Water dripped in the darkness. No light. No voice. Only the hollow sound of drops falling into an unseen pool.
Krogh Hanz woke in a grotto chamber that had forgotten the world. Beside him lay a rusted sword, its blade eaten away by centuries. Bronze lamps jutted from the stone walls, their weak flames throwing shadows across murals whose colors had somehow survived—vivid reds and golds that seemed to breathe in the flickering light.
The cold pressed against him as he opened his eyes and rose from his bed of ice.
White robes hung from his shoulders, layered and pale as winter mist. They fell in clean lines around a frame that seemed almost too delicate for the weight of what he'd endured.
His face stopped the breath in your throat. Beautiful in a way that made you uneasy—the kind of beauty carved into jade by hands that knew their craft too well. Dark brows like brushstrokes. A straight nose. Lips the color of peach blossoms just before they open.
His skin drank what little light the lamps gave, turning it into something luminous. Porcelain, but alive. And his eyes—dark emerald pools framed by lashes that cast their own shadows—held something ancient in their depths.
He stared at the rusted sword for a long time. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet. "Don't just crow, go Krogh. Stare at the abyss long enough..." He sighed. "And it swallows you whole."
The tunnel narrowed, then opened.
Darkness thinned from ink to the grey of old linen. A scent hit him—sharp as struck flint, snow and something clean and hollow beneath it.
His numb fingers found the exit's rough arch, stone torn by some ancient violence, and he pushed through a curtain of ice-rimed roots.
The world didn't return as sight. It came as feeling—a crystalline cold that scoured his lungs, nothing like the cave's dead air. Krogh raised his hand against light that was everywhere and nowhere at once.
When his eyes adjusted, he couldn't breathe.
He stood on a shelf of rock, the mountain's shoulder. Below him stretched a kingdom of white silence. Rolling hills like the backs of dead giants lay buried under snow so deep and unbroken it seemed carved from a single piece. The sky hung low, hammered iron, draining all color except the blue shadows pooling in the valleys.
The beauty wasn't gentle. It was severe, magnificent in its indifference. Snow-dusted pines stood in perfect isolation on distant slopes, dark stitches in white fabric. The wind stirred occasionally, lifting veils of powder that danced and settled.
The cold was alive. It needled his skin, whispered promises of sleep. It made the air brittle and strange. Yet shivering in his white robes, Krogh felt something fierce rise in his chest. After the suffocating dark, this frozen vastness sang. Terrible. Exquisite. Now.
He looked at his hands and laughed—bitter and sharp.
"Countless years of cultivation. Scattered to the mountains and clouds."
The words triggered coughing that tore through the silence, wrong in this place. When it passed, he lifted his head toward the peaks visible through shifting white—the Mother Peak of Tidal Severance, vast and terrible, dwarfing the Child Peak where he stood.
His eyes held too much at once.
Longing.
Confusion.
Bitterness.
And beneath it all, surprising even himself—fear.
Vermithys.
Home.
His home.
But...
The wind rose, fierce and sudden. His hair whipped behind him. He squinted against it. Snow gathered on his lashes.
Cold memories crashed over him with the storm. Past lives. Other faces. Ju-On.
They poured into him like a nightmare he couldn't wake from.
He was home.
So... when was now?
The cold sank deeper. Through skin. Through bone. Freezing something in his chest that had nothing to do with temperature.
Krogh Hanz.
His first life—no, this life—he'd been the Sword Saint of Vermithys. Dao Lord Emperor Stage. Absolute pinnacle. Even those They-Above-All, ruler of the entire world and a full realm beyond him, refused to face him blade to blade.
He was the Sword King of Frigid Sanctum. One of the five gods' residences.
Then came that heaven-defying opportunity. The secret ascension no mortal had ever achieved. His hunger for the Dao made him hide it, take it for himself alone. He'd told Vermithys he was entering seclusion at Tidal Severance Peak.
Five hundred years, he'd said.
But now...
Now it felt like thousands.
He could still see it. Taste it. The ascension had worked—he'd reached the God's Heaven. Only to find horror waiting. Not heaven. A demonic world. A cultivation sect that ruled entire nebulae, drunk on malice and power beyond reason.
A hundred years he'd spent there, searching for a way past the Dao Lord Emperor limit. He'd failed. Chose death before his time ran out. Left his insights to descendants he'd never know.
A thousand years passed.
Then he was born again. His parents named him Krogh Hanz.
Again.
He awakened the same sword genius. Became the most talented cultivator in that demonic heaven world.
Another heaven-blessed opportunity. Another key to Dao Lord Emperor—this time through the most legendary path in that realm. The strongest Dao Pillar in all the God's Heaven.
But the Dao demanded its price. An undefeatable malice rose to contest his right to ascend.
His first life's memories came flooding back before that final clash. He won. Killed the evil thing from the Malice Pit. But shattered his chance at the Cosmic Dao Pillar in the process.
He chose death as his body broke apart.
Failed.
Twice.
How could the invincible Sword Saint fail... twice...
He smirked at the thought.
Nonsense.
A God's Heaven ruled by demonic cultivators? Absurd.
Reborn twice? Ridiculous.
Ju-On, a thing from the malice itself? Nonsense.
A dream.
Had to be a dream.
The details were already slipping away, fading like nightmare-images in morning light. He'd just woken from a long, terrible sleep. The memories flooding him—they were fragments of delirium. That's all.
Yes. Just a nightmare.
He'd told Vermithys he would enter seclusion for five hundred years. He'd simply... fallen asleep too long.
But something was wrong.
His cultivation was gone. That vast ocean of spirit essence he'd spent a lifetime accumulating—vanished. Dispersed like it had never existed.
Yet his understanding had deepened impossibly. His cultivation insights hovered just beneath the threshold he'd sought for decades. And his body—he looked at his hands again—young. Almost adolescent. As if the tempering had burned away everything worldly, every impurity, leaving only this.
A body returned to its fundamental state.
The body of his youth.
But what good was understanding of Great Dao without cultivation power? He might as well be a cripple mortal holding a sword he couldn't lift.
He sensed the damage in his body. Twenty years. That's how long it would take to repair what had broken in his cultivation.
Twenty years.
He started down the cliff face. The mountain hadn't changed—every stone step, every vista exactly as it had been a thousand years ago.
But the mortal world below? That would be different. Mountains endured. People didn't. The secular realm with its politics and passions would have churned through countless transformations while he slept. He had no idea what era awaited him.
As he descended, something shifted inside him. His dantian—that hollow vessel at his core—was filling again. Slowly. A trickle into a dried seabed. Pathetic, really. Like throwing a cup of water at a wildfire.
But rivers flowed to the sea. Oceans would be filled one day. Eventually.
He slowed his pace. Let his mind wander.
They said the world was a chess board, all beings merely pieces. But human affairs were infinitely more complex than chess. Even brilliant minds could only glimpse the broadest patterns of fate.
His footsteps grew slower.
Then stopped.
Beyond the protective formation he'd set around Tidal Severance Child Peak thousand years ago, he heard voices. The sound interrupted his thoughts, sparked an irritation he hadn't felt in countless centuries.
Through the trees, half-hidden in dappled shadow—
He saw her.
She stood where light surrendered to forest, and the sight of her stopped his breath.
Not because she was beautiful, though she was. Beauty was common enough among cultivators. This was something else. Something that made the world around her seem like a painting she'd walked out of.
Her gauze dress were dark whitish. Her curve silhouette drank the pine shadows. The white caught the dying sun and held it, making her glow like something not quite of this world. Wild jasmine and late-blooming wisteria cast moving patterns across her form, the forest painting her into existence with each passing moment.
A breeze wandered through. Her dark gauze dress rippled like ink in water. A few dark strands lifted from her neck.
Something clenched in Krogh's chest. His breath hitched. His body trembled—a string plucked deep inside him, one he'd forgotten existed.
He knew her.
Not her face, which was in profile and softened by distance. Not her name. But he knew her. The certainty was absolute and terrifying.
He couldn't remember why.
"Five hundred years have passed, and yet Fairy Hanzwart still cannot forget?"
A man's voice shattered his concentration. Krogh's eyes found him—middle-aged, lean, wearing black and white Daoist robes. He stood opposite the woman, his tone carrying that particular smugness of those who think they understand others' pain.
"These past days I've built my dwelling at the mountain's base. I've seen Fairy soaring up on your sword, circling outside Tidal Severance Peak like a loyal bird. Such devotion..." The man smiled. "Truly admirable."
Fairy Hanzwart…?
Drip.
The name fell into his mind like cold water into a dark pool. A single drop spreading ripples through still darkness.
Fragments of dream pierced again.
The nightmare-dream surged back drowning him like a chill tide.
A wraith of blind little girl calling him Shifu.
His last sword apostle. The one he'd placed everything into.
Yunny Hanzwart.
But… that child had been small. Broken. And blind.
This woman turned her head slightly, and he saw her eyes.
They weren't just beautiful. They held a universe in their stillness—not simply a color, though the shade was impossible, twilight caught between storm-grey and deep violet. They were vast. Fathomless. The kind of eyes that didn't reflect light so much as absorb it, draw it inward to some infinite depth.
Her lashes were a silken fringe so dense and dark they cast shadows across the high curve of her cheekbones. Painterly shadows that moved when she blinked, when she breathed.
Looking into those eyes felt like vertigo. Like standing at a cliff's edge and feeling the pull of the drop.
This couldn't be her.
The blind girl couldn't have eyes like that.
Could she?
He heard the lady's voice, frigid as winter ice: "How the Sword School conducts itself is none of your Yin-Yang Pavilion's concern."
The man responded with a cold, mocking laugh. "Fairy Hanzwart truly lives up to her reputation as the number one sword immortal fairy of the Hydal Dynasty. In this current age, female cultivators who dare to walk the world with a sword on their backs have become so rare they can be counted on one hand."
The lady replied with measured coldness: "I hope you can still speak so confidently ten years from now."
The man broke into unrestrained laughter. "Ten years? Do you truly believe that the first apostle of Sword Saint will ever emerge from seclusion? Don't deceive yourself. The entire world knows by now that old man were dead long ago in that seclusion cultivation. Even the legendary Krogh Hanz himself was dea—"
SLASH!
Before he could finish his sentence, a brilliant sword light illuminated the entire mountain woods daped under snow. In less than an instant, the tip of the beuaty's long sword had crossed the distance between them and now pressed against the man's throat with deadly precision.
She spoke with icy calm: "Slander my Shifu again, I will kill you."
Drip.
Surprisingly, the man showed no fear whatsoever. He replied with infuriating nonchalance: "Yunny Hanzwart, haa, Yunny Hanzwart... though my cultivation realm falls far short of yours, others may not know the truth, but I certainly do. Right now, you are nothing more than—"
Drip.
Yunny... Hanzwart... Huh…?
Suddenly, the male cultivator from the Yin-Yang Pavilion's expression turned sharp and severe. His head whipped toward the mountain forest, his gaze blazing like lightning. "Who's there?!"
Krogh's body trembled slightly. Having only just awaken from seclusion, he had not yet regained proficiency in using Martial Techniques to conceal his presence and spiritual aura. He had been discovered.
The beauty's gaze also turned toward his hiding place.
Left with no choice, Krogh slowly emerged from the concealment of the trees. Looking at the two figures before him, he considered his options for a moment before bowing respectfully with cupped fists: "This humble mortal greets the two immortal masters."
Yunny studied him as he raised his head, her delicate brows drawing together slightly in confusion, showing her beauty. "Which immortal martial sect do you belong to?" she inquired.
Krogh looked at his last apostle, taking in how she had transformed. She had become so breathtakingly beautiful—her refined and elegant features, her dark hair piled high and secured with a simple wooden hairpin, her immaculate dark white sword gauze dress that wrapped around her proud and upright figure. She seemed less like a beautiful female cultivator and more like a sword standing in the forest, so striking that all the surrounding natural scenery had been robbed of its brilliance in her presence.
He felt genuinely gratified. His youngest apostle had not only blossomed into even greater beauty after reborn in Vermithys but had also crossed that crucial threshold of the sword path and enter the Dao lord Emperor Stage.
What a pity that at this moment, he could not reveal his true identity to her.
Huh…? Isn't that a dream…?
Meeting Yunny's questioning gaze, Krogh replied with perfect calm: "I have no sect or school. I am merely a concubine-born son of the Rum Clan of the Hydral Dynasty. My name is Rayzlin Rum."
Thousand years ago, in anticipation of various potential disasters, Krogh had already planted numerous contingency measures and backup identities. This particular persona had been carefully designed and documented even before his seclusion began.
From this moment forward, the legendary figure who had once shaken the world—Krogh Hanz—was dead. In his place lived only the white-robed youth named Rayzlin Rum.
Yunny studied him intently, then suddenly asked: "Would you be willing to follow me in cultivation world, to pursue the greatness of the sword path?"
Rayzlin felt a jolt of surprise in his heart. Was his Frigid Sanctum really so casual about accepting disciples? Just like that?
At that moment, the middle-aged man from the Yin-Yang Pavilion released a string of sharp, mocking laughter. "How unexpected! The great Sword Beauty Fairy Hanzwart has fallen so low that she has become... so desperate and undiscriminating in her choices! Hahaha! Has your Sword School truly fallen to such depths that you cannot recruit anyone anymore? You would take in a random stranger you met by the roadside after a single glance?"
Yunny completely ignored his cold ridicule and mockery. She asked again, her voice softer but no less earnest: "Are you willing?"
The man's lips curled into a sneer as he suddenly interjected: "Young man, don't be hasty in your answer. I am Jeogh Jetus, the Fifth Elder of the Yin-Yang Pavilion. Though my personal strength may not be extraordinary, my position within the Holy Pavilion is certainly distinguished. Would you perhaps be willing to accompany me to cultivate at the Yin-Yang Pavilion instead?"
Yunny's expression turned severe, her gaze sharp as a blade. The middle age man who had identified himself as Jeogh simply laughed. "What's wrong, Fairy Hanzwart? Displeased? Well, I, Jeogh Jetus, am deliberately competing with you for this recruit."
Jeogh continued his pitch with obvious satisfaction: "Young man, I'm sure you're aware of the Yin-Yang Pavilion's status within the Hydral Imperial Dynasty? Meanwhile, this Fairy Hanzwart's Sword School of Frigid Sanctum has long since fallen into decline, unable to support itself. Regardless of your natural talent or spiritual roots, entering the Sword School would be an extremely poor choice for your future."
Rayzlin very much wanted to inform him that he genuinely had no idea about the world's situation right now. He had been sealed away for many centuries, after all.
Yunny's voice turned ice-cold with barely restrained fury: "Jeogh Jetus, do you truly believe I won't dare to kill you?"
Jeogh stretched out his neck with deliberate provocation, his laughter cold and mocking, his posture clearly saying "go ahead and try." In his heart, he was certain that no young person in the entire Hydral Dynasty could possibly refuse the temptation of becoming a disciple of the Yin-Yang Pavilion. Moreover, this sort of empty-headed pretty boy from a concubine lineage of a mortal kingdom would naturally crave power above all else. The fact that this young man hadn't immediately agreed was likely just an attempt to save some face for this so-called number one female sword cultivator of the entire dynasty. Regardless of this so called Rum guy's actual qualifications, Jeogh was determined not to let Yunny recruit him. He was deliberately and openly suppressing her Sword School.
Yunny sheathed her sword and turned to face Rayzlin. Even her own confidence seemed to waver. She released a barely audible sigh of resignation. Just as she was preparing to summon her sword and depart, the young man suddenly looked directly at her and spoke slowly and clearly: "I'll go with you."
Yunny's graceful body trembled with shock as she stared at him in utter disbelief.
Jeogh's eyes widened even further. He looked at Rayzlin with the expression one might reserve for a madman or an imbecile, as though witnessing the most incomprehensible thing in the entire world. His face contorted with rage, and he actually couldn't help but laugh—a sound of pure incredulity. "Do you have any idea what you're giving up?"
He added with another cold, contemptuous laugh: "A truly ignorant backwater brat! The Sword School is a dead-end path. This is true today, and it will still be true ten years from now. You refuse the great opportunities of the Dao that lie before you, choosing instead to seek your own perish. Fine! I won't stop you. But the next time we meet, I will personally flay the skin from your bones!"
Rayzlin paid him no attention whatsoever. He slowly walked to Yunny's side. Due to his current youthful body's shorter stature, he now only reached her shoulder. The little girl wraith he had once doted upon and frequently patted on the head was now actually taller than him. The realization made him feel profoundly uncomfortable in a way he couldn't quite articulate.
The young man looked up at the Sword Beauty's face and said simply: "Take me to the Sword School."
——
The solar was called Vermithys. The planet beneath their feet was Hydral, divided into four great powers that had shaped its history for millennia.
To the east sprawled the Hydral Dynasty, a continental empire of mortal lands where cultivation sects and imperial politics intertwined in endless complexity. Ninety thousand miles south lay the City Sunless, ringed by the vast Crescent Moon Sea—home to the Moon Adore elves, whose pale towers rose from waters that never fully saw daylight. The Northern Domain had fractured long ago into warring territories claimed by three great demon clans, their battles carving scars into the frozen wastes. And above all the planets in the solar of Vermithys, close to the sun, floated the Infinite Insurmountable Lands, transcending the mortal realm entirely, where those who had surpassed the Dao Lord Emperor Stage gathered in their impossible cities of cloud and stone.
The Sword School of Frigid Sanctum stood at the southern edge of what was once the Balfton continent, now absorbed into the Hydral Dynasty's sprawling borders. It was built upon Blizzard Peak, a mountain that overlooked the Crescent Moon Sea, where the roar of endless waves had echoed for countless ages. The Sword Saint Krogh Hanz had founded it single-handedly in an era now fading into legend—one of the six great sects of the entire planet, though its fortunes had clearly dimmed since those glory days.
Five hundred years ago, when a catastrophic attack by evil demon gods had shattered the Balfton Dynasty completely, the genius sword master Yunny Hanzwart had refounded the abandoned Sword School from its ruins, breathing new life into old stones.
During their sword flight, Yunny spoke little. She explained the basic structure of the Sword School in clipped sentences, outlined matters Rayzlin would need to know—practical things, simple instructions. Her voice carried over the howling wind with cultivated clarity, but she offered nothing more than necessary. The stronghold of Frigid Sanctum was vast when seen from above, its buildings spreading across multiple peaks like a city built for giants. Yet up close, passing through its gates and courtyards, one could only feel the pervasive emptiness. Too many halls stood silent. Too many training grounds lay unused.
The bone-chilling wind cut through them relentlessly as they flew. Yunny had already granted him protective wards—multiple layers of them, more than most cultivation masters would bother with for a new student—but Rayzlin's weakened body still suffered. The cold invaded through the gaps in spiritual defense, needling his skin, making his fingers numb. He endured it in silence.
A memory surfaced unbidden. He had once brought this youngest apostle on sword flights exactly like this. But he hadn't been nearly as thoughtful as Yunny was now. His careless flying had left that stubborn wraith of a girl half-frozen, her small body shaking with cold she refused to acknowledge. She'd never complained. Not once. Just held on tighter, her blind eyes streaming tears from the wind.
The corners of his mouth lifted slightly, remembering.
Brilliant sword light descended toward a vast square. Before them stood a manor house built from blue ice-iron, its walls gleaming with an otherworldly sheen that seemed to hold captured starlight. Yunny sheathed her sword with the unconscious grace of someone who'd performed the motion ten thousand times.
Rayzlin lifted his head slowly, gaze traveling upward to the two large characters carved in cold jade above the entrance. They shone with icy blue light: "Listen Sword."
The manor radiated a clear, pristine beauty that illuminated everything around it. Not warmth—beauty. The kind that made you catch your breath and feel small. Yunny led him toward the main hall's entrance, and above the threshold, sword qi crisscrossed the air in intricate, dangerous patterns. Cold light flashed and danced between invisible blades. Any newly emerged cultivator witnessing such fierce, severe sword qi would be struck with awe, their heart racing with fascination and fear.
Rayzlin remained extraordinarily calm. His expression revealed nothing.
The peerlessly beautiful woman who could rightfully claim the title of greatest sword cultivator on the entire planet turned to face him. She spoke slowly, each word deliberate. "I don't know why you chose to follow me to learn the sword. Perhaps you're genuinely devoted to the Dao of the Sword Path. Perhaps this is just a momentary impulse, born from youth and insufficient thought." Her eyes held his, searching. "But regardless of your reasons, once you step through this threshold with me, you become my apostle. Your life will be bound to the sword. Your existence and the sword becoming one thing, inseparable." She paused. "Do you understand?"
Rayzlin looked at her quietly.
For a moment, he hesitated.
The stunning woman released a soft sigh. She reached out and gently patted his shoulder—a gesture almost maternal, incongruous with her ethereal beauty. "Demanding you make such a decision so quickly was unfair. That's my fault, not yours. If you want to reconsider, I'll escort you down the mountain myself." Her voice softened. "There's no shame in it."
Rayzlin shook his head quickly. "No... it's not that."
Yunny's elegant eyebrows drew together in confusion, beautiful even in perplexity. She waited, silent, for him to continue.
Being stared at so intently by such a beauty made something squirm in Rayzlin's chest. Heat crept up his neck. He looked away, scratching his head, suddenly unable to meet those impossibly deep eyes.
"I'm willing to pursue the sword path," he said, and his voice came out slightly strangled, almost stammering. "But... could I possibly... not call you Shifu?"
PSA: Hey there, fellow dao!
First off, a huge, heartfelt thank you for spending time with this chapter. It truly means the world to me that you're here on this journey.
Now, lean in a little… because I've got some wild news! I'm revving up to launch a crazy, high-flying xianxia-themed side story straight into the main plot. Imagine this: graceful, fierce, and devastatingly attractive sword masters clashing in breathtaking sword battles… and yes, promise—it'll be just like our NTRS journey, packed with tons of intimate, steamy FUCK scenes. 😉
But before I dive headfirst into writing this storm of clash and passion… I'd love to hear your thoughts!
What did you feel about this first chapter?
And the big question: Are you willing to read a harem-based NTR story in this style?
Your opinion really helps shape where this goes. So don't be shy—let me know what you love, what you're curious about, or what makes you raise an eyebrow!
YoungPeasant