The Perfect Courtesan

In the grand hall of the pleasure pavilion, the warm glow of silk lanterns painted the air with a reddish hue, as if the night itself burned in a quiet flame of desire and memory.

Sandalwood incense, slowly dying in a bronze censer, wove lazy spirals that drifted among lacquered screens. Decorated with distant mountains and frost-covered plum blossoms, they seemed to guard an unreal world — where everything was beautiful… yet nothing was true.

At the center of the chamber, she stood with the stillness of a Guō Xī painting: suspended between the real and the dreamed, between art and flesh.

She was not merely a woman, but a carefully sculpted illusion — a poem everyone longed to read, but no one could ever possess.

Her eyes, deep and dark as freshly ground ink, held no words, only silences. Silences that spoke of moonless nights, of unspoken promises, of destinies that could never be chosen.

Each gaze of hers was a delicate brushstroke upon another man’s story.

Her skin, fine as porcelain from the Ru kilns, seemed untouched by the world’s harshness.

Under the reddish light, it did not shine — it breathed, as if her whole body carried an ancient soul.

Her hair, long as autumn’s sorrow, fell in a black cascade, gathered partly with golden lotus-shaped hairpins. No ornament was ostentatious; she needed nothing more than her own existence to command the room.

Discreet pearls gleamed here and there like dew caught on dark petals.

Every movement of hers carried the rhythm of a qín melody — fluid, precise, impossible to imitate.

From the subtle gesture of holding a cup of plum wine to the way she inclined her head when hearing a verse, it seemed even the air stopped, unwilling to disturb her presence.

She wore a robe of white silk, pure as untouched snow.

No lavish embroidery nor heavy jewels — in her, simplicity was royalty.

In a world of excess, her purity was a form of power.

Yet it was not her face that men feared to forget — it was her voice, her art, her soul poured into notes and words.

She was a master of the qín, and her fingers — slender, almost painfully delicate — could draw laments from the strings as though touching the heart of winter itself.

When she wrote, her brush danced with a precision that seemed beyond human.

Her poems, rare and fleeting like snowflakes on a mild night, left even the scholars in silence.

In the world of courtesans, where so many competed to please, she did not.

She never needed to bow.

She was destiny, disguised as a woman.

And yet, there was sorrow in her perfection.

For though her name was whispered in the halls of power, in the libraries of scholars, and in the most discreet conversations of the court — she was not free.

She was admired, desired, revered… but also owned.

Like a work of art behind glass, she could not choose whom to love, nor when to leave.

Many followed her with devotion, dreaming of purchasing even a single night by her side.

But no one, not even the wealthiest of men, could pay the price of her freedom.

For it was not only a matter of silver… but the weight of her story, the unwritten contract that bound her to the pavilion, the broken promise of a childhood lost in mist.

She was, without doubt, the most perfect flower in the garden.

But also, the most caged.

And like the plum blossoms that bloom within the fog — beautiful, solitary, and fleeting — she too shed her petals in silence, night after night, verse after verse.

(Page 20 of The Courtesans’ Book, Chapter 2: “Broken Reflection”)

Signed by Bai Ruì — The Perfect Courtesan

> In the mirror I see an ideal face,

yet behind it lies an unreal place.

The shining shell conceals the pain,

the sorrowed tale of a life in chain.

> I am the image all desire to touch,

yet none have known my tears as such.

The perfect courtesan, the dream they chase,

but within me — only emptiness has place.

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