Burials, Farewell

Cliff Plateau.

The gale howled, branches swaying.

Su Yueli used her hands to scrape away the earth bit by bit. Pebbles embedded in the soil ground her fingertips raw, and blood mixed with mud filled the gaps beneath her nails.

A few days ago, on Sunward Slope outside Fengling City, she had used these same hands to dig a pit for Shen Qing'an.

Now, she had to dig another one.

So living too long truly turned one into a practiced gravedigger, burying the people around them one by one beneath the earth.

By the time dusk blurred into darkness, the deep pit had finally taken shape.

Su Yueli carried Lu Chen's body up the cliff and gently laid him into the pit, just as her master had taught her over the past twenty years.

A handful of yellow earth, then another, until that head of graying hair was completely buried.

Su Yueli knelt before the newly raised mound and picked up the half gourd of strong liquor stained with blood.

Pulling out the wooden stopper, she tipped back her head and took a swallow.

"Cough, cough..."

The fiery liquor burned down into her stomach, mingled with a trace of bloodiness. It made her eyes redden, but this time, it no longer seemed as hard to swallow as it had a few days ago.

She slowly poured the remaining half gourd of liquor before the grave.

The clear liquor seeped into the yellow earth and swiftly vanished.

"Master, you said you suffered a qi deviation. I don't believe it."

Su Yueli stared at the grave mound without a tombstone, her eyes full of stubbornness. "What you cared about most in this life was a martial artist's backbone. You would never have slaughtered ordinary people. Your letter must have been hiding something."

She reached out and touched the sheepskin letter in her robes.

"You told me to go to Qing Province to find your friend... I won't go for now."

"This is your place. Wherever you are, I will be there. If you refuse to tell me, then I'll investigate it myself. If I can't get to the bottom of it, I'll stay here forever."

In the days that followed, Su Yueli became the gravekeeper of this dead mountain.

She spent an entire month burying the hundreds of corpses from the small village below, one by one, on the sunward side of Blackwind Ridge.

More than four hundred earthen mounds stood packed together like a silent scar.

During the day, she practiced her fists atop Cliff Plateau.

Having lost every last bond, she seemed to have become a tireless machine for training.

If ten thousand repetitions were not enough, then she did twenty thousand. When her strength ran dry, she gritted her teeth until they nearly shattered and forcibly squeezed the qi and blood from the depths of her marrow.

At night, she sat before Lu Chen's grave, wiping her hands as she spoke to the lonely mound, telling it of her progress in fist training that day, telling it of the mountain's withering and flourishing.

Day after day, year after year.

To mortals, time was the deadliest poison. To her, it was merely fallen leaves piling up outside a cave.

In the blink of an eye, five years passed.

Over those five years, Su Yueli turned over every corner of the dead village at the foot of the mountain, which had long since become ruins.

At last, after a rain in the fifth year, she discovered a trace of something out of place in the collapsed backyard of the village chief's house.

It was a massive bluestone millstone used to grind grain.

The rain had washed away the dark red bloody mud on its surface, revealing a cut that had split the bluestone in two. A trace of chilling cold still lingered on the severed surface, enough to oppress her qi and blood.

Su Yueli stood in the rain, staring at that cut.

Her master's fist art followed the path of pure, crushing violence. If it struck stone, it would only leave pulverization and spiderweb cracks.

Such an unnaturally smooth cut could only have been made by one thing—an immortal cultivator's flying sword.

The lingering Sword Qi had remained undispersed even after five years of wind and rain.

"It was immortal cultivators..."

Su Yueli clenched her fists. Everything made sense now.

Her master had not suffered a qi deviation after all. Immortal cultivators had driven him into a dead end.

Perhaps, to protect her, he had chosen to take the blame for the village slaughter and used suicide to sever the immortal cultivators' pursuit.

Immortal cultivators.

But which faction had it been, and why would they bring down a butcher's blade upon a mortal village?

Su Yueli did not know...

She carved this blood debt into her heart, branding it into her marrow alongside her hatred for the Azure Cloud Sect.

Returning to Cliff Plateau, Su Yueli went to the lakeside and washed the mud from her hands.

Ripples shimmered across the water, reflecting her appearance.

Five years had passed.

A full twenty-five years had passed since that bone-testing ceremony twenty years ago.

Su Yueli looked at her reflection in the water. That cool and beautiful face was still fair as jade, the tear mole at the corner of her eye still striking. There was not a trace of wrinkle, nor the slightest hint of age.

Time had completely come to a standstill upon her body.

"So I really have become immortal..."

Su Yueli tugged at the corner of her mouth in self-mockery.

Just yesterday, relying on five years of monotonous fist-swinging and the accumulation of endless years, she had forcibly broken through the barrier of the Second Martial Realm and stepped into the Third Blood-Exchange Realm.

The old blood within her body was gradually stripped away, while newly born qi and blood surged through her meridians like rivers, brimming with power.

For a mortal martial artist, reaching the Third Realm of Blood Exchange was enough to establish a sect in the martial world and fight a hundred foes alone.

But in the eyes of those immortal cultivators who could ride swords through the sky and split mountains apart, she was still an ant that could be crushed to death at any moment.

"Hu—"

Su Yueli exhaled a stream of white breath and turned to look at Lu Chen's lonely grave.

After five years of sun and rain, her master's grave was already overgrown with waist-high weeds, trembling in the autumn wind.

"Master, I found something. It was those people in the heavens who did it."

Su Yueli walked to the grave and plucked the weeds out one by one, her tone calm. "I've entered the Third Realm too, but I'm still far too weak."

She paused, then rose to her feet.

"I plan to leave the mountain. I'm going to Azure Province City to find your close friend, Tie Tu."

Before long, Su Yueli changed into clean clothes and walked out of Blackwind Ridge.

When she passed Fengling City, Su Yueli stopped outside the city.

It was the Lantern Festival. The city blazed with lights, lanterns hung all along the long streets, and fireworks blossomed in the night sky, illuminating the snow on the official road beyond the city walls.

Men and women leaned against one another, while children holding candied hawthorns threaded through the crowds. The air brimmed with the bustle of mortal life and the warmest vitality of the human world.

Su Yueli stood in the shadows, silently watching the scene.

For an instant, a trace of envy flashed through her eyes.

If she had possessed spiritual roots, if she had not suffered all this, perhaps she too could have lived like an ordinary person, finding a place of peace amid this vast mortal world.

But that trace of envy was immediately extinguished completely, like a spark in the wind.

She could not start a family.

It was not only because of that monstrous face forever frozen at seventeen or eighteen, but also because of the psychological barrier she could never cross.

A man's soul in a woman's body.

She could neither marry a woman nor wed a man. Love, to her, was nothing but an absurd joke.

She was like a lonely ghost cast by the heavens beyond the river of time, destined to walk alone forever—unable to marry, unable to wed, unable to love.

Loneliness was the only companion of one who lived forever.

Su Yueli withdrew her gaze and turned toward Sunward Slope outside the city.

Five years had brought subtle changes to the landscape of Sunward Slope as well.

Shen Qing'an's lonely grave had received no care, and more than half of its mound had collapsed.

Not only was the grave covered in withered grass, a crooked wild jujube tree had even grown beside it. Its roots plunged deep into the soil, as though they meant to fuse the person below with the earth completely.

Su Yueli walked to the grave, pushed aside the waist-high weeds, and sat beside the collapsed mound.

"Shen Qing'an, I came to see you."

Su Yueli's voice was soft, especially ethereal beneath the cold moonlight.

"I haven't come in five years. Even your roof has collapsed, and so much grass has grown. You were so cold before you died. Now that the weeds are blocking the wind, it should be a little better, right?"

She reached out and patted the patch of wild grass sticking out of the earth.

"I didn't take away the things you spent your entire fortune to buy back then. I left them to be buried with you. Those immortals sit high above us, but we mortals have no use for them."

The night wind swept past. The withered branches of the wild jujube tree swayed with a rustling sound, as though answering her.

Su Yueli raised her head and looked at the cold, bright moon in the night sky.

"I'm leaving, for Azure Province City."

"The immortals of this world owe us far too much. Whether it's the Azure Cloud Sect or the immortal cultivators who killed my master, I will collect this debt from them, stroke by stroke."

"I have no spiritual roots. I cannot cultivate immortality."

Su Yueli slowly rose. The night wind lifted her long hair, while in those cool eyes burned a blaze that seemed capable of piercing the heavens.

"Then I'll use Martial Dao to reach the Tenth Realm, the Eleventh Realm, the very end of time!"

"Until one day, I drag them down from the heavens one by one and grind them into mud!"

After saying that, Su Yueli never once looked back at the myriad lights of countless homes. She turned and walked into the boundless night, heading toward Azure Province City.