'By the way, that fortune teller… I definitely felt a familiar trace…'
As the Sword Empress retreated to her quarters, the mountain air crisp against her skin, she turned the encounter over in her mind like a blade under lantern light. His words lingered, a subtle undercurrent to the divination, but it was the echo on his body that gnawed deeper—the faint, unmistakable residue she'd brushed against his skin.
His dantian was wrecked, so it was hard to tell for sure… but that was definitely a mark of Huashan's qigong.
She, of all people, couldn't have mistaken it. That subtle imprint belonged to the foundational breathing art passed to Huashan's newest initiates, a gentle flow that rooted the spirit to the mountain's unyielding grace.
A wrecked dantian means he either committed a sin or suffered an accident…
A fledgling disciple. A core shattered beyond mending. A shadow stirred in her memory—raw, unwelcome. A wound she'd inflicted on herself, etched in regret's quiet steel.
…No way.
How many sleepless nights had she spent scouring the peaks for that lost child? It had to be her imagination playing cruel tricks. Over ten years had carved canyons in the time since—surely too vast a gulf for fate's thread to span.
Gentle.
That's the mantle the world draped over the Sword Empress, a whisper on every tongue from righteous halls to shadowed dens of vice. Even her foes spoke of it in hushed tones—not the brittle kindness of some sheltered idealist, but a rare softness forged in a martial heart, unyielding yet yielding where mercy bloomed.
She extended olive branches to the redeemable: evildoers cornered in her blade's shadow, offered paths to atonement—apologies wrung from trembling lips, coffers emptied for the wronged, a fragile second dawn. Radical, yes, teetering on peril for anyone less armored in strength. But she was strong, a tempest cloaked in silk, her justice a fortress no ill wind could breach.
Yet even she harbored no quarter for the irredeemable. Those who spat on her offered grace, villains whose rot festered beyond the scalpel's reach—they met her steel without remorse, her sense of right a line drawn in bloodied sand.
And for this Sword Empress, a secret festered unspoken in the Central Plains' vast chorus—one known only to a hushed circle within Huashan's veiled chambers.
An unthinkable saga: she'd claimed a disciple with her own hands... and severed that bond with the same.
Just as the Sword Empress blazed across the martial firmament, so too did her shadowed heir flicker like a hidden flame. Nurtured in seclusion, a jewel cradled from the world's coarse grind, the girl emerged only once—unveiled at the Martial Alliance's grand tournament, where her grace with a blade earned her the moniker Sword Flower. It echoed her master's own prodigy-days whisper, a petal unfurling in steel's garden.
She returned to Huashan's embrace amid a chorus of longing—young lords and wandering swordsmen alike, their breaths caught on dreams of her next descent into the fray. But the peaks claimed her forever after; she never strode the rivers again.
"What are you staring at so intently?"
"M-Master?!" The girl's head snapped up, cheeks blooming scarlet as she scrambled to her feet. "I'm not slacking on my training, I swear…"
"I haven't even scolded you yet—why are you already hanging your head?" The Sword Empress's tone wove amusement with gentle reproach, her eyes crinkling at the edges. "I just asked what you're looking at."
They stood at the fringe of the outer yards, far from the inner sanctum's rigorous hush—near the sun-baked fields where secular initiates drilled in ragged clusters, their shouts mingling with the clash of wooden blades.
"Those are the disciples who just joined a few days ago," the Sword Empress continued, her gaze following her pupil's. "I was worried since you never seemed interested in others, Soyeon, but maybe I can relax a bit now."
"N-No, it's not that! I didn't come here on purpose…"
"Hm?" A knowing smile tugged at her master's lips. "Looks like you came to see someone specific. I just meant I thought you were here to check out the new disciples as a group."
At those words, the Sword Flower's face ignited—a vivid flush that spread like dawn over misted peaks.
"Is there someone you know? Most of the disciples here are kids who haven't even reached their mid-teens."
"No! No! I just… even though they're secular disciples, I wanted to see the kids learning the sword under the same Huashan name!" The girl's words tumbled out in a frantic rush, hands twisting in her sleeves. "I swear there's no ulterior motive!"
"…For someone claiming that, your gaze seemed awfully fixed on one person earlier."
"Y-You saw that?"
"I wasn't sure, but your reaction confirms it."
The Sword Empress sighed inwardly, a quiet ache threading through her pride. Her disciple—ever solitary, her world a narrow blade's edge—had finally stirred with curiosity toward the wider tapestry. And yet, it bloomed toward a child a full decade her junior. A peer might have kindled growth through shared sweat and steel; this? A missed bloom, fragile as spring frost.
Naturally, no shadow of suspicion clouded her thoughts. Impure intent? Unthinkable in the clear dawn of her creed. She chalked it to simple wonder—a senior's innocent pull toward a fledgling under the same banner.
Well, she might try to act mature as a senior in life, so maybe I can hope for that.
"So, which one is it?"
"D-Do I have to say?"
"If you don't want to keep sneaking out here behind your master's back, yes."
"…Over there. That one."
The Sword Empress followed the hesitant point of her disciple's finger, her gaze settling on a lone figure amid the drill.
At the Sword Flower's direction stood a boy, lost in diligent toil. Barely cresting his mid-teens, if that—slight and unassuming, his form a whisper against the yard's clamor.
And her first impression?
…The 'Hua' in Huashan doesn't mean 'flower,' does it?
I couldn't help but wonder if this kid had stumbled into the wrong sect. His frame lacked the raw vigor of his peers—frail, almost ethereal, stunted in height and build. A puzzle, truly, how he'd scraped through the gates at all. Martial paths seemed a cruel jest for such delicacy; channeled elsewhere, those features might've carved him a throne of admirers across the Plains one day.
The kind of face poets crooned would "make women weep when he blossoms."
For now, though? Just an innocent bloom—cute in its unscarred way.
"By the way, it looks like he doesn't know how to train properly."
He grappled with a training stone, heaving it in awkward arcs that screamed peril. The body was iron, aye—hammered to temper under the right forge—but only if the metal held the heat. At his tender span, with that reed-thin build, such weights would forge no strength; they'd fracture, poison the roots before they took.
"What are you doing? Why aren't you going over to correct him?"
"Y-Yes, what?!"
"He's studying under the same Huashan name, isn't he?" Her master's voice sharpened with gentle insistence. "If something's wrong, it's your job as a senior to guide him, not just stand by and watch."
"…! I'll be right back!"
The moment permission bloomed, the Sword Flower bolted—lightfoot qinggong carrying her across the yard in a silver streak.
…She's gotten a lot faster than last time.
I'd thought her at full gallop before, but this? A disciple's quiet evolution, glimpsed in a heartbeat. While I marveled briefly at her strides, she closed the gap and bent to converse with the boy.
He, unguarded as a fawn in spring, warmed to her swiftly—his wariness melting into bright smiles and easy chatter. Perhaps he'd clocked her robes, finer threaded than the initiates' roughspun, marking her as kin of a higher bough.
She'll figure it out and come back on her own.
Part of me yearned to linger, to witness this rare unfolding—my flower brushing petals with another soul. But hovering risked wilting the moment; better to slip away unseen, granting space for roots to twine.
...
...
It seemed my disciple had woven a swift thread with the boy, their meetings blooming like unchecked vines in the outer yards.
"His name's Dan Yuseong," she confided later, eyes alight with a storyteller's glow. "He said he joined Huashan because he grew up under a kind old man without parents, but the old man passed away, and he wanted to honor his dying wish by entering the sect."
"A kid with a tough story," I murmured, a pang stirring for the orphan's lot. "So what was that wish?"
"He wanted to smell the plum blossoms of Huashan once."