All Was Ready but the Wind and Snow

As Pei Qian climbed the mountain, she gripped a bamboo-yellow paper knife. Her thumb pressed lightly against the handle, easing the blade from its sheath before gently pushing it back in.

Though it was fashioned like a paper knife for a scholar's desk and made from ancestral bamboo of Qingshen Mountain, it could be used against enemies. Since the green bamboo came from the ancestral grove of Bamboo Sea Cave Heaven, the knife counted as a Magic Treasure with formidable Suppressive Magic against Demons and Ghosts.

Cen Yuanyi happened to be descending the mountain while practicing her Fist Stance. Pei Qian stopped again and stepped aside to let her pass, slipping the Bamboo Knife into her sleeve.

On the steps near the summit, Zhu Lian and Mi Yu sat drinking. Watching the scene, Zhu Lian sighed. "Even if she retraced every step of her old wanderings, following the very same route, there would never again be that black-charcoal little girl with a talisman stuck to her forehead, chanting, 'Walk with swagger, make the demons stagger.'"

In Mi Yu's memory, Pei Qian was still the little girl he had met at the Sword Qi Great Wall: clever, impish, and afraid of nothing. Seeing her again at Luopo Mountain had genuinely surprised him. That abrupt sense of change was much like Sui Youbian's.

Since arriving on the mountain, nearly everything Mi Yu knew about Pei Qian had come from Chen Warm Tree and Zhou Mili's casual chats. Little Millet told him even more during their daily patrols. Every morning, before he had so much as stepped outside, the black-clothed little girl would already be at his door, punctual as a Guardian God. She never hurried him; she simply waited. Mi Yu once told her she needn't wait outside, but she said waiting