"But you're not stone, Mo Xuan," she whispered. "I see it. You feel it, too. I know you do."
A long silence passed.
Then Mo Xuan said, "What we feel does not matter. Not now. Not with what's coming."
Jiang Xue's heart cracked like thin glass. "You do feel it."
He turned away.
"I've seen too many lives lost because I chose poorly. If I open that door, I won't be able to close it. And one day, I'll have to watch you die."
"That's not your decision to make," she said. "We all walk toward death, Mo Xuan. But for once… can't we walk together?"
He closed his eyes.
"I'm sorry."
Jiang Xue left the mountain that day.
She didn't run. She didn't rage. She simply walked—slow, steady, with the silence of someone whose heart had finally given up waiting.
She descended into the lowlands, where spring rains had begun to flood the terraced plains.
And there, in a chance meeting during an Azure Sect summit, she encountered Dai Tianxiang.
He was the opposite of Mo Xuan in every way—bold, gallant, gregarious. Where Mo Xuan was silence and stillness, Tianxiang was fire and action. He didn't ask permission to speak his mind, and he made no secret of his admiration.
Within a season, he proposed.
She didn't say yes out of love.
She said yes because she was tired.
Tired of longing for a man who had locked his heart away.
The dream shifted again.
Yin Shuang—still submerged in her mother's memories—now walked beside her father. Dai Tianxiang laughed as they stood atop the Azure Cloud Sect's cloudstep bridge, his long blue robes billowing in the wind.
"You know, I thought I'd have to duel a dozen suitors for your hand," he said, grinning. "Turns out you had none."
Jiang Xue smiled politely. "I had one. But he wasn't the dueling sort."
Tianxiang didn't press. He knew enough not to.
Despite everything, he was kind to her. Loyal. Protective. He loved Yin Shuang with pride and devotion. He gave her a home, even if he never truly reached her heart.
Jiang Xue threw herself into cultivation again. But this time, not as a student of Mo Xuan—but as a peer.
She could not match the elegance of his Celestial Eclipse Manual, but she sought to echo its principles in her own way.
She began forging a weapon—not just any blade, but one that embodied both what she had learned and what she had lost.
She called it the Peerless Sword.
Yin Shuang now stood in a vast cavern—this time fully awake.
She had risen in the middle of the night, the dream still pulsing in her spirit. Something had compelled her to travel to the old Azure Cloud Sect ruins—long since abandoned after the massacre.
There, beneath the old meditation shrine, lay a sealed chamber she had never dared to enter.
But the Peerless Sword had guided her.
And now, here she stood—in the sacred forge her mother once used. The forge lay untouched. Blackened anvil. Silent walls. And carved above the chamber's entry: What cannot be spoken, must be made.
At the center of the room, she approached the anvil.
In her hands, the Peerless Sword.
She set the blade down onto the iron slab.
The forge stirred.
Light pulsed from the sword, like breath inhaled after long dormancy. The runes along its length glowed—not with fire, but moonlight and memory. The very walls of the chamber responded, ancient arrays humming back to life. Formation lines blazed across the stone, spiraling outward.
The sword awakened, a voice bloomed inside her soul.
"If you are holding this sword," Jiang Xue said gently, "then I am gone."
Yin's breath caught.
"But you, my daughter, have grown strong enough to wield not just my weapon, but my path."
The light from the Peerless Sword surged. Runes danced into the air above the blade—spiraling cultivation sequences, breathing patterns, elemental cycles. Not just a technique, but a transmission.
"The Peerless Sword technique is not a mimicry of the Celestial Eclipse, but its reflection," Jiang Xue continued. "Where Mo Xuan chose stillness, I chose motion. Where he chose silence, I chose voice."
Knowledge poured into Yin Shuang's spirit—not as pages to study, but as memory encoded in soul-light. She saw stances formed in flame and shadow. She felt Qi spirals invert and stabilize within her core. She understood—not because she read, but because she remembered.
Jiang Xue's memories became hers. This surge of her mother's memories seemed to fill the gaps in the Peerless Sword techniques that she had acquired earlier through the Peerless Sword's realm.
"You do not need to be me," Jiang Xue whispered. "Walk your own line. Find your own eclipse. But if you choose this path, then walk it with clarity—not in hiding, not in fear."
Yin fell to her knees, tears sliding silently down her cheeks. The sword pulsed in her hand—no longer heavy. As if it recognized her at last.
She stood slowly.
The Peerless Sword blazed with new light.
A whisper of wind passed through the forge.
Outside, beneath the heavens, the clouds parted—revealing a moon, half in shadow, half in light.
A perfect reflection of the mother.
And the daughter who now carried her legacy.
With a sudden realisation, Yin Shuang's eyes widened. The inherited memories snapped into focus like a trap closing.
Kai didn't know. He couldn't know.
Yin's breath caught.
She staggered from the forge, eyes burning. "No…"
A wind rose suddenly through the cave—dry, cold, and sharp. The sort of wind that preceded calamity. It curled around her as though mocking the truth she now carried.
She gripped the Peerless Sword hard enough to whiten her knuckles.
"Kai…" she whispered. "Kai is in trouble, I need to let him know!"