The first time the lady of the treasure house saw Chu Xingyun she thought him to be arrogant, idiotic, in a rush to lose his life, and undeniably cunning. After being beaten in a contest of medicine making, Qin Yuyan found she could remove idiotic off her list of descriptions for the boy. In its place she added intelligent, smug, a customer on par with some of her trickier customers, and someone who only moves when they know they'll win.

As the next three months of rapid rising in status occurred, she found herself adding wise, ambitious, and a genius. In truth, she found himself likening him for more the head of Shui family than the boy would likely appreciate. Cunning, cutthroat, and remarkably unflappable in the face of adversity. If she ever told Chu Xingyun that he reminded her of the man he once called uncle, she was sure she would have received a biting remark that could have come from that old man's mouth as well as his.

Still, the lad cut an impressive figure and she found herself pulling out all of the stops she would normally only pull with her trickiest customers. Moving into his personal space, acting flirty, and generally being as seductive as she be to encourage him to like doing business with her more.

The fourth time she met with him face to face, after his long absence from the Chu Family villa, she found herself giving him a description she hadn't foreseen him achieving: loving. Well, to be more accurate she gave him several new descriptions (besotted, infatuated, enamored, enraptured,), but the simplest one she could find was that he was a man passionately in love with his young wife.

The way he carried his wife reminded her of how her attendants handled the priceless artifacts or expensive medicine ingredients. His eyes gleamed with some sort of manic passion and desperation as he kneeled before her with his ailing wife before him. Even though he explained that she had caught a chill and needed warming up through yan dan pills, Yuyan could tell whatever that this was, was far more complicated than that. A chill could bring discomfort and eventual illness when left untreated or when the person affected cultivated at night. Whatever was going on the Chu family's madam was not something as simple as illness or a chill.

Even from her place next to the medicine furnace, she could feel the cold emanating from the girl. If left as it was, she wouldn't be there come morning. So, it was to her great resignation, that she told the city lord to leave. The man was only wasting her time discussing theories on curing his disease, anyway. Even if she could refine the higher dan pill, there was no actual proof that is would cause his misaligned vital energy to dissipate.

Meanwhile, if she kicked Chu Xingyun out or didn't help him, his wife would die, and Yuyan would be stuck with a very irate master strategist with at least a good couple of hundred years on his life to make the rest of hers miserable.

Ah, decisions, decisions. And apparently an entire three days of creating a new hot tempered variant of incredibly effective yan dan pills.

In the end, her impressions of him didn't change too much. He was still arrogant (though if any had earned the right to be, she supposed to was him), far to rushed to endanger himself or others (what else do you call insulting the city lord?), and undeniably cunning. He just also had a giant 'push me and die' button with purple hair and a love for flowers.

Author note:

Rewatched the first few episodes and man is Xingyun freaking impressive and arrogant. Like... uber arrogant. Poor everyone who has to deal with him.