xiyu picks up the work slip, her fingertips tracing the name of Uncle Chen’s only son.

“Big Brother Linqiu…
the Little Lin who always used to sneak me mulberries?”

In her memory, a pale, frail boy once held out a bamboo tube with hands stained by dye.

“Miss, I washed these fruits three times.
They’re not dirty.”

Uncle Chen collapses to his knees, hunched over, his throat working as if swallowing hot coals.

“Back then, the child had a raging fever, rambling nonsense—
and still kept talking about how the miss liked honeyed mulberries…”

Liu’s father closes his eyes and lets out a sigh, then pushes the thirty-seven bolts of cloth into the dye vat.

The instant indigo swallows the silk,
the loom’s thunder drowns out Uncle Chen’s alcohol-tinged whimpering.

Liu Xiyu clutches Yun Cangyue’s fur tight, watching madder juice ripple in the dye vat like bloodstains.

“From now on, when goods are inspected, you’ll be the second pair of eyes.”

With that, Liu’s father turns to leave.
At the threshold, the hem of his robe pauses for just a moment.**

“Xiyu—
the warp and weft of the human heart are a hundred times harder to fathom than silk.”

Three days later, a newly hung inspection ruler at the dye house eaves gleams in the morning sun.

Crouching beside the drying racks, Liu Xiyu runs her fingertips over the triangular marks Yun Cangyue left behind.

“Father asked me to redraw the inspection procedures.
What do you think… should warp thirty-two, weft fifteen be written in?”

A flick of a tail brushes a loose thread from her temple.
A claw tip dips into dew and writes: “Prevent the small before it grows.”

Liu Xiyu lets out a soft laugh.

“You’re right.
Spell it out too clearly, and people will just learn how to drill new loopholes.”

The spring breeze lifts the lingering scent of madder,
weaving the memory of those thirty-seven bolts into fresh silk.

All at once, Liu Xiyu lifts Yun Cangyue and spins,
her gold-threaded skirt flaring into the shape of a blooming honeysuckle.

“From now on, on the first day of every month,
we’ll come to the dye house as discipline inspectors!”

Yun Cangyue presses an ear tip to the girl’s racing pulse,
a claw tip quietly hooking a single strand of gold thread.

In the reflection of the dye vats,
morning light blurs the outlines of girl and rabbit into a gentle wash of gold.