"Who are you? Why are you here?"
The woman's voice rang clear and cool, cutting off Yin Zhiping's private lament.
"That should be my question. The stone stool you're sitting on—I made it."
Yin Zhiping pointed at the stool beneath her, the gesture saying: I found this place first; what you're doing is moving into the magpie's nest.
And then it came back to him—hadn't he just been thinking that Xiaolongnü would still be young now, likely a little girl?
The woman before him was sixteen if she was a day. She could not be his calamity, nor Zhen Zhibing's.
Which meant her identity all but announced itself.
Aside from Li Mochou—the she-devil who would one day scourge the jianghu—who else could she possibly be?
Surely not his Grandmaster's old flame...
"Ah—I'm sorry. I didn't know someone made it. I thought it was simply here, so I sat."
The moment she heard the stool was someone's work, Li Mochou rose quickly, yielding the seat.
The Li Mochou of right now seemed untouched, yet, by love's wound. But reading the faint unease in her face, Yin Zhiping guessed: she and Lu Zhanyuan had likely already met.
"It's fine. This place isn't mine either—anyone may come. It's only that I'm usually alone up here; I rarely see another soul. Sit, miss."
There was only the one stool. So for convenience's sake Yin Zhiping drew his sword and planed a second boulder flat—one freshly minted stone stool.
Then he moved to a small nook where he kept dry firewood laid by, for exactly this: roasting a bird up here in peace. Hence the chicken from the back kitchen.
"My thanks. But the hour grows late—I should go back."
Li Mochou plainly had no wish to linger with a stranger—a man, no less.
Master had always taught: men are not to be trusted. And she and her Lu-lang had already pledged hearts—all the more reason to keep every other man at arm's length.
"As you please. Though if you ever wish to come, miss, come freely—I'm not here every day myself."
Yin Zhiping observed the courtesies.
He took a moment to inspect his own heart, and confirmed it: no, he had not fallen for the future she-devil.
At first sight, in that sunset, Li Mochou had genuinely stunned him—but that was the whole of it. Nothing close to love at first glance.
A man who had survived his past life's age of industrial-grade faces could say with confidence: we are not so shallow. We look at what's inside. Beauty is passing cloud...
"My thanks!"
Li Mochou left feeling distinctly odd. She had slipped down the mountain in secret before, walked the world a little—that was how she'd met her true love, Lu Zhanyuan, and traveled the jianghu at his side.
That journey was the first time she learned she was beautiful: every passerby's face had said so, startled and besotted at once.
Her Lu-lang had worn that same look at their first meeting—had gentled his voice whenever he spoke to her.
But the man just now—past that first flicker of surprise, his eyes had simply... settled. Gone level.
The few sentences that followed carried an unmistakable indifference, as if she were any ordinary person at all.
For Li Mochou, who had lived her short public life inside a ring of besotted stares, the man's difference was—novel.
Not that she resented the lack of worship. It was simply the first time anyone had looked straight past her beauty. The feeling was strange, and new.
Yin Zhiping paid the departing Li Mochou no further mind—didn't even ask her name—and set about his fire and his chicken.
As long as she wasn't Xiaolongnü, she was, to Yin Zhiping, just another person.
That was his confidence today. What tomorrow held, no one could say.
He had no way of knowing how much trouble that one extra sentence of courtesy—come freely—was going to buy him.
***
Roast chicken. Warm fire. The sun going down.
And Yin Zhiping's heart finally went still.
He didn't know whether he had some version of what his old world called battlefield trauma.
Death itself no longer weighed much with him. A sword-stroke, a palm—that was all dying was.
But a battlefield's dead arrive all at once—hundreds, thousands, stacked into hills and then burned. That, no amount of theory had prepared him for.
He had been holding it down ever since. Only now, watching the sun thin to a final line and vanish, did something in him truly come back into balance.
Then he began to train.
Because a new understanding had come to him.
The Quanzhen Swordplay first; the Quanzhen Palm Technique after it; the Golden Goose Art last.
When all three had been run through once, he seated himself on the stone stool, faced the horizon, and set the Quanzhen Inner Art turning.
And while Yin Zhiping sank wholly into cultivation, the proficiency panel he hadn't glanced at in ages was quietly changing.
The moon climbed past the willow-tips.
One full circuit of qi, and Yin Zhiping opened his eyes slowly.
He took stock of the new true essence banked in his body—considerable—and, for a rarity, opened the proficiency panel.
One look, and he froze.
Every other art still read its flat 100. But the number after Quanzhen Swordplay had, at some unmarked moment, become 101—and after it, a new button had appeared: ADVANCE.
Yin Zhiping worked through it.
The Quanzhen Inner Art had been his first choice of cultivation—but the art he had trained most, always, was the Quanzhen Swordplay.
So tonight's insight had pushed the swordplay past its limit, into some further stage.
Which made that ADVANCE button...
Yin Zhiping steadied his mind, and pressed it.
The panel flipped over, and showed him a different face.
Stark and simple. Three options:
Myriad Swords Return to the Origin. Sacred Spirit Swordplay. Flying Immortal Beyond the Heavens.
Yin Zhiping stared at the three lines, and excitement climbed his spine unbidden.
Speak of a thing, and heaven delivers it.
He was short exactly one top-tier art—and here came three.
Myriad Swords Return to the Origin and the Sacred Spirit Swordplay both came out of the world of Fengyun.
Myriad Swords Return to the Origin was the Sword Sect's crowning secret, passed only to its strongest disciple in each age, later mastered by Wuming—the highest attainment of the way of the sword. When it was invoked, ten thousand swords bowed as servants before their master, as pilgrims before a god.
One casting, and sword-force of matchless ferocity poured out of the body itself; the wielder's form could dissolve into a wisp of blue smoke while raw edge-qi saturated the air. Numberless blades storming like wind and rain, filling the sky, weaving a net of sword-pressure—magnificent past description. And every one of those ten thousand swords answered the wielder's command.
The Sacred Spirit Swordplay was the art Sword Saint Dugu Jian created to counter Wuming—Sword One through Sword Twenty-Two, and then the last: Sword Twenty-Three, in its two faces, Heaven-Ending Earth-Severing and Loving Heaven Merciful Earth. Men called it the sword out of hell.
Flying Immortal Beyond the Heavens was Ye Gucheng's supreme stroke. Everyone who saw it said the same thing: that sword did not belong to the mortal world. The stroke takes form before the hand moves; the spirit lingers after the hand has finished; absolute hardness wielded as absolute softness, the unchanging as the ever-changing—truly a swordplay without peer.
And now Yin Zhiping had to choose one of the three.