“Oh, she’s fallen asleep again.”
“So young, and yet she manages to sleep so soundly!”
“She hasn’t been practicing her swordplay lately, and she keeps running off to the library pavilion.”
“She’s changed. She doesn’t bring us fruit at the sword-practice terrace anymore. Does she have some other bird now? Are the wild birds at the library pavilion prettier than us? Or do they sing better?”
“Stinking wild birds! Traitor!”
……
The girl sleeping against the tree opened her eyes and raised a hand to shield them from the glaring sunlight.
Through the gap between her fingers, two chattering birds exchanged an awkward glance with each other, then flapped their wings and flew up.
Chi Fengxue reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of flatbread.
She tilted her face up, sunlight illuminating porcelain-white features, beneath her long, slender brows, her almond eyes curved into a smile. “Here, this is for you.”
The plump little sparrows flapped over and landed in her palm, their small heads bobbing up and down as they pecked gently at the bread in her hand.
“Ah Xue, I love you!”
The little sparrow ate until its belly was round and full, its slender claws, tender as willow leaves, gripping her forefinger as it stood side by side with its companion on her hand, chirping praises.
“Love Ah Xue.”
“Love Ah Xue.”
Fengxue smiled and stroked the birds’ heads one by one with the pad of her finger, then raised her hand. “Off you go.”
The two gray tits spread their wings and flew off into the distance.
Chi Fengxue stood and watched them fly toward the green mountains, where in the distance the high peaks disappeared into a sea of clouds, the upturned eaves of the Daoist palace flickering faintly in and out of view.
Like a palace of the immortals.
It was time for morning lessons. The blue-green bell swayed, its toll rolling through the mist, one peal after another.
A clear breeze blew against her face, carrying the sound of wind through countless pines.
Even now, Fengxue still felt somewhat as if worlds had passed since then. After all, only a moment ago she had still been in the Ghost Realm, surrounded by grotesque monsters and demons.
The lightning Shen Yujing had summoned was sharp beyond compare, splitting heaven and earth, shredding everything into pieces.
Hot blood sprayed out, some of it hers, some of it others’.
Corpses lay piled upon corpses on the ground, everywhere her eyes fell were severed limbs. The wind blew, and the thick stench of blood pressed into her lungs.
She had been pinned beneath the corpse of a demon, unable to move, staring up at a sky as black as ink.
A blade of sword-energy tore across the heavens.
The demonic energy churned and roiled to either side, revealing a strip of clear, deep sky.
An immortal descended from above, riding the wind, his white robes untouched by dust.
Fengxue wanted to cry out to him for help, but her gaze fell on the young woman standing beside him.
She had heard that this was the wife of the Head of Xuanmen, his dao companion [1]a cultivator’s term for a spouse or life partner jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2797644_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2797644_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, a match made as perfect as phoenix and simurgh [2]a mythical bird-pair symbolizing an ideal, harmonious couple jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2797644_1_2').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2797644_1_2', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });.
Suddenly, from the sky, flakes of thin snow began to fall, one after another.
The snowflakes spun in the wind and landed on her body.
Fengxue caught one, it landed in her palm, very cold. She watched her own palm seem to merge with the snowflake, and suddenly she realized, this was the purest, most upright spiritual energy between heaven and earth.
All the filth and evil around her dissolved in that overwhelming tide of spiritual energy, ground into fragments.
She was going to die too, lying here together with this pack of demons and monsters, silently turning into pus and flesh.
She raised her head to look at the sky. Amid the roiling demonic energy, Shen Yujing was locked in his final battle against the Demon Lord, while a woman beside him played the qin to support him.
They were the Head of Xuanmen and Gao Tianyue, while she was about to be shredded into a puddle of blood and mud.
Fengxue stared fixedly at Shen Yujing.
He had once been her senior martial brother, her fiancé, the young man she had longed for day and night.
She must have died. Only, the moment she opened her eyes, somehow she had returned to a hundred years earlier, back to when she was still studying the Dao on Qingming Mountain.
Fengxue pressed a hand to her chest, as if she could still feel that hole of blood, hear the hollow whistle of wind within it.
If only she had been reborn a little earlier. Earlier still.
In her previous life, her situation on Qingming Mountain had been deeply awkward. In her youth she had a marriage arranged with Shen Yujing, later the Shen family fell into ruin, and an immortal from above sought Shen Yujing out, saying he was born with the bones of the Dao [3]a phrase for someone with innate spiritual aptitude jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2797644_1_3').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2797644_1_3', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, perfectly suited to seeking immortality and the ultimate Dao.
At the time, Fengxue had adored Shen Yujing deeply, and insisted on cultivating the Dao alongside him. Riding on his connections, she too had come to this towering immortal abode, bowed before Master Lingyun, and became his disciple in name only, a personal disciple with no substance to match the title.
Qingming Mountain, chief of the orthodox Daoist sects.
Master Lingyun, a true immortal walking among men.
Thousands of disciples studied on Qingming Mountain, all craning their necks, hoping to become Master Lingyun’s personal disciples. But Master Lingyun’s eye was exacting, his five personal disciples were all dragons and phoenixes among men [4]outstanding, exceptional people jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2797644_1_4').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2797644_1_4', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, each with talent far above the rest.
Then came his sixth disciple, Chi Fengxue.
Fengxue’s talent was poor.
Compared to her senior martial siblings, she was like a fish eye mixed among pearls [5]an inferior thing passed off as something precious jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2797644_1_5').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2797644_1_5', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, truly unfit to be seen. She and Shen Yujing had begun cultivating together, Shen Yujing could grasp the art of talismans in three days, drawing thunder talismans of tremendous power, and within a hundred days had refined the exceedingly rare Palm Thunder. Yet even now, whether Fengxue could successfully draw a talisman was still purely down to luck.
The geniuses advanced a thousand miles a day, she was like an old donkey turning a millstone, circling in place.
The contrast was so stark that rumors spread through the mountain, saying she had only become Master Lingyun’s personal disciple by riding on Shen Yujing’s coattails.
It was, in fact, the truth, and Fengxue had no grounds to argue otherwise.
At first she had liked Shen Yujing, and that was why she had come to cultivate on this austere mountain with him. But after hearing those words, she threw herself into training, if only to prove she was worthy of being Master Lingyun’s personal disciple.
Yet in truth, she simply had no talent for cultivation.
Fengxue had no choice but to devote herself to swordsmanship, day after day, drawing and swinging her sword thousands upon thousands of times, from the first light of dawn to the moon high in the night sky. She trained herself into swift footwork and blindingly fast swordplay, but this was mere mortal swordsmanship, unworthy of the eyes of true cultivators.
She could not master a flying sword, could not even become a Sword Immortal, at most, she could become a first-rate swordsman in the mortal world.
Immortal and mortal swordsman, a single word’s difference, yet as far apart as cloud and mud.
This should have been her fate: to train bitterly in swordsmanship, and in the end, unwilling yet forced to admit her own mediocrity, to abandon the Dao and go home to serve her parents, or to endure on the mountain until her hair turned white, while the youth she once adored remained forever young, his face unchanged.
The life of a mediocrity.
Lamentable. Pitiable.
But her fate took a sharp turn after one demon-slaying mission.
A small town had been plagued by evil creatures. Shen Yujing led his fellow disciples to investigate, and she, clinging to him, tagged along. When they arrived, they found the ten-mile-long street swallowed by dense ghost-energy, the townspeople had all been devoured by vengeful ghosts, and the street was littered everywhere with man-eating ghosts and demons.
To keep the monsters from fleeing and harming the surrounding villages, they set up a sealing array to contain the ghost-ridden town.
Fengxue too had stayed in the town, fighting desperately against the demons.
No sooner had they cleared out one wave than more demons surged out of the ghost-fog.
No matter how many they killed, there was no end to it.
Her own spiritual power was the weakest among them, but her swordsmanship excelled. When her fellow disciples’ spiritual energy ran dry and they could no longer cast their arts, she alone moved like a flying dragon with her sword, as fluid and unstoppable as a fish in water, cutting a path straight to the heart of the ghost-town.
There they discovered a breach in the town, one that led directly into the Myriad Demon Den.
The legendary, terrifying place said to hold down ten thousand demons and monsters.
Countless demons crawled out of the crack, ready to tear the mortal world to shreds.
The young disciples were struck speechless by the sight before them, none of them had imagined that a simple demon-slaying mission would turn into a catastrophe threatening countless lives.
The seal was on the verge of collapse, and the senior disciples who had gone for help had, one by one, died gruesome deaths.
Their comrades fell one after another beside her, scalding blood staining her indigo robes crimson. At first she still couldn’t help but sob quietly, later, she grew numb, swinging her sword again and again without thought.
In the end, only she and Shen Yujing remained.
Shen Yujing’s face had gone deathly pale, a few dried spots of blood scattered on the snow like crow feathers, stark and jarring. He told Fengxue to go on ahead, then, hands forming seals, he used the god-summoning technique with the resolve of mutual destruction [6]jade and stone burning together, destroying oneself along with one’s enemy jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2797644_1_6').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2797644_1_6', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, a bolt of purple lightning struck down, and the demons that raised their heads were instantly reduced to ash.
The young man was like a crane with broken wings, falling into the ghost-fog, plunging toward the gaping, blood-red mouths of the demons, into a bottomless abyss.
Without a second thought, Fengxue reached out and seized hold of that solitary crane.
The Heavenly Purple Thunder pierced through the clouds, lighting up heaven and earth.
With a deafening boom, the earth shook and the mountains trembled, the small town reduced to ruins.
Fengxue, dragging the unconscious young man, fell into the demon den, then carried him on her back, out of the ghost-realm teeming with vengeful spirits.
She didn’t remember how she had managed it.
She only remembered swinging her sword numbly, foul bloody mist splattering across her face, her arms aching and weak, her body heavy as lead, she only remembered the demons’ long pincers piercing her body, her limbs screaming in agony, her throat thick with the taste of rust.
Shen Yujing seemed to wake a few times, his consciousness hazy, telling her to put him down and run ahead first.
Fengxue refused to let go.
After a long while, she finally carried him back into the mortal world. Leaning on her broken sword, she had barely walked a short distance when she missed her footing and stepped into empty air, she only had time to shove Shen Yujing upward before she herself tumbled off the cliff.
She was lucky. She didn’t die.
A woodcutter chopping firewood on the mountain had saved her, she recuperated for half a month before she could walk again.
By the time she returned to Qingming Mountain, she learned that not long after she’d fallen off the cliff, disciples from Qingming Mountain had come looking for them, and the unconscious Shen Yujing had happened to be rescued.
The one who saved him was a female cultivator of fine talent, beautiful face, and gentle temperament, named Feng Fuliu.
Feng Fuliu had been the first to find the dying young man, and had used her spiritual power to protect him the whole way, to save Shen Yujing, she hadn’t hesitated to exhaust her spiritual power, damaging her own spiritual core.
Everyone on the mountain believed it was Feng Fuliu who had saved Shen Yujing.
In her previous life, when Fengxue returned to the mountain and heard of this, she naturally refused to accept it. She went and told everyone the truth, but no one believed her.
Of course, no one believed her.
The truth she told sounded too absurd. Someone with the lowest cultivation, ordinary talent, who couldn’t even draw a talisman properly, how could such a person have carried a man out of that terrifying ghost-realm?
A single divine bolt of lightning had wiped out all the evidence, and the only proof she had, her bloodstained sword, had already been lost when she fell off the cliff.
The disciples on the mountain had long resented her, and they assumed she was fabricating the story purely to steal the title of Shen Yujing’s “savior” for herself.
She had felt wronged and stifled, with nowhere to voice her grievance. Master Lingyun’s lineage had few disciples, above her were only five senior martial siblings.
Her master was in secluded cultivation, her eldest senior brother had long since been expelled from the sect to serve the dynasty, her second senior sister was stationed permanently to guard against an evil dragon and rarely returned to the mountain, her third senior sister had left the mountain decades ago and Fengxue had never even met her, and Shen Yujing remained unconscious.
The only one still on the mountain, her fourth senior brother, had never once shown her a kind face.
Fengxue, stifled beyond measure and without anyone close to her on the mountain, could only pour out her troubles to the two little sparrows. She knew few spells, only the crudest beginnings of beast-taming, but it was enough to understand the birds’ chirping and befriend them.
Small as they were, the mountain tits were fiercely loyal, in those days, they would deliberately fly over the heads of the gossiping disciples and relieve themselves on them, letting “disaster”, or rather, droppings, “loom over their heads right on cue” [7]a pun on the saying “disaster looms overhead,” recast here as “shit looms overhead” jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2797644_1_7').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2797644_1_7', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, venting her anger for her.
At the time, Fengxue only hoped Shen Yujing would wake soon, to prove her words true.
But when Shen Yujing finally woke…
“Senior Sister Fengxue? Senior Sister?”
Fengxue snapped back to the present.
A young Daoist boy stood with his hands tucked into his sleeves, cheeks flushed, gazing at her with an earnest, slightly dim-witted expression. “Senior Sister, Senior Brother Shen has woken up. The Sect Head wants you to come.”
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