Xie Yingying stood before the jade pendant, her fingers idly tracing the smooth, cool curves of the carved lotus. 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 ancient artifact. They had turned, instead, to the woman who had, against all odds and every expectation, become her current companion.
She had never planned on digging into Su Min's past. At first, their alliance was meant to be simple, a temporary and purely transactional arrangement. It was not meant to become complicated.
After all, their first meeting had been anything but friendly.
After her forced awakening, her crystalline seal shattered by the Demon Crown Prince in his crude, mistaken attempt to free her, Xie Yingying had shown no mercy. The trespassers who had confused her sect's sealed sanctuary for a mere secret realm were expelled like insects, their ambitions crushed beneath her indifferent power. As for the prince himself, she had killed him with her own hands, her eyes cold and empty, before stepping out into a world that had long forgotten her name.
And outside the shattered ruins of her mansion, she saw her.
Su Min.
There was no killing intent in that first clash, only a coiled tension, a mutual curiosity that was sharp and immediate, and an unspoken probing of each other's limits. Fire and wind collided in bursts of crimson and emerald light, the air crackling with released energy. Su Min's dual element sword arts, blending fire and 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, where every fight was a lesson in survival.
Then there was the pill. A pristine Foundation Establishment Pill, gleaming untouched amid the mansion's wreckage, a treasure any cultivator would kill for. Su Min had glanced at it, her eyes lingering for only a heartbeat, and then turned away without a second look, her attention already elsewhere.
Only a true alchemist would treat such a treasure with such casual 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 kind of character.
So, she had tested the waters. She made a simple request for a pill, nothing elaborate, nothing personal, just a straightforward proposition. Su Min agreed, but in return asked for her help against a Golden Core demon beast that was 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.
Three months passed in quiet cooperation. No oaths were sworn. No grand declarations of trust were made between them.
But curiosity took root all the same, a tiny seed that began to sprout in the quiet moments.
Xie Yingying was not 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 did not line up with the world as Xie Yingying knew it.
She had strength, yes. And control, a deep and formidable well of it. But she lacked the arrogance that usually accompanied such power. She did not posture. She did not 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 suspicious. It went against the very nature of power.
So, Xie Yingying began to dig. Not openly. Not even deliberately, at first. It was more of a slow, gathering awareness.
Fragments of information came slowly, pieced together from jade slips looted from dead cultivators who had trespassed into her mansion and never left. There were names, half burned records, official incident reports stamped with fading seals, and rumors whispered in backwater villages where news traveled slowly.
One thread stood out among the rest, the southern frontier.
It was a land not of dust and drought, but of dense, miasma choked forests and venom laced undergrowth. The mountains were steep and treacherous, the rivers muddy and swift, carving deep gorges through the jungle. Venomous insects and spirit beasts made every step outside a settlement a genuine risk. Yet people endured there, tough and resilient. The Great Wei's reach barely brushed these lands, they were too far, too wild, too inconvenient to govern properly. Instead, local Tusi chieftains ruled like petty kings, their power absolute within their scattered territories.
It was the perfect place for someone who did not 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 foot worn paths. She was known as a healer.
Not the kind who demanded jade or gold. Currency was scarce in the frontier, barter was the law of the land. She set her own simple rules, no house calls, no exceptions. You had to 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. It was only when held under moonlight that her unique spiritual seal would shimmer faintly into view, a secret sign of her favor.
A lone, young woman with no sect name and no family crest. Doing all of that for almost ten years.
Xie Yingying did not want to believe it. Cultivators did not act out of pure benevolence. 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.
Then came the stories from Yongzhou.
The records were scattered and vague, like ashes after a fire. A monster had risen from the desert, a Qi devouring beast on the brink of Foundation Establishment. Entire militias had been swallowed by the shifting sands, and when the wave of demons finally reached the city gates, hope had begun to falter, thin and brittle.
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 history 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 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 records and from the world.
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.
Xie Yingying exhaled, a quiet and slow release of breath that did little to ease the tightness in her chest.
She should have felt nothing. Sympathy was a dangerous luxury. It made your blade hesitate in a crucial moment, and hesitation was a death sentence. And yet, a feeling she could not name stirred within her, restless and unwelcome.
"Even a beast fights back when it is cornered," she murmured to the empty room, her fingers tightening imperceptibly on the fine silk of her sleeve.
But Su Min had not become a vengeful ghost, consumed by hatred. She had not chased power solely to burn her enemies to ash. Instead, she had become a healer, a quiet presence in the wilderness who asked for little and gave much.
That was the part Xie Yingying could not reconcile. It defied all logic.
Why?
Why not demand offerings and favors like every other cultivator with a shred of power? Why hide her strength and tend to the sick?
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, but for the quality of her resolve. A true heavenly flame did not choose the strongest host. It chose the one whose intent would not 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 not necessarily righteous. It was not purely good.
It was just enduring. It was a will to survive, but also to persist on her own terms.
And it burned with a fierce, unyielding light that nothing, not even 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, 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.
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 practice.
Crimson gold flames licked hungrily at the cauldron's base. They were controlled. Perfectly stable. They were an extension of her will.
A memory stirred within her, an old lesson from her master, long before the seal, long before her long sleep, from a time when the world was simpler.
"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 seemed to thin for just a moment.
Not much. Just enough that her next words were not 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 crack in her own formidable armor.