“Does the sword have a name?”
The dream was a vast expanse of white, and an indistinct figure asked this question.
A childhood Liu Ziyi cradled the sword in his arms and shook his head. Then, he lowered his head to meticulously wipe the sword body, cleaning away the mud and grime stained onto it from the scramble.
He was short in stature, and hugging this three-chi-eight-cun longsword only allowed his messy-haired, fair face to peek out.
No one knew how a humble handyman disciple had obtained this sword, nor how he had managed to hide it in the woodshed for decades.
The figure high above sighed at this sight. He raised a hand as if to stroke the child’s head, only for the boy to cautiously and carefully dodge away.
“Please, please don’t… take my sword away…”
He was still only a twelve-year-old child after all, and the nervousness he could not conceal made his speech sluggish, making it crystal clear to everyone present just how much he treasured the longsword in his arms.
The large hand paused at those words and finally withdrew.
After a moment, that figure squatted down in front of him, revealing a face that remained stubbornly youthful. With a head of white hair and a reassuring smile—one that Liu Ziyi had seen before—he was none other than Sect Master Shen Qing.
“Give it a name…”
Shen Qing spoke thus, raising a hand to cast a spell that completely washed away the mud stains on the sword. Disregarding the objections of the Third Elder Fuye beside him, he continued:
“And become my disciple.”
“That way, no one will ever dare snatch your sword away again. How about it?”
The child hugging the sword tightly did not raise his head. After a long silence, he nodded.
“Shen Qing, have you lost your mind? Who is he… Have you forgotten? He shouldn’t even be staying here! Second Senior Brother—” Fuye’s lowered voice reached everyone’s ears.
Yet the willful Shen Qing directly cut Fuye off, leaving a sound-isolation barrier around Liu Ziyi’s ears.
The last sentence he heard before that was:
“Lingji, take your junior brother back up to the cliff.”
Tianxuang Cliff, Qixue Residence.
It was already approaching deep night, yet Qixue Residence remained brightly lit. Liu Ziyi, who had yet to wake from his unconscious state, lay upon the bed in the inner chamber, while right beside the bed sat Shen Zhuoqing, who had kept vigil for day and night.
He had not closed his eyes for a dozen hours, nor had he consumed a single drop of water.
Even when Master Shen Qing tried to persuade him, it was useless. As if cursed, he slumped by Liu Ziyi’s bedside, gazing quietly and without a single word at Liu Ziyi’s peaceful sleeping face.
And when the night grew deep and quiet with no one else around to tend to Qixue Residence, Shen Zhuoqing would stealthily place his hand over the bandaged right palm, rubbing and stroking the injury that had been treated in time, over and over again.
It was as if he needed to rub the gauze over the web of his thumb until it frayed and wore thin, just so he could beat back the waves of biting cold and trembling brought on by heart palpitations and terror.
Perhaps he had truly gone mad, or perhaps his reason could no longer maintain its footing in the silence, for he gripped that hand of his own accord and muttered in a low voice.
In the murmurs that were too indistinct to make out, there were only two repeated words—Xiao Liu.
Holding that hand as if to confirm once more that all of this was real, Shen Zhuoqing pressed his own face against it.
That hand was actually warmer than his face.
If anyone were to touch Shen Zhuoqing at this moment, they would find his body temperature frighteningly low. Excessive panic had thrown his sea of consciousness into turmoil and blocked his meridians, rendering him completely incapable of executing the warming body technique—a truly fatal condition up here on the freezing Tianxuang Cliff.
Yet even with lips drained of color from such bone-chilling cold, he remained unwilling to leave.
Shen Zhuoqing closed his eyes, making the dark circles beneath them all the more prominent.
Once again, amidst the darkness, he beheld that mountain of corpses and sea of blood. Wronged and prematurely dead souls shrieked, and demonic qi beneath the bloody filth swarmed forward like vicious ghosts, interrogating him with hoarse, terrifying voices in his ear.
[You knew full well that Xiao Liu would get hurt, so why didn’t you stop him?]
It was no use.
Even if he stopped this time, there would be a next time.
[So you just watched your junior brother enter that perilous place while you ran away alone?
You coward!]
Such reproaches came endlessly, and Shen Zhuoqing had long since grown accustomed to them.
Yet in a moment of unconscious distraction, his fingertips tightened involuntarily, pressing once more against the wound wrapped in gauze.
The sudden wave of pain caused Liu Ziyi, lying upon the bed, to let out a muffled groan, his brows furrowing as his eyelashes trembled slightly.
Shen Zhuoqing still could not regain his wits. Plagued by his inner demons, his vision remained blurred, and he vaguely saw the person on the bed frown, hallucinating once more as he caught sight of blood dripping from that fair face.
That hoarse voice began to interrogate him anew:
[How much pain must Xiao Liu be in? Why didn’t you go save him?]
Pain—
The pain of the wound being tightly compressed by fingers to the point of nearly tearing apart thoroughly awakened the half-conscious Liu Ziyi.
He sucked in a sharp breath and forced his eyes open, only to find Shen Zhuoqing leaning over the bedside with lowered eyes, pressing his injured right hand tightly against his own face.
What on earth is going on?
Liu Ziyi’s newly awakened mind remained sluggish for a split second.
Realizing that if this continued, the wound would split open again, he called out “Senior Brother” and tried to pull his hand back.
“Senior Brother…?”
Liu Ziyi rasped out in a hoarse voice.
Unfortunately, his body had not fully recovered from the lingering poison, and he was simply no match for Shen Zhuoqing’s strength. After tugging twice, his palm remained firmly and immovably plastered against Shen Zhuoqing’s face.
It was freezing cold to the extreme.
Dragging his other arm with sheer effort, Liu Ziyi managed to reach over and pat Shen Zhuoqing’s shoulder, finally snapping the man out of the cage of his inner demons.
“Senior Brother, what’s wrong?”
Upon waking abruptly, Shen Zhuoqing immediately let go of Liu Ziyi’s hand, and the once-murky depths of his eyes recovered a sliver of clarity, though the trembling of his breath remained difficult to conceal.
Thoroughly stripped of any lingering sleepiness by this bizarre ordeal, yet feeling terribly weak throughout his body, Liu Ziyi simply raised his eyes to observe the Shen Zhuoqing before him—
His senior brother had let go of his hand, yet remained silent.
Those lips moved as if to speak, but in the end, they merely spat out a single phrase: “It’s nothing.”
Then, leaving a bewildered Liu Ziyi behind, he stood up and walked away.
He didn’t go far, however, merely stepping aside behind the folding screen to escape Liu Ziyi’s probing gaze.
“…?”
The perplexity between Liu Ziyi’s brows deepened as he propped his body up from the bed into a sitting position.
The pain from someone pressing down on the injury in the web of his thumb had been fierce just now, leaving him completely dazed at the time.
Now, clearing his thoughts, he recalled that back in the back mountain, he had been pierced by poisonous flora, injuring his right hand and contracting a toxin that induced unconsciousness.
Yet right as he was about to slip into death’s door, a strange swordsman had rescued him. Of course, that person was definitely not Shen Zhuoqing.
Liu Ziyi could be certain that given that piercing sword intent and aura, the person was at least a cultivator above the Nascent Soul stage.
And just now, he seemed to have dreamed of what happened when he first became a disciple—
Thinking along these lines, Liu Ziyi immediately felt around his bedding, finally relaxing only when he found Xiliu still resting by his side.
Ah, right.
It seemed someone had called out his name, too.
How did they call him again?
Failing to find an answer after a moment of thought, Liu Ziyi gave his own forehead a slightly irritated tap, finally fishing out the memory of that voice’s cry from his chaotic brain.
Xiao Liu.
That must have been Shen Zhuoqing, right?
When did he ever worry about him like this?
Sitting up straighter on the couch, Liu Ziyi attempted to glean something from the fragmented memories pieced together in his mind, but unfortunately came away with zero clues.
Lowering his gaze to inspect the web of his thumb, which had been neatly and properly bandaged, he thought silently to himself:
It looks like it was treated very promptly. I owe it to the restriction Shen Zhuoqing placed on me, otherwise I don’t know if this hand could have survived that potent poison.
He still remembered the sensation when the wound split open and he couldn’t even grip Xiliu properly.
At that time, he couldn’t even execute the most basic sword techniques completely. If that injury had been left to linger, I’m afraid he would never be able to practice swordsmanship again in this lifetime.
Much like that eye of Qiu Zaiqi’s, no matter how much one cultivated, it would ultimately remain a glaring weakness.
A seed of disaster.
At this thought, Liu Ziyi’s gaze abruptly shifted toward the outer chamber beyond the folding screen.
Shen Zhuoqing’s expression and words just now, alongside the lingering aura belonging to him left around the web of his thumb.
And the pain brought by the tight grip he had maintained were all vividly replaying before Liu Ziyi’s eyes.
His senior brother’s hands had been so cold.
Up here on Tianxuang Cliff, to not even deploy the warming body technique…?
Propping himself up by the head of the bed, Liu Ziyi raised his voice and called outward:
“Senior Brother, are you still out there?”
His slightly hoarse voice pierced through the folding screen and reached Shen Zhuoqing’s ears.
At that moment, Shen Zhuoqing was busy suppressing the demonic qi churning within his body. Hearing the voice sent another wave of turbulence through his sea of consciousness, causing a trickle of blood to spill from the corner of his lips.
He had no choice but to accelerate the circulation of his Cleansing Heart Technique, barely managing to beat down the inner demons within before finally opening his mouth to respond:
“…I am here. What is it?”
Liu Ziyi said, “Senior Brother, could you pour me some water? I can’t get up, and I’m so thirsty.”
Hearing Liu Ziyi say this, Shen Zhuoqing finally registered that he had just bolted out like that without even offering a cup of water to Liu Ziyi, who had been unconscious for a whole day and night.
Fortunately, the inner demons had already been suppressed. With a slight press of his lips back into their usual appearance, he picked up a cup of herbal tea from the outer chamber and walked in.
Liu Ziyi had been observing him ever since Shen Zhuoqing stepped into the room. Shen Zhuoqing managed to meet his gaze for a bare second before guiltily lowering his eyes, and only when he reached Liu Ziyi’s side and offered the teacup did he speak:
“Drink. The lingering poison in your body has not yet cleared, so drinking a cup of spiritual tea will help soothe it.”
Liu Ziyi obediently nodded. Seeing that Shen Zhuoqing had no intention of handing the cup over to him, he leaned in and caught the rim of the cup with his lips. Unexpectedly, even in feeding water, a senior brother like Shen Zhuoqing was exceptionally practiced.
As Liu Ziyi moistened his throat, he lowered his gaze to look.
His line of sight fell upon the inner collar of Shen Zhuoqing’s robe. Only from this angle could he clearly spot it—a single drop of blood, so tiny it looked like a speck of vermilion.
Liu Ziyi silently finished the tea in the cup. His voice finally free of its hoarseness, he smiled up at Shen Zhuoqing and said, “Thank you, Senior Brother.”
Noticing that Shen Zhuoqing’s tense mental state seemed to relax slightly in response to that smile, Liu Ziyi leaned closer toward him.
This movement startled Shen Zhuoqing into tightening his grip on the teacup, making Liu Ziyi’s smile look almost mischievous as he held onto the empty cup and instinctively leaned back a few inches.
He wanted to find an excuse to escape.
But how could Liu Ziyi let this opportunity slip by? His injured hand immediately clamped tightly onto Shen Zhuoqing, gambling on the fact that Shen Zhuoqing was currently too afraid of hurting him again to shake him off.
Like a stalking cat closing in step by step, his other hand reached out and pushed aside Shen Zhuoqing’s collar without a word, pressing his thumb unceremoniously right onto that drop of red blood.
He felt the Shen Zhuoqing gripped tightly in his grasp give a start.
And that bloodstain was wet.
Liu Ziyi raised his head to catch Shen Zhuoqing’s startled gaze, held up his blood-stained finger right in front of Shen Zhuoqing, and knitted his brows in question: “Senior Brother, what is the meaning of this?”