Yun Nian, from the Xuanmiao Sword Sect, was nearly pierced by the beast’s shrill cry. As it cut through the air like a needle made of fire, forcing her instincts to tighten, she reflexively tilted her head, her eyes snapping toward the source of the sound. Only then did she see it clearly. Xie Qingli’s back was already soaked in blood. A Crimson Feather Beast’s claw mark had torn across his left shoulder, the wound deep enough to expose raw flesh that looked as if it had been scorched rather than torn. Blood now seeped steadily through his white robes, spreading like ink into silk, while the exposed skin carried a faint, unnatural red glow—like embers refusing to die out.
The Crimson Feather Beast was a fire-type spirit beast. Its attacks did not merely wound; they burned as its fire poison would sink into the flesh, seeping along meridians, scorching the lungs and organs from within as if the body itself had become a furnace with no exit. Yun Nian’s breath caught as she bent closer, panic flashing across her face. “Help, Master!” Master Fu Tan, who had just arrived down the mountain for barely half a day, saw her first instead of the injured man. Her hair was in complete disarray, tangled with stray leaves, as though she had rolled through half the forest on her way here. His eye twitched almost imperceptibly. This disciple of his… truly never allowed him a moment of peace.
So, without responding to her panic, Master Fu Tan stepped forward. His attention finally settled on Xie Qingli, unconscious in Yun Nian’s arms, and with a calm motion, he extended his spiritual energy, letting it flow into the boy’s meridians like a quiet stream searching for fractures.
Yun Nian on the side blinked anxiously. “How is he, Master? Will he die?” Master Fu Tan did not even glance at her and asked, “Do you want him to die?” Yun Nian’s lips curved downward in grievance as her voice softened into something almost pitiful. “No, Master… if he dies, I don’t want to live anymore.”
Because if he died, her mission would fail, and her few hard-earned points would be wiped out in one clean sweep. That would be true despair for her, worse than death itself. So she tightened her arms around Xie Qingli again, hugging him even closer, protective and instinctive. Master Fu Tan’s eyelid twitched once more seeing this.
And the boy in her arms—who had been pretending to be unconscious all along—stiffened almost imperceptibly as this scene unfolded. His fingers curled slightly, with veins rising on the back of his hand, as if he were restraining something far darker than pain. She asked again, “Master, he—”
“Not dead.” Master Fu Tan cut her off flatly. “Just unconscious, but if you keep pressing on his wound like that, he might actually die.” Yun Nian froze hearing this. Only then did she realize where her hand was. Her palm had been resting directly over one of Xie Qingli’s injuries, pressing down without awareness while she held him tightly.
System:
$$You! Let go! Your hand!$$
Yun Nian reacted instantly, pulling her hand back as if burned.
Xie Qingli on the other hand, still lying motionless, endured it all with closed eyes and clenched teeth. The muscles in his jaw tightened slightly, as though suppressing the urge to do something irreversible. Master Fu Tan withdrew his spiritual energy and, without ceremony, lifted Xie Qingli from Yun Nian’s arms. Yun Nian instinctively stepped forward, half-raising her hand as if to help, only to watch her master shift the boy cleanly into his left hand, deliberately keeping him out of her reach.
A faint sting of conscience prickled her. “Master… what should I do now?” Master Fu Tan summoned his sword with a flick of his sleeve without replying. Xie Qingli’s body lifted effortlessly as he was carried away. Only then did he glance at her. “What you can do ends here.” His gaze moved past her, landing on the several figures still kneeling not far away, and the air changed instantly. His presence as one of the elders was calm yet overwhelmingly oppressive, pressing down like a mountain suspended above their kneeling heads. Chang Xuan among the group felt it first—an inexplicable chill crawling through his spine, as though every hidden thought he had was stripped bare and laid open under daylight in front of everyone.
Yun Nian also followed her master’s line of sight.
Then, with a pout, she spoke innocently. “Master, I saw it myself. These four disciples were bullying Junior Brother Xie. They should be punished according to Xuanmiao Sword Sect rules.” Chang Xuan and the others straightened at once as if struck hearing this. “Senior Sister! We didn’t!” one of them blurted quickly. “We were just joking with Junior Brother Xie. We never meant to hurt him!”
“Yes, Master! It was just play! Nothing serious!”
“Senior Sister is misunderstanding the situation! It’s too hasty to accuse us like this!” Yun Nian stared at them in disbelief. They were so young, but so shameless. Did they even know what honor was?
“You made him clean the mountain for you,” she said sharply, stepping forward, “and you even hit him just now. I saw it with my own eyes. Are you saying I’m blind?” She moved as if to grab Chang Xuan by the collar, but Master Fu Tan stopped her with a subtle lift of his hand. “Master…” she frowned. Fu Tan did not look at her this time, as his gaze remained fixed on the kneeling disciples, cold and unyielding. Chang Xuan and the others faltered under that stare. “M-Master…” Fu Tan lifted Xie Qingli’s sleeve without urgency, revealing bruises on his pale forearm—fresh, uneven, unmistakably recent.
Then he turned slightly, peeling back a fragment of a torn talisman stuck near the boy’s back. Small, but damning.
Enough to understand the whole situation.
“This,” Master Fu Tan said evenly, “was just done recently. Dare you still call this play?” His voice lowered a fraction. “And this talisman… I know who threw it.” The air seemed to freeze. “Intending to harm a fellow disciple. According to sect law, the punishments are one hundred lashes, expulsion, and a permanent ban from the Three Sects, Six Schools, and Fourteen Palaces.” His tone remained calm, almost detached. “I will report this to Elder Yuan Qing of the Twelfth Gate.” The kneeling disciples went pale all at once hearing this.
“No—Master, it’s not like that!”
“Please listen to us! We didn’t mean it!”
But Fu Tan had already turned away from them as if they no longer existed. Only Yun Nian remained in his attention. “Aren’t you coming?” he asked mildly. “Planning to stand guard here all day?” Yun Nian pointed toward the distant battlefield. “The Crimson Feather Beast—”
“The Beast Taming Bureau will arrive shortly.”
“Ah… yes, Master.”
And so they returned. As sword light carried them back toward Snow-Treading Peak, slicing through the air like a pale thread sewing sky to mountain.
After arriving at their place on the mountain, Master Fu Tan placed Xie Qingli in the side courtyard down on the bamboo couch. Yun Nian, on the other hand, stood nearby, unusually quiet now, watching closely as her master examined him.
“Master… how is he?” she asked after enduring it for half an incense stick. Fu Tan withdrew his hand at last, his expression unchanged. “His meridians are problematic.”
Yun Nian’s brow tightened hearing this. “They are too cold,” he continued. “The Crimson Feather Beast’s fire poison is pure yang. It has penetrated deeply into his lungs and organs. It will take time to remove.”
Yun Nian’s gaze dropped to Xie Qingli.
His face was pale to the point of fragility, frost faintly gathering at his brows, yet beneath his collar, his skin burned an unnatural red—like two opposing worlds trapped in one body. Ice above. Fire below.
She frowned. “What’s wrong with his meridians?”
Fu Tan shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Is there any way to cure him faster?”
Master Fu Tan looked at her, a glimmer of quiet amusement in his eyes. “Why are you so consumed by his well-being? He is merely an outer disciple of the Twelfth Sect—he has no ties to you. I don’t recall you being this frantic when your own senior brother was injured.”
Yun Nian stiffened, her chin lifting in a defensive tilt. “…I was anxious then, too. I am simply a reserved person by nature.”
Fu Tan didn’t call out her transparent lie. Instead, he shook his head with a faint sigh, stood up, and began walking toward the door. Just before stepping out, he offered a thread of comfort: “He will live. Go prepare the medicine. A month’s time should be enough to purge the fire poison from his meridians entirely.”
Yun Nian immediately trailed after him, her steps hurried. “Is there truly no way to extract it all at once? The pain is wearing him down, he looks so uncomfortable—wait, Master!”
Her warning came a beat too late.
Fu Tan had abruptly halted.
Unable to stop her momentum, Yun Nian stumbled straight into his broad back. She recoiled with a soft hiss, instinctively rubbing her smarting forehead.
Her Master turned slowly, looking down at her with a knowing, indulgent expression. “To care this deeply for an outer disciple… Tell me, Nian’er, has that boy caught your eye?” His gaze drifted lazily toward Xie Qingli on the bamboo couch. “What’s so special about him,” Fu Tan said lightly, “besides his face? An outer disciple of the Twelfth Sect at that… who knows when he’ll ever amount to anything.” After saying this, Fu Tan let out a faint sigh, as if the weight of the whole world had briefly settled on his shoulders, then reached out and patted Yun Nian lightly. “Don’t be as superficial as your senior sister,” he said, his tone half-admonishing, half-weary.
Yun Nian fell silent. “…” The system had mentioned it earlier—after Xie Qingli entered the Ancient Tomb Sword Ruins and rose to fame with his Shattered Thorn Sword, her master would be among the most eager to fight the other peaks for him, like a hawk finally spotting a prized blade in the sky. And with that thought, Yun Nian watched Fu Tan’s retreating figure as he walked away, slightly unsteady, and her emotions tangled into something she could not easily name.
As her master departed, the courtyard fell quiet. Only then did Yun Nian turn back toward the bamboo couch and stand there for a long time without moving.
Contemplating what was wrong with his meridians? In the original story, there had been no mention of Xie Qingli having damaged or abnormal meridians at this stage. Nothing about this had ever been written, not even a passing line. This was her first solo mission, and the target just so happened to be the male protagonist of this entire world. So even she, who usually followed instructions carefully, felt a faint sense of uncertainty creep in at the edges of her thoughts. As she was thinking about this, a voice interrupted her.
System:
$$You’ve been staring at him for a while. What conclusion have you reached?$$
Yun Nian’s gaze drifted over Xie Qingli again, slow and thoughtful. Even with his eyes closed, his presence was difficult to ignore. His brows were sharp, his features clean and striking, like a blade that had not yet been sheathed. She nodded after a moment. “I was thinking, with this face… he deserves to be the male lead of this world.”
System:
$$…That’s it? You don’t feel anything else? He literally took that claw for you.$$
At that reminder, Yun Nian’s eyes shifted to his shoulder where thick layers of gauze wrapped his wound tightly, and even from a distance, she could almost smell the faint iron of blood tangled with the bitter chill of medicinal herbs around the wound. He had, in fact, taken that strike for her.
For a brief moment, she seemed to recall it more clearly than before—the way his blood had splattered across her face, warm at first touch, then sliding down her palm in a slow, chilling trail toward her wrist. It had not felt like normal human warmth at all; instead, there had been an unusual coldness buried beneath it, something that didn’t belong to a human.
That was likely connected to his strange meridians. At first, she had been startled by his action. But now that her breathing had steadied and her thoughts had cooled, she remembered what the original narrative had described: Xie Qingli at this stage was meant to be gentle, harmless, almost fragile in his goodness. A person who would instinctively protect others even at his own expense. Someone like that… it wasn’t strange that he would do something like this.
A pure and kind person. And yet, in the later chapters, that same purity would be eroded—slowly, inevitably—until what remained was something far more dangerous. A monster without warmth, without restraint, knowing only slaughter. Yun Nian let out a soft sigh, recalling the original text, as if shaking off an invisible weight. Then she stepped forward and bent down, carefully taking Xie Qingli’s hand and tucking it beneath the thin blanket, smoothing it as though settling something fragile that might break with too much force. After that, she went to the window and closed it tightly, blocking out the cold wind before quietly turning away.
Only then did she finally leave. As the light, unhurried rhythm of her footsteps faded down the corridor, the young man on the bamboo couch slowly opened his eyes. His gaze landed first on the thin blanket draped over him.
It was warm, soft to the touch. A faint trace of her presence still lingered in the room—subtle yet unmistakable, brushing against his senses like a memory that refused to dissipate. Earlier, when she had leaned close to tend to him, that scent had filled his lungs without warning, embedding itself somewhere deeper than breath could follow.
Xie Qingli lifted a hand to the blanket, his fingers tightening slightly against the fabric, before he sat up. He rose from the couch and walked to the window. With a quiet push, the wooden frame creaked open. From there, he could still see her figure in the distance—slender, moving away in a blue robe that blended so easily into the surrounding greenery it looked as if she belonged to the mountain itself.
Snow-Treading Peak was no different from the Twelfth Gate in structure, yet here it was quieter. Cleaner. No unnecessary noise, no prying eyes, no people pressing in on him from all sides. In the Twelfth Gate, he had to restrain himself, wearing patience like a mask, enduring Chang Xuan and the others while carefully hiding what he truly was.
As the Ancient Tomb Sword Ruins would open next week, there was no longer any need to continue pretending. Originally, he had intended to use the Crimson Feather Beast to deal with those people, wiping them out in one clean sweep. But Fu Tan had arrived unexpectedly, disrupting his plans. And worse, Fu Tan had been watching him. That man had always been protective of his own disciples. If he noticed even a hint of imbalance, Xie Qingli would have had to explain things he could not afford to explain. So he had adapted.
Suppressed his killing intent. Played the part of someone injured by a talisman. Even taken a strike for that so-called “little disciple,” just enough to shift suspicion away from him. It was a small price. And yet, fate had carried him here instead—Snow-Treading Peak, of all places.
Still… That was fine. He had come for something else anyway. With Yun Nian no longer in sight, Xie Qingli’s expression darkened slightly as he stood there in silence, his fingers tightening around the wooden frame. Then, slowly, he closed the window. The soft click echoed through the room like a sealed thought.
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