Recovering from her hunger strike, Zetian kneels on her bed as Qin Zheng fits her with a new suit of Yellow Dragon armor made of Earth-type spirit metal. She cannot manipulate the metal herself; only his mental command makes it pliant. She privately reflects that he is the third man—after Yang Guang and Shimin—she has chosen to bind herself to, and silently reminds herself she is the Iron Widow.

Qin Zheng explains that in his era, qì manipulation was an art and pilots routinely lived past twenty-five, hinting that unseen forces have deliberately weakened modern pilots. He reveals he was trained by a female pilot, Mi Xuan, commander of the Three-Legged Crow, and that multiple Iron Widows existed in his time because the yīn-yáng seats then required equal inputs. After his disappearance, Mi Xuan and other Iron Widows were executed and erased from history. He admits the Yellow Dragon's seats are functionally equal—his earlier objection to switching was simple stubbornness.

Zetian begs to be trained as Mi Xuan trained him. He defers, citing his political workload, and warns that his era's training was brutal. He recounts being subjected at age nine to a stress-induced metamorphosis experiment: locked in a flooding dungeon with nine other children until only one survived, raising his spirit pressure into the thousands. Zetian suspects her own spirit pressure may have spiked similarly.

Before leaving, Qin Zheng forces a spirit-metal mask and veil over her face, claiming tradition forbids other men seeing the empress and that it will aid the use of body doubles. When Zetian protests that he merely wants to display his control, he grabs her throat, warning her not to associate with other men or insult his honor publicly. She counters that he is treating her as property despite his laborist principles; he distinguishes private from personal property, then storms off to reform education, leaving her trapped in armor she cannot control.