After Qiaolian settled on the plan, the family began quietly preparing to leave.
At dusk, a lone figure stood at the summit of Jueshan Mountain, watching smoke curl from the village far below.
He was tall and loosely built, draped in a faded blue robe that had seen better years. Long, unkempt hair fell across his face and concealed most of it, but what it did not hide was strange enough: his features lay beneath a layer of pale, false-looking skin that gave him a ghostly, unsettling cast.
Jueshan carried a spiritual ward, yet for reasons no one could easily explain, this man and his two attendants had passed through it without resistance and reached the great tree at the mountain's peak without incident.
The man standing at his back, thick-waisted and sharp-eyed as a leopard, was named Yu Chen.
Yu Chen had been standing in the biting wind for half an hour. He endured it once, then again, then finally leaned forward and spoke with careful deference: "Master, should we report this to the other sects?"
What he meant by "this" was the reincarnation tree. It had borne its fruit, as expected, but the fruit was gone, fallen at some unknown hour, leaving only scattered fragments of shell on the ground.
The tree was ancient, thousands of years old. Its owner, Su Yishui, had fed it a blood sacrifice and surrendered half of his near-completed cultivation in exchange for one purpose: to let the tree absorb the lingering remnant souls drifting in its roots and condense them, bit by bit, into flesh.
Yu Chen had never fully made peace with his master's choice. Because what Su Yishui had destroyed himself for was the reincarnation of a notorious demoness: Xiumu Mu Qingge.
Su Yishui had once been her disciple. But Mu Qingge had not taken him out of any honest wish to teach. She had coveted his exceptional face, and with that as her motive, she had peeled him away from Shushan Sect, the path he had chosen, and forced him into her service, then forced her demonic cultivation methods onto him.
Before he had chosen the immortal path, Su Yishui had been the favored son of a powerful prince's concubine. Though he could not be entered in the family records, he had been raised with care and dignity. He had never been summoned or dismissed by anyone as though he were a servant.
Yet at sixteen, when he renounced worldly life and set his mind on cultivation, that boy, still soft-featured as a bloom in spring, fell into the hands of Mu Qingge.
What followed spoke for itself. Su Yishui was a rare talent. Even beginning from a position of weakness, with cultivation that lagged behind hers, he had eventually surpassed her. And he had turned. He defected from her sect and allied with the three righteous orders to bring her down.
When the end came, Mu Qingge had faced the combined assault of the three great sects, been struck by the nine-fold bone-sacrifice curse, and had nowhere left to retreat. Her bones were stripped, her spiritual power shattered, and her soul scattered to nothing.
Only Su Yishui had shown the smallest mercy, preserving a thread of her residual soul and binding it to the reincarnation tree. Without that, Mu Qingge would have ceased to exist entirely.
What infuriated everyone was what she had done in her final breath. As she died, she raised one finger and cast a curse on Su Yishui. Not any lethal curse. A face-melting curse. The face that had once drawn the world's attention warped and sealed, and from that day forward Su Yishui could only cover it with a veil.
Even at the point of death, she had played a spiteful prank. That, more than anything, laid bare the texture of her cruelty: it was not rage but amusement. She had wanted him marked for the rest of his life, and she had gotten exactly that.
Perhaps worn down by the curse, Su Yishui occasionally let his true face show. Every time, it provoked either gasps or laughter. After years of this, he spoke less and less. He built foundations, refined elixirs, and spent the rest of his time doing what he was doing now: standing alone in silence before empty mountains and open sky.
The warm, gentle young man Yu Chen remembered from years past seemed to have been replaced entirely after Mu Qingge had finished with him. What remained was someone hollow and still, in a way that made those around him quietly afraid.
Perhaps it was the curse that drove him, even now, to see the demoness reborn.
Seventeen years earlier, Yu Chen and his sister Yu Tong had accompanied their master to Jueshan. They had found the tree bearing fruit. Then the three sects had sent people to destroy it. Su Yishui had blocked them and fought, and the battle had been fierce.
But his inner elixir had already been spent on Mu Qingge's reincarnation. He was not what he once was, and against opponents of that caliber, not dying in the process had taken everything he had.
In the end, the sects relented. They had all profited from Su Yishui's contributions to their victory. Cutting him down would have been remembered as a betrayal, and they had reputations to protect. Feeling, perhaps, some genuine pity at the sight of that ruined face, they descended from the high ground and made a public concession: let Mu Qingge be reborn through the tree, and let Su Yishui have the curse lifted.
But they were clear on one point. Once the curse was broken, Mu Qingge's life or death was entirely within Su Yishui's hands.
After that, a binding prohibition was placed over the mountain. No one could approach. They gave the tree ten years, enough for the fruit to ripen and fall.
The ward had been seeded with Su Yishui's own spirit blood, which meant it could repel outsiders with ill intent, but it could not block Su Yishui himself. Yet for all those years, he had not returned.
Until today. Passing nearby, they noticed the spiritual shield had thinned, and there were signs of intrusion. So they had gone up to look.
What they found changed everything. The tree's fruit was gone, and so was any trace of when or how it had fallen. The demoness reborn in it could be anywhere. If Mu Qingge had come back with her nature intact and no one to rein her in, the consequences would not be small.
Su Yishui, still facing the wind, said only: "There is another one."
Yu Chen turned. And there, on the branches he had dismissed as bare, was a fruit he had somehow missed before. Small, half-tucked behind withered leaves. He blinked and looked again.
But the branch where this fruit grew was not the same branch from seventeen years ago. That one had been at the west end. This one was at the east. The west end was empty.
He began to understand.
The woman who had stood quietly at his side all this while was his sister, Yu Tong. She had served Su Yishui for years with unwavering constancy.
She spoke carefully: "At the time Mu Qingge fell, her younger sister Mu Ranwu died alongside her in that same battle. They were very different. Mu Ranwu had cultivated alongside her sister but was gentle and pure, nothing like her. She had tried to help the three sects that day, using the Soul-Eating Lock to bind Mu Qingge's spirit. But Mu Qingge reversed it and dragged her in too." Yu Tong paused. "Could both their remnant souls have been caught on this tree together? Two fruit from two souls?"
Yu Tong had been young then, not yet foundation-built, and her memory of Mu Ranwu was vague. The woman had been kind, yes, but beside a sister of Mu Qingge's exceptional talent and striking beauty, Mu Ranwu had been so ordinary that faces forgot her.
The question that now nagged was simple: if two fruits had grown, which soul had fallen first?
Yu Chen voiced the doubt aloud. Su Yishui, still standing in the wind, said nothing.
It was the younger attendant, the one they called Feather Boy, who answered, pressing his lips flat with an expression of bitter certainty: "Have you not seen how a cuckoo operates? The moment those chicks hatch, they tip every other egg out of the nest. The reincarnation tree has finite spiritual power. If two fruits form, that power is split between them. The weaker soul gets squeezed out."
The west fruit, the one that had fallen, had been the first to grow. Now it was gone. The east fruit, which they had almost missed entirely, had swelled into fullness in its place.
Mu Qingge had displaced her sister's remnant soul. She had taken the tree's power for herself. Against her, Mu Ranwu had never stood a chance, not in talent, not in will.
The east fruit was Mu Qingge. She had reincarnated.
And Mu Ranwu? She had likely dissolved before she could ever form a body. Gone to nothing, slowly, while the tree was still growing.
Yu Tong felt a quiet ache at that. She remembered Mu Ranwu's uncomplicated kindness.
Then Su Yishui, who had not spoken in a long while, said something none of them expected: "Lingxi Palace has gone without disciples for too long. Go to the village below. Find candidates to take in."
The siblings stared.
Lingxi Palace was the sect Mu Qingge had built. Its rules had never once concerned themselves with spiritual roots or cultivation aptitude. It accepted orphans only. The one standard that mattered: looks, for both men and women. Those rules had always said everything that needed saying about the person who made them.
The only reason Mu Qingge had ever landed a disciple as gifted as Su Yishui was pure blind luck.
After her execution, Lingxi Palace had fallen to ruin. Its remaining disciples, most of whom had never cultivated anything meaningful, had been sent off with a portion of the demoness's gold and silver. The three sects, too invested in their own image to slaughter children, had settled for scattering them.
And now Su Yishui wanted to reopen the mountain under that name.
Neither sibling could find words for what they thought of this.
Su Yishui offered none. He rose onto his toes, let his robe catch the wind, and descended the far side of the mountain in long, soundless strides. Yu Chen and Yu Tong rode the wind after him without another word.
The mountain had stirred with wind and strange currents for days. The village at the foot felt none of it. People planted and rested as they always had.
Qiaolian, having made her decision, moved straight to arrangements. She put out word that several of the family's plots were available to rent. The house she would leave standing for now. Land values in a village like this weren't worth rushing. If things settled, they could always return.
Then trouble arrived from an unexpected corner.
Carpenter Xue, going to Ding's house to collect his wages, ran into Ding's mother-in-law instead. She declared the table he had built was cracked across the top, called his craftsmanship defective, and refused to pay.
The second Ding son was about to marry. The full furniture set had taken Xue Liangui more than a month. Now there was no payment, which meant no money for travel, and the oil and salt at home were already running thin.
Carpenter Xue held his ground. He told them what they already knew: the wood had been wet when it was delivered. He had said so from the start. The Ding family, not wanting to spend more, had told him to use it anyway.
What he had not expected was that Ding's wife would then turn around and deny all of it, and instruct her hired hand to slap Carpenter Xue across the face. Twice.
The reason for it was not the table.
The second Ding son had recently attached himself to a promising match, the daughter of a county degree-holder, a connection the family had worked hard to secure. But the boy had become infatuated with the Xue girl, the frail and slight Xue Ranran, and had taken to muttering about taking her as a concubine.
If the degree-holder's daughter heard about that, the engagement would be finished.
Ding's wife had decided the Xue family needed a lesson. They needed to understand that wealthy families did not open their doors to just anyone, that pretty girls from struggling households should stop dangling themselves in front of her son, and that any hope they had of climbing through him should be snuffed out now. The withheld wages and the slap were both deliberate. A warning dressed as a complaint.
Qiaolian heard all of it and felt the color rise in her face.
"What a rotten, calculating woman," she said, voice sharp with fury. "No wonder no one in the village takes work from that house."