Eventually, the dragon-fireworks began to feel repetitive. Even the taste of the divine wine started to seem samey. Lucid dreaming, she concluded, was like hosting a banquet where you were the only guest. The novelty wore off.
With a sigh, Su Yao relinquished her control over the dream. She let the fabric of this subconscious realm unfold, curious what her own ancient mind would conjure without her direction.
The cosmic void shimmered and dissolved. She found herself standing on a windswept, barren plain under a blood-red sky. The air smelled of iron. Classic.
A figure materialized before her, clad in ornate golden armor that gleamed with self-importance. He pointed a glowing sword at her. His voice was a booming echo.
“Die, monster! You don’t belong in this world!”
Su Yao blinked. How derivative. She decided to play along. Tilted her head, a faint smile on her lips.
“What is a man?” she replied. Her voice cut through his dramatics with casual profundity. “A miserable little pile of secrets. But enough talk. Have at you!”
The challenger roared and attacked. The battle was a beautiful, chaotic ballet of light and energy. He was skilled, she’d give him that, a worthy product of her subconscious. She met his blows with precise, elegant counters, drawing out the duel for the sheer pleasure of the movement.
After a particularly thrilling exchange where she disarmed him with a flick of her tail, he staggered back. His armor was cracked.
“You fight with honor, demon!” he gasped. “This isn’t over! I will train! I will return!”
Su Yao gave a graceful, mocking bow. “I shall await your return with bated breath.”
The challenger vanished in a puff of golden light. Su Yao stood alone on the plain. The adrenaline of the fight faded. It had been fun. A good diversion.
As always, the thought followed. He said he would return.
She tried to recall the face of the last dream-challenger who had vowed the same. And the one before that. The features were blurred, generic. She couldn't remember a single one ever actually coming back.
A faint frown touched her brow. What happened to them? Did they simply forget their oath? Or was the answer more tragic? Did they meet their end on the blade of some lesser demon on their way to the market before they could fulfill their grand promise?
The thought was strangely melancholy. So many vows cast into the void, never to be honored. It was the way of things, she supposed. Promises were as fleeting as dreams.
That melancholy thought of broken vows pulled at the very fabric of the dream. The barren plain dissolved into a vision, clear and sharp as crystal. She was a spectator, watching a scene from her own long-forgotten past unfold like a play.
She saw a young, earnest cultivator with a bright spark of potential. The same one from the plain, the one who had fought well and been spared. He was sitting with a beautiful, dark-haired woman by a moonlit pond. The woman was whispering to him. Her voice was a silken poison.
“Forget this foolish quest,” she pleaded. Her eyes glistened with manufactured tears. “Chasing after demon queens and ancient evils, one day, you will not return. Stay with me. Let us build a quiet life. What is glory compared to a lifetime of peace together?”
The man looked torn. His righteous fire was dampened by her words. He took her hand. “You are right. My quest, it can wait. You are more important.”
From the shadows, the spectator Su Yao saw her past self watching this exchange. Her past self’s features twisted with a cold, possessive fury. The man was hers to challenge and spare. This mortal woman was stealing her diversion.
Her past self strode into the clearing, disguised as a simple, fierce human warrior maiden.
“Fool!” her past self shouted, pointing an accusing finger at the couple. “Break this off at once! This man belongs to me! And you,” she snarled at the woman, “you are no mortal! You are a snake demon trying to consume his life force!”
It was a wild accusation, thrown out as a justified reason to break them apart. As the words left her mouth, however, the beautiful woman’s face contorted. The woman’s eyes flashed yellow. Her form shimmered, revealing the scaly, monstrous truth beneath the illusion. It seemed like her past self had, by sheer chance, spoken the truth.
A battle ensued. Her past self, bound by her human disguise, fought without a shred of her demonic power, relying only on sublime martial skill. It was a brutal, close-quarters struggle against the serpentine demon. Finally, she shattered the demon’s core with a well-placed strike, watching it dissolve into foul smoke.
The young cultivator stared in horror and awe at the warrior maiden who had saved him. “Who, who are you?” he stammered. “I have never seen you in my life. Why would you say I belong to you?”
Her past self clutched her chest. Her face was a mask of perfectly feigned heartbreak and betrayal. “You, you have truly forgotten me? After all we meant to each other? To think I wasted my feelings on you!”
Without another word, she turned and fled into the night, leaving the bewildered and guilt-ridden man alone with the ashes of his would-be lover.
Her vision faded. The present Su Yao watched it all with a detached curiosity. That man’s face, it was familiar. The set of his jaw, the shape of his eyes, it somewhat resembled Zhang Wei.
A slow, understanding smile spread across her lips. So that was what happened to some of them. They were domesticated. Seduced away from their grand promises by the mundane temptation of a quiet life.
Her past self, in a fit of petty, possessive boredom, had actively destroyed one such temptation, ironically while exposing a real threat.
She felt a mild amusement at the cyclical nature of it all. Perhaps Zhang Wei was a distant descendant. Or perhaps it was just a common face. It mattered little.
The dreamscape swirled lazily around her, but Su Yao’s thoughts were now firmly fixed on the vision. The melancholy was gone, replaced by a sense of wry, ancient amusement.
Marriage, she mused. The word tasted both foreign and familiar. What a terrifyingly effective trap. More potent than any ancient artifact, more binding than any soul contract. Time and again, it had stolen from her.
She remembered that cultivator, and she remembered others too.
A mighty barbarian king from the northern wastes, who could drink an entire barrel of fire-wine and then wrestle a glacier bear for fun, had met a delicate scribe from the southern courts and had traded his sword for a plow.
A celestial dragon-slayer, whose spear could pierce the heavens, had been reduced to a doting father, bragging about his child’s first steps.
Her challengers, her drinking buddies, her favorite sources of entertainment, all vanished into the quiet, mundane abyss of matrimony. Tamed by the promise of a warm hearth and a familiar face.
A fate far worse than death, in her opinion.
“The fearsome matrimonial beast,” she declared to the empty, shifting dream. “It feeds on the spirit, draining color and wonder until only a pleasant, boring husk remains.”
Su Yao chuckled, a low, rich sound that echoed in the void. She raised her now-empty cup in a phantom toast.
“To all the warriors lost to the battlefield of domesticity! May your afterlives be filled with thrilling arguments over whose turn it’s to take out the trash!”
It was a tragedy, really.
All that potential, that glorious capacity for violence and revelry, extinguished by something as simple as love and comfort. The thought was enough to make her sigh. It seemed the great cosmic joke was that the most powerful force was the desire for a quiet life.
And she, the eternal, was forever left behind, watching the interesting ones get picked off one by one.
With a final, dismissive shake of her head, she decided she’d had enough of the past. The present, with its own set of amusingly trivial problems, was calling.
She could feel the spiritual poison’s grip on her human body loosening, but there was still a little time. Her dream-wine tasted suddenly bitter. A sharper, more irritating memory overshadowed the amusing notion of matrimony as the great enemy.
“Useless,” she muttered to the empty pavilion, swirling the wine in her cup. “All that potential, wasted on stability.”
The dreamscape shifted again to a rapid montage of flickering images.
She saw them again, her promising challengers. Only this time, they were being ambushed in shadowy ravines. And their food was poisoned by smiling “allies.”
“Pathetic,” her own voice from a memory sneered. She watched her past self in disguise sidle up to a young swordsman about to buy a “lucky charm” from a shady vendor. “That trinket? It'll make your sword hand cramp at the first clash of steel.”
“Buy this one instead.” Her past self shoved a different, genuinely harmless amulet into the swordsman’s hand. “Looks uglier, but it won't get you killed.” The swordsman, confused but wary, listened.
They were lured into caverns by false treasure maps. She saw herself ‘accidentally’ dropping a scroll that contradicted the fatal route. “Oh, dear me! My research indicates that path leads to a nest of Rock-Burrower Serpents! Are you sure your map is correct?”
They were betrayed by jealous rivals. She saw herself pouring wine and whispering loud enough to be overheard, “I heard that so-called ‘friend’ of yours has been spending an awful lot of time at the Black Viper sect’s compound lately. Strange, don't you think?”
They were being picked off by cowards and schemers.
Her past self, again and again, always in a mortal guise, intervened.
She used their own methods against them. After each rescue, she would offer the stunned challenger a piece of advice. “Your footwork is sloppy,” the old woman would grunt. “Focus on the ‘Stance of the Rooted Pine,’” the scholar would suggest, pointing to a passage in the “accidentally” dropped scroll. “A stronger foundation will save you more often than a sharper blade.”
She saved them through superior cunning. It was a game to her. A young heroine, saved from a poison plot, knelt before her physician disguise. “Thank you, benefactor! How can I ever repay you?”
The disguised Su Yao waved a dismissive hand. “Repay me by living long enough to become a true legend. The world needs more of those.”
Without realizing it, these scattered acts of selfish preservation began to weave a legend. Tales spread of a mysterious, righteous wanderer who aided virtuous cultivators in their darkest hours. They spoke of her wisdom, her unwavering moral compass.
The montage ended. Su Yao, the true architect of the legend, snorted in derision. The sound echoed in the silent dream space. Unwavering moral compass. What a joke. It had all been about maintaining a healthy stock of worthy opponents.
The final, crushing irony of the memory settled over her. The very ones she saved, the ones who benefited from her “guidance,” never challenged her again. She remembered one in particular, a spearman she had saved from a trap.
Years later, she sought him out as a lone traveler on the road. They shared tea under a twisted pine. As the wind whispered through the leaves, she asked him casually, “Tell me, why did you never return to challenge the Great Fox?”
The spearman paused. A shadow crossed his expression.
“I reached a plateau,” he said finally. “After that battle, nothing felt the same. I trained and bled, but it was like I’d already glimpsed something I couldn’t surpass. Like the path just ended.”
Su Yao smiled faintly, hiding the flicker of disappointment behind her eyes.
He glanced at her, then down at his tea, swirling the leaves absently. “You’ve traveled far,” he said. “They call you the Jade Purity Maiden now, don’t they? You help people and slay demons. You’ve seen real monsters.”
She inclined her head politely, letting the title pass without comment.
He hesitated, then asked, “Did you ever face the Great Fox?”
She tilted her head slightly, as if puzzled. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, if anyone could defeat it, I figure it’d be you. You always seem one step above the rest. I’ve wondered if you and the fox fought, would you lose?”
Su Yao gave a soft, almost amused breath. “Nah,” she said, reaching for her cup. “I’d win.”
He smiled, unknowing she meant it literally.
She watched him go, knowing he would never ask again. In that moment, the lightness between them faded, replaced by a quiet finality. The man and the others she saved would forever remember her alter ego as a benevolent savior, never knowing she was the malevolent being they originally sought to slay.
It seemed like they had hit the limit of their potential, forever doomed to never becoming strong enough to pose an interesting threat to her.
The dream was now thoroughly sour. Her escapism had turned into a gallery of her own failed investments. “A waste of perfectly good trickery,” she sighed, finishing the bitter wine.
Enough, she thought with finality. Time to wake up and deal with the modern, uncomplicated annoyance of an heiress who can't cook.
She let the dream dissolve. The taste of divine wine was replaced by the phantom ache of a spiritually-induced headache. Her past was a cycle of disappointment. The present, for all its trivialities, was at least straightforward.
Then, without warning, the fragile boundary between sleep and waking shattered with a violent, physical jolt.
A blast of frigid air and harsh, sterile light assaulted her eyes. Su Yao was lying on a cold, hard slab. The air reeked of antiseptic and something else, formaldehyde.
Her eyes focused on a light fixture above. A man in a white lab coat was staring down at her. His face was a mask of pure, unadulterated terror. He dropped a metal clipboard with a deafening clang.
“S-SHE’s ALIVE!” he screamed, scrambling backward and tripping over a wheeled stool. “THE CORPSE IS ALIVE!”
She sat up. The movement was smooth, effortless. Su Yao looked down at herself. She was wearing a cheap paper gown. A toe tag was tied to her foot. She plucked it off and read it: Xiao Ling. D.O.A. Cause of Death: Acute Systemic Organ Failure (Suspected Poisoning).
She looked around. Stainless steel drawers lined the walls. This was a morgue. They had pronounced her dead.
A slow, cold smile spread across her face. Li Xiu’s cooking was truly a weapon of mass destruction.
Two more attendants rushed in, drawn by the first man’s screams. They froze in the doorway, eyes wide as saucers.
Su Yao swung her legs off the slab. Her bare feet hit the icy floor.
“You,” she said, her voice hoarse but firm, pointing at the trembling attendant. “My clothes. Where are they?”
“Y-you, you were dead! No vitals! Cold!” he stammered.
“I was recuperating,” she corrected, standing up. The paper gown rustled. “It was a deep meditative state to purge toxins. Your equipment is clearly inadequate. My clothes. Now.”
Her aura, even suppressed within the human body, was enough to compel obedience. The attendant pointed a shaking finger towards a locker.
Minutes later, Su Yao was fully dressed, straightening her collar as she walked out of the morgue, leaving three traumatized medical professionals in her wake.
Director Luo was in the hallway, arguing with a doctor. He turned, saw her, and his jaw dropped.
“Xiao Ling! They said you were, they said…”
“Their diagnosis was premature,” Su Yao said, brushing past him. “The poison has been expelled. I have achieved a full recovery.”
She stopped and looked back at his pale, shocked face.
“Inform the network. Schedule the next shoot for the Blackwater Bridge tomorrow. The delay was regrettable.”
She continued walking. Waking up in a morgue was a new experience. It was, she decided, significantly less pleasant than waking up in her Jade Mountain palace. But it did have a certain dramatic flair.
Stepping out of the morgue’s sterile chill and into the slightly warmer hallway of the hospital proper, Su Yao expected screams, panic, or at least stunned silence. Instead, she was met with a familiar, and frankly underwhelming, scene.
Mei, Li Xiu, and Wong Lei were clustered on a bench right outside the morgue’s administrative office. Mei was playing a game on her phone, Li Xiu was nervously twisting her hands, and Wong Lei was peering at a vending machine as if trying to exorcise it with her mind.
Mei looked up first. “Oh, hey. You're up. Took you long enough.” She went back to her game.
Li Xiu sprang to her feet. Her face was a mixture of relief and crushing guilt. “Xiao Ling! You're alive! I'm so, so sorry! I thought I'd killed you!”
Wong Lei jumped, spinning around. “She’s alive? See? I told you! The talisman I slipped under the gurney worked!” She looked immensely pleased with herself.
Su Yao stared at them. This is not the reaction one expects after returning from the dead. “You are unsurprised,” she stated.
Mei snorted without looking up from her phone. “Duh. You got hit by a truck and walked it off. A little food poisoning was gonna keep you down? Please. We were just waiting for your system to reboot.”
“Indeed,” Li Xiu said, wringing her hands. “The doctors said you were ‘non-responsive.’ But we knew you'd be fine. We just didn't know it would take three days.”
“Three days?” Su Yao repeated. She'd been dreaming for three days?No wonder the morgue had gotten involved.
Wong Lei nodded vigorously. “Yep! But see, you're fine! A bit pale, but fine.” She leaned closer, whispering conspiratorially. “Was there a light? Any messages from the other side?”
“There was a light,” Su Yao deadpanned. “It was bright. The message was that this hospital’s diagnostic skills are severely lacking.”
She began walking down the hall. Her friends fell into step beside her as if she'd just returned from a quick trip to the bathroom.