(Flashback:Lan Xue's memory — years before Wang Lin's execution)
The sect gardens at dusk were quiet.
Not empty. Just forgotten.
A place where outer disciples rarely tread, and inner disciples had long outgrown. But Lan Xue came here often. To breathe. To feel the wind. To listen to silence.
And one day, he was there.
Wang Lin.
Younger. Not yet feared. Not yet famous.
Just… intense. Focused. Reading a scroll beneath the old spiritwood tree like the world didn't deserve his attention.
Lan Xue had walked past him twice that week. Never spoke. Never dared.
Until that day.
Until the petals began to fall.
Until the spirit tree dropped a snow-colored blossom directly onto Wang Lin's shoulder.
And he looked up.
Not annoyed.
Not cold.
Just aware.
"You're following me," he said, voice like distant thunder wrapped in velvet.
Lan Xue's cheeks burned. She bowed. "I didn't mean to—"
"You're too quiet to be accidental," he said, brushing the flower off. "Too light-footed."
Silence stretched.
She almost turned to leave.
But then—he spoke again.
"What's your name?"
She turned back slowly.
"Lan Xue."
He nodded once. "Like snow."
"You… know the character?"
"I read more than I speak."
She smiled faintly. "Then why sit here, where no one reads?"
"Because here," he said, glancing around, "no one lies."
That made her laugh. Soft. Honest.
And for the first time, Wang Lin… smiled.
Not wide. Not bold.
Just a flicker. Like the flame of a candle noticing the wind.
They spoke for only ten minutes.
About nothing.
And yet, it lingered.
She returned to that garden for a month.
And so did he.
Until the day he stopped coming.
Until the day whispers of betrayal began.
Until the day she vanished… taken by a force neither of them understood.
But to this day—
Lan Xue remembers the last thing he said to her under the spirit tree, when she asked if he believed in fate.
"No," Wang Lin said. "But I remember every face I'd fight to keep if fate tried to take it."
And in the frozen cave where she now trains, far away from the Heavenly Sky Sect, Lan Xue opens her hand.
Inside?
A dried blossom.
Snow-white.
Still whole.
She closes her hand again.
And whispers into the dark:
"Wait for me, Wang Lin."