Xue Ranran crouched down and quietly gathered the scattered Qingxin pills her master had thrown to the ground. When she straightened up, she pressed her lips together and waited for the scolding. Su Yishui stood in silence for a long moment, then turned and walked away without a word.
She felt no relief at all. She had been frail since childhood, always a burden to her parents. Now that she had finally found a path forward by learning to refine medicine, she had nothing useful to show for it. How could that not wear on a person?
Qiu Xi, standing nearby, had no sense of his junior sister's low spirits. He let out a small sigh on her behalf and said quietly, "Looks like Master couldn't even be bothered to scold you properly. Go back inside and keep your head down."
Xue Ranran gathered the remaining pills into their box without a word, planning to compare them against a proper batch later to figure out where she had gone wrong. Then she went obediently to her room, shed her outer coat, pulled the blanket over herself, and went back to sleep.
But the moonlight through the window kept sleep away. She lay there thinking about her senior brother, lying in bed stuffed and miserable, wondering how he was faring.
After turning it over for a while, Ranran decided that when he woke at dawn with his stomach in that state, he would probably want a light, gentle porridge. She slipped out of bed and padded quietly toward the kitchen to prepare one.
She never reached it. From a distance, she spotted a dark shape standing inside the small kitchen.
Her first thought was that her eldest senior brother had sneaked out of bed again. But when she drew closer, the figure standing at the stove holding a bowl and eating leftover cold rice was not her senior brother. It was her master.
Only two days ago, Ranran had overheard her second uncle Yu Tong boast proudly that their master's cultivation had long since transcended ordinary needs. For the past three years he had sustained himself entirely on flower nectar and the essence of sun and moonlight, untouched by the smoke and flavors of mortal cooking.
And yet there he stood, spooning up mouthfuls of ham fried rice with obvious relish.
"Are you hungry?" Ranran asked, before she could stop herself. "Should I make you something hot?"
Su Yishui startled. Absorbed in the rice, he had not heard anyone approach. He turned sharply and looked at the girl standing behind him with poorly concealed irritation.
That Qingxin pill was insufferable.
He had only sniffed it. Then, out of curiosity, taken the smallest taste.
At first, entering his mouth, it sent a wave of warmth through his chest, and when that passed, he had assumed nothing was wrong.
But when he settled onto his futon to meditate that night, every quiet moment filled with something he had not thought of in years. His first master, Mu Qingge, walking him through the long main streets of the capital in his youth. The roads alive with crowds and smoke, shop fronts running in rows, banners snapping in the wind.
She had always known exactly which street vendor sold the sweetest water and whose pastries were the softest. She bought things all the way down the street and fed them to him as they walked, watching him eat with a look of satisfied mockery, laughing and saying, "Keep eating and you'll get fat and ugly, then maybe I'll finally let you go."
Her laughter on that long open street cut through the quiet of the night and spread like wild growth through a mind trying to sit still. And with it came the smell, inexplicably, of everything that had lined those streets that afternoon.
A restlessness he had no name for rose through the silence and would not settle.
Su Yishui gave up on meditation and went out to walk in the moonlight. He had no particular destination, and yet somehow he ended up in the kitchen. There was a bowl of cold ham fried rice sitting on the stove. Some messenger of appetite picked it up and began to eat.
The flavor broke through every wall he had built, unstoppable as a river cracking its banks, and then this girl had to come wandering in at exactly the wrong moment.
Ranran had only good intentions. She was genuinely worried that three years without soup or warm food might have left her master's stomach in a delicate state.
What she did not expect was that in the next instant Su Yishui moved, seizing her by both thin shoulders with sudden force.
She had no time to cry out. His grip felt as though it could simply close and shatter the bone beneath.
She was still pressing her lips together against the pain when she noticed something was happening to his face. The layer of something coating his features was dissolving, like sealing wax loosened by hot water, peeling away in the moonlight to reveal clean, sharp brows and eyes that caught the darkness like cold steel.
Through the pain in her shoulder, Ranran whispered, "Master... your face..."
Su Yishui released her immediately, stepped back several paces, and said in a flat voice, "What are you doing out of bed at this hour?"
By now the change had settled. His features were clear.
Xue Ranran had always suspected from his posture alone that her master must look remarkable, and she had been right. Even at night, with limited visibility, she could make out the straight line of his nose and the cold gleam of his eyes. The face was extraordinary.
What puzzled her was this: he had to be in his thirties, and yet his face carried the sharp, unformed energy of a boy of eighteen or nineteen. Two decades appeared not to have left a single mark on him.
Unable to fully register any of this, Ranran just exhaled shakily and said, "Master... you frightened me nearly to death."
Su Yishui said evenly, "It was dark. I took you for an intruder. Tomorrow I'll have Yu Tong bring you an ointment for the bruises."
Ranran felt somewhat reassured knowing it had been a mistake. She cleared her throat and added carefully, "That being said... Master, your face..."
Su Yishui glanced down at the water barrel nearby. In the bright moonlight, the surface showed him his own long-forgotten reflection.
He went still for a moment. Then he looked once more at the girl standing there rubbing her neck, locked his expression back into place, and withdrew with long, calm strides, sleeves trailing behind him.
Ranran stood rooted to the spot for quite some time. Eventually she soaked some leftover rice in broth and went back to bed.
The next morning, Su Yishui appeared wearing a mask of black ebony that left only his mouth uncovered. He still seemed reluctant to be seen.
He called Ranran specifically to the teahouse and asked whether she had mentioned anything about his appearance to her senior siblings.
She shook her head honestly. It had only happened late the night before, and she did not share quarters with Qiu Xi and the others, so there had been no opportunity. She had also been summoned to the teahouse before breakfast, which meant she had spoken to no one.
Su Yishui nodded. "First rule," he said. "You are not to mention my appearance to anyone, or discuss it in any way. What happened last night did not happen."
Ranran had no idea why he would give such an instruction, but she nodded without question. She received two or three taels of silver each month and held her master in the kind of straightforward esteem one holds a good employer. If he said to do it, she would do it.
After issuing the order, Su Yishui looked at her for a moment longer. Something seemed to put him in poor spirits again, and he said simply, "You may go."
Her seniors, however, had not received this new rule.
At dinner that evening, Qiu Xi said with a sigh, "Our master has such bearing, such presence, but then there is the matter of his looks. And now that dark mask on top of it all. They say cultivation can preserve youth indefinitely. When Master's cultivation advances, do you think he might become... easier on the eyes?"
As a child, she had heard tales of a remarkable healer in the western mountains. All those years had passed, and her mentor had turned out to look like that. Which suggested that no matter how exceptional one's immortal arts, appearance was apparently a separate matter entirely.
This thought troubled Qiu Xi, who already doubted her own looks. If she failed to achieve immortality, she had at least hoped cultivation might keep her young and beautiful. It felt like a poor return for all those hours guarding an alchemy furnace and working the bellows.
Xue Ranran was eating enthusiastically and said nothing for a moment. She had eaten poorly for two meals running after the Qingxin pill disaster, so she had cooked herself today: honey-glazed ribs and a clear fish soup, and she was working through both with full concentration.
Then she glanced up and said plainly, "Looks don't feed you."
Second senior brother Bai Baishan, passing a dish nearby, grinned. "Your pills do though, junior sister. What flavor should you make next time?"
Ranran's expression fell. Her eldest senior brother was still recovering in bed, her broken pill furnace had been confiscated by Yu Tong, and per the master's instructions, she was to practice seated meditation until she could sustain focus without distraction, only then returning to the furnace.
Their master, newly restored to a youthful face and apparently embarrassed about it, had retreated to a cave on the northern face of Xishan Mountain and was not expected to come down for a full month.
If the master worked this hard, an apprentice could hardly afford to be idle. So apart from meals and fetching water, Ranran spent her hours sitting cross-legged alongside the Yu siblings.
Qiu Xi's dream of beauty had made no progress, but her legs were beginning to curve like a strung bow.
One afternoon, while the younger disciples were training with Yu Chen in the courtyard, the row of bronze bells hanging from the trees began to ring all at once.
Yu Tong had told them that those bells were connected to the spiritual ward at the base of the mountain. If they rang continuously, it meant someone had breached the boundary.
In ordinary circumstances, no common person could cross a spiritual ward and ascend the mountain. But the bells did not merely ring. They rang and rang until they shattered on the ground.
Whoever was coming had broken through cleanly and was heading straight for the mountain gate.
The Yu siblings exchanged a look and rose together. Before they could start down the mountain, the visitors had already arrived.
Several men and women in moon-white robes stood at the gate, all appearing to be around twenty years of age, though the speed at which they had scaled the mountain in a single bound made clear they were practitioners of considerable ability.
At their head stood a young man with a red exorcism talisman painted between his brows and a feathered crown on his head. He clasped his hands in formal greeting and said, "Wei Fang, eldest disciple of the Jiuhua Sect, here by command of my master to invite Mr. Su to Jueshan to suppress a demon."
The Jiuhua Sect was one of the three major factions that had once joined forces to hunt and corner the female demon. They were also among those who had nearly leveled the peak of Jueshan Mountain in that old campaign. At the time, they and Su Yishui had reached an uneasy standoff. Unable to destroy the reincarnation tree, the three factions had reluctantly agreed to let the sacred fruit ripen and fall, at which point the matter of the female demon's reincarnation would be settled.
Twenty years had now passed, and by their reckoning the fruit was ready to drop. The three sects had agreed to travel to Jueshan together to see it through.
What they had not anticipated was that Jueshan had already been seized by Wei Jiu, a demon cultivator, and his disciples. The mountain was blocked entirely. Forcing their way in risked an all-out battle with heavy losses, so the Jiuhua Sect's leader, the Kaiyuan Perfected, had sent ahead to request Su Yishui's help as a useful counterweight.
Yuchen had no particular goodwill toward any of the righteous factions. He clasped his hands in a perfunctory return gesture and said, "Our master is in closed retreat and will likely not emerge for another month. I suggest you all return home."
Before Wei Fang could respond, the junior disciples behind him spoke up with visible indignation. "He won't even give Jiuhua Mountain this much face? Su Yishui's arrogance is something else."
Wei Fang's tone turned cold. "It was your master who obstructed everything at the time, insisting on breaking the face-sealing curse himself, which is the only reason our elders allowed the reincarnation tree to stand. Now he's drawn Wei Jiu's demon cultivators straight to it, and he hides in his cave saying nothing about the curse and nothing about showing up. Is he genuinely planning to spend the rest of his life faceless? To ascend as some immortal with no face to show for it?"
That was not a rebuke. It was an insult, and Yuchen had no patience for it. His hand was already swinging before the thought finished forming.
Wei Fang was the eldest disciple of the Jiuhua Sect. His cultivation put him well above Yuchen. The moment Yuchen's fist came for him, Wei Fang turned his hand and formed an ice seal with two fingers, directing it sharply toward Yuchen's body.
In the next breath, Yuchen was locked solid inside a casing of ice, unable to move at all.