Mo Xuan nodded. "I will continue to practice."
The girls sighed in unison. The lone guy groaned quietly to himself. But Mo Xuan continued refining regardless, calm, steady, and focused entirely on the work in front of him. The earlier explosion hadn't embarrassed him in the slightest. If anything, it had only motivated him further, and that alone, somehow, made all the girls fall even deeper for him than before.
Day after day, the smell of herbs lingered on Mo Xuan's clothes, following him even after he'd left the alchemy hall behind for the evening. Another cauldron cooled before him one afternoon, this time perfectly intact, a faint medicinal fragrance spiralling upward from within it. The pill resting inside glowed with a soft, clean light.
A proper grade-one pill, smooth and flawless.
He exhaled softly. It had taken countless failures, several explosions, and an entire classroom full of girls shamelessly praising him even when he'd been covered head to toe in soot, but he had finally crossed the threshold.
He was now a true Grade-One Alchemist.
He closed the cauldron and stored the finished pill in a small bottle, placing it carefully into his storage ring alongside everything else he'd gathered over the past weeks.
"I've stayed long enough," he said, his voice calm and steady, entirely unlike the boy who had once trembled at the mere thought of having killed someone.
Jin Bao had already left two days earlier, following their discussion. Yu Lianxue and Yu Lianyan departed a few days after that, leaving behind only a faint floral fragrance in their courtyard and a lingering warmth in the air.
Mo Xuan did not go to see them off. He chose not to. He had already promised to meet them again at the Five-Year Ranking Battle, and no farewells were needed beyond that promise. He intended to walk forward, not look back.
He stepped out of the Alchemy Pavilion and walked along the quiet path towards Azure Peak, carrying only the bare essentials.
Just before dawn, he stood at the base of the mountain. No witnesses, no audience, no lingering attachments pulling at him. He looked toward the far northern horizon. The sky was still dark, but a thread of silver light pierced the clouds low on the edge of the world.
"The Northern Border," he whispered. "A place where life is cheap and only strength speaks."
If he wanted to carve his name into the heavens, he needed to temper himself first, in fire hot enough to burn away whatever softness remained.
With a single step, he left the sect. He did not look back.
The road north of the sect's territory unravelled slowly beneath his feet, one province giving way to another over the course of a full month before the terrain ever hinted at the harshness waiting further ahead. He passed through settlements clinging to the edges of trade routes, small towns where the local sects held just enough authority to keep the place looking alive, and stretches of farmland where ordinary people worked fields, living their entire lives with contentment.
Ten days in, he crossed a river gorge so wide he had to cut down logs to ferry himself across. The crossing alone took the better part of a day, the water below churning dark and cold even in what should have been a mild season. Fifteen days in, the last true city he'd see for a long while thinned out behind him, its walls shrinking smaller and smaller against the horizon until they disappeared entirely, swallowed by distance and a low bank of clouds.
By the third week, the villages had grown sparse enough that he sometimes walked two full days without encountering another living voice besides his own thoughts and the wind cutting across the empty road.
Mo Xuan travelled swiftly but with caution, never letting the pace of the road dull his awareness. His consciousness, now settled firmly at the Second Realm, spread naturally around him as a thin, invisible veil stretched across the landscape. He could sense disturbances dozens of meters away without effort — small ripples of spiritual energy stirring in the grass, malicious intent coiled somewhere just out of sight, the slow, patient movement of beasts shifting beneath the soil long before they surfaced.
This realm of consciousness was rare for someone his age. Most cultivators only awakened the First Realm somewhere in their mid-twenties, after decades of grinding, careful cultivation. Reaching the Second Realm meant his awareness could extend to a wider range, picking up on fluctuations that would have fooled mortal eyes and revealing traces of the world most people would never notice at all.
It made the vast wilderness stretching ahead of him considerably less threatening than it should have been.
On the twenty-third day, a pack of Windrazor Wolves chased him for half an hour before finally giving up, unable to match his pace. Three days later, he passed through a foggy marsh, though he never once let it slow his stride or pull his attention from the path ahead.
As the journey wore on, the weather shifted, marking the start of winter with the first snowfall.
More than a month into the journey, Mo Xuan came upon the remnants of an ancient battlefield.
Snow had not yet claimed this stretch of land, though everything about it already looked frozen in some other, older sense. Broken swords jutted out of the earth like a forest of metal gravestones, their blades rusted through and pitted with age. Armour pieces lay half-buried in the dirt, twisted into shapes that suggested violence rather than simple decay. Blood stains had dried so deeply into the soil beneath his boots that even the passage of time hadn't managed to erase them. A faint red mist drifted low between the rusted steel, resentment hanging so thick in the air that a frail mind might have fractured within minutes of standing at its centre.
Mo Xuan sat down in the middle of it all anyway, unmoving, using the pressure and killing intent saturating the air to cultivate.
The pressure hammered against his consciousness like crashing waves, wave after wave of old, unresolved anger pressing in from every direction at once. He allowed it in rather than resisting it, welcoming the sensation, letting it temper his Dao-heart the way fire tempers steel.
If this is what life at the border is like, he thought, then Master wasn't exaggerating in the slightest.
When he finally stood again, hours later, frost had gathered across his hair and shoulders without his noticing. He brushed it off absently and continued walking, the battlefield's resentment fading slowly behind him with every step he put between himself and it.
The land grew harsher with every mile that followed. Forests thinned into skeletal trees, their bare branches clawing upward at a sky that offered them nothing in return. Hills twisted into jagged black stone, sharp enough in places to cut through careless boots. The wind screamed across the open plains like some vast, grieving beast mourning.
What he'd estimated to be a short remaining stretch of the journey now looked far longer than expected. Snowflakes swirled heavily through the air in scattered, half-hearted flurries at first, then thickened with each passing day. A handful of days after that, everything around him had turned white, the world reduced to a single, blinding colour broken only by the dark smudges of distant rock formations jutting up through the drifts like half-buried teeth.
He pressed on regardless, donning thicker clothes suitable for the weather, moving through terrain that offered no real shelter beyond whatever the naturally carved landscape provided, spending his nights huddled against outcroppings of stone or the leeward side of frozen ridges. His cultivation kept him warm through the worst of it, circulating heat through his meridians even as the temperature outside dropped low enough to freeze exposed skin within minutes.
Days blurred together beneath the unbroken white, his internal sense of time relying more on the steady rhythm of his own cultivation than on any visible marker of morning or evening.
He was now on the outskirts of the Northern Border — the place where countless cultivators had come, over generations, to rise or die, with very little room left for anything in between.
Deep into the snowfields, well over two months since he'd first left the sect behind, the world fell silent. Mo Xuan paused mid-step, one boot still hovering just above the packed snow beneath him.
Killing intent.
It seeped through the snow like venom, spreading outward in a way that made the hair along his arms rise despite the layers of cold-resistant cloth wrapped around him. He held perfectly still for a moment, letting his consciousness stretch further outward, searching for the exact point the pressure was radiating from.
It wasn't coming from one direction. It was coming from several.
Somewhere beneath the endless white stretching out in every direction, shapes were moving — patient, coordinated, closing in on him from multiple angles at once. Mo Xuan didn't reach for his sword yet. Instead, he let his breathing settle, allowing his expanded awareness to map out exactly what he was dealing with before committing to anything.
The shapes beneath the snow continued closing in, unhurried, confident in their numbers. Mo Xuan exhaled slowly, watching the faint disturbances ripple closer through his extended senses, and allowed himself the faintest, humourless smile.
Whoever they were, they'd chosen the wrong traveller to hunt through this particular stretch of white. He rolled his shoulders once, loosening weeks of stiffness, and waited for the first shape to break the surface.