[Long Meili's Point of View — Continued]
There was no time for elegance.
With thirty percent of my cultivation available and the poison already circulating through my blood like a slow-burning ember, I moved past the two men blocking the exit with the efficiency of someone who could not afford to prolong a fight. The first retreated before getting close enough to be useful. The second was less prudent and paid for it with a broken nose.
They definitely had not expected me to have so much strength despite being weakened. That was why they had not defended themselves as they should have; they did not want to damage their plaything. They all thought that way.
I reached the corridor. Then the stairs. Then the outer courtyard of the Heavenly Sword Sect, where the cold night air struck my face like a welcome slap.
Behind me, the voices were reorganizing.
There was no time. I was in enemy territory and far from home. I raised my hand and pressed my finger against the only protective talisman I still carried—the last one, saved for emergencies I had hoped never to use. I felt the concentrated Qi inside it release all at once, a wave of power sweeping across the courtyard in every direction. The shouting stopped.
Everything below the Golden Core Realm was gravely injured or dead. Fortunately for them, this was only the outer courtyard.
There was no room for guilt at that moment. There was room to run.
"Yue."
The name left my lips quietly, almost in a whisper, but she heard me. She always did.
A white figure descended from the night sky—large and silent as falling snow, with wings that parted the air without making a sound. Yue landed in front of me in a single fluid movement, her griffin forepaws touching the ground without impact, her blue eyes meeting mine with that expression intelligent animals wore when they understood the situation before you had to explain it.
I climbed onto her before her hind legs had even finished landing.
"Fly. As fast as you can..."
And she flew.
The altitude brought cold. For a moment, the cold brought clarity.
But Fire Snake poison was not the kind of thing cold could solve.
I knew about this poison. Any female cultivator experienced in sect conflicts did—it was a weapon for cowards, designed not to kill but to leave the victim vulnerable in ways that went beyond cultivation. It suppressed strength gradually and, as a side effect that the bastards who developed it had certainly considered a feature rather than a flaw, raised the body's temperature and sharpened desire until the mind became clouded.
I had let my guard down. I had accepted tea from the Senior Leader of the Heavenly Sword Sect without checking its contents, because checking the tea of a longtime ally would have been an insult, and I—foolish woman that I was—still treated certain traditions with more respect than they deserved.
Damn traitors.
The poison was already in my organs. It was already in my blood. It was too late to expel it with the Qi I had left—the window to do so had closed hours ago, while I was still sitting in that hall and pretending the temperature of the room was normal.
Damn it, I thought as Yue cut through the dark wind above the mountains.
My body was hot. Not the kind of heat that came from exertion—it was a heat that rose from within, slow and constant, spreading through my limbs and making every cold breeze inadequate. My mind still functioned, but with the fog around the edges that I recognized and hated. Concentration required effort. Sitting still and doing nothing made everything worse.
I needed privacy. I needed somewhere I could spend the next few hours without being seen in a state that no one, under any circumstances, should ever see.
Several hours later, though they felt like an eternity, the Azure Mountain Sect lay ahead.
I knew those mountains like the back of my hand. After all, I was the current leader of the Sect. There was an area in the rear, beyond the main slopes, where the servant disciples stayed and where the higher-ups rarely went—a forgotten place within a place that already paid little attention to itself. No one could see me in my deteriorating condition.
"Land over there," I told Yue, pointing toward the rear slope.
She descended without question.
My eyes found him first.
Among the trees on the slope, climbing with the particular determination of someone who knew he was not well but had decided that fact was irrelevant, there was a man. Young. His clothes were torn and stained with blood that had dried in dark layers across the fabric. He moved slowly, bracing one hand against a tree here and a stone there, each step a silent negotiation with his own body. He was definitely going to die. Definitely.
Yue landed a few meters in front of him, and he stopped.
I climbed down.
And when I came close enough to see his face, my breath stopped for a full second.
Dark-purple eyes, almost violet—the kind that seemed to contain their own light even in the darkness of the slope. Brows drawn like sword strokes, firm and symmetrical. His lower lip was swollen at the corner, his face pale from blood loss, which did nothing to diminish what lay beneath it. Black hair fell between his eyes in loose strands, with a disorder that was not neglect but structure—the kind of face artists spent years trying to capture and were never completely satisfied with. Could he be an immortal cultivator who had been injured and fallen into my Sect?!
What a man.
The thought appeared before I could intercept it, direct and unfiltered.
And the poison, already doing what poison did, immediately amplified that thought to inconvenient proportions.
My heart sped up. The heat, already high, climbed another step. My knees—my knees, which had endured battles and cultivation storms—wavered slightly.
Control yourself, I thought.
But Fire Snake poison was not the kind of thing one could control through sheer intention.
Without thinking—or thinking less than I should have—I approached him, slipped my arm around his, and supported him before he realized what was happening. He weighed more than he appeared to. I carried him because I could, and because the poison had decided that I very much wanted to do so.
He murmured something.
I did not understand the words. But the tone was confused, and there was something in the texture of that voice that made the heat in my chest rise two more steps.
"Be quiet," I said. More to myself than to him.
Yue watched us with the expression of an animal witnessing something inevitable and deciding not to comment. Using the strength I had left, I disappeared with him into a nearby room in the rear section of the Sect.
The room I had temporarily taken in Azure Mountain's guest wing was large and quiet, with long-burning candles maintained by the Qi permeating the air. At its center stood a bed wide enough to require no further comment.
I placed him on the bed.
He opened his eyes—purple, disoriented, trying to process the unfamiliar ceiling and the woman standing beside the bed, in an order that had not yet reached a conclusion.
"Wait," he said weakly. His voice was hoarse and dry from hours without water.
But the poison had already ended the internal debate I had pretended to be having.
I leaned down and kissed him. My first kiss.
He remained still for a moment—the kind of stillness belonging to someone whose brain had received too much information too quickly—and then, very slowly, he kissed me back.
Ahem.
Ahem.
His clothes were the first problem. I solved it in the most efficient manner available. Mine were dealt with next according to the same logic.
He was injured; I knew that. His ribs protested when he moved in certain ways—I could feel it in the moments when he stopped, breathed, and recalibrated. But there was a difference between being injured and being incapable, and he was clearly in the first category. More than that, there was something in him that answered my heat with a heat of its own, like two embers recognizing each other.
This man surprised me in a way I will not detail, but which will remain in my memory for an indefinite amount of time.
Moonlight entered through the window and stayed.
The hours passed with the particular slowness of nights one does not want to end.
The petals fell until dawn.
[Qin Yami's Point of View]
The memory ended.
I sat on the bed for a moment, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling with an expression that probably said everything about the mental state of someone who had just lived through twenty years of another person's life in a matter of seconds, endured another night I had not asked for, and dealt with the small detail of being in a cultivation world where people flew on beasts and beat each other over medicinal pills.
All right, I thought. This is real.
It was not a hypothesis. It was a fact. The body I inhabited hurt in concrete and specific ways—the ribs continued their unsolicited report, and the left leg had spent the night engaged in intense activity and was communicating that clearly. Pain was a difficult argument to refute when one tried to question the reality of a situation. How had I endured it? I probably would have died.
I was in a cultivation world. In the body of someone else, a young man named Qin Yami, a servant disciple of the Azure Mountain Sect, without extraordinary talent, without a patron, without resources, and with an earth-grade cultivation technique that had brought him to the Human Foundation Establishment Realm after six years of constant effort.
I had read enough fiction in the genre to know what that meant.
Mediocre, I thought without judgment. I am the walking definition of mediocre, trash, an animal in this world.
That was an observation, not a sentence—but it was still not exactly encouraging when the entire world around me was built on power hierarchies in which mediocre meant invisible, and invisible meant disposable.
The second realization came next, and it was more complicated.
That woman.
I had read enough cultivation fiction to recognize certain patterns as easily as I could recognize an unproductive meeting before it began. And that woman—far too beautiful, far too powerful, with a white griffin as a pet and an exit in which she carried me away without anyone noticing—had every visual and narrative marker of someone who should not be sleeping with minor characters without consequences. She definitely had a reason, and she was probably going to kill me. She was likely a demonic cultivator who used men to strengthen herself, and judging by her apparent beauty, it was obvious.
She is a powerful demonic cultivator, perhaps a "heroine," I thought. Or something equivalent. Which meant I was in serious trouble. Before, when I had been climbing down toward the foot of the Sect, I had at least had a chance of surviving. Now my chances depended on her mercy. Escape was impossible; I knew that.
The thought arrived with the uncomfortable calm of someone who had read the book and already knew what happened in the coming chapters. Protagonists in cultivation fiction did not like finding their love interests already occupied. And the circumstances of this particular occupation were the kind that created permanent enmities.
How had I reached this idiotic conclusion? Obviously because she looked like the women in the books I read. She had been described like a goddess who had descended from the heavens. And obviously, in all the classic harems, it was impossible for her to be a simple cannon-fodder character whom some Yan or Tang would fight and conquer during one of their near-death moments, when there was supposedly no way out. Wait! Did I do that?!
I sighed. Having received two lives as one, the process of acceptance seemed easier. I certainly would not be returning to Earth when I fell asleep and opened my eyes again.
I rose carefully—the ribs insisted on participating in the process—and examined the room more closely than I had been able to the previous night, when my priorities had been different.
It was large. Luxurious in a way that did not shout, but whispered insistently—each piece of furniture was simple in form, yet of such quality that it stood out to anyone paying attention. The finishings in this room had cost more than everything Qin Yami had owned in his nineteen years combined. The candles in the holders were the kind that burned all night without needing to be replaced.
She was not an ordinary disciple. That was an established fact.
I found the bathtub in a side chamber—the bathroom—already filled with water that still retained some residual warmth, scented with something subtle I could not identify but found pleasant. Someone had prepared it.
I entered the tub with the care my ribs demanded and lay in the water for a moment, staring at the stone ceiling above.
So, I thought. What do I know?
First: I was in a cultivation world, in the body of a twenty-year-old young man with a history of trauma, no special talent, a useless cultivation technique, and a cultivation level that barely justified the effort of the past few years.
Second: I had been thrown from a mountain the previous night by disciples who wanted a pill, survived because of a geographical accident, and then been found by a woman who had abused me in every possible way.
Third: that woman was clearly powerful, clearly important, and clearly not the kind of person who spent the night with servant disciples on the verge of death out of habit or amusement. Perhaps she needed strength? Again, the idea that she was a demonic cultivator did not seem so unrealistic.
What was she doing here, still alive?
The question remained in the water with me, without an immediate answer.
I remembered everything that had happened. Her touch when she held me on the slope—that impossible heat that seemed to come from within. The way she had carried me without any apparent effort, which spoke eloquently of the difference in cultivation between us without needing a single additional word. And then the room, the kiss, and everything that had followed with the particular logic that nights sometimes have when two people stop asking questions.
She was drugged, I thought. Her heat was inhuman. Perhaps I had lived through a cliché and stolen her from the protagonist of this world, or perhaps I had become the protagonist. So many wandering thoughts from someone who had come from the modern world. The fact that I was here meant I was the chosen one, right?
Always so analytical.
It was an observation, not an excuse for either of us. I had reciprocated because I had answered the desire, even through the pain of being before such a being; it had been like a sedative for the pain. I had made conscious choices despite the condition of my body, and she had acted under the compulsion of a poison that I suspected I knew, from Qin Yami's memories, had been specifically designed for that purpose. As a servant disciple, gathering herbs was obviously one of his duties among the hundreds of other tasks.
It was not a situation that could be easily classified in moral terms. So I chose not to classify it, because the water was warm, my ribs were injured, and I had survived being thrown from a mountain. Sometimes the mind needed to process things in the order it was capable of handling.
She is beautiful, I thought next, because some realizations arrived regardless of context.
Then another memory surfaced—small and specific, buried beneath the avalanche of information from the night.
Someone had said something. One of the disciples, in a corridor of the Sect, a few days earlier—Qin Yami had walked past without paying attention because there had been no reason to listen to corridor gossip. But the memory was there, complete, like all of Qin Yami's memories that now belonged to me as well.
"I heard that the Sect Leader is going to visit the legendary Heavenly Sword Sect to discuss an alliance with our Sect. They say they want to marry her off to establish the alliance, but she said she was already engaged."
"That news was explosive... No one had ever heard anything like that before."
"Could it be something the leader made up?"
"Shh... Keep your voice down."
Qin Yami remained motionless in the bathtub for a considerable amount of time.
Married.
To whom, no one knew.
He looked at the wall in front of him. He looked at the bathtub. He looked at the ceiling.
Ah.
The thought that came was not panic. It was the quiet recognition of someone looking at the sum of several separate elements and realizing that they all pointed to the same place.
The leader of his Sect had declared that she was married, and yesterday he had met a goddess who had descended from the heavens... Precisely the kind of woman the Azure Mountain Sect's leader was known to be: one of the greatest beauties, even before they met, he thought. Which meant it had not been the poison that created this situation. The poison had merely... hastened the destiny of a cliché from cultivation stories.
He remained silent with that thought for a moment.
It was definitely her. He had only needed to analyze everything and put the pieces together.
Was this good or bad?
The honest answer was: probably both, in proportions he still lacked enough data to estimate. On the one hand, a woman at that level of cultivation and presence was the kind of connection that changed the course of any ordinary human's life. On the other hand, he had read enough stories of this genre to know that being close to someone like that was a double-edged sword. Both sides were sharp.
But she is genuinely the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, he thought, with the kind of honesty that was only possible when one was alone in a bathtub with no one around to judge. In both lives.
He stood up. Dried himself. Returned to the room.
The bed was empty. Sunlight entered through the window with the horizontal, golden light of early morning, and the room contained only the silence that remained after someone left.
She had left while he was sleeping. He had not seen her when he regained his memories and opened his eyes.
Qin Yami stood in the center of the room for a moment, staring at the neatly made bed.
All right, he thought. So that is how it is.
He did not know what to expect next. He did not know whether she would return to kill him...
What he did know was that he was alive, that his ribs hurt in a manageable way, and that he still had the Human Foundation Pill the other disciples had tried to steal but had failed to obtain because he had not given in.
I still have the pill.
The check was instinctive—his hand went to the hidden pocket sewn into the inside of the sash around his waist, where he had stored the pill before being cornered. It was still there, small, orange, and intact, exactly where it had remained while the world around him collapsed and rebuilt itself in ways he was still processing.
One thing at a time.
He had survived the previous night.
The rest was a problem for the day.
In the Azure Mountain Sect's main wing for visitors, an elder stared at the visitor register with an expression suggesting that the day had already become more complicated than he had planned.
The name of Long Meili, his master and the Sect Leader, was on the list. In other words, she had invited a visitor and recorded it... The problem was this:
In the internal notes column, written in small, careful handwriting, was the following: "The person in this room is my husband. Do not open the room unless I ask you to, and do not allow anyone to approach the Sect's guest wing."
The elder closed the register.
He preferred not to investigate this news, which the elders had assumed was a lie when she said she was engaged... Avoiding complications was what had made him an elder, after all.