Xue Ranran had not expected the strange-faced man to silence her with a compliment she didn't know how to answer. She stood there, caught between politeness and confusion, when a sharp knock rattled the door.
"Ranran, open up! Quick!" Qiaolian's voice came through strained and urgent.
Ranran's first thought was relief. Her parents were back. She crossed the room and pulled the door open.
What she saw stopped her cold.
Qiaolian was half-carrying Xue Liangui, one arm hooked under his shoulder, her face streaked with tears. His face was dark with blood.
It had started badly and grown worse.
When Qiaolian brought her husband to the village chief to arbitrate the wage dispute with the Ding family, the chief had initially spoken with some fairness. Then Madam Ding, the patriarch's mother-in-law, had leaned in close and murmured something about her second son's connections at the county academy, and how the chief's own boy was hoping to enroll that very year.
The village chief's spine dissolved on the spot. He reversed everything he had just said, mumbled something about the furniture damage being a reasonable loss, invented an excuse about his dog whelping, and left.
Qiaolian's patience broke. She turned on Madam Ding directly.
The Ding household was large and its men were built to match. Several thick-armed cousins closed in around her. Xue Liangui stepped between them and his wife, and they beat him for it.
What saved them was Ranran's advice from that morning, surfacing suddenly in Qiaolian's mind. She filled her lungs and screamed into the street:
"Come and see! Ding Xiucai's family is beating a man to death! What kind of son does a house like this produce? And they expect him to pass the provincial examination? Let the officials come and judge their character!"
The Ding men went still.
The second son's examination was days away. Provincial officials were already visiting households, vetting the moral standing of candidates. A death on the premises would end everything. Master Ding, calculating fast, shoved three strings of coin at Qiaolian and told them to go.
Liangui got his wages. He also got a body full of bruises and, it would turn out, a broken leg.
Qiaolian wept the whole walk home, supporting her husband with both arms, replaying every moment she wished she'd handled differently. She should have used what she knew about the Ding family from the start. If she had pressed that pressure point early, none of this would have happened to him.
She pushed open the yard gate and went rigid.
Several figures stood in the courtyard. One of them had a face so disfigured she could not locate his eyes or nose in it.
The air left her. Her vision tilted. She fainted.
Ranran lunged for her mother but wasn't strong enough. Her legs turned to water beneath her. The woman called Yu Tong stepped forward, caught Qiaolian, and helped Ranran steer her inside.
Xue Liangui was badly shaken, but he was a practical man. The three strangers showed no hostility. He gathered himself enough to ask his daughter quietly: "Ranran, who are these people?"
Ranran glanced over. The strange-faced man had already drawn his wide-brimmed curtain hat low over his features. She exhaled, then leaned close to her father and murmured: "They're immortals, Father. They travel looking for disciples. For longevity cultivation."
Liangui's face went another shade paler. Longevity seekers, coming for children born in the Geng year. Had they heard about Ranran?
Qiaolian, meanwhile, had come around with a thin groan. Ranran knelt beside her and spoke quickly and softly before her mother could take in the room. Just travelers, she said. They stopped to drink water and eat.
Yu Tong, feeling that the visit had already run long, dug into her coin purse. The bacon had all gone into the girl's mouth at the previous meal. Coarse rice and plain water didn't warrant much. After deliberating longer than strictly necessary, she pinched out one small silver piece and set it on the table.
She had other things to attend to. The reincarnation fruit on Jueshan was ripening. Wei Jiu and his disciples were likely already moving. If the reincarnated Mu Qingge fell into Wei Jiu's hands, the master's curse would unravel. She needed to guard the spirit fruit herself, and the window was narrow.
She was ready to go.
Su Yishui was not.
He had noticed Xue Liangui's leg. Without a word, he crouched, set the broken bone with his hands, and pressed his palm over the injury. Warmth spread through the carpenter's leg, and the grinding agony he'd been bracing against simply... stopped.
Liangui stared.
"I have suppressed your pain," Su Yishui said, his voice flat and even. "In three days it will return. The bone is set. Keep it bound and still. It will heal cleanly, if you let it."
Yu Chen, standing off to the side, had been listening to the account of what happened at the Ding house. The anger in him had been building. "Should I go and remind that family of their manners?" he asked.
Liangui waved it off without hesitation. "No. We'd have to move sooner than we planned as it is. No point adding more trouble."
Qiaolian, now fully conscious and calmer, agreed. After Ranran's quiet explanations, she had stopped bracing for worse news.
What surprised Yu Tong was Su Yishui himself. Her master, who treated most human affairs with the attention one gives to passing weather, was being almost warm. He spoke with the easy manner of a traveling physician who had seen everything. He told the couple plainly: their daughter was born under a thin-fortune star. Without some cultivation of health and spirit, her years would be few.
Under ordinary circumstances, the Xue couple might have believed exactly this. The world was full of such warnings, and some were genuine.
But they had also heard, in the years before, of strangers hunting children born in the Geng year. This man with his ruined face was pressing hard to take Ranran away, and the more he pressed, the worse it looked.
And "her years would be few" — what was that supposed to mean? It had the sound of a curse, not a kindness.
Qiaolian declined, politely but with finality, and moved to show them out.
Su Yishui did not argue. He paused at the door and said only: "If you change your minds, come find me at the western hills outside Yongcheng. My name is Su Yishui."
Then he walked out, his two followers behind him. If you kept your eyes off his face and watched only his back, you saw a man with a scholar's build and a soldier's posture: broad shoulders, narrow waist, unhurried.
Qiaolian caught herself staring and pulled her gaze away.
What was wrong with her.
On the road out of the village, their path crossed the Ding family carriage heading toward the county town.
Master Ding was irritated. He'd been forced to pay the carpenter. He was going to a dinner that required a pleasant face, and he didn't have one available. Inside the carriage, shielded from the road, he leaned toward his son and muttered:
"A man's future is everything. Why are you chasing that sickly girl from the Xue house at a time like this? When you've made something of yourself, she won't be fit to carry your shoes. We threw good money at this mess. Once the examinations are done, your mother and I will settle that family properly, in the middle of the night."
His son laughed. "I barely paid her any attention. Why is everyone treating it so seriously? She practically walked into it. Don't work yourself up, Father. We have drinking to do."
Su Yishui was some distance from the carriage, but an immortal cultivator's hearing is not built like an ordinary person's. He caught every word across the open road.
The feather-boy, watching from beside him, saw the master raise one finger. A small, precise gesture. An invisible charm flicked through the air toward the carriage, quick as a breath.
It was the Yixin Tongkou Mantra. The Spell of One Heart, One Mouth.
Anyone it touched would be unable to speak against their true feelings for three hours. Every word they uttered would be exactly what they meant, stripped of calculation and performance.
The Ding father and son were heading to a banquet full of officials. The entire evening would require flattery.
Yu Tong watched the carriage roll away and felt something she rarely felt around her master: amusement edged with disbelief. He had not been a meddlesome man. Today he was different.
The Xue family packed that same night.
The altercation with the Ding household had already decided it. They had planned to wait out the winter, but waiting now meant risk. Better to move while the family was busy nursing its humiliation.
The cart held the woodworking tools, a few bundles of clothing, and dry food for the road. The yard gate got a good lock. The old donkey was past his best years and couldn't pull weight on the long hills, so Ranran and her injured father rode while Qiaolian walked beside, leading the animal.
For the first three days, Liangui felt nothing in his leg because of Su Yishui's working. On the third day, the pain came back like needles driving into the bone.
He didn't dwell on it. Ranran was worse.
One day out of Juefeng Village, his daughter began to fade. No fever. No visible wound. She simply wilted, the way a plant wilts when someone has pulled it halfway from the soil. The color left her face. Her cheeks hollowed.
They were still traveling when a group of villagers coming the other way stopped them with news worth telling.
The night of the county banquet, it seemed, had gone badly for the Ding family.
The father, sitting among officials and relatives at a fine table, had been asked to praise his son's scholarly progress. He had smiled and explained, in full detail and with evident pride, that the boy was a complete fool who couldn't pass an examination on his own and had paid others to sit them for him, supported throughout by strategic bribery.
The son, meanwhile, had leaned across the table to ask the county magistrate where he'd purchased his concubine, and whether she might be available for an evening.
The magistrate had them beaten and thrown out.
The examinations, the marriage prospects, the family reputation — gone.
Qiaolian listened to this without a word. Then she exhaled, long and slow, and kept walking.
They still needed to put distance between themselves and what remained of the Ding family's reach. A shamed household with nothing left to lose was sometimes more dangerous than a confident one. But the weight on her chest had lifted, at least a little.
She took the donkey's rope and pulled.
The road ahead was long, and Ranran needed a doctor.