The Heavenly Pavilion stood atop the Main Peak, commanding a view of the thousand miles of plains beyond the mountain.
Dressed in a gauzy skirt, the Red-Haired Hu Concubine sat sideways on the windowsill. Before her lay azure clouds and the autumn sun. The fierce autumn wind high above stirred her gauzy skirts, and her silhouette looked less like a Female Emperor and Martial God than a wanderer who had drifted here from the Frontier Beyond the Pass.
Perhaps she had been pounded too hard last night and entered Sage Time. After getting up today, her thoughts had suddenly begun to wander. She saw her father's retreating figure leading bailiffs through the Great Desert in search of water, and her mother's kind eyes as she told her stories of the Central Plains.
She remembered disliking the name her parents had given her at first.
She had wanted to fulfill her father's lifelong wish of saving the common people through her own abilities, yet her parents had named her "Meiren."
It was just like Mei Conggao, who had set her heart on becoming an immortal maiden, yet had been named "Xiaofan."
Their names and aspirations ran in completely opposite directions.
But thinking about it now, once one entered the Jianghu, turning back was hard; once one entered the Immortal Dao, worldly dust was forgotten.
The paths she and Mei Conggao had chosen were both strewn with thorns and hardship. There were cultivators by the thousands upon thousands, and more than half died on the road of cultivation. How many ultimately attained the Dao?
As parents, how could they bear to let their daughters take such paths? To be pretty and cherished, ordinary and free of illness or calamity-those were already the finest blessings in the world.
Fortunately, however, they had made