Xie Yingying stood before the jade pendant, a piece of ancient celestial jade recovered from the ruins of her sealed mansion. Her fingers idly traced the smooth, cool curves of the carved lotus, a familiar motion that usually brought her focus. A faint, persistent hum of spiritual energy pulsed just beneath its surface, a steady rhythm against her skin, but her thoughts were far away from the artifact's profound age or its latent power. They had turned, instead, to Su Min, the woman who had, against all odds and every expectation, transcended the role of temporary ally to become a constant, unsettling presence in her newly chaotic life.
She had never planned on digging into Su Min's past. Her initial strategy, after her millennia long sleep, was one of clinical efficiency. The alliance was meant to be simple, a temporary and purely transactional arrangement, a bridge to be crossed and then burned once she regained her footing. It was not meant to invite complication, emotional or otherwise. She didn't need complications. She needed power and stability.
After all, their first meeting had been anything but friendly.
After her forced awakening, her crystalline seal shattered by the foolish Demon Crown Prince in his crude, mistaken attempt to free her, Xie Yingying had shown the world exactly why she had been sealed in the first place. The trespassers who had confused her sect's sanctuary for a mere secret realm were expelled like insects, their ambitions crushed beneath her indifferent, overwhelming power. She had personally ended the prince with her own hands, her eyes cold and empty, before stepping out into a world that had long forgotten her name, the dust of her shattered prison settling around her like snow.
And outside the shattered ruins of her mansion, she saw her.
Su Min.
There wasn't any killing intent in that first clash, only a coiled tension, a mutual curiosity that was sharp, immediate, and an unspoken, intense probing of each other's limits. Fire and wind collided in bursts of crimson and emerald light, a vortex of spiritual energy that tore up the earth beneath their feet and sent stones skittering into the abyss. Su Min's dual element sword arts, blending the aggressive nature of fire with the resilient growth of wood, were unmistakable. They were disciplined and deadly, a style refined not in the safe lecture halls of a sect, but honed blade by blade in the wild, merciless lands, where every fight was a lesson in survival or death, and every mistake was your last.
Then, the test, delivered without words, the Foundation Establishment Pill.
The pristine pill, gleaming untouched amid the mansion's wreckage, was a treasure capable of launching a cultivator past the mortal limits, an object of desperate desire for most. Su Min had glanced at it, her eyes lingering for only a heartbeat, and then turned away without a second look, her attention already focused entirely on the power dynamics between them, on Xie Yingying herself. Only a genuine master alchemist, someone with a power source and knowledge far beyond the pursuit of such base treasures, would treat it with such casual, genuine indifference.
It was a small thing, that single moment of disregard. But for Xie Yingying, that single gesture spoke louder than any boast or promise ever could. It was a quiet declaration of a different, unsettling kind of character, one that didn't fit the mold of a typical wandering cultivator.
She had tested the waters with a simple request for a pill. Su Min agreed, asking only for her help against a Golden Core demon beast terrorizing a nearby valley. A fair trade. Clear terms. No promises extended beyond that single task. It was exactly the kind of agreement Xie Yingying preferred, emotionless and defined, with a clear beginning and a clear end.
Three months passed in quiet cooperation. No oaths were sworn. No grand declarations of trust were made between them. They moved around each other with a careful, practiced distance. But curiosity took root all the same, a tiny, annoying seed that began to sprout in the quiet moments between tasks, in the shared silence over a campfire, in the way Su Min never asked for more than was agreed.
Xie Yingying wasn't someone prone to idle fascination. Her past as the Holy Maiden of the Heavenly Yin Sect had taught her to see past the masks people wore, to listen not to their words, but to the silence that lay between them, where their true intentions often hid.
And something about Su Min didn't line up. She had strength, yes. And control, a deep and formidable well of it. But she lacked the arrogance that usually accompanied such power. She didn't posture. She didn't preach. Even when she held a clear advantage, she never pressed it. She offered terms instead of demanding dominance, a quiet negotiation instead of a loud command. That, in itself, was highly suspicious. It went against the very nature of cultivation power, which was to dominate and consume.
So, Xie Yingying began to dig. Not openly, that would've been a sign of weakness, of investment. It was more of a slow, meticulous gathering of awareness, a collection of puzzle pieces she told herself she was assembling for strategic purposes only.
Fragments of information came slowly, pieced together from jade slips looted from dead cultivators and rumors whispered in backwater villages by people who didn't know they were being listened to. One persistent thread led south, to the southern frontier.
It was a land not of dust and drought, but of dense, miasma choked forests, where the air tasted heavy and metallic, and venom laced undergrowth snatched at the unwary. The mountains were steep and treacherous, the rivers muddy and swift, carving deep gorges through the untamed jungle. The Great Wei's reach barely brushed these lands, they were too wild, too inconvenient. Local Tusi chieftains ruled like petty kings from their wooden forts. It was the perfect place for someone who didn't want to be found, a place to disappear completely.
And somewhere in those mist veiled mountain ranges, Su Min had built a life. Not among the villages, but deep in the untamed mountains, where the trails faded away and powerful spirit beasts roamed. Her name was known in whispers, carried from hut to hut along footworn paths. She was known as a healer.
She wasn't the kind who demanded jade or gold. She set her own simple rules, no house calls, bring the patient to her. No token, no treatment, unless she happened to be in a particularly generous mood. Those tokens were simple bamboo slats, marked only with subtle grain patterns that, when held under moonlight, would reveal her unique spiritual seal. A lone, young woman with no sect name and no family crest, doing all of that for almost ten years, surviving and helping others survive.
Xie Yingying didn't want to believe it. Cultivators acted out of self interest, every kindness had a price, every act of mercy, a hidden angle. But the stories were consistent, and the people remembered her not with blind devotion, but with a kind of reverent awe, the way one remembers a force of nature that chose to be gentle, a sudden ray of sun through a perpetual canopy.
Then came the records from Yongzhou.
The records were scattered and vague, like ashes after a great fire. A monster had risen from the desert, a Qi devouring beast on the brink of Foundation Establishment. But someone held the line. Not an army. Just two people, Su Min and the Radiant Monk, Hui Ming. It was then that Xie Yingying began to focus on the family name, "Su." It was a key, and she had just found the lock.
She dug deeper, into the older, dustier histories of the Su clan. They had once been a noble family, rising to prominence under their patriarch, Su Bosheng, who served as the Minister of Rites. Because of his high rank, the clan's seat was established in Yu City, a place of influence and power near the heart of the dynasty. Yet their fortunes were destroyed during Prince Yong's rebellion years ago. Branded as traitors by the Emperor, they were purged. Every branch, every bloodline, was systematically erased from the official records and from the world itself.
But one girl had survived. Hunted across provinces. Chased to the very edge of the empire, into the southern wilds where few dared to follow.
Su Min.
The pieces fell into place like frost settling on a mirror, cold and clear. Her desperate flight. Her years of obscurity. Her formidable strength, hidden behind a wall of silence. It all made a terrible, brutal sense. The puzzle was solved, and the picture it revealed was one of profound loss and relentless survival.
Xie Yingying exhaled, a quiet and slow release of breath that did little to ease the sudden, unfamiliar tightness in her chest.
She should've felt nothing. Sympathy was a dangerous luxury in their world. It made your blade hesitate in a crucial moment, and hesitation was a death sentence. And yet, a feeling she couldn't name stirred within her, restless and unwelcome, a prickle of something that felt too much like understanding.
"Even a beast fights back when it's cornered," she murmured to the empty room, her fingers tightening imperceptibly on the fine silk of her sleeve.
But Su Min hadn't become a vengeful ghost, consumed by hatred for the world that wronged her. She hadn't chased power solely to burn her enemies to ash. Instead, she had become a healer, a quiet, steadfast presence in the unforgiving wilderness.
That was the part Xie Yingying couldn't reconcile. It defied all the logic she had lived by for centuries. It made no strategic sense.
Why?
Why hide her immense strength and tend to the sick and the weak?
And then, in a quiet moment of clarity that felt like a splash of cold water, she understood.
The Nanming Lihuo, the heavenly flame, had accepted her. Not for her raw power alone, but for the unshakeable quality of her resolve. A true heavenly flame didn't choose the strongest host. It chose the one whose intent wouldn't falter when tested by fire, whose core purpose was as steady and enduring as the flame itself. Su Min's intent was steady. It was a will not just to survive, but to persist on her own terms, to create a pocket of order and compassion in a world of chaos, to defy her fate not with destruction, but with creation.
It burned with a fierce, unyielding light that nothing, not even the entire weight of the empire, could extinguish.
The room around her was quiet again, save for the low, consistent bubbling of alchemical flames echoing from the pill furnace in the next chamber. The scent of refined herbs drifted through the open doorway, bitter and sharp, yet tinged with the clean, purifying essence of pure fire.
Xie Yingying stirred, her feet moving before she had fully formed the thought. She stepped into the threshold, leaning against the wooden frame to watch, her presence silent.
Su Min was seated before the furnace, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, manipulating the flames with an unexpectedly leisurely precision. One hand slowly rotated, directing the complex, interwoven threads of qi swirling inside the bronze cauldron with the ease of long, intimate practice.
Crimson gold flames, the unmistakable sign of the Nanming Lihuo, licked hungrily at the cauldron's base. They were controlled. Perfectly stable. They weren't just a tool, but an extension of her will, a reflection of that steadfast resolve.
A memory stirred within her, an old lesson from her master, long before the seal, spoken in a voice she had almost forgotten, "You will know a person's heart best when they believe no one is watching them."
Xie Yingying's gaze softened, almost against her own will. The careful, calculating distance she always maintained, the wall she kept between herself and the world, seemed to thin for just a moment. Not much. Just enough that her next words weren't carefully calculated or weighed for advantage.
Just enough that, for the first time since she had woken up in this strange and chaotic world, she let something genuinely unguarded slip into her voice, a small, almost invisible crack in her own formidable armor.