The Nine Lotus Palace sat on a terraced hillside outside Red Maple, its pavilions built from pale stone and pearl-white wood, gardens overflowing with medicinal blossoms that scented the entire hillside in something between lotus and rain.
Tianyun had imagined, from Lin Yueqing’s descriptions, something grander and colder — a place of strict discipline and stricter hierarchy.
Instead, it felt, oddly, like a larger and more elegant version of Widow Fen’s herb shop back home, every corner devoted to the quiet, patient work of keeping people alive.
Chen Hao spent three days in the palace’s recovery hall, hooked to a slow drip of spirit-infused medicine while his Qi channels knit themselves back together beneath the careful attention of senior healers.
Tianyun visited every day, usually with Feng Li in tow, usually bearing some fresh complaint about Cook Deng’s continued crimes against food back at Cloudmist.
“She’s threatening to serve the offal stew again,” Feng Li reported on the third visit, settling into the chair beside Chen Hao’s cot with the theatrical gravity of a man delivering terrible news.
“I told her recovery patients need proper nutrition.
She told me to mind my own dantian.” “Sounds accurate,” Chen Hao rasped, still weak but considerably more color in his face than the day of the attack.
“You’ve never once minded your own business in three years I’ve known you.” “See, this is the thanks I get for visiting the nearly-dead.” “You’re visiting because Elder Bao ordered everyone to check on me, and you’re afraid of what he’ll do if you skip it.” “…Also accurate,” Feng Li admitted, grinning despite himself.
Tianyun watched the exchange with quiet relief, the easy banter a welcome contrast to the pale, frost-marked arm he’d knelt beside in the tournament dirt three days earlier.
Chen Hao caught him watching and rolled his eyes, though without any real heat behind it.
“Stop looking at me like I might vanish,” he said.
“I’m not dying.
The healers say I’ll be back to full strength within the week.” “You nearly did die.” “I nearly did a lot of things.
Dying isn’t one I’m planning to finish today.” Chen Hao’s expression sobered, just slightly.
“You came for me.
Cut through a cultist with your bare hands and something that looked a great deal like a sword technique, from what the others tell me, even though you’ve never held a blade in your life.” His eyes narrowed, sharp despite his weakened state.
“I’ve spent three weeks resenting a boy with a broken root for showing up my three years of hard work.
Turns out the broken root nearly got himself killed pulling my idiot self out of the fire.
Feels like I owe you an apology I don’t know how to give properly.” “You don’t owe me anything,” Tianyun said.
“You’d have done the same.
You already did — for those younger disciples, before I even got there.” “That’s different.” “It really isn’t.” Tianyun offered a tired, genuine smile.
“Just try not to make a habit of nearly dying in front of me.
My ribs have taken enough punishment this month without adding heart failure from fright to the list.” Chen Hao huffed something that might, in a more generous mood, have qualified as a laugh.
Xuan Zhen found him that evening, sitting alone on the terraced garden’s outer wall, watching the sun sink behind the Spirit Continent’s distant peaks in long bands of orange and violet.
“Second fragment,” the old man observed, settling beside him without invitation, wine gourd already in hand.
“Sooner than I expected.
Sacrifice tends to move faster than patience, in my experience — for better and for considerably worse.” “Chen Hao nearly died because of what’s inside me.” “Chen Hao nearly died because a cult of murderous fanatics attacked a crowded tournament,” Xuan Zhen corrected, not unkindly.
“Don’t mistake proximity for blame, boy.
You’ll spend the rest of your life doing that if you let yourself start now, and it’s a poison that ruins better men than you before their time.” Tianyun was quiet for a while, turning the jade shard over in his fingers, watching the second fragment’s fresh gold glow pulse gently alongside the first.
“Jiang Ruoxue said the Heavenly Sword Pavilion will want to know about me eventually,” he said finally.
“The hooded stranger said something’s coming that I’m not ready for.
Elder Bao looks at me like I’m a storm he’s watching build on the horizon.” He looked up, meeting Xuan Zhen’s cloudy eyes directly.
“You promised me answers after the next fragment woke.
It’s awake.
I’d like those answers now, if you’re willing to give them.” Xuan Zhen studied him for a long, considering moment, and for the first time since the mountain, Tianyun watched the old man actually weigh the decision rather than deflect it outright.
“Some of it,” he finally said.
“Not all.
You’re not ready for all of it — not because I doubt your strength, but because some truths need a stronger foundation beneath them before they can be carried without collapsing the one holding them.” He took a slow pull from the wine gourd, gathering himself.
“Your Dao Root wasn’t broken by accident, or by some flaw in your birth.
It was broken deliberately, a very long time ago, by beings powerful enough to shatter a foundation Heaven itself had woven — and they didn’t do it to punish you.
They did it to hide something inside you that was never meant to exist in the first place.” “Hide what?” “A fragment of something older than the Nine Heavens themselves ever should have touched.” Xuan Zhen’s voice had gone quieter now, careful in a way Tianyun had never heard from him before.
“I won’t give you the name tonight.
Names have weight, and that particular name has enough weight to crush a boy with two fragments awake if he hears it before he’s ready to carry it properly.
What I will tell you is this — the Blood Moon Cult wants to harvest what’s inside you because their master believes it can be used, weaponized, torn free of you and bent toward his own ends.
The hooded stranger, whoever they serve, wants something different.
I don’t yet know what.” “And you?
What do you want from me?” Xuan Zhen’s cloudy eyes softened, just slightly, into something that looked almost like grief.
“I want you to survive long enough to choose your own answer,” he said, “instead of having Heaven, or the Blood Moon Cult, or anyone else choose it for you the way they tried to seventeen years ago.” He set the wine gourd down between them, an oddly vulnerable gesture from a man who never seemed to set anything down.
“Your father — Li Wei — was not always an herbalist, boy.
I think you’ve already guessed that much.
He was a soldier once, in a war fought so long ago that most records of it have crumbled to dust, and he made a promise to someone he loved very much that he would keep you safe, whatever the cost, for as long as he possibly could.” “Someone he loved,” Tianyun repeated slowly.
“Who?” “That,” Xuan Zhen said, rising, robes settling around him in the fading light, “is a story that belongs to him, not to me.
Ask him yourself, someday, when you’re both ready to hear and to answer honestly.” He offered a small, tired smile.
“You have a gift for making old men give up more than they intend to, Li Tianyun.
It’s either your greatest strength or your most dangerous one.
I haven’t decided which yet.” He turned to leave, then paused, glancing back with something almost like affection breaking through his usual dry composure.
“Three fragments,” he said.
“Time Perception, if the old records mean anything at all.
It’ll come when it comes — through something you can’t prepare for, the same as the first two.
When it does, come find me.
There are things about the road ahead I can only explain once you’ve seen a little further down it yourself.” He was gone before Tianyun could ask anything else, leaving behind only the darkening garden, the fading scent of wine, and a great many new questions layered carefully atop all the old ones still waiting for their turn.
He found Lin Yueqing later that night in the palace’s quiet medicine hall, sorting the last of the day’s herbs by lamplight, her sleeves rolled up and a faint smudge of green pollen across one cheek that she hadn’t noticed yet.
“You look like a man who’s just been handed several new mysteries,” she observed without looking up.
“Xuan Zhen told me a little.
Not everything.
Apparently I need to earn the rest, one fragment at a time.” “That sounds exhausting.” “It is.” He settled onto the bench across from her, watching her work with the same quiet fascination he always felt around her — the careful precision of her hands, the small furrow of concentration between her brows, the particular grace of someone who’d built her whole life around the deliberate, patient work of making broken things whole again.
“He told me my father used to be a soldier.
That there was someone my father loved, a long time ago, tied up in all of this somehow.” “How do you feel about that?” “Strange.” He considered the question honestly, the way she always seemed to deserve.
“Like the ground under my whole life keeps turning out to be thinner than I thought.
But also—” He paused, reaching across the small table between them to gently wipe the smudge of pollen from her cheek, his thumb lingering a moment longer than the task required.
“Also like I’m not facing any of it alone.
That helps more than I probably say often enough.” Lin Yueqing went very still at the touch, her dark eyes lifting to meet his, something warm and unguarded passing between them in the lamplight.
“You say it plenty,” she said softly.
“Your ears just usually say it first.” “They have terrible timing.” “They have honest timing.” She set down the herbs she’d been sorting and reached up, covering his hand with hers where it still rested near her cheek, holding it there a moment longer before letting it settle, entwined with her own, on the table between them.
“Whatever’s coming, Tianyun — whatever the Blood Moon Cult wants, whatever the hooded stranger is watching for, whatever your father’s old war left buried in your blood — I meant what I said before.
You don’t have to face any of it alone.
I’d like to be there, if you’ll let me, for however much of the road ahead turns out to be mine to walk beside you.” He didn’t have a clever answer for that — no dry humor, no half-formed deflection, nothing but the simple, steady warmth of her hand in his and the quiet certainty, settling somewhere deep and unshaken beneath two awakened fragments and a great many unanswered questions, that whatever came next, this at least was something he had gotten entirely, unquestionably right.
“I’ll let you,” he said, and meant every word of it.
To be continue….