"Greetings, Elder!"
"Greetings, Elder!"
Amid a chorus of greetings, Heartless Immortal walked alone to the frost-covered pine by the cliff.
Standing with her hands behind her back on the snow, she wore a complicated expression seldom seen on her face.
Clear footsteps sounded behind her. Without turning, she asked, "Xiao Lan, when did you arrive?"
The young woman in an unadorned white dress, without a trace of makeup, came up behind her and answered respectfully, "Just today. My three years of mourning for my husband are over. It's time I did something for the Luo Tian Sect."
"Have they... treated you well?"
Heartless Immortal hesitated. By "they," she meant the cultivators at the Luo Tian Sect's main gates.
Since deciding to join the Luo Tian Sect, nearly every surviving cultivator of the Ice Fortress lineage had visited Hundred Mile Green River. She alone had never set foot on Great Green Mountain.
What subtle feelings lay behind that was hard for others to fathom.
Shi Lan replied without hesitation, "They've treated us well enough. You could call it fair treatment. Perhaps it's because of my husband's connections, or perhaps the Supreme Elder gave instructions in secret. Either way, the sisters hardly feel like guests living under someone else's roof."
"I see... Good. That's good."
Heartless Immortal murmured the words. Her feelings about the Ice Fortress sisters settling so smoothly into the Luo Tian Sect were deeply tangled, but relief won out in the end.
She had defied her ancestors' injunction and led her disciples into another sect. If she had entrusted them to the wrong people, even ten thousand deaths would not absolve her.
Looking at her master's slender back, Shi Lan hesitated. "What about you, Master?"
Heartless Immortal said calmly, "Don't worry about me. You've dealt with him before. You