Chapter 12: Zhan Yunwei's Mercy That Changed Everything
I don't believe in fate.
When Zhan Yunwei came back to herself, someone was shaking her gently by the shoulder. "Junior sister, wake up — we're almost at Qiyang County."
She opened her eyes. She was inside a carriage, and Senior Sister Duan was seated across from her, one of the students who had arrived at the academy around the same time and taken up the study of spirit manipulation techniques together.
The carriage was spacious and well-appointed, and the girls inside couldn't quite conceal their excitement, which had been building since morning.
"We'll see Brother Afeng soon — can you check whether my hair is lying flat?"
"It's fine. Help me choose — which fan should I carry so that Senior Brother Wan notices me right away?"
In the carriages traveling alongside theirs, fair-skinned and carefully groomed young men were attending to their own appearances with similar concentration, each of them arranging himself into the most agreeable version of his presentation in preparation for the spirit cultivator sisters who would be coming to receive them.
Zhan Yunwei did not quite belong to this atmosphere.
She sat in the corner in her pink silk dress, staring faintly at the scene in front of her, her head carrying a dull, persistent ache. She had the distinct feeling that she had forgotten something — something important, something that would tell her she shouldn't be here at all. But no matter how carefully she pressed at the feeling, whatever was underneath it refused to surface.
Senior Sister Duan, noticing her stillness, leaned over. "Junior Sister Zhan, shouldn't you be changing? The spirit cultivators will be arriving soon to escort us into Qiyang County. Is there no one you're hoping to see?"
The question anchored her. Right — they were on the way to Qiyang County.
She was fourteen, or thereabouts. She had recently arrived at the academy and was studying spirit manipulation techniques under the instruction of the spirit masters.
A few days prior, evil energy had begun accumulating in Qiyang County at an alarming density, and the Immortal Alliance, concerned for the population, had first dispatched spirit cultivator disciples to manage the situation and then arranged for this group of spirit masters to follow behind, carrying soul-cleansing jade discs to purify what the cultivators could not reach.
It was a mission with genuine stakes, but the carriage around her suggested no particular awareness of this. Surrounded by expensive silk upholstery, protected by immortal soldiers on all sides, moving in the finest conveyances the Alliance could provide — the spirit masters had filtered out the urgency and kept only the occasion, which was the opportunity to encounter their favorite spirit cultivators.
For most spirit masters, life was comfortable and cushioned, and the primary complexity it offered was the selection of a suitable companion from among the thousands of cultivators available to them.
Senior Sister Duan smoothed her skirts and settled back. "Have you heard who will be here today?" She lowered her voice with the conspiratorial pleasure of someone sharing excellent news. "The most outstanding spirit cultivator from the immortal sects — the sword cultivator from Penglai with the natural sword bone. 'Heavenly Jade Capital.' Many of the senior sisters came specifically for him." She studied Zhan Yunwei. "You haven't been at the academy long — have you seen him?"
"You mean Senior Brother Pei?" Zhan Yunwei thought of the boy who had walked across the academy several evenings ago to accompany her in her practice. "I've seen him."
Senior Sister Duan's eyes lit up. "Is he as handsome as the rumors say?"
Zhan Yunwei smiled. "Yes."
"If you say it's true, then it must be." She sighed happily. "I wonder which of his fellow disciples he'll fall for one day." Zhan Yunwei didn't know. But she knew that Senior Brother Pei was a sword cultivator unlike any other — a quality in him that went beyond skill or appearance, something harder to name.
He had insisted on repaying what he called her life-saving grace, even though she hadn't done very much, and had quietly helped conceal her practice of certain techniques that the academy would have found objectionable.
As the convoy approached the gates of Qiyang County, a woman from among the traveling staff came forward carrying a small child — perhaps three years old. The woman was round-faced and plainly dressed, with the honest manner of someone who does not naturally intrude but has run out of alternatives.
"Forgive me for troubling the ladies. Could any of you please help this child?"
Zhan Yunwei looked over. The child was dressed in coarse cloth, thin and dark-skinned, her clothes heavy with mud. The woman, a cook who traveled with the convoy, had found her in a village they had passed through. In that village, many residents had been tainted by evil energy. The current prefect of Chetian, a man named Dongfang Jibai, had taken the efficient approach of declaring the affected villagers to be evil spirits and having them killed. The child had been hidden inside a rice jar. She was the only survivor. The cook had used her own purifying jade disc on her, but the evil energy had not cleared fully, and now the child was feverish and declining.
Dongfang Jibai's name was known and despised widely enough that no one drove the child away. The sympathy for her situation was genuine. Under ordinary circumstances, the arrival of a cook with a sick child would have produced several willing volunteers among the spirit masters.
But not today.
Everyone had changed into their finest clothing. They had arranged their hair, chosen their accessories, and composed themselves into the best version of their presentation. No one wanted to take a mud-streaked, feverish child from the cook's arms and undo all of that.
The cook stood at the carriage entrance, feeling the weight of her own poor timing, trying to think of another approach.
Then a pale hand pushed aside the curtain from inside.
A spirit master leaned through the opening. Her eyes were warm, her smile easy. "Give her to me."
"Oh—!" The cook's relief was immediate and total. She transferred the child quickly. "I'm so sorry to trouble you, Miss. She's a little dirty, she—"
"It's all right," she heard the young lady say, and she heard the warmth in it.
While the other spirit masters descended from the carriages and located their chosen cultivators, Zhan Yunwei remained inside, settling the child across her lap and placing her fingers gently against the small forehead.
Evil energy entering a body produced pain — often severe and disorienting. This child had been so thoroughly saturated with it that a single jade disc had barely made an impression. She was fragile in the specific way that children are fragile, and Zhan Yunwei worked carefully, using her spiritual power only to feel out the meridians and guide the energy along them rather than attempting to force anything.
In her discomfort, the child was reaching out in her sleep — a small, dark hand groping for something, finding the fabric of Zhan Yunwei's dress, and clutching it tightly. She pressed her face into Zhan Yunwei's side.
The cook rubbed her hands together. "She doesn't mean anything by it. She's lost both her parents, so she's probably just unsettled and confused in her dreams."
"I know," Zhan Yunwei said. "Please sit for a while."
She too had wanted her mother, once, and had understood clearly what it was to dream of comfort that wasn't there.
The cook, somewhat disarmed by the complete absence of complaint in this spirit master's manner, settled in and watched.
An hour later, the child stirred and opened her eyes.
The cook leaned forward, delighted. "Aheng! Do you recognize your auntie?"
The child paused. She looked at the cook, brow furrowing slightly. Then, slowly, her gaze moved to Zhan Yunwei. Then, with a stillness that was not quite what one expected from a three-year-old waking from a confused sleep, she looked down at her own hands — at the small, soft, unfamiliar fingers, at the child's frame she currently inhabited.
In that moment, Zhan Yunwei saw something pass across the child's face that could only be described as silent, bewildered embarrassment.
The child — Aheng — withdrew her hand from Zhan Yunwei's skirts, pressed her lips together, and climbed off her lap without assistance.
The cook moved to catch her. Aheng refused.
"Aheng, what is it? What's wrong?"
The child's eyes had gone to the floor. She curled her small fingers into her palm, and after a long pause said, in a voice that was barely audible: "Nothing."
Hearing her own voice — the high, thin, unmistakably childlike pitch of it — she closed her mouth. Her brow furrowed. She did not speak again.
Having been reduced to the body of the three-year-old girl Aheng, Yue Zhiheng concluded, with a cold clarity, that he had not hit Yue Wujiu nearly hard enough.
The Floating Dream Mirage was, as its name suggested, a formation that drew people into their most dangerous past and generated killing intent within the dream's architecture. Those caught inside believed the dream to be real and could not be pulled out by force from the outside. If a person died within the mirage, they died outside it as well. The only way to break the formation was to survive the killing intent it produced — to walk through the past and come out the other side.
The formation was a Heavenly Rank construct, and within its structure lived numerous vengeful spirits who gave it a kind of consciousness of its own — one that consumed passing souls to maintain itself. Yue Zhiheng had forced his way into Zhan Yunwei's dream, and the mirage had responded by stripping him of nearly all his capabilities and containing what remained in the body of a three-year-old child.
Countless invisible, greedy eyes pressed in from the shadows around them, watching both him and Zhan Yunwei, trying to hold them there.
Yue Zhiheng kept his gaze level and his expression cold. Fine. Let's see what you're actually capable of.
Zhan Yunwei found the child named Aheng peculiar from the beginning.
The original Aheng — the real Aheng — had woken crying after her recovery, distressed and disoriented, finding comfort only in the cook's familiar arms. This child had not cried at all. Her eyes, when they opened, had the color of dark ink at their edges, glass-clear and oddly composed. When the cook tried to take her back, she looked at Zhan Yunwei with those unreadable eyes and declined to move.
The cook threw up her hands.
Zhan Yunwei considered the small figure in front of her. "Do you want to come with me?"
Aheng nodded.
"If you come with me, you cannot cry. And you cannot wander off. You have to listen to what I say. Understood?"
The person in front of her looked at her steadily. A brief flash of something — irritation, possibly — moved through those dark eyes. Then, after a pause, she nodded.
They had arrived in Qiyang County's territory, and Zhan Yunwei still had her assignment to complete. The convoy had brought many soul-cleansing jade discs, infused with spirit masters' spiritual power, to distribute to the general population — there were simply too many people in the city to treat each one individually, and this method was the most efficient available.
When word spread that the spirit masters had arrived, the people received them with a gratitude and excitement that was genuinely moving.
Zhan Yunwei's classmates were handling the distribution in the city streets.
Afraid that Aheng might get separated from her in the crowd, she moved to carry her.
The child stiffened and refused.
Zhan Yunwei said, with the patient practicality of someone who has done the arithmetic: "If I have to follow you at your walking pace, we won't finish before dark. You agreed to listen to me. Either I carry you, or you stay here with the cook."
Aheng's brow furrowed. She stopped objecting.
Zhan Yunwei picked her up. Aheng went immediately rigid, shifting her weight to avoid unnecessary contact, her expression completely blank as she gripped the shoulder of Zhan Yunwei's dress.
The stiffness was so deliberate, so clearly effortful, that Zhan Yunwei laughed. "Are you shy?"
"No. Absolutely not."
"There's nothing wrong with being shy," Zhan Yunwei said, looking at her with perfect seriousness. "You'll understand that better when you're older."
"..."
The child pressed her lips into a tight line, her expression communicating with great precision that she would very much like Zhan Yunwei to stop talking. Zhan Yunwei found this expression — the specific speechlessness of someone whose dignity has been unexpectedly challenged by circumstances — genuinely charming in a way that was entirely different from the listless, frightened child of an hour ago.
She carried Aheng through the city streets and talked as they went. "This isn't Xinghua Village anymore — this is Qiyang County. Have you heard of Qiyang Immortal Mountain? The immortal family there is named Yue, and the Yue family's immortal lord is known for benevolence. Auntie Cook has said she'll see about sending you there to cultivate. The Yue Immortal Lord will certainly take good care of you."
She heard Aheng make a quiet, dismissive sound.
"That's a rather cynical attitude for someone your age. What is it about the Yue family that you find objectionable?"
Aheng didn't engage directly. She said, in a tone entirely devoid of warmth: "If you say they're merciful, then they're merciful."
Zhan Yunwei was about to press further when a commotion erupted ahead.
"Stop him! Catch that thief!"
A boy — disheveled, carrying a sour, faintly sinister energy around him that was different from the ordinary grime of poverty — burst through the crowd ahead of them and sprinted away, pursued by several shouting civilians. Zhan Yunwei saw what he had in his hand: a soul-cleansing jade slip.
He had taken it directly from someone in the crowd. He was thin, and he looked entirely capable of being knocked down by a strong gust, but his momentum was reckless and focused — he drove through the pedestrians ahead of him, snapping at them to get out of his way, and the force of his intention kept him moving faster than his body alone could explain.
The spirit cultivators nearby were not going to let a common boy outrun them. One of them drew his spiritual sword; it crossed the distance in a flash and struck the boy across the shoulder. He flew backward and landed hard on the ground, coughing up blood.
Zhan Yunwei expected him to stay down. He got up. He still had the jade slip.
The anger this produced — in the civilians who had been watching, and in the immortal sect disciples — was substantial. Someone shouted about the audacity of it. Someone else picked up a stick.
Stealing a jade slip was not a minor offense. It was stealing someone's chance at survival, their extension of life against the evil energy that was actively damaging the population. In the rules of the immortal mountain, this was a serious crime. If he didn't return it and someone beat him to death here in this alley, no one would speak in his defense.
Zhan Yunwei glanced at Aheng.
The child was watching the boy on the ground. Her eyes held no fear — only a cold, inward-turned expression that was not quite recognition and not quite contempt. Something more private than either.
She turned her head and said, with a flatness that was clearly aimed at dismissing the scene: "Don't you have something to be doing? This is nothing. Look away."
Zhan Yunwei reached over and pinched her cheek, firmly enough to be felt, and said in a tone she rarely used: "Don't say that."
A person's life was not nothing. That was not negotiable.
Yue Zhiheng had not anticipated meeting his own past self inside Zhan Yunwei's dream.
He knew this day precisely. A spring morning, the entire immortal mountain festive with preparation — it was the birthday of Yue Huai Le, the young lady of the Yue family, and the celebrations had spilled across every corner of the mountain. Even the servants had received spirit stone lucky bags.
In the forbidden area of the back mountain, in a dilapidated courtyard no one was looking at today, the cold rice that had been set aside to be delivered to the two children there had been forgotten entirely.
Before dawn, the mute girl's body had begun doing what it did on the worst days: convulsing, her back distorting, something pressing from inside against the skin as though a sharp bone were trying to come through. The pain was specific and total. She had asked him to kill her.
She had not done this because she wanted to die. She had done it because the person who had been called their grandfather had told them long ago what this was: the fate of children born carrying evil energy. Children like them did not live long. Even if they never became evil, their bodies were the embodiment of that energy, and the energy consumed them before they could reach adulthood. The Yue family patriarch had looked at them both without particular feeling and said: this is fate, and you must learn to accept it.
The sun had been warm that morning and had felt entirely cold on their skin.
The boy — himself, years younger — held the only knife in the courtyard: a wood-chopping knife, small and worn. He pointed it at his sister.
From the far side of the immortal mountain came the sound of laughter and celebration. What was in front of him was a desolate yard and walls and years of confinement in an array that had been placed around them like a cage.
The mute girl's fate was also his fate.
But what was fate? Was it being rejected by blood? Being left behind by the mother who had borne you? Was it being raised in an enclosure like an animal, or was it being the one who had to raise the knife?
He had shoved his sister aside, turned, and swung the knife at the barrier.
He had run all the way down from Qiyang Immortal Mountain to the city at its feet — the city where celebrations were happening and people were moving freely — trying to think of who in this world could help the mute girl he had left on the mountain, or even who might be willing to try. If not help, even a piece of candy. Anything that acknowledged she existed.
His sister had lived from birth to this morning without ever having had one extraordinary wish fulfilled. She wanted to eat a piece of candy. That was the whole of her ambition for herself.
But by the time he got to the candy shop, he was bleeding from the wounds the array had given him when he broke through it, and covered in the kind of filth that made shop owners move their brooms. The shopkeeper had pushed him to the ground and told him to take his beggar's business elsewhere.
From the ground, he had heard people nearby saying that the immortal mountain was distributing jade slips today. One per person. For anyone carrying evil energy, a jade slip could extend their life by decades.
He had looked at his hands, pressed into the dust. He had stopped thinking about the candy. He had picked up the knife.
He couldn't take the jade slips from the immortal sect directly — they were being distributed to the common people outside. He could only watch from the periphery and wait.
That year, he did not know how to read. He had never been taught. No one had explained to him what a gentleman was, or what it meant to have propriety, or why integrity was supposed to matter.
In the alley in Qiyang County, with spring flowers blooming on the branches above, Zhan Yunwei pushed her way through the people who had closed in around the boy on the ground.
She took the jade slip from his hand and returned it to its owner.
"You have your slip back," she said to the crowd. "There's no need to take his life. The immortal sect will determine his punishment."
The spirit guard came forward, awaiting her instruction.
Zhan Yunwei considered. "In Qiyang County's ordinary law, what is the punishment for stealing a few buns?"
"A caning."
The girl's eyes curved. "Then three strokes."
She picked up a branch from the ground and brought it down across the boy's palm three times — not without force, but measured.
Then she crouched in front of him.
"Why did you take it?"
The boy's eyes were closed. His chest moved with the specific quality of someone who has run out of hope and has stopped fighting the feeling of it.
Zhan Yunwei had already understood. He hadn't taken food. He hadn't taken money. He had taken a jade slip — the one thing in this city that could extend a life. Only someone who desperately needed a life extended would risk what he had risked for it.
She did not have a jade slip to give him. What she had was a piece of peace jade that her father had pressed into her hands the first time she began practicing spirit control techniques, when she was very small. Over the years she had used it as a vessel for practice — inscribing spirit control techniques into it, carving her childhood primers into its surface. It was the thing she was most reluctant to part with.
She felt that reluctance clearly. She gave it anyway.
She opened the boy's clenched fist and placed the jade in his palm. "Save whoever you need to save. The world is hard, and wanting to live isn't a crime."
Aheng raised his eyes.
From where he stood in the body of this small child, he watched the figure on the ground — watched himself, years younger, bloodied and without hope — and heard, as he had heard once in truth, the question come from the disheveled boy's cracked voice:
And you? What do you want? I have nothing. Will you take my life as payment?
Zhan Yunwei looked into the dark eyes in front of her. She was quiet for a long moment.
"I don't want your life," she said. "Everyone's life is worth keeping."
A pause. "But there is something I need from you." She held his gaze. "Promise me you'll learn the principles in this jade. Survive. Learn to read. Learn to conduct yourself with respect. If you ever become a spirit cultivator, use it to serve the people."
He said nothing. He got up from the ground and turned and walked away without looking back.
Aheng watched the retreating figure until it was gone.
He thought about what expression Zhan Yunwei's face would wear if she knew who that boy was. Knew that the person she had just released, to whom she had given her most precious childhood possession and her simplest and most sincere request, would one day become a treacherous villain — the kind of man that people would want nothing more than to see destroyed.
Yue Zhiheng's expression remained entirely still.
Well-read and knowledgeable in etiquette.
How ironic.
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