The Argent Sky Sect wasn't just a place. It was a declaration carved into the bones of the world.
Shen Li's journey there with the small, grim delegation was a week of dust, hard bread, and silent disdain. He was baggage, a living reminder of their clan's shame, to be handed over like a defective spirit stone. He didn't speak. He watched. He mapped the threads of his five companions—their Resentment, their Relief to be rid of the scandal, their Worry about their own standing.
And then, on the seventh day, the mountains rose.
They didn't climb from the earth; they seemed to have been placed there by a giant's hand, piercing the clouds themselves. Peaks of stark, blue-grey stone glittered with veins of quartz that caught the sun like scattered diamonds. Waterfalls, thin as silver threads from this distance, plunged from impossible heights into veils of mist. Bridges of carved white jade arched between peaks, and buildings clung to cliffsides—tiered pagodas with upturned roofs of celestial blue tile.
The air changed. It grew thinner, colder, and crackled with unseen energy. This was Qi, rich and wild, so thick it was like breathing light. To the others, it was a pressure, a challenge. To Shen Li, with his thread-sight, it was a storm of luminous potential. Countless threads of Energy, Growth, Discipline, and Ambition wove through the atmosphere, a tapestry so vast and complex it made his head spin and his empty dantian ache with hungry reflex.
So this is the board, he thought, his heart a cold, steady drum. The pieces are not petty clan elders. They are dragons and phoenixes in training.
They passed through a massive gate of carved moonstone, guarded by two disciples who stood as still as statues, their robes of sky-blue and silver fluttering in the high mountain wind. Their eyes held the distant focus of eagles. Their threads were strong, straight lines of Duty and latent Power. They glanced at the Shen Clan delegation with indifference that was worse than contempt.
The hand-off was swift and bureaucratic. A sour-faced logistics elder accepted the tribute chests, signed a scroll with a flick of his wrist that left characters glowing with faint Qi, and then gestured to a tired-looking outer sect disciple.
"The servants and porters go with him. The guest quarters are on the Azure Mist Peak for the clan representatives. Be gone by tomorrow."
And just like that, Shen Li was severed from the last thread of his old life. He followed the bored disciple, carrying a heavy pack of supplies meant for the servant's quarters. They didn't walk up the beautiful jade bridges. They took a narrow, winding path cut into the cliffside, a road for beasts of burden and menial laborers.
The servant's compound was on the "underside" of the majesty. A cluster of plain wooden buildings nestled in a damp canyon where the sun only reached for a few hours a day. It smelled of wet stone, boiled cabbage, and unwashed bodies. The threads here were dim—Fatigue, Resignation, petty Greed.
He was assigned a bunk in a long hall with twenty others. A thin blanket, a wooden bowl, and a daily schedule of drudgery: hauling water from the crystal springs for the inner sect disciples' baths, cleaning the practice yards, sorting spirit herbs for the alchemy pavilion (the damaged, low-grade ones, of course).
It was perfect.
No one looked at him twice. He was another faceless ghost in the machine of the great sect. This was his cloak of shadows. From here, he could observe everything.
His first task: hauling water. It led him up a well-worn path to the "Nine Petal Spring," a beautiful pool fed by a waterfall, reserved for the elite. He could not enter the walled garden, but he could wait at the servant's gate while an inner sect attendant took the buckets.
It was here he saw her.
A young woman stormed out of the main gate of the spring garden. She was perhaps eighteen, dressed in inner sect robes of finer make, but they were disheveled. Her black hair, meant to be in an elegant knot, was half-falling down. But it was her face that struck him—a masterpiece of delicate features currently twisted in fury and humiliation. And her threads…
They were a storm of brilliant, painful light.
A core thread of Sword Intent so sharp and bright it hurt to look at, but it was tangled and bound by thick, ugly cords of Betrayal and False Accusation. Threads of Pride lay shredded. A pulsing thread of Vengeance, hot and red, burned at her center. And over it all, a sickly, invasive thread of Poison—not physical, but spiritual, a curse of reputation—was slowly trying to dim her light.
She was a fallen star, crashing to earth.
She didn't see the servant boy by the gate. Her eyes, the color of a winter sky after a storm, were blind with inner tempest. She brushed past him, and for a second, her Betrayal thread brushed against his own quiet Observation. He felt a jolt—a flash of memory not his own: a trusted senior brother's smiling face, a dagger in the dark, a shouted accusation of theft, the cold disappointment in a master's eyes.
Bai Xiaoling. Her name came to him on a thread of overheard gossip from the snickering inner sect attendants. "Did you hear? Bai Xiaoling, the so-called sword prodigy from the Winter Sword Sect. Caught stealing the Seven Snow Plum Blossom. Thrown out in disgrace. Her own master washed his hands of her."
"Heard she's hiding here, begging for refuge. Pathetic."
Shen Li watched her retreating back, his mind working with icy precision. A genius, wrapped in chains of scandal. Isolated. Furious. Packed with explosive potential. She was not a piece on the board. She was an unguided comet, ready to destroy anything—or anyone—in her path.
Perfect.
He didn't approach her. Not yet. A desperate, proud creature like that would see any offer of help as pity, another insult. She needed to fall a little further. She needed to be truly out of options.
His second task: cleaning the public practice yards at dusk. This was his university. Here, he watched the disciples train. He saw the clumsy forms of outer sect members, their threads of Effort straining. He saw the fluid, powerful movements of inner sect disciples, their Technique threads weaving complex patterns in the air.
And he saw the threads of their relationships. The alliances, the rivalries, the secret loves, the hidden jealousies. He saw a young master subtly sabotage his rival's training dummy. He saw a pair of female disciples sharing a secret smile, their Friendship thread glowing warm and strong.
He absorbed it all. The social hierarchy. The power dynamics. The routes. The schedules.
Days bled into a week. He was a ghost, a silent, watching shadow. He learned that Bai Xiaoling was given the lowest status of an "honored guest"—which meant a drafty room in a remote pavilion and no access to resources. She was a political courtesy, a piece of trash not yet thrown out. Her Isolation thread grew thicker, her Desperation thread sharper.
The hook was set in his mind. But he needed bait. And he needed a catalyst.
He found it in the alchemy sorting shed. Among the wilted Frost Ferns and bruised Spirit's Root, he sometimes found discarded, half-rotten fruits of the "Moonwhisper Berry." Useless for alchemy once bruised. But he remembered, from Lin Feng's vast memory of poisons and antidotes, that the juice of a Moonwhisper Berry, mixed with the sap of a common Blue Reed, created a faint, almost undetectable analgesic and blood-coagulant. A crude healing paste.
He began to collect the berries, squeezing their fading essence into a small, stolen clay jar. He gathered the reeds from a ditch near the servant's quarters. He prepared his bait.
The catalyst came from the threads. He was hauling water again when he saw them. Two inner sect disciples, their threads heavy with Malice and Lust, following the path to Bai Xiaoling's remote pavilion. He'd heard their muttered words: "...fallen beauty... no one to protect her now... teach her a lesson about gratitude…"
Shen Li's blood ran cold, but his mind was calm. This was the moment. The universe had handed him the perfect opportunity to create a debt, an alliance, a weapon.
He did not run to her aid. That would get him killed. He did something smarter.
He knew the mountains now. He knew a narrow, treacherous animal trail that cut through a steep ravine, a shortcut to a point downstream from her pavilion. He dropped his water buckets and moved, his weak body protesting as he scrambled over rocks and through thorny brush.
He reached the ravine floor, a place of jagged rocks and a fast, icy stream. He hid behind a large boulder, his heart pounding, not from fear, but from calculation.
He didn't have to wait long.
A figure tumbled down the steep slope from above, crashing through brush and landing with a sickening thud on the rocks near the stream. It was Bai Xiaoling. Her robes were torn. A deep, bleeding gash was on her arm. Her face was pale, her eyes blazing with defiance and pain. She tried to stand, her sword—a beautiful, slender blade of blue steel—clutched in her good hand, but her leg buckled.
From above, laughter echoed. "Run, little sword fairy! See how far you get!"
She was cornered. Wounded. Truly alone.
Shen Li watched. He saw her Desperation reach its peak. He saw the flicker of hopelessness try to dim her Vengeance thread. This was the moment of absolute vulnerability.
He did not step out heroically. He moved like a ghost. While her eyes were locked on the cliff above, waiting for her pursuers to descend, he crept to a point just upstream. He took his small jar of crude paste and smeared it thickly on a clean, flat stone. Then, he took a waterskin he carried and placed it next to the stone.
His final touch: he found a few of the Blue Reeds, the other component, and laid them conspicuously beside the paste.
He was not giving her medicine. He was giving her the means to make her own. A subtle, crucial difference. It preserved her pride. It turned charity into a discovery of her own resourcefulness.
He then retreated back into the shadows behind his boulder, melting into the rock and gloom.
Minutes later, Bai Xiaoling, dragging her leg, moved along the stream, looking for a way out or a place to hide. Her eyes, sharp even in her pain, scanned the banks. They passed over, then snapped back to the flat stone. The paste. The waterskin. The reeds.
Confusion warred with survival instinct on her face. She looked around, seeing no one. Was it a trap? But her thread of Discernment—a thread he saw was strong in her—vibrated. She sniffed the paste, examined the reeds. Recognition dawned in her stormy eyes. Basic medicine lore.
With swift, desperate movements, she mashed the reeds into the paste, then applied the whole mixture to her bleeding arm. The effect wasn't instant, but the bleeding began to slow. She drank deeply from the waterskin.
A new thread, thin but bright, sprouted from her: Confused Hope.
Just then, the two disciples dropped down into the ravine, leering. "No more running!"
Bai Xiaoling raised her sword, her posture screaming defiance even in ruin.
Shen Li, from the shadows, acted. He couldn't fight. But he could distract. He focused on the ravine wall above the two men. He saw a network of threads: Loose Rock, Root Stability, Gravity. He fixed his will on one key Root thread holding a large, precariously balanced boulder. With a mental strain that made his nose bleed, he didn't pull it. He vibrated it, just as he had with the ritual array.
The root, weathered and old, gave a silent, internal crack.
The two disciples took a step toward Bai Xiaoling.
And with a groan of shifting earth, the boulder broke free.
It wasn't a landslide. It was a single, enormous rock that crashed down between the men and Bai Xiaoling, kicking up a huge plume of dust and debris, filling the ravine with thunderous noise.
The disciples cursed, jumping back in surprise and alarm.
In the confusion of dust and noise, Bai Xiaoling didn't hesitate. She turned and vanished downstream, limping but moving, swallowed by the mist and rocks.
The disciples, coughing and waving dust away, found only an empty ravine and the roaring stream. They searched briefly, but the falling rock spooked them—it seemed like bad luck, or worse, the mountain itself rejecting their actions. They left, muttering about "accidents."
Silence returned to the ravine, broken only by the water.
Shen Li stepped out from behind his boulder. He wiped the blood from his nose, his body trembling with exhaustion. He walked to the spot where she had been. The stone was smeared with paste. The reeds were gone. The waterskin was empty.
He picked up the empty skin. And there, on the ground where she had knelt, he saw it. A single, jade green hairpin, simple but elegant, fallen from her unraveled hair in her flight.
He picked it up. It was cool to the touch. He could see her faint Personal Qi thread still clinging to it, a strand of winter wind and sharp steel.
He pocketed the hairpin, a slow, cold smile finally touching his lips in the solitude of the ravine.
The comet has been guided. A thread of connection has been spun, however faint.
She is not saved. She is... recruited.
Now, to let the wound fester just a little more. To let the hunger grow. And then, I will offer not a handout, but a partnership.
Welcome to the web, Bai Xiaoling.
To be continued...