Di Yusheng flew west.
Not because west mattered. Luoxue had gone east — toward the Zhuming sect, and the only thing Di Yusheng knew for certain was that he didn't want to be anywhere near where Luoxue was going. So he picked the opposite direction and flew.
If Di Yusheng was being totally honest with himself the reason he got angry was because Luoxue was right.
Since he was able to move freely he hasn't been able to do much even though he had longed for it every second of his first 5 yrs.
Luoxue telling him that only reminded him of how nothing had truly changed despite being able to move.
As he was flying the runes on his body were quiet just like they'd been quiet since he met Lin Xue.
Then they began being irritated.
It happened without warning. One moment he was cutting through open sky, wind against his face, the landscape a blur of green and brown below. The next, his divine sense expanded untill it reached a certain place.
A girl. Young. Cute.Dark hair, plain clothes, a wrapped sword strapped to her back. Walking along a dirt road that wound beside a river. She was moving toward him. Not fast — walking pace, steady, the gait of someone who'd been on the road for hours and had hours still to go. The vision held for some seconds.
Di Yusheng stopped flying. Hovered for a moment, fifty feet above the treeline, processing. The soul runes( he called them that because they are connected with his divine sense)hadn't reacted to anybody else and they seemed more interested in the sword and for some reason.
He descended.
The stream came into view below — a narrow tributary cutting through a shallow gully, smooth stones, clear water. He landed on the bank, knelt by the edge, and looked at his reflection.
He looked dirty .
He washed his face. The water was cold and clean. Then sat back on the flat rock beside the stream and waited.
He didn't have to wait long.
After speaking to the sword it appeared to know some things like someone had tried to kill Yusheng when he was a kid and said it was glad he did.
It also claimed Yusheng has some memories that he doesn't remember the sword would tell Yusheng what he really is as long as he did one thing for it.
He had no idea why but he felt like the sword would never lie to him he tried threats but the sword appeared to know him better than he thought.
Di Yusheng wanted to also travel and experience the world and doing it alone wasn't so appealing to him.
The road to Lianzhou ran along the southern bank of the Qingli River. The river was wide here — forty meters across, shallow enough to see the bottom in places, the water running clear over beds of pale stone. Willow trees lined the bank in uneven clusters, their branches trailing in the current, dragging slow arcs through the surface. The road itself was packed earth , the natural result of decades of feet and cart wheels pressing the same path into the ground.
To the south, the land rose into low hills. Forested. Dense. The kind of forest that looked pleasant from a distance and swallowed people up close. To the north, across the river, the terrain flattened into farmland — rice paddies in flooded terraces, a few wooden houses on stilts, smoke rising from chimneys in thin vertical lines.
The Ye Clan was northeast. Half a day's flight at golden core speed — less for a nascent soul, more for someone on foot. Close enough to reach in hours. Close enough that the clan's territory started to make itself known as the road curved east: boundary markers carved with the Ye character, small shrines at crossroads bearing their sigil, the occasional patrol path worn into the grass along the ridgeline. They were walking toward the Ye Clan's doorstep. Lianzhou sat just beyond it — the town existed in the space between the clan's territory and the next region over, a neutral ground where sect and clan politics were supposed to stop at the gates though that was not the real case.
Supposed to.
They'd been walking for an hour when Di Yusheng spoke.
"Di Yusheng."
The girl looked at him. Not startled — she'd been watching him from the corner of her eye for miles, cataloguing him the way prey catalogues a predator it can't identify. Steady glances. Measured distance. She walked two paces behind him and slightly to the left, close enough to talk, far enough to run.
"An Ning," she said.
A pause. The river murmured to their left. A heron stood motionless in the shallows upstream, watching the water with infinite patience.
"Where's the army you mentioned?" An Ning asked.
Army. Di Yusheng thought about it. He mentioned an army.
"We'll pick them up on the way," he said.
An Ning waited for more. He didn't have more. She seemed to accept it anyway. She'd been trusting the sword since the stream, and apparently that trust extended to the sword's chosen traveling companion, however reluctantly.
Another mile of silence. The willows thinned and the road opened up — wider here, sun-baked, the earth cracked in dry patterns where the moisture had evaporated. A stone marker at the roadside, half-buried in grass. The Ye character carved into it, weathered but legible.
"Do you not have anything to do?" An Ning asked.
Di Yusheng looked at her. She was looking at him directly now — not from the corner of her eye, not the cautious peripheral glance. She was facing him with the kind of straightforward curiosity that suggested she genuinely wanted to know. Not mocking. Not judging. Just asking.
"Actually, yes," he said. "I don't."
He sighed. A short breath. Not performative — just the air leaving his lungs in a shape that happened to sound tired.
"Just me and my boring life," he said.
An Ning didn't respond. She didn't need to. The statement sat between them, plain and unadorned, and she let it stay. She adjusted the strap on her shoulder and kept walking.
They passed another boundary marker. Then another. The Ye character appeared on stones, on trees, on a wooden arch spanning the road — a formal gate, lacquered black, the character painted in gold. They were deep in Ye Clan territory now. The road was better maintained here, the undergrowth trimmed back, the trees spaced evenly as if someone had decided nature needed to be organized.
Then something moved in the sky.
Di Yusheng stopped. An Ning stopped beside him. A figure descended from the north — fast, cutting through the air at an angle that suggested urgency rather than leisure.
She landed twenty feet ahead of them on the road. Boots touching the packed earth with a sound like a door closing. Her robes were dark blue , high-collared, formal. Her hair was pinned up in a style that belonged in a council chamber, not on a dirt road. She stood straight, composed, and looked at Di Yusheng the way someone looks at a problem they'd hoped was already solved.
"Yusheng," she said.
"Sect master," Di Yusheng said.
"How have you been?" she said.
"She went to the Zhuming sect," he said. "Unless you're not here for Luoxue she seems to be in a bad mood though I'd be careful."
"Thankyou."she said it while flying away.
An Ning watched the space where she'd been. Then she turned to Di Yusheng.
"Your sect master?"
"My former sect master ," he corrected.
He started walking again. An Ning fell into step beside him .
"Former?"
"Yes something happenedwhich led me to leave the sect."
Yusheng then said look the army has arrived as An Ning looked at where Yusheng was looking at she saw people in black coming towards them some were whispering to each other others looking ahead with conviction others simply unexpresionless.
Di Yusheng flew up and looked at all the people who had gathered there were more than fifty which was more than enough for me.
"So I'm not that good at speeches but I will say this you guys are very lucky you came" as he said he closed his eyes then flames, soil,water came from the Ye Clan estate and rushed towards him then stopped in front of him.
They then turned into people though they were naked. These were the ones who enjoyed thier new life in the estate.
They made a deal without knowing the other party's terms and now they would pay for simply staying when they were called.
"Lei Yan, Ye Song, Ye Qing come forward "
They all did then the soil people who were absorbed into Lei Yan, The water people into Ye Song and the Fire People into Ye Qing.
An Ning witnessed all this and asked
"Are you a demon "
"No if anything I'd like to think of myself as a god"
A figure stood on the rooftop of the central building. Tall. Robed in black — not the uniform black of the cultivators below, but a deeper black, the kind that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. His cultivation presence was enormous. Not the sharp, aggressive pressure of a fighter — the vast, settled weight of someone who had reached a realm where power stopped being about force and started being about simply being. A nascent soul. The real thing.
The patriarch of the Ye Clan.
He stood above everyone. Below him, his clan arranged in black. His enforcer clothed and calm.. He looked down at the black figures on the road .
"Where do you think you're going?"