The light inside the main chamber of the Tranquil Heart Pavilion was dim.
Heavy curtains sealed the sunlight out completely, letting through only a few thin threads of glow that fell across the edge of the bed.
Miguel and Yixuan stood side by side before it.
Neither of them spoke.
The woman lying there looked so peaceful she might simply have been asleep.
Her face resembled Yixuan’s closely enough to be startling, but years without sunlight had left it white to the point of transparency.
Her chest did not rise or fall.
Not even the faintest sound of breathing came from her.
Yixuan’s fingers, hanging at her side, curled tight without her noticing.
She only stood and watched her sister, and the sorrow she had been holding down all this time rose up past her control.
Thirteen years.
Every single day, she stood at this bedside for a long while.
Looking at that lifeless face, listening to the suffocating quiet of the room.
The helplessness worked at her like a dull blade, grinding away a little more each time.
Today, though, was different.
Yixuan drew a deep breath and forced the churning bitterness back down.
She turned, walked to the wooden rack by the head of the bed, and lifted the porcelain basin that was kept there year-round.
The water in it was changed fresh every day.
With practiced hands she soaked the towel draped over the rim, wrung it out, and came back to the bedside, wiping her sister’s cheeks and the backs of her hands with the lightest of touches.
“Sister, I brought a guest to see you today.” Yixuan kept her voice low, and it trembled a little.
The towel traveled slowly down Yijiang’s forehead, every motion so careful it was as though she feared hurting her.
“A few new restaurants opened down the mountain.
That girl Fufu won’t stop pestering me about their char siu buns.
When you wake up, let’s go try them together, all right?” She wiped and murmured, running through all these small, trivial things.
As if the woman on the bed would open her eyes the next second and scold her with a laugh.
“My little sister, such a greedy little kitten~” Miguel stood half a pace behind them, arms folded, watching the scene in silence.
Long before the two of them stepped through the door, his divine sense had already read Yijiang’s condition down to the bottom.
The result went without saying.
It was bad.
In truth, far worse than Yixuan and the rest imagined.
In Miguel’s inner vision, Yijiang’s body was intact.
The muscles hadn’t even seriously wasted away after so many years flat on her back.
But underneath that shell there was nothing at all.
An empty expanse.
No heart-soul.
No memories.
Even the most basic survival instincts of a living creature, heartbeat and breath, had stopped completely.
This was not a “vegetative state” in any medical sense.
A vegetative patient at least retained a faint metabolism.
Yijiang’s condition, put plainly, was an empty husk stripped of every driving force, one that could only end in dissolution.
Under normal circumstances, a mortal body without soul or instinct, no matter how high its cultivation had been in life, could never hold thirteen years of living vitality with no energy cycle to replenish it.
Unless something was forcibly keeping her alive.
As for what?
The answer was already clear.
Deep in Yijiang’s long-withered heart meridian, a single strand of energy lay dormant.
Impossibly faint, and yet pure to the utmost extreme.
That pale blue glow, reduced to a speck finer than a strand of hair, and still Miguel knew it at a glance.
The Power of Creation.
Thirteen years ago, in the catastrophe of the Fall of Old Eridu.
That Void Hunter-class weapon called the “Azure Empyrean Sword” had unleashed a horrifying devouring force, paying for it by draining everything its Sword Master had.
And at that very moment, Miguel had been in Eridu, spending the Power of Creation without restraint to save lives.
A small portion of that scattered, overflowing Power of Creation had been swept along by the Azure Empyrean Sword’s pull.
By pure accident, that origin force of the highest rank had jammed itself into place one second before Yijiang was drained dry, shielding the last spark of life in her flesh.
Fortune buried in the middle of disaster, then.
Miguel turned it over quietly.
The Power of Creation stood so high in rank that even a trace of it was enough to keep a mortal shell from rotting or breaking down.
It amounted to driving an unbreakable anchor into that wasteland of nothingness.
So long as the anchor in her body held, the soul and memories the Azure Empyrean Sword had swallowed could be traced back along that line, and hauling them home was only a question of time.
With that, Miguel had his course settled.
All that remained was to wait for the current Sword Master of the “Azure Empyrean Sword” to arrive with the blade itself, and he could finalize the treatment.
He drew his divine sense back, and his eyes returned to the two sisters at the bed.
Yixuan was still wiping her sister’s fingers with painstaking care, her touch gentle, chattering on about how things were going up on the mountain.
Watching this Sect Master, dignified and commanding before her disciples and unruffled before the Mayor, reduced now to a helpless little girl, Miguel felt something twist quietly in his chest.
Through the Authority of Time, he had long since seen every turn of Yixuan’s original fate line.
If he hadn’t appeared as a variable.
This white-haired woman, who looked so strong and so free of care, would have spent the rest of her life steeping in bitterness.
Her sister’s early death.
And the new Sword Master, her most beloved youngest disciple Ye Shunguang, would have walked the same road a few years later, tormented without end by the Azure Empyrean Sword until she met a fate much like Yijiang’s.
Of course, Wise and Belle, the Children of Fate, would stumble into the matter and steer the ending onto a road that wasn’t quite so cruel.
But that was still nothing more than a delay.
It would never root the thing out.
And beyond all that, Yunkui Summit faced trouble from within and without.
She had to carry the whole sect on her own, keep her disciples steady, and for the sake of New Eridu she had to stand at the front line herself and fight those lunatic Bishops of the Cult of Exaltation to the death.
Time after time she would watch the people beside her leave, and be able to do nothing about it.
An ordinary person would have been crushed long ago under that unbroken chain of despair.
But Yixuan gritted her teeth, swallowed every drop of bitterness alone, and held up the sky by herself.
This girl was strong enough that it hurt to look at her.
Fortunately, he was here now.
Those wretched tragedies had crossed his path, and that meant there was no chance whatsoever of them playing out a second time.
“Mr.
Miguel.” Yixuan set the towel back in the basin, straightened, and turned around.
She looked at Miguel, who had said nothing this whole time, and something unsteady crept into her.
Even her breathing went quieter without her meaning it to.
“My sister… can she still be saved?” She asked it carefully, the words caught between desperate hope and the fear of hearing a no.
Miguel met her eyes and smiled, ready to put her mind at rest.
And right then, a rush of hurried footsteps broke out beyond the courtyard.
An instant later, Ju Fufu’s piercing voice went off like a string of firecrackers.
“Master, Master!
We brought Junior Sister Little Guang!” “Ai-yo, Senior Sister, slow down!
Junior Sister Little Guang is frail enough as it is and you’re walking that fast!” “Junior Brother Yinhu, move it, keep up!” The bright voice cut straight through the heavy wooden door and rang back and forth inside the Tranquil Heart Pavilion, which a moment ago had been silent to the point of oppression.
Miguel and Yixuan both went still.
A second earlier Yixuan had been sunk in grief.
Now, hearing that familiar racket, the gloom on her face was replaced at once by a resigned sort of headache.
She raised a hand and rubbed at her brow.
Miguel simply laughed out loud.
He turned his head and caught Yixuan’s eye.
The weight that Yijiang’s condition had laid over the room was swept clean away by those few loud, boisterous shouts.
“Seems that having a bundle of energy around the house is a good omen sometimes,” Miguel said, grinning.
Yixuan lowered her head, a little embarrassed, and smoothed the hem of her Daoist robe.
“You must think us ridiculous.
The children are always like this.
They have no manners at all in front of you.” “Don’t say that.” Miguel waved it away.
“I think it’s fine.
If they all went around with a face like Ye Shiyuan’s, life out here in the deep mountains would be unbearably dull.” While they were still speaking, the wooden door of the main chamber was shoved open from outside.
It swung with a long, drawn-out creak.
Ju Fufu poked her fluffy head in first.
Her two yellow-and-white ears twitched, and once she had confirmed there was no sign of her Master’s temper rising, she sauntered in.
“Heh heh~ Master, Mr.
Miguel.” “We brought her here!” Ju Fufu thumped her chest, plainly angling for credit.
Behind her came Pan Yinhu, dripping with sweat, and Ye Shiyuan, who was still forcing a composed front even though his breathing had clearly gone ragged.
And at Ye Shiyuan’s side walked a girl who looked as if she had only just come of age.
She wore an oversized azure Daoist robe that made her look smaller and thinner still.
Her complexion was fair and rosy, nothing like the “sickliness” one would expect from the Sword Master of the “Azure Empyrean Sword”.
Instead she was sizing Miguel up with a pair of big red eyes, openly curious.
This was Ye Shiyuan’s blood sister, and Yunkui Summit’s current Sword Master of the Azure Empyrean Sword: Ye Shunguang.
“Master.” Ye Shunguang greeted her obediently, her voice clear and sweet.
Seeing her youngest disciple, Yixuan’s expression softened a great deal, and she beckoned.
“Little Guang, come here.
Greet Mr.
Miguel.” Ye Shunguang came forward as told and nodded to Miguel.
“Hello, Mr.
Miguel.” Miguel nodded back with a smile, his gaze traveling straight past the girl to what lay behind her.
It wasn’t Ye Shunguang herself he was studying.
It was the Void Hunter weapon locked inside the “Azure Empyrean Sword Casket” that Yixuan had forged with her own hands.
A long rectangular casket of interwoven black and white, its surface engraved with countless Yunkui Summit spell patterns.
Their purpose was obvious enough: to suppress what was sealed inside.
Yet to Miguel’s perception, all those patterns did was settle the thing in there a little.
They still couldn’t stop it from eroding its Sword Master.
____ 👻🔥Walnut-chan — Patre*n🔥👻 🔥 New history: Zenless Zone Zero: