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I think my favourite part of this episode is Mu of the Yard going around making enquiries into how all her rescuers happened to show up at Zhaoren Palace at the right time. I bet that even when she was thanking Prince Yu, she took the opportunity to slip in a couple of leading questions. She has a suspect in mind already – no doubt it wasn’t just the fact that MCS cared enough to have her rescued but that the person he asked for help from was Jingyan that got that bloodhound nose sniffing again. Her surprise when Prince Jing says it was Meng Zhi who sent him is hilarious. Then the two of them go off together to make enquiries of the Commander, who soon cracks under their combined probing. It’s such a shame we don’t get more scenes of Nihuang and Jingyan working together.

I don’t have any new observations about either Prince Yu’s confidence that he’s now got MCS on his side, nor the crucial meeting between MCS and Prince Jing to “set the rules.” I will say, though, that I can see why on first viewing I had such a hard time trusting MCS. He has inscrutability down to a fine art. Of course, with hindsight you can see all the little cracks and twitches that indicate Deep Emotions going on underneath the surface, but when you don’t, he seems entirely reserved, and this, as Frank Churchill says in Emma, “is a most repulsive quality, indeed […] There is safety in reserve, but no attraction. One cannot love a reserved person.”

Xia Dong comes back with all the evidence needed to damn the Duke of Qing, but she’s also found out about Tianquan Manor’s involvement in the escape of the slaves, so Xie Yu decides the world would be better off without her. Once again, I am consumed with resentment that Xia Dong wasn’t cast age-appropriately. It looks just ridiculous when Jingrui says that she taught Yujin when he was a child.

I’m bad at noticing what’s going on in fight scenes, so it took me until this rewatch to realise that Xia Dong is only pretending to be badly hurt the whole time in order to draw out one particular attacker. It also occurred to me, as we see the black-clad assassins come ninjing out of the river in slow motion, to wonder what on earth they were doing in the river in the first place. They haven’t swum across it, because their clothes are dry. Perhaps they spent most of their cultivation time learning how to dry wet clothes with their qi, because they can’t be very good at fighting if even Yujin can beat them.

Xia Dong is very impressive as she savagely beats a tooth out of the fallen assassin to find his cyanide capsule. Credit where it’s due, the actress does a good job here. Covered in blood, the man coughs out a confession that it was Prince Yu who sent them. The audience knows this a bare-faced lie, but will Xia Dong believe him? Tune in for the next episode to find out…