"I told you once before — I don't belong to this world." Xiao Se's voice was quiet, unhurried, giving her the explanation she deserved. "I come from another plane entirely. A place called the Dou Qi Continent. Time there flows at a different rate — roughly five times slower than here. So while ten years have passed for you—" He paused. "—only two years have passed for me."
The color had left Li Hanyi's face.
Her shoulders, a moment ago rigid with indignation and embarrassment, had gone still in a different way — the stillness of someone whose mind has just arrived somewhere it didn't want to go and is working through the implications against its will.
She understood the math. She was not slow.
If their worlds moved at a ratio of five to one, then her hundred years of life — the full span of a human existence — would amount to twenty years in Xiao Se's reckoning. She would grow old. She would die. And he would still be young, still be standing somewhere, watching the place where she had been.
A tragedy, dressed in the language of arithmetic.
Her throat tightened. Her eyes prickled with a warmth she had not given permission to be there.
Xiao Se watched her face move through the calculation and didn't wait for her to finish arriving at the conclusion alone. He reached into his storage ring without ceremony, withdrew a jade box, and held it out.
"I'm glad we found each other when we did," he said simply. "If it had been any later, I think we both would have spent the rest of our lives regretting it." He extended the box toward her. "Open it."
"What is this?" Li Hanyi wiped her eyes with the back of one hand — a quick, private motion, as though speed would make it less visible — and accepted the box.
Inside, resting on a bed of aged silk, were two pills. They had the look of something that had existed for a very long time — the deep, settled color of things that had accumulated meaning along with years.
"An immortality elixir," Xiao Se said. "One pill, and even an ordinary mortal can live for several thousand years."
"An immortality—" Li Hanyi looked up at him. "Immortality?"
He nodded.
And then, before she had finished processing this, he had already taken one of the pills from the box, reached forward, and placed it gently in her mouth.
It dissolved the moment it touched her tongue. No taste, no resistance — simply gone, absorbed as though it had been waiting to be taken.
Then the light came.
Thin wisps of white radiance began rising from Li Hanyi's skin — not dramatic, not violent, but steady and pervasive, the way dawn comes up: gradually, and then entirely. It moved through her from the inside, touching every part of her at once.
Xiao Se watched her face. "How do you feel?"
Li Hanyi stood very still for a moment, taking stock of something that had no direct precedent in her experience. "Like—" She searched for the right words. "Like there is no ceiling. Like something that was always quietly running out has been refilled." She looked at him, and the practical part of her surfaced almost immediately. "And you — have you taken yours? Don't just stand there, take the other one."
Xiao Se shook his head, something mischievous moving across his features. "If I take an immortality elixir now, my appearance would be fixed at exactly how I look today." He tilted his head. "I'm sixteen, little fairy. Can you honestly tell me you want to spend several thousand years next to someone who permanently looks like a teenager?"
Li Hanyi opened her mouth. Closed it.
The logic was entirely sound. She hated that it was sound.
In truth, Xiao Se had reasons beyond aesthetics. A transmigrator with a system as his foundation, with the cultivation rate he was achieving — he was confident that within the next ten years he would break through to Dou Zun, perhaps further. At that level, the mortal lifespan became a concern that solved itself. An immortality elixir now would be a waste of something rare on a problem he would outgrow.
"Then keep it somewhere safe," Li Hanyi said finally, firmly, with the tone of someone closing a subject before it could reopen. "And don't let anyone know you have it. If word gets out, you will have more problems than you can manage."
Xiao Se nodded, tucked the box away, and pulled her into his arms in a single smooth motion before she had time to prepare a dignified response to being pulled. She fit against him as though the space had been shaped for it, and the scent of camellias — her particular, constant scent — reached him immediately.
"So," he murmured against her hair. "What have you decided, little fairy?"
"Decided what," Li Hanyi said, muffled slightly by proximity and the effort of sounding more composed than she was.
"Be my little fairy."
She made a sound of mild protest. "What do you mean, 'yours' and 'mine'?" She pulled back just enough to look at him, cheeks flushed, lower lip pushed into an expression that she would have denied was a pout if directly accused. "Say it properly. In plain words."
Xiao Se cleared his throat.
"I like you," he said, quietly and without decoration. "Will you marry me?"
"Yes." She didn't hesitate. Not even for a breath.
But then something moved through her eyes — a shift from warmth into something more careful, more braced. She sat up slightly, and when she looked at him, her voice had the particular weight of a question she needed the true answer to.
"Will you still leave?"
"Yes," Xiao Se said.
The simple honesty of it landed before he could soften it. Li Hanyi's expression didn't collapse, but something in it ached. "Why? You just agreed to marry me."
"Because I need to save my sister." He held her gaze. "There are things I can't set aside. Not yet."
"Then I'll come with you."
He shook his head. "The Dou Qi Continent is beyond anything here. I can keep myself safe — I can't guarantee the same for you, not yet. But I can move between this world and that one freely now. I'll come back often. And when things settle — when I've done what needs doing — I'll bring you there myself." He said it without hesitation, without qualification. "Believe me. It won't be a long wait."
Li Hanyi was quiet.
She looked at him for a long moment — measuring something, or perhaps just looking, the way people look at things they want to keep. Then she raised her head, and her beautiful eyes were luminous with something that had moved past sadness into something simpler and steadier.
"Tonight," she said calmly. "Let's get married tonight."
"Yes," Xiao Se said.
That night.
The moon was full and silver, the kind of moon that made everything it touched look like something worth preserving. The thatched hut on the mountain slope glowed with warm candlelight, and Sikong Changfeng — who had been summoned by some communication Xiao Se had sent and had arrived with the particular expression of a man who has been waiting for this and had prepared something appropriately brief to say — stood as the witness.
No guests were invited. No ceremony was arranged. The wedding was the two of them, and the mountain, and the candlelight, and the old Spear Immortal quietly bearing witness to something he suspected would outlast the city he guarded.
Later that night—
The candles burned in the hut, casting long, narrow shadows of two figures on the wall. The mountain outside was utterly silent.
"Then I'll blow out the candles," Xiao Se said softly. He knew her — knew that the directness of light and the directness of being seen were not the same thing, not for her, not tonight. He waited, giving her the choice.
A small, barely-there nod. "Mm."
He extinguished the light. He lifted the veil. He touched her shoulders, gently, and felt her breath catch — the expectation and the shyness moving through her together, neither one winning — and then the candlelight was the only thing that had been between them, and it was gone, and there was nothing between them at all.
The next morning, Li Hanyi emerged from the hut a wife.
The change in her was not dramatic, but it was real — a fullness to her bearing that hadn't been there before, a quality of settled completion that the years of waiting had kept perpetually just out of reach. Xiao Se had given her a new white robe, and she wore it in place of her usual men's clothing, and the mountain morning light suited her in a way that made several things obvious.
In the days that followed, they were rarely apart. They trained Lei Wujie — her newly acquired disciple, whom Xiao Se had immediately begun referring to as his cheap brother-in-law, which Lei Wujie received with the bewilderment of someone still piecing together the family tree — sparring with him, correcting his form, watching him improve with the particular satisfaction of teachers who are genuinely invested in what they're teaching.
On the fifth day, Xiao Se took care of one remaining matter — Xiao Yu, the source of all the grief threading through the young singer's story — and then, quietly, he left.
Dou Qi Continent. The Tagore Desert.
Inside the Snake-People Clan Palace—
"Your Majesty." The guard's voice was carefully neutral in the way of someone delivering news they anticipate will be poorly received. "We have searched the entirety of Serpent City. There is no sign of Lord Xiao Se."
Medusa sat at the head of the hall, one hand pressed to her temple. The guard waited.
She was not, if she was being honest with herself, surprised. And she was also — if she continued being honest — somewhat responsible for the situation.
The events of the previous evening replayed themselves with pointed clarity. Xiao Se had, she was forced to acknowledge, been remarkably forthcoming. He had confessed everything — not evasively, not in pieces, but honestly and in full. And her response had been to throw him out of the hall with enough force to leave impressions in the cobblestones.
He had been, technically speaking, doing the right thing by telling her. She had responded to the right thing by launching him through the doors.
The question was whether he was avoiding her out of anger, or had simply — sensibly — decided to give her the space she had violently indicated she required.
Was that too much? she thought, examining the question from several angles and not arriving at a satisfying answer. He came here to marry me. He told me the truth. And I—
"Who was the last person to see him last night?" she asked, her voice settling into its public register — cool, level, Queen.
"Your Majesty — Commander Yue Mei and Miss Yue'er, it seems."
"Bring them to me."
They arrived within minutes — Yue Mei composed, Yue'er slightly wide-eyed, both of them with the manner of people trying to determine what precisely they were walking into.
"Do you know where Xiao Se is?" Medusa asked.
"Your Majesty." Yue Mei's response was immediate, practiced, the tone of someone who has their answer ready. "Lord Xiao Se mentioned last night that he had made a breakthrough and needed to enter seclusion."
Yue'er hesitated, then asked carefully: "Is there something you need from him, Your Majesty?"
Seclusion.
Medusa considered this. The pieces fit. Xiao Se had the Fallen Heart Flame integrated now, and his cultivation technique had recently advanced to the high-grade Earth rank — for a cultivator of his caliber, a breakthrough from seven-star Dou Huang to eight-star Dou Huang within two months was not implausible. It was, in fact, rather expected. And beyond that — he had the Vast Ocean Protective Qi. If Xiao Se wanted to be truly unfindable, he could stand directly beside someone without leaving a single trace of his presence. She herself might walk past him without noticing.
The tight coil of anxiety in her chest eased, fractionally.
She waved her hand. "It's nothing urgent. You may go. When he returns — tell him to come to me directly."
"Yes, Your Majesty." Both women bowed and withdrew.
The palace doors closed.
Medusa sat alone for a moment with the quiet and her thoughts.
The pregnancy changed things. She had known it would, had been bracing for the shape of the change without knowing quite what shape it would take. What she hadn't expected was how thoroughly it would rearrange her interior landscape — the unsteadiness that arrived with it, the need for something she didn't have a clean word for, the way everything that had previously seemed manageable had quietly reclassified itself as urgent.
She was the queen of the Snake-People. She had led battles, settled crises, held the clan together through things that should have broken it. She was not, as a rule, someone who felt insecure.
And yet, she thought, tracing the rim of her armrest with one finger, here I am.
Meanwhile, having departed the world of The Legend of the Young Swordsman, Xiao Se stepped through the threshold and arrived on the Douluo Continent.
The Continental Advanced Soul Master Tournament had already begun.
(End of Chapter)
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