Xi Jiuge felt she had slept for an eternity.
At some point, a soft female voice drifted to her through the dark — gentle, unhurried, calling her name: "Jiuge."
She didn't recognize it. She tried to find the source, tried simply to open her eyes, and even that small effort cost her everything she had. A sliver of light reached her — shimmering, blue-tinted, the world above her rippling like water over silk. Then the weight returned, and she slept again.
When she woke properly, she was lying in the cup of a lotus blossom. Thousands of acres of still blue water stretched beneath her. White snow blanketed every shore. The attending maids dropped to their knees the moment her eyes opened, and through their frightened, overlapping explanations, Xi Jiuge pieced together who she was.
She was Xi Jiuge — daughter of Xihe, goddess of the sun, mother of light. Xihe had died before she could give birth. Xi Jiuge entered the world incomplete, already deficient, and had slept since the age of gods.
A month ago, her seal had cracked. The Queen Mother of the West had felt it break and pulled her from the depths of Yaochi. Her spiritual core was intact. Her body was whole. And yet she remained unconscious for reasons no one could explain. The Queen Mother had placed her in a lotus at the heart of Yaochi, letting sunlight absorb into her as deeply as possible. Had she not woken soon, the Five Emperors would have been summoned to deliberate.
She woke. That much went right.
But waking was not the same as living. Xi Jiuge could not yet leave Yaochi. She met many people and recognized none of them. Her mind was a white room — bare walls, no furniture, no memory she could call her own. The earliest thing she could claim was a sound she'd heard while sealed beneath the lake: a voice singing Nine Songs. She didn't know whose voice it was. She couldn't stop wondering if it had been her mother's.
Yaochi was more than a convalescent pond. The Queen Mother of the West had planted peach trees along its banks, fruit that extended life and conferred immortality. The water itself was said to purify any mortal who drank even a sip — granting a body of glass, a mind without stain. For Xi Jiuge, recovering here was an extraordinary gift.
She spent long hours submerged, watching the sky above the surface.
One afternoon, two celestial handmaidens pruning the peach trees on the bank believed themselves alone. Their voices carried across the water.
"Did you hear? The enthronement decree for the Mingjing Goddess was issued with all five seals of the Heavenly Emperors. All five, together. That has never happened. Not once since heaven was established."
"And the Queen Mother intends to take her as a personal disciple," the second voice added, sharper and higher. "The Queen Mother, who has never accepted anyone. Not once."
"How does a woman who just woke up deserve that?"
"She's Xihe's daughter." The first voice dropped into something between envy and resignation. "She shows no particular talent and resources still pour into her hands. The Queen Mother teaches her herself. With guidance like that, even a pig could ascend. Why couldn't I have been born better?"
A pause. Then the voice lowered further, careful now.
"But did you notice — the Mingjing Goddess seems... off?"
"Off how?"
The rustle of fabric. A held breath. "The White Emperor came to see her. He brought a protective talisman he'd made himself. A brother doing that for his sister — I was moved just watching. But she didn't react at all. No warmth, no softness. Later, when someone mentioned him, she spoke about her own brother the way you'd speak about a stranger. No smile. No familiarity. Just — nothing. We looked at each other afterward and neither of us knew what to say."
"You think something is wrong with her mind?"
"Shh—" The companions quickly hushed each other, then continued in conspiratorial whispers. "Xihe was beloved by every tribe, every realm, every creature with a belief. Not admired from a distance the way Nuwa is — truly loved. The daughter Xihe gave her life to protect... is actually like this?"
"Being slow-witted is manageable. Kunlun has remedies for that. But if she's volatile — if she acts without conscience — at her rank, how does anyone correct it?"
"The eyes," the first handmaiden said quietly, as they gathered their baskets to leave. "You didn't see her eyes. The White Emperor and the Queen Mother have given her everything. And she has no gratitude. Not even a flicker. If she can't feel that for the people closest to her, what can anyone expect from her?"
Their footsteps faded into the orchard.
Xi Jiuge rose slowly from the water and leaned against the lotus, tilting her head at the empty bank.
Gratitude, she thought. What is that?
She had a girl's body and an infant's inner life. No emotional residue, no accumulated longing, no instinct toward affection. She had assumed this was simply how existence felt — neutral, functional, clean. It had never occurred to her that others were different.
Now, for the first time, she understood: she was the anomaly. Even the lowest-ranking fairy in Kunlun could feel things Xi Jiuge had no access to. And that frightened them.
Am I really that strange?
From that day, she watched people with the focused attention of a student studying a foreign language. She catalogued their behavior, mapped their emotional responses, and practiced imitating them. The Queen Mother of the West, occupied with the governance of heaven, sent her crate after crate of classical texts and told her to read first and ask questions later.
Kunlun's immortal path was rigorous: self-restraint, ritual propriety, the severing of personal desire in service of the world. Everyone around her said the same thing in different words — that her status demanded she carry the responsibilities of a goddess. Uphold justice. Protect all things. Serve as a model.
Xi Jiuge read everything. She learned how to be a good person, a good sister, a good disciple, a good future wife, and eventually a good sovereign. She practiced each role with the diligence of someone who understood the assignment but had never heard the music.
It was exhausting at first. Then it became habit. The reputation of history's most ideal goddess accumulated around her quietly, without her quite meaning it to.
But her chest stayed hollow.
She performed gentleness and kindness and righteousness because the books said to, and the books seemed correct. What she couldn't grasp was the why behind any of it. Why did a couple sustain love across centuries? Why did a man lay down his life for a friend with no shared blood? Why did ministers die for kingdoms they could have abandoned?
She didn't feel the answers. She just kept playing the role, telling herself: This is how the world works. There's no reason to ask. Follow the form and you'll be fine.
One night, mid-thought, a voice appeared in her rooms.
It had no gender, no age, no identifiable source. It simply spoke, as if it had been waiting for a pause in her performance.
"You exhaust yourself daily. You won't even let yourself rest in sleep. But tell me — does any of this mean anything to you?"
Xi Jiuge went still. She was in the Chonghua Palace, the private sleeping chambers the Queen Mother had set aside for her exclusively. Layered formations sealed the space inside and out. Nothing uninvited should have been able to enter.
She looked. She searched. She found nothing.
"Don't bother. You won't find me."
"Who are you?" she asked, her tone level.
The voice answered with something that sounded almost like grief. "I said we would meet again. But when we do, you'll still be yourself and you'll have been remade into someone else entirely. I preferred the girl you used to be. Seven years old, naive and wild and a little cruel — at least she was real."
"You're not making sense. Say something useful or leave."
"Am I making no sense? The Queen Mother never told you — your consciousness returned much earlier than anyone admits. Years before you 'woke.' And rather than tell you, they filled you with books about virtue and grace and selfless duty. You're less alive than a seven-year-old. At least she acted from her own will. You're a puppet."
"That's a lie." Xi Jiuge had studied logic along with virtue. She found the flaw immediately. "If my consciousness had returned years ago, I would have memories from that period. I have none."
"Because of Yaochi." The voice was patient, as though it had expected this argument. "Holy water for immortality. A body of glass. A pure and unblemished mind. Tell me — what is that, really, if not a system for washing away every emotion and instinct a person has, until what remains is obedient and useful?"
The words were a direct insult to the Kunlun path. Xi Jiuge raised her fingers to form a seal — a banishment formation. The voice laughed.
"A mortal invention. It can't touch me. I was born with this land. Every god that ever arrived here came uninvited. You are all guests who forgot you were guests."
"The land was formed from Pangu's body," Xi Jiuge said flatly. "What you're claiming is absurd."
"Then go and see for yourself. Nine hundred years ago, a fragment of your consciousness drifted into the demon world. The Queen Mother discovered it, built a summoning formation to call it back, and used Yaochi to erase everything it had experienced. Go and look. Or are you afraid of what you'll find?"
"Why would I believe anything you say?"
"Because it costs you nothing to look."
A long silence.
"Fine," Xi Jiuge said.
The Demon World
Underground, stone steps descended in heavy layers, forming tiered platforms braced by carved pillars. Relief paintings covered every surface — gods ascending through clouds, gods setting the moon in its path, gods in attitudes of power and sacred purpose.
The gods looked down at the arena and saw nothing useful.
Li Hanguang stood on the central stone platform. He had been fighting for four hours. The creature was enormous — it had taken everything he had — and now it lay dead, its bulk shaking the floor as it fell. Li Hanguang fell too, staggering, going down to one knee at the edge of the platform.
From the viewing stands above, someone spoke. He caught a fragment: "...burned incense faster this time, brought the head of the household..."
He stopped listening. It made no difference who came. There was always another fight waiting.
Two hundred years ago, Li Yao had written home to the Jiuli people. She missed them, she said. She wanted to bring her nephew Li Hanguang to her new home — for her own comfort, and to give her daughter Chang Ju a companion.
Li Yao had married into You Mansion, home of Chang Yin — Grand Secretary, head of the most deeply rooted clan in the demon world. The Jiuli people needed the Chang family's influence to establish themselves in the demon world. Li Yao's marriage was a political foundation, which made her the most prized daughter-in-law in the Jiuli leadership. When she wrote that she was homesick, no one questioned it. Li Hanguang was sent immediately, with instructions to do whatever Li Yao required.
He could have refused. He could have disappeared quietly into the wilderness. He didn't.
Li Yao had saved his life. In his heart, she ranked higher than his own mother. She had a daughter now — Chang Ju — and she wanted someone to watch over her child. Li Hanguang would have done it without being asked. He would have given his life for his little cousin without a moment's hesitation.
He also carried something else: the memory of that light. When he was ten years old, he had seen a miracle — pure sunlight falling from nowhere, saving him from something he had no name for. He had taken it as a sign that he was watched over, that if real danger came, the light would come again.
He left the Jiuli territory with something close to joy.
He walked straight into a different abyss.
The person who sent him there was Li Yao herself.
Chang Yin had not married Li Yao for her beauty or her warmth. He had married her for her bloodline. She was the daughter of Chi You — and the Battle of Zhuolu had proved what that bloodline could do.
Chi You had led fewer than seventy Jiuli warriors and driven the Yellow Emperor's hundred-thousand-man army back nine times in nine battles. The Yellow Emperor had been brought to the edge of destruction more than once. It had taken the combined intervention of the Queen Mother of the West and Emperor Jun, with the full resources of heaven behind them, to finally stop Chi You's advance. When Chi You was captured and executed, the world named him a war-mad demon and revised history to suit the victors.
The irony was not lost on anyone paying attention: the same world that denounced Chi You worked tirelessly to replicate him.
Chang Yin wanted that bloodline in his family line. He believed that a child born of Li Yao, trained in the Chang family's arts of divination and strategy, carrying Chi You's gift for battle — such a person would be unstoppable. The Chang family's long decline would end with his generation.
Li Yao became pregnant quickly. Chang Yin treated her with visible care. Ten months later, she gave birth to a daughter.
Chang Yin ran the divination.
Chang Ju had no martial star. No power over force or conflict. She was not the weapon he had envisioned.
The esteem that had surrounded Li Yao evaporated. She had been elevated, celebrated, treated as the key to a dynasty's revival — and then her value was quietly revoked the moment her daughter failed to be what was wanted. That kind of fall can break a person. Li Yao didn't break. She panicked, and in her panic, she thought of Li Hanguang.
Li Hanguang wasn't recognized by the Jiuli people as legitimate. But Li Yao had watched him grow. She knew, with the certainty of someone who had actually looked, that this abandoned child was the one who had truly inherited Chi You's gift. His half-sister — Li Hanguang's mother — was too consumed by her own obsession to acknowledge it, too volatile to see past her hatred of the boy.
Li Yao reasoned carefully. Her sister had discarded the child. Li Yao had picked him up. Using what she'd salvaged from her sister's refusal didn't seem like wrongdoing — it seemed like efficiency. Li Hanguang was wasting in the wilderness. Why not bring him to the Chang household, where he could learn something real, and in return help protect her daughter's position? Three problems resolved at once.
She wrote the letter. Li Hanguang heard that his aunt was homesick, and didn't ask another question before setting out.
He walked into hell.
Chang Yin recognized Li Hanguang's ability within days. With Li Yao as a buffer, he had no fear of the Jiuli people's response. He moved quickly.
Li Hanguang was locked underground. A steady supply of magical beasts, poisonous creatures, and monsters of increasing size and ferocity were sent in to test him. Chang Yin wanted to find the ceiling of his endurance, the exact perimeter of his body's limits. To prevent rebellion, he taught Li Hanguang nothing — no spells, no cultivation techniques, no methods of resistance. Li Hanguang fought with his bare hands against things that outweighed him tenfold, with no tools and no instruction.
Winning meant nothing. Every victory was followed by a harder fight. Losing meant death.
Between battles, the experiments continued. The Chang household used him for medical testing. They drew his blood in quantities that left him pale for days. They opened his flesh looking for something they could isolate and copy. Chang Yin had convinced himself that Chi You's bloodline was a code — something that could be extracted, replicated, and built into an army. He wanted that army. He believed he could have it.
This continued for two hundred years.
The cruelest part was the intervals. Every so often, Chang Yin would let Li Hanguang surface. He was given clean clothes, a normal face, and a few hours with Chang Ju. Chang Ju had no idea. She knew only that her cousin had a demanding training schedule and that her father — out of unusual generosity — had taken the boy in and was working hard to develop his potential. In her eyes, the Chang household was a place of beauty. A kind father. A lovely mother. A patient, gentle cousin who was unfortunately very busy.
The only thing that ever made Chang Ju unhappy was how rarely she got to see him.
When his visits came, she would find him and hold on and talk — about the cold making it hard to sleep, about a dress her mother had made that she found unflattering, about homework that had accumulated beyond reason. Li Hanguang always listened. He smiled. The Chang family guards stood nearby, watching every word.
He had nearly died several times. Each time, he had waited for the light. The sun that had come for him when he was ten — he had held onto that memory like a rope, something to grip when everything else gave way. He waited through anticipation, through doubt, through the slow death of hope, through two hundred years of nothing.
The light never came again.
He lay on the cold platform now, staring up at the painted gods in their stone relief — soaring, powerful, turning their blank eyes toward him across the centuries — and thought: Maybe the light abandoned me after all. The demon world is where gods discard what they don't want. We are all discarded here.
His hope that a god would save him and Chang Yin's delusion that gods could be forced to answer — both were the same kind of joke, from different angles.
Then, in the exhaustion that follows fighting for your life, the voice came.
It had no gender and no age. It spoke quietly, finding the precise fracture in his composure.
"You're drowning. And the person who pulled you out of the water once — to her, it was nothing. A passing act. Something she might have already forgotten. She's not coming back."
Li Hanguang's chest tightened in a way that facing a ten-foot monster had never managed. He wanted to be deaf. He wanted the voice to stop.
It didn't stop.
"You are weak. Low-born. Invisible. Why would a goddess remember someone like you? But if you had real power — if you had the strength to demand accounting — you could make everyone who wronged you answer for it. And her — you could have her. If her people objected, you could deal with that too."
His mind blurred. Then — light.
Gold, falling from above, the way it had when he was ten. The sun, coming toward him again.
It took him somewhere else. A vision bloomed like a fully rendered world: she had come for him. He had been discovered by Emperor Xuan, recognized, claimed as a son. Centuries had passed softly. Everyone blessed the match. A wedding night, the Chonghua Hall lit for a celebration, her in red, and he standing before her with the silk veil between his hands.
The scene held there. The voice pressed close.
"Lift it. She will be your wife. You will have this forever. Just lift it."
His hands were almost moving.
Then his mind surfaced, quiet and blunt: Emperor Xuan would never legitimize a half-blood, not in a heaven where lineage was everything. They would never allow the marriage.
And more simply: the person beneath the veil is not her.
The vision had constructed everything correctly — her posture, her stillness — but the essential thing was wrong. He knew it without seeing her face.
The voice, realizing it had lost him, turned sharp.
"Ji Shaoyu, she crossed fire for. She broke forbidden laws for Ji Shaoyu. You could have all of it — just lift the veil and take it—"
She tilted her head slightly, something shifting in her stillness. "Li Hanguang?"
Her voice. Her phrasing. Her confusion.
He stepped back. "You're not her."
The wedding chamber came apart from the edges inward — fire consuming silk, walls collapsing into nothing, her figure fracturing like struck porcelain. He opened his eyes.
Above him: real sky, real moon, clouds trailing across mountains and fields like ink in water. Petals had drifted onto him while he was under, releasing a thick, sweet, slightly nauseating perfume.
He lay there with his arm over his eyes, taking stock.
The flower that bloomed from Pangu's bones was not a poetic metaphor. It was genuinely, ruthlessly effective. A dream built from nothing was easy to escape — firm your mind and push through the seams. But a dream built from real memory, real longing, real possibility — one that simply rerouted your worst moments toward better outcomes — that was another order of difficulty entirely.
Li Hanguang had nearly not made it out.
What he wanted most, he now admitted to himself with the clarity that follows near-failure, was not his parents' love or a family that hadn't discarded him. It was her. Specifically: her coming back for him. A second time, in the dark, the way she had come the first time.
She hadn't come. Twelve hundred years in the Chang household, and no sun.
He let himself breathe for a moment before trying to move.
When he shifted, the sleeve beside him fell.
He went still.
Xi Jiuge was lying next to him in the grass. Eyes closed. Brow slightly pinched. She didn't look well.
Li Hanguang sat up fast and looked at the Su Yuetan blossom beside her. The moonlight-colored petals had begun curling at their edges — the first sign of wilt, minutes away from gone.
"Mingjing Goddess." His voice was quiet but urgent. "Nine Songs."
Nothing.
He hadn't expected the flower to trap her. Xi Jiuge had no prior experience with illusions — or so he'd assumed. But Su Yuetan had caught her anyway, and held her harder than it had held him, and the blossom was dying.
He looked up. In every direction, moon-tracing clouds covered the hills like shallow water.
No time to think through the elegant solution. He picked the immediate one: destroy every moon-tracing cloud within reach. Remove the power source. Without the original plants feeding the illusion, it had nothing to sustain itself.
He moved fast.
Inside the illusion, Xi Jiuge was still fighting the voice.
She had come to the demon world as the voice suggested, and found a blood-soaked young man in a sealed underground arena. The voice told her this was the person she had rescued — the fragment of her consciousness had drifted here, and this boy was the one she had touched.
She refused to accept it.
The voice brought her further. A mountain. Charred trees in a wide arc, the kind of burn pattern she would recognize anywhere — the signature of solar fire, the Sun God's specific heat. There was only one person in existence who could make that mark.
Herself.
She had never been to the demon world. She had no memory of these mountains. So whose fire had done this?
The voice moved into the gap she couldn't close: "The White Emperor and the Queen Mother lied to you. Their care was management, not love. They washed your memory because an obedient Xi Jiuge was more useful to them than a real one. Promise me something and I'll tell you everything—"
She didn't want to hear it. Kunlun was her home. Her brother's love was real. She had never been here. She had never saved anyone. This was an illusion designed to destabilize her, and she would not—
The voice cut off mid-sentence.
Its pressure dropped sharply. The insistent rhythm of its seduction faltered, became erratic, then faded. As the interference cleared, Xi Jiuge's thoughts settled back into their own shape.
She reviewed what she'd seen. The young man in the arena — at some point her mind had named him. Li Hanguang. But that made no sense. She and Li Hanguang had met in the Heavenly Palace. They had exchanged three sentences across a thousand years. There was no prior connection. Nothing to remember, nothing to have erased.
The voice had been lying. The whole thing was fabricated to make her doubt everyone she trusted.
The demon world fell apart around her like old paper. Xi Jiuge opened her eyes.
Her head felt split in two.
Nearby, a pair of cool hands steadied her. A low voice: "Are you hurt?"
She pressed her palm to her forehead and shook her head. Moved to sit up. Li Hanguang helped her without making it into something, just shifted to give her the support she needed and held it.
She said nothing. He didn't ask.
The pain in her consciousness eased gradually, pulling back from sharp to dull to manageable. The silence between them filled with something else — something she had no name for yet, but could feel at its edges.
She had dreamed, in that illusion, that she and Li Hanguang were connected. That there was something between them — long, significant, chosen.
She sat in the grass with the dying petals around her and thought, with the precise and unsettled honesty she had learned from years of observing things she didn't understand:
What was that?