Fortunately, Xue Ranran was not the only hopeless case to stumble through the gates of Lingxi Palace.
The palace had not taken on new disciples in some time, but under the sponsorship of the immortal physician Su Yishui, the mountain gate had opened once more. The ceremony drew a crowd, yet when the incense smoke cleared, only three apprentices had been accepted alongside Ranran.
Both of the boys were older than her. The eldest, surnamed Takakura, came from a martial arts family. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with thick brows and an open, honest face. The second senior brother went by Bai Baishan. Slender where Takakura was solid, he carried himself with a quiet, bookish refinement.
Beyond her two senior brothers, Ranran also gained a third senior sister: Qiu Xier. Like Ranran, she was an ailing seedling no other physician had been able to cure. Her family had run out of money and options, and had all but resigned themselves to waiting for the end, when the master found her at the mountain gate and brought her up for treatment. Apparently Qiu Xier suffered from chest pains, though she looked round-cheeked and cheerful enough.
Ranran had initially wondered why Master Su kept collecting broken, sickly disciples. Now, seeing the pattern, she suspected it was simply a habit of his. Perhaps it sharpened his medical skills. Or perhaps he had a weakness for strays.
Sorting out how to address everyone proved awkward. The four disciples ranked themselves by age rather than the order they'd entered the sect. The real difficulty was what to call the Yu siblings, Yuchen and Yu Tong, who had been training under Su Yishui long before any of them arrived.
Su Yishui said, "They practice alongside me. Think of them as fellow disciples — your martial uncles."
The Yu siblings refused absolutely. Even if they one day ascended to heaven and became gods, they would still pour tea and stand at attention before Su Yishui. There was no bending that rule. Calling their master's master their "senior brother" was out of the question.
After considerable argument, Su Yishui grew tired of the whole business, flicked his sleeve, and went up the mountain to meditate.
The rest of them, big and small, sorted it out themselves: the younger disciples would call Yuchen "First Uncle" and Yu Tong "Second Uncle." The Yu siblings would continue calling Su Yishui "Master."
On an auspicious day, all four young disciples knelt together, offered tea with both hands, and performed the formal apprenticeship ceremony before the portrait of Lingxi Palace's founder.
The palace had changed hands, but the former master's portrait still hung in the main hall.
While kowtowing, Ranran stole a glance upward at the Demon Master's likeness. She turned out to be a strikingly beautiful woman, painted with an air of breezy irreverence. She wore robes of deep red, sat astride a white tiger, and dangled embroidered shoes carelessly from the toes of her long jade feet. One hand gripped a large wine gourd. She looked thoroughly dissolute — the kind of person who would laugh in the face of every rule ever written.
How on earth had such a woman produced a disciple as severe as Su Yishui?
Ranran privately concluded that her master had simply decided to be the opposite of everything the palace had ever stood for. A monk in a den of drunks.
No wonder the founding master had tired of him and gone off to cause chaos as a demon again. No wonder Lingxi Palace's reputation had been declining ever since.
The three new disciples were all still finding their footing, but since Ranran had arrived a few days ahead of them, she took it upon herself to give them a proper tour. She walked them through every corner of Lingxi Palace, and made a particular point of introducing them to the old sect rules plastered all over the walls — not as guidelines to follow, but as warnings of what they might have enjoyed in a different era.
Third Senior Sister Qiu Xier read through the regulations with undisguised regret. She coughed softly and muttered, "What a shame I wasn't born sooner."
Second Senior Brother Bai Baishan, whose family had deep roots in both Buddhist and Taoist traditions, seemed well-versed in the history of Xishan. While they walked, he filled the others in on the past.
It was said that the female demon had been immensely powerful, but her ambitions had no ceiling. She wanted dominion over all three realms. She secretly opened a rift to the demon world and summoned forth creatures that threatened to tear the living world apart. The righteous sects could not stand by. The Battle of Xishan shook the four corners of the realm, and three of the great sects joined forces, marshaling every ounce of strength they had to bring her down.
Today's Lingxi Palace carried only the name of that legacy. Inside, everything had long since been turned toward the righteous path.
Qiu Xier sighed when he finished. "All that was twenty years ago. Mu Qingge may have done terrible things, but she is still our ancestor. Whatever she did, we shouldn't speak of her with disrespect."
Takakura, who was not much for speeches, nodded firmly. "My mother always said: don't presume to judge those of an earlier generation. We're here to learn. If our master walks the righteous path, so do we."
Ranran nodded along, though privately she shared Qiu Xier's wistfulness about the old rules.
Still, a few days earlier, she had walked down the mountain with Second Uncle Yu Tong to buy tea, and watched him spend the better part of an hour haggling the vegetable seller down by three copper coins. The lesson was clear. The spirit of Lingxi Palace's new first rule — spend only what must be spent — was alive and breathing.
This was why Ranran never took too much at the dinner table. She couldn't afford to seem wasteful and get sent back down the mountain. At the same time, given how sharply she tasted everything, she had quietly volunteered herself for the task of preparing all three daily meals.
Yu Tong had never had much patience for kitchen work anyway. Before Ranran arrived, she'd been getting by on coarse cakes and foraged fruit, barely bothering to eat at all. After all, if one intended to leave behind mortal flesh, it seemed hypocritical to coddle one's appetite.
But since Ranran enjoyed cooking, Yu Tong let her. In a few years the children would be beginning the harder practices, training their spirit and refining their character. For now — eat well. Make something you love while you still can.
Once the new students had settled in, it was time to choose the direction of their training.
In both the immortal and demon paths, the starting ground is roughly the same; what differs is the road ahead. Most practitioners follow the internal cultivation method — building a foundation, condensing the golden core, nurturing the Nascent Soul, and passing through the tribulation to ascension. But this path is heavily shaped by a person's innate constitution.
Those born with exceptional spiritual roots, like Su Yishui himself, advance at extraordinary speed, and ascension is a matter of when rather than if.
For those of ordinary constitution who rely on discipline alone, they can extend their lives considerably, but rarely escape the final certainties of birth, age, illness, and death.
So a smaller number go a different route: the path of forging tools and refining elixirs, crafting immortal pills to compensate for what nature did not provide. This path cares less about inborn talent, but the failure rate is punishing. Practitioners can spend decades hunched over furnaces, only to die white-haired and still seeking the breakthrough. Then again, some breakthrough at all. There are also those who, like the ancient emperor, practice until their last breath and still find nothing.
Finally, there are the crooked roads. Feeding on others' spiritual power, absorbing the foundation-building pills of weaker cultivators to fuel one's own advancement. The folk legends call it "harvesting yin to replenish yang." This is the method most associated with evil demons — though even righteous cultivators have been known to employ it against genuine monsters and tyrants, calling it the subduing of those who bring disaster to the world.
Su Yishui took a laissez-faire approach to his four new disciples. He watched, assessed, and let each of them find their own way.
The two male disciples settled quickly on the internal cultivation path. Their constitutions supported it, and the road, though long, was clear.
Third Senior Sister Qiu Xier had a weaker foundation, but Su Yishui judged her workable, with room to grow.
Then there was Xue Ranran.
She had no connection to the immortal path whatsoever. Her inner spiritual field was so empty it practically echoed. Even Yu Tong was quietly startled — she had never expected to find a waste constitution even less suited to immortal cultivation than her brother's had been in a former life. This was the kind of emptiness that took root and couldn't be changed. Whatever had happened when she fell early from the spirit fruit tree, it seemed to have settled this.
Yu Tong tried not to show how disappointed she was.
After a period of deliberation, Ranran and Xier both decided to take the elixir and tool-refining path.
Ranran's reasoning was simple: sitting beside a warm furnace, fanning the coals, refining pills and nodding off in the heat seemed infinitely preferable to meditating in a cold room for days or picking fights with demons. There was something she found deeply agreeable about the whole arrangement.
With that settled, they were each assigned a furnace.
Qiu Xier received a Dingxin copper stove. Its three-clawed golden lid was crowned with a bronze turtle figure. It was sturdy and impressive, the kind of furnace that announced itself.
When it came to Ranran, it appeared the master's household had been scraped fairly bare. What she received was a battered old iron furnace, black with age, its base bearing obvious repair marks where it had clearly cracked and been mended before.
She suspected it had been burned through at least once.
Qiu Xier was genuinely embarrassed on her behalf and offered to switch. Ranran waved it off. Old or new, it hardly mattered. She was already a written-off case — what right did a waste like her have to occupy a fine new furnace? She took the black iron pot without complaint.
For their first practical test, both girls set to refining the introductory Qingxin Pill — a Clarity Pill.
It was a standard beginner formula: good for clearing the dryness that accumulated from long meditation sessions, simple to compound, demanding only that one follow the recipe carefully and keep a steady eye on the fire.
Three days and three nights passed.
When the time came to open the furnace, Qiu Xier extracted two bright, gleaming pellets. Clean, even, properly formed.
Ranran had not slept. She'd sat in front of her furnace for three full nights, eyes wide, watching the flames with fierce concentration until her eyes had gone red and raw. At dawn on the final day, she finally lifted the lid.
Qiu Xier, standing nearby, raised her nose to the rising steam and blinked. "That smells wonderful. Why does yours smell different from mine?"
Ranran looked down at her two pills with the fond tenderness of a mother regarding newborns. She was already thinking ahead. "Our pills should go to the senior brothers. They've been meditating for three days — they need the relief."
The two eldest disciples had spent those same three days in the thatched meditation hut with their uncle Yuchen. They would be exhausted and dull-headed. The pills were exactly what they needed.
Qiu Xier, whose legs were longer, got there first. She found Second Senior Brother Bai Baishan and pressed her pill into his hands with fussing attentiveness. He thanked her, swallowed it with a sip of water, and returned to his quiet recovery.
Ranran arrived shortly after and handed her pill to Takakura.
Unlike his brother, who'd swallowed his cleanly, Takakura sat there chewing. He chewed slowly, with a furrowed brow, as though wrestling with the flavor. He could not seem to swallow. Ranran watched him for a moment, then asked, "Well? How does it feel?"
He finally got it down with visible effort. He looked up. "There's a savory undertone. Like... soup dumplings. Juicy ones, with broth."
Ranran's face went slack.
Qingxin Pills were supposed to settle the mind. Calm the spirit. Help a cultivator release worldly attachments.
Why did hers taste like lunch?
She turned it over in her mind. Had she been sitting by the furnace thinking about soup dumplings? Had she been genuinely, achingly hungry, and fanning the coals and daydreaming about braised meat and thin dough — and somehow the pill had absorbed that?
That evening at dinner, the difference was immediately clear. Bai Baishan, fresh from the meditation hut, had a bowl of congee and was satisfied. Takakura ate like a man who hadn't seen food in a week. He cleared every dish on the table, then announced he was still hungry. Sometime deep in the night, he climbed out of bed, crept down the corridor to where the dried provisions were hung, and began gnawing on an air-dried raw ham.
Master found him there before dawn. He pressed his sleeping acupoint, and Takakura slumped harmlessly to the floor. Had he been found any later, the eldest senior brother might have eaten himself into a fatal blockage.
The connection was unmistakable. Takakura's three days of meditation had been completely undone — not by distraction, not by a wandering mind, but by a Clarity Pill that tasted like soup dumplings and had, instead of releasing his attachment to earthly desire, lit it on fire.
When Su Yishui had Yuchen carry the deeply asleep Takakura back to his room, Ranran came forward of her own accord, head low. She stood before her master and confessed.
Su Yishui said nothing. He held out his hand. She gave him the remaining pill.
He pinched off a small piece, turned it in his fingers, and brought it to his nose. Then he placed it on his tongue.
A pause.
His expression did not change — it never really did. But for just a moment, something shifted in his posture. He looked as though he'd been very slightly startled. Then he tossed the remainder of the pill away with a flick of his wrist.
Even without being able to read his face clearly, Ranran had the distinct impression that his brow had risen. Not furrowed. Risen. The kind of expression that meant this was not ordinary disapproval.
She suspected this was worse.