The seasons turned, and the meetings continued.
Every few days, Lianxi would finish her training early, pack her qiankun bag, and make her way to the cave. Xuan was always there first. She had long since stopped pretending she didn't notice.
With him beside her, she began to venture where she had never dared go alone. They crossed the Whispering Marsh, where the mud swallowed careless feet, and climbed the eastern ridges where Tier 4 beasts made their dens. Lianxi always went armed with a hundred careful preparations and a list of escape routes, and Xuan always went armed with his sword and an alarming amount of confidence. Between them, they survived.
She could feel it helping. Each brush with death sharpened something in her, and her qi circulated more smoothly afterward. Her cultivation was advancing faster than before.
It was still slow. She had reached only the third level of Qi Refining, while Xuan climbed through Core Formation as easily as a man walking uphill. When she thought about it too long, a familiar frustration gnawed at her.
But she did not let it discourage her. Her dantian mended a little more each day, and the other arts were another matter entirely.
There, she flew.
Master Gao had taken to watching her with a strange expression. She learned pill formulas after reading them once. She corrected errors in ancient array diagrams that had stood uncorrected for centuries. When he taught her a new medical technique, she would practice it for an afternoon and then ask, politely, whether there was a way to make it more efficient. There usually was. She usually found it herself.
"Master," she asked one evening, "am I learning too slowly?"
Master Gao looked at her over the rim of his teacup for a long moment. Then he set it down, sighed, and said, "Xiao Xi. Go to bed."
She went to bed feeling rather troubled by this response.
✦ ✦ ✦
On this particular day, Xuan was late.
Lianxi sat on the flat rock outside the cave with her legs crossed, watching the trees. She did not pace. Pacing wore out one's shoes, and shoes were expensive.
She had already counted the medicinal herbs in her bag twice, re-sorted her needles by length, and calculated that if she left now, she would reach home before dark with time to spare for two hours of Core Manipulation.
She did not leave.
An hour passed. She was in the middle of composing a very reasonable scolding in her head when she heard hurried footsteps, and Xuan burst through the trees, slightly out of breath.
"Sister Xi! I'm sorry. I'm so late."
The scolding evaporated. "You're never late."
"I know." He dropped onto the rock beside her, raking a hand through his hair. "Someone tried to follow me."
Lianxi went very still.
"Don't worry," he said quickly, seeing her expression. "I lost her. I took a route through the marsh and doubled back twice. There's no way she tracked me."
"Her?"
"A friend. She's a year younger than me." He grimaced. "My sworn sister, actually. She's been asking for weeks where I keep disappearing to. Every day, without fail. She wants to come along." He shook his head. "I've refused every time."
Lianxi frowned. "She must be very curious."
"She is." He glanced at her sideways. "I promised I'd keep you a secret. I'm not going to break that promise. Not for her. Not for anyone. She doesn't know a single thing about you, and she never will."
Something twisted uncomfortably in Lianxi's chest.
She had known, in an abstract way, that these meetings cost him something. She had simply never sat down and calculated what. Now she did, and the sum was unpleasant. A boy who was clearly someone, vanishing for whole days at a time, refusing to explain himself, taking detours through poisonous marshland to shake off his own sworn sister. And for what? To sit in a valley with a girl who wouldn't even tell him her name.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I've caused you a great deal of trouble."
Xuan turned to look at her, and something in his face changed.
"Don't," he said quietly. "Don't ever say that."
"But it's a reasonable assessment of the situation. You've had to lie to your sworn sister, alter your route, and lose several hours—"
"Sister Xi." He was smiling, but his eyes were serious in a way she didn't know how to read. "There is nowhere in this world I'd rather be than here. Do you understand?"
Lianxi opened her mouth. Then closed it.
She understood the individual words. Assembled in that order, spoken in that tone, with him looking at her like that, they refused to make sense. There was no passage in any book she had read that covered this.
"…That is a very inefficient use of your time," she said finally.
Xuan laughed, and whatever had been in his eyes retreated behind it. "Then I'll be inefficient. Come on. Where are we going today?"
She had planned an expedition to the northern ridge, where a rare frost-touched herb grew on the cliffs. She had just opened her mouth to explain when she stopped.
Her head turned sharply toward the west.
"What is it?"
Lianxi didn't answer at once. She had been training her senses for years, and lately, since her mental power had grown, she caught things she couldn't explain. A disturbance in the air. The particular quality of silence that came when something in the forest was frightened.
"Someone's in trouble," she said. "That way. Perhaps two li. The birds have gone quiet, and there's qi moving erratically." She listened harder. "It's a girl. Young. She's panicking."
Xuan's face drained of color.
"Ling Shi," he breathed.
He was already running.
✦ ✦ ✦
They heard the snarling before they saw anything.
Lianxi caught Xuan's sleeve and yanked him behind a fallen trunk before he could charge into the open. He shot her an impatient look, but she pressed a finger to her lips and pointed.
In the clearing below, a girl stood with her back against a boulder, a slender jian held out in front of her.
She was perhaps nine years old, dressed in pale pink silk now torn at the hem, her hair coming loose from its ornaments. Her face was white with terror.
Circling her were six beasts.
They were the size of large dogs, with hunched shoulders and mottled ash-grey hide stretched tight over knotted muscle. Their jaws were far too wide for their skulls, crowded with uneven yellow teeth, and their eyes glowed a dull, sickly red in the shadows. Every so often, one of them let out a sound halfway between a bark and a laugh.
"Duskmaw Hyenas," Lianxi whispered. "Tier 3. They hunt in packs and they never break off once they've started. They wear their prey down." She scanned the clearing rapidly. "The hide is thick across the back and shoulders, but the throat and belly are soft. They're also cowards. They won't commit until they think the prey is exhausted. That's what the circling is for."
Xuan's hand was already on his sword. "She can't hold six."
"No." Lianxi's assessment was cold and immediate. "She's at the first level of Foundation Establishment. Strong for her age. Not strong enough. She has perhaps fifty breaths before the first one moves, and once one goes, they all go."
"Then I'm going." He turned to her. "Stay here. Stay hidden."
Lianxi nodded at once. "I'll cover you."
He hesitated, just for a moment. Then he was gone.
Xuan came down the slope like a falling star.
He landed between Ling Shi and the nearest hyena with a crash that cracked the stone underfoot, and his sword took the beast across the throat before it could even turn. It dropped without a sound.
"Brother Yu!"
"Behind me!" he barked.
The pack broke into chaos. Two lunged at once from opposite sides, jaws gaping. Xuan spun to meet the left one, which meant the right one had a clear path to his flank.
It never reached him.
A needle flashed out of the treeline, so fast it was nothing but a silver line in the air, and buried itself in the soft flesh under the beast's jaw. The hyena's legs folded mid-leap. It hit the ground and slid to a stop, dead.
Ling Shi's head whipped toward the trees.
Xuan didn't look. He trusted it completely. He drove forward into the pack, and every time one of them tried to circle to his blind side, a needle came out of the shadows and took it in the throat, or the eye, or the soft hollow behind the foreleg. He never had to guard his back. He never even had to think about it.
It was over in under two minutes.
Xuan stood in the middle of six carcasses, breathing hard, and flicked the blood from his blade.
"Brother Yu!" Ling Shi ran to him and seized his sleeve with both hands, her eyes shining with tears. "I was so frightened. I thought I was going to die."
"What are you doing out here?" His voice was flat. "This is a Tier 4 zone. You had no business coming this deep."
"I only wanted to find you." Her lip trembled. "You've been disappearing for weeks. Every time I ask, you won't tell me anything. I was worried, Brother Yu. I thought something might have happened to you." She lowered her head. "I know I shouldn't have followed. I'm sorry. I just… I couldn't bear not knowing."
Xuan's jaw tightened. "You could have been killed."
"I know." A tear slipped down her cheek. "But you came. You always come."
She wiped her face with her sleeve, composing herself with visible effort. Then her eyes lifted, and swept slowly across the treeline.
"Brother Yu," she said softly. "Who else is here?"
"No one."
"There is someone." She stepped past him, toward the trees, her voice still gentle. "Those needles didn't come from your hand. I saw them." She smiled faintly. "You've never used a hidden weapon in your life."
"Ling Shi. Let it go."
"But why?" She turned back to him, her expression open and puzzled and entirely innocent. "If someone helped save my life, shouldn't I thank them? It would be terribly rude of me not to."
"I said let it go."
"They saved me, Brother Yu." Her eyes widened slightly, wounded. "Are you asking me to be ungrateful?"
Xuan said nothing. His silence was answer enough, and she had already turned away from it.
She began to walk the edge of the clearing, unhurried, peering behind every trunk and boulder. "Hello?" she called sweetly. "Please come out. I only want to thank you. You have my word that I mean no harm."
From behind the fallen trunk, Lianxi watched her search and calculated.
She was not afraid of the girl. She was afraid of what the girl represented. One more person who knew she existed. One more thread leading back toward the hut, toward the barrier, toward the old man who had told her, with a gravity she had never forgotten, that this was a matter of life and death.
The correct course of action was to leave. Now, while the girl was searching the far side.
Lianxi moved.
She slipped backward into the undergrowth, silent as smoke, placing each foot exactly where the leaf litter was thinnest. Ten paces. Twenty. The trees were closing around her, and she was nearly clear, and she allowed herself one small breath of relief.
"There!"
The undergrowth exploded.
Ling Shi came through the brush with her jian already drawn back, and there was nothing gentle in her face at all.
Lianxi's mind registered several things in the same instant. The girl's cultivation was four full levels above hers. The thrust was aimed at her shoulder, which would cripple but not kill. She had no time to dodge, no time to reach her needles, and no defensive technique that would stop a Foundation Establishment strike.
She was going to be hurt.
Steel rang against steel.
Xuan stood between them, his sword braced against Ling Shi's blade, and for the first time since Lianxi had known him, his face was truly cold.
"Ling Shi." His voice could have frozen the river. "Step back."
"Brother Yu—"
"Step back."
The pressure that rolled off him made the leaves shiver on the branches. Ling Shi stumbled backward, her sword arm dropping, and the shock on her face was, for one unguarded second, entirely genuine.
"You drew a blade on a child," Xuan said. "She is eight years old. She just saved your life, and you drew a blade on her." His hand was shaking on the hilt. "What is wrong with you?"
Ling Shi's eyes filled instantly.
"She was hiding," she whispered. "She was hiding and watching us, and then she tried to slip away without a word. What was I supposed to think, Brother Yu? Someone lurking in the trees, spying on you, refusing to show herself—" Her voice cracked. "I acted out of fear. For you. Was I wrong to be afraid?"
"Yes."
"I only—" She pressed her hands to her mouth, and the tears spilled over. "I only wanted to protect you."
Lianxi watched from the ground behind Xuan, brushing dirt from her sleeve, and found the whole performance fascinating.
The tears were real. She could see that much. But the timing was immaculate. They had arrived the precise moment the accusation failed, like a second rank of soldiers moving up when the first was repulsed. The posture was flawless too: shoulders drawn in, chin down, hands trembling at exactly the amplitude that suggested distress without appearing unwell.
Lianxi had read about grief in medical texts. Genuine acute distress produced irregular breathing. This girl's breathing was perfectly, evenly paced.
Remarkable, she thought, with something close to professional admiration. She's crying on purpose.
She filed it away for later study.
Ling Shi's gaze slid past Xuan's shoulder and fixed on her.
She looked, and she was not impressed. A skinny child in plain, mud-stained cloth. Sun-darkened skin, ordinary dark eyes, hair tied back with a strip of rag. No ornaments. No sect insignia. Nothing at all.
This? Something hot and ugly turned over in Ling Shi's chest. He's been running out here for this?
"Is it her?" she asked. "Is she the reason you've been sneaking off?"
"That isn't your concern."
"It is my concern." The tears kept falling, but her voice steadied. "Brother Yu. What's her name?"
Xuan said nothing.
"Where does she live?"
Nothing.
"Who is her master?" Ling Shi took a step closer, watching him. "What family is she from? Which village? How did a girl her age learn to place a needle in a beast's throat at thirty paces?"
Xuan's brows drew together.
It was a small thing. It lasted less than a second. But Ling Shi had known him since they were four years old, and she read it the way she would read an open book.
Her breath caught.
"You don't know," she said slowly. "You don't know any of it."
"Ling Shi—"
"You've been coming here for months." Her voice rose, genuinely incredulous now, and for once she wasn't performing at all. "Months, Brother Yu. And she hasn't told you her name? Not one word about where she comes from, or who taught her, or what she's doing alone in a forest that kills grown cultivators?" She laughed, high and disbelieving. "And you never asked? Or you asked, and she refused, and you simply… accepted it?"
Xuan's silence stretched.
"Do you hear yourself?" she pressed. "A child appears out of nowhere in the deepest part of the Balzamia Forest. She survives here alone. She handles poisons and hidden weapons like a trained killer. She hides when strangers come, and she vanishes the moment she's seen. And she will not tell you a single true thing about herself." Her voice dropped. "That isn't shyness. That's training. Someone taught her to be that way."
"That's enough."
"What if she was put here?" Ling Shi's hands closed into fists. "What if someone left her in this forest precisely so that you would find her? Think, Brother Yu. Of all the people in the world she could have stumbled across, she found you. You cannot afford to trust a stranger, of all people. Not with your ident—"
"Enough."
The word cut the clearing in half.
Lianxi's head came up.
Xuan's back was to her, but she saw the change run through his shoulders, and the air around him turned so heavy she felt it press against her chest. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet, and it was worse than shouting.
"You will not finish that sentence."
Ling Shi had gone pale. "Brother Yu, I—"
"Not one more word. Do you understand me?"
She nodded quickly, her eyes lowered.
Lianxi looked at the back of Xuan's head and thought, with perfect clarity: Ah.
She had always known he was someone. The quality of his robes. The casual way he spoke of pills she had only read about. The sheer speed of his cultivation. She had simply never assigned a number to the risk he was taking every time he walked into these trees.
She assigned one now, and did not like the result.
"She's dangerous," Ling Shi tried again, more softly. "Please. Don't let her fool you."
"I can judge that for myself."
"But—"
"I can look after myself, Ling Shi." He sheathed his sword with a hard click. "I don't need you following me. I don't need you vetting the people I speak to. You will stop interfering in my affairs. Is that clear?"
"…Yes."
"Good. Now go home."
Her head snapped up. "What?"
"Go back. Now."
"Alone?" Her voice climbed. "Brother Yu, this forest nearly killed me an hour ago. You want to send me back through it by myself?"
"You reached this place by yourself," he said. "You're at Foundation Establishment. Take the southern path, avoid the ridge, and you'll be out before dark. You'll be fine."
And then Ling Shi began to cry in earnest.
"Brother Yu, how can you be so heartless?" The words came out broken, and this time her breathing did stutter. "You've never been like this. Never. You used to care about me more than anyone." Her eyes, wet and furious and desperate, went past him to the small girl standing in the leaves. "Is it because of her? Is she why you've changed?"
Silence.
Lianxi, who had spent the last several minutes analyzing tear production and threat assessment, now found herself the subject of a question, and discovered she had no prepared answer for it at all.
She looked at Ling Shi, red-eyed and shaking. She looked at Xuan's rigid back.
Then she stepped out from behind him.
"Brother Xuan."
He turned. "Sister Xi, you don't have to—"
"She's right," Lianxi said.
He blinked. "What?"
"About the forest." She nodded toward the treeline. "The Duskmaw pack you killed was a hunting party. There will be a den nearby, and dens hold twenty or more. They'll smell the blood within the hour and follow the scent back along her trail. She's exhausted, she's bleeding from that cut on her ankle, and she doesn't know the southern path as well as she thinks, because she came in from the west." She met his eyes. "She won't make it out before dark. If you send her alone, she'll die."
Xuan's jaw worked. "Sister Xi—"
"You should take her." Lianxi's tone was perfectly level, the way it always was when she described something clinical. "It's the correct thing to do."
For a long moment, he simply looked at her, and there was something almost pained in his face.
"I don't want to leave you," he said.
"I know. But wanting is not a factor in this calculation."
He let out a breath that was half a laugh and entirely defeated.
"…Fine." He turned to Ling Shi. "Wait at the ridge. I'll be there shortly." Then, to Lianxi, urgently: "Wait for me. I'll see her to the boundary and come straight back. Two hours at most. We can still—"
"I need to go home."
His face fell. "Now?"
"I've been out longer than I intended." It was not entirely a lie. "We should postpone."
"Then tomorrow."
"No."
"The day after."
"No." Lianxi looked at a point somewhere past his left shoulder. "Two weeks."
"Two weeks?"
"I'll be occupied." The lie sat awkwardly in her mouth, and she compensated by adding detail, which she immediately recognized as a mistake. "There's a refinement I need to attempt. It requires continuous attention. Also an array. Several arrays."
Xuan stared at her.
"Sister Xi," he said quietly. "Are you avoiding me?"
"No."
"Did I do something wrong?"
"No." She said it too quickly.
Xuan searched her face. Then understanding settled over him, and his expression softened.
"Is it because of what she said?" He stepped closer. "Don't pay her any mind, Sister Xi. I don't care where you come from, or who taught you, or what you're hiding. I trust you."
Lianxi stood very still.
It wasn't that. If anything, Ling Shi had been right about all of it.
And he had chosen her anyway.
"…It isn't that," she managed. "Thank you, Brother Xuan."
"For what?"
"I don't know yet." She bowed. "I'll need to think about it."
And for the first time all afternoon, something in her face was not composed at all.
"Then two weeks is a very long time," Xuan said.
"Fourteen days," she said. "It's the same length as any other fourteen days."
"It isn't," said Xuan.
Lianxi had no response to that either.
She bowed instead, which was always safe, and turned away.
"Sister Xi."
She stopped.
"You'll come," he said. It wasn't quite a question. "In two weeks. You'll be there."
Lianxi did not turn around.
"I'll consider it," she said.
Then she walked into the trees.
✦ ✦ ✦
She kept a steady pace for the first li, checking twice that no one followed. Only when she was certain did she slow down, and let herself think.
The facts arranged themselves in her mind with unwelcome neatness.
Whoever Xuan was, he was important enough that a single unfinished word had turned him to ice. And he had been walking into this forest for months, shedding whoever guarded him, shaking off his own sworn sister, lying to everyone he knew. For her.
She had been doing the same. Every meeting was a violation of her master's rule. Every hour in that valley was an hour in which someone might notice, might follow, might trace a small girl back through the trees to a barrier and a wooden house and an old man who had told her, with terrible seriousness, that this was a matter of life and death.
Today, someone had. It had taken less than a year.
There would be others. There were always others.
And the girl hated her. That much had been obvious from the first glance, long before the sword. It had nothing to do with spies or suspicion. Lianxi did not fully understand the shape of it, and she suspected she was missing something important, but she recognized hostility when it was aimed at her, however prettily it was wrapped.
Ling Shi would not let this go. People like that never did.
The logical conclusion was simple. She reached it before she was halfway home.
She would have to find an opportunity to cut ties with Brother Xuan.
Not today. Not in a way that would wound him. But soon, and cleanly, the way one removed a shard from a wound before the rot could spread. He would be angry for a while. Then he would go back to whatever great place he had come from, and to his sworn sister, and in a year he would barely remember the odd little girl who had given him medicine in a cave.
It was the correct decision. She had examined it from every angle and found no flaw in it.
Lianxi stopped walking.
She stood alone on the forest path with the light going gold through the leaves, and pressed one hand flat against her chest.
There was a pain there. A real one, dull and heavy, spreading beneath her ribs.
She took her own pulse. Steady. She checked her breathing. Normal. No obstruction, no qi deviation, no sign of poison or internal injury. By every measure she knew how to apply, she was perfectly healthy.
She stood there a long time, waiting for it to pass.
It didn't.
Eventually she lowered her hand, and kept walking, and did not understand at all why her eyes had begun to sting.