"So none of you are multi-element spirit masters?"
"???"
"You weren't born with a companion spirit artifact either?"
"???"
"And a sword cultivator's spirit sword can't spawn more swords?"
"???"
"Okay, but sword cultivators controlling a few flying swords at once, that's normal, right?"
"Are you some kind of idiot???"
Ning Ruan, called an idiot for the ninth time: "..."
...
Ning Ruan wasn't an idiot.
All she'd ever wanted was to be a healer. Instead the village geezers had gaslit her for fifteen straight years into becoming a six-element spirit master who was also a sword cultivator.
Those old men could manipulate like nobody's business. Run a pyramid scheme back home on Blue Star and they'd have pulled ten years, minimum.
Out there, they'd said, geniuses walked the streets and bigshots were as common as stray dogs. A six-element spirit master like her, a sword cultivator who could only manage two flying swords? She'd get stomped flat the moment she left the village.
Ning Ruan had believed them.
Ever since she'd been reborn into this world she'd grinded day and night under the village's crowd of dads, terrified she'd get whacked the second she stepped outside.
But now that she'd actually left the village...
She finally knew just how badly she'd been scammed!
She drew a deep breath.
Behind her, several people were staring at her the way you'd stare at an idiot. Unbothered, the girl in the green robe tightened the sword casket that covered nearly the whole of her back.
She strode up, did what everyone else was doing, and set her right hand on the towering stone pillar in front of her.
Today.
It was the last day of the recruitment assembly for the Crimson Heaven Sect, one of the seven great sects of Qingyun Province.
The elder running the tests wasn't expecting much from anyone who showed up today.
Anyone with real talent wouldn't have left it to the last day to get tested.
So when the pillar erupted in a blinding beam of pure light, his eyes went wide anyway:
"Bone age fifteen, light... light-element Third Realm spirit master, affinity nine... ninety-six?"
Ning Ruan let go and fixed the elder with a clear, calm gaze.
The elder finally snapped out of it and handed over a plain jade token, suddenly all warmth:
"This is your test token. Take it to the receiving platform up ahead and you'll be guided into the Thousand-Step Stairs.
The Thousand-Step Stairs have nine hundred and ninety-nine steps in all. The higher your cultivation, the greater the resistance.
If you really can't hold on, sit down where you are and steady your breathing. Don't push it.
For a light-element spirit master, reaching the hundred and fiftieth step counts as passing the entrance test."
Ning Ruan nodded. She didn't bother asking why something called the Thousand-Step Stairs had only nine hundred and ninety-nine steps... Right now she just needed to get up the thing and get admission over with.
She might even make it in time for lunch at the Crimson Heaven Sect.
Yes. She wasn't joining the Crimson Heaven Sect because of how badass it was.
It was because this sect had Xun rabbits.
She liked eating those.
"Tsk, tsk. It's rare to see someone this eager for the Thousand-Step Stairs... Such a shame she's a light-element spirit master..."
The testing elder watched the green-robed girl turn and leave without a word, stroking his beard with a sigh.
Then his eyes drifted to the waist-high black sword casket on her back, and his expression turned odd:
"...Come to think of it, what's a little light-element girl doing with a sword casket?"
He wasn't the only one who found a light-element spirit master with a sword casket absurd.
But just then.
A startled shout pulled everyone's attention away: "Look! Crimson Heaven Sect direct disciples, flying on their swords!"
Flying on a sword was a sword cultivator's privilege.
And only sword cultivators above the Third Realm could manage it.
Anyone else, without a flying artifact, needed to be Fourth Realm at the very least to fly on their own, and it burned through spiritual energy.
"White robes, red sashes. They really are direct disciples."
"Eh? They look like they're coming this way."
"They are. Looking for someone, maybe?"
"..."
The group dropping out of the sky was indeed looking for someone.
And when a thread of dark light landed square on top of Ning Ruan's head, she was fairly sure they were here for her.
"It's her! The Spirit-Lock Compass never finds the wrong person... It's her!"
There were four of them.
Three men, one woman.
The speaker was the girl the three sword cultivators had ringed protectively in the middle.
Her voice was thick with tears and her eyes were red, full of rage and hate.
She pointed her sword at Ning Ruan, who'd been about to step onto the receiving platform for the Thousand-Step Stairs. "You're the one who killed my mother and crippled my father's dantian, aren't you?"
"Wasn't me," Ning Ruan said, calm and in no hurry at all.
The disciples waiting nearby for the platform quietly shuffled back.
Clearly settling in to watch the drama.
"You're lying! The Spirit-Lock Compass never gets the wrong person. You killed my mother!"
The girl wept, a pitiful sight, her small frame shaking hard with grief and rage.
"Oh." Ning Ruan pressed her lips together and nodded as perfunctorily as a person can nod. "Then I guess it was me."
Nobody had expected her to just admit it, and that casually.
The girl's teary eyes actually went blank for a second before the hate came flooding back. "How could you... My parents had no quarrel with you, none. How could you..."
"Little Sister, why waste words on her? She killed someone. We take her in, and that's that."
"Third Senior Brother's right. A vicious piece of work like her shouldn't even be alive, and she wanted to join our Crimson Heaven Sect? What a joke."
"Heh... Some people don't know when to die. Her walking right up to our door saves us the trouble. For every tear our Little Sister sheds, I put another hole in her."
"..."
As the girl's hoarse, grieving voice trailed off, the three armed men beside her looked up one after another and stared Ning Ruan down.
The commotion under the platform was hard to miss.
Even the queues for testing off in the distance started drifting over.
Several testing elders arrived fast and landed in front of Ning Ruan.
"Nephew-disciple Li, might there be some misunderstanding here? We did hear something about what happened to the Li Clan yesterday.
But as far as I know, your father is a Fifth Realm fire-element spirit master, and your mother was a Fourth Realm light-element spirit master.
With their strength, against a Third Realm light-element girl, how could it possibly end with one dead and one crippled... This... this makes no sense at all."
It was the elder who'd tested Ning Ruan, and his plump face wore a deeply strange expression.
Li Yu heard him, but her red eyes never left Ning Ruan:
"No. It must be her... The Spirit-Lock Compass never finds the wrong person. She killed my mother!
The one who killed my mother cannot live under the same sky as me. Today I take her life with my own hands."
Watching the girl ahead of her, crying herself into a mess while shrieking about avenging her mother.
Ning Ruan raised her eyes, cool as anything. "Surnamed Li... Hm. Then there's no mistake. Your mother? I really did kill her!"
"Fifteen years ago, she killed my mother."
"Fifteen years later, I killed her."
"That's only fair, isn't it?"
Ning Ruan tilted her head a little, dead serious.
Li Yu's eyes went wide, and it took a long moment before she roared back, red-eyed:
"Nonsense! My mother was kindness itself. She saved more fellow cultivators than anyone could count. How could she ever kill anyone?
And even if she did, your mother must have deserved to die!"
"Kindness itself?" Ning Ruan gave two amazed little tuts, then crooked a finger and tapped the jade storage belt at her waist.
Out came a palm-sized mirror of jet-black stone.
With a faint smile, she fed spiritual energy into it:
"Oh, your mother was kindness itself, all right. Stole another woman's dao companion, then decided a pregnant woman needed hunting down and wiping out.
Her and your father. Trash and a dog, a match made in heaven."
...
Ning Ruan figured the little Li girl across from her, her dear "little sister" by another mother, definitely had something seriously wrong with her.
She wanted revenge, but she didn't just attack.
She just stood there yapping on and on, like she was trying to claim the moral high ground...
Too bad. The moral high ground... she was taking that too!
The image the image-recording mirror threw up was a big one.
At the very least, the gawkers were getting a decent viewing experience.
The moment the crisp image spread across the air, the muttering below rose on all sides.
"Heavens, how many image-recording stones went into forging that mirror? It can throw an image that big?"
"Never mind big, look how sharp it is. You can even see the grass at the bottom... Wait, this footage. Is that someone running for their life?"
"Could the image-recording stone have been tampered with?
When the elder mentioned the Li Clan just now, it reminded me. Didn't something happen to the Li Clan's Second Master and Madam Qingwu yesterday on the way back to Shengjing?
If it's really them, how could Madam Qingwu possibly kill an innocent?"
"Footage from an image-recording stone is always the truth. Nobody can tamper with it.
But Madam Qingwu and Second Master Li were the most devoted dao companions there were. Them, murder some pregnant woman? I don't buy it. Unless the woman was some vicious demonic cultivator to begin with."
"..."