Hmm... did I leave the window open...? Today is a holiday, so I'll sleep in... This sunlight on my face...
I moved my body slowly, my muscles protesting with that pleasant stiffness of a morning off. I stretched with my eyes still closed, yawned deeply—and felt the sunlight hitting my face directly, with the irritating persistence of a human alarm clock.
I decided to open my eyes.
What greeted me was an unfamiliar ceiling.
I stared at it for a few seconds. It was made of dark wood, with interwoven beams forming a pattern I didn't recognize. It definitely wasn't the ceiling of my apartment. Definitely wasn't anything I had ever seen before. It was far too elegant to be an ordinary house, at least to my eyes.
What ceiling is this?
My mind began to work—slowly at first, like a cold engine that needed to warm up—processing the last memories available before I fell asleep. And among those memories, there was nothing that included me entering this place.
Was I kidnapped?
I considered the possibility more calmly than I should have. But my mind, shaped by years of meetings and administrative reports as a law-office worker, had a natural instinct not to panic before having enough data about something. First analyze, then make a final decision; in my case, the obvious conclusion was that I had been abducted... It was efficient.
I got up from the simple bed where I had been lying—a wooden cot with a thin mattress—and began sweeping the room with my eyes. The walls were made of hewn stone. Light entered through a narrow, tall window. There was no door in sight, only an opening covered by a thick cloth hanging like a curtain.
I found what appeared to be an adjoining bathroom.
"Appeared" because the word bathroom evokes certain things that this room did not have. No toilet. No shower. No equipment I would associate with modern hygiene. There was a solid metal basin on a wooden stand, a beautifully polished mirror on the wall, and a water jug beside it. Everything had an aesthetic I would generously describe as ancient China. Although I had never traveled to such a beautiful country.
I walked to the mirror. I cupped water in both hands and splashed it onto my face—cold, the kind of cold that truly wakes you up—and when I raised my eyes to my reflection, I stopped.
That face wasn't mine. It definitely wasn't me.
Eyes of a deep, dark purple, almost violet, with a clarity that didn't match someone who had just woken up. Hair as black as the absence of light, long and loose over the shoulders. Features a sculptor would choose to represent an important character in an epic story. It was a beautiful face—very beautiful—but it definitely wasn't the face of an analyst in his early thirties who spent his days in front of spreadsheets and video conferences and, in his free time at most, liked running on the streets and playing video games on his mediocre computer, where one battle royale game with bizarre powers and another blocky game barely ran.
I stood motionless.
And then something broke inside my head.
It wasn't subtle. It was like two high-voltage electrical currents suddenly colliding—a violent white spark that tore through my consciousness from side to side. Then came the flood, on the scale of a giant tsunami.
Twenty years of memories that weren't mine rushed through my mind like a river bursting through a dam. There was no way to hold them back. I simply... lived through everything.
I saw a baby being born. I saw the same child learning to crawl across a straw-covered courtyard, then learning to walk while holding the fingers of a tall, dark-haired man. I saw a kind-eyed woman smiling as she held her son in her arms. Ordinary people. A small, warm family.
The child's name was Qin Yami.
Qin—which meant King.
Yami—which meant Darkness.
It wasn't an ordinary name; it was almost a provocation directed at the universe. But his parents had chosen it, and so it remained. The boy grew up carrying that name the way any humble child carries his: without thinking much about its weight.
The years passed as they usually do in childhood—slowly during the good moments, invisible when viewed from the past. Games. Food. The warmth of a home with two people who loved that child without condition or calculation.
Then came the day when all of it ended at once.
Qin Yami was ten years old when demonic cultivators crossed the village border. There was no warning. There was no time for anything. His parents died before he could understand what was happening—and when the same eyes that had killed his parents turned toward him, something intervened. The Azure Mountain Sect arrived. Too late to save the dead. Early enough to save those who were still breathing.
Qin Yami was taken away with the other young survivors. They became servant disciples—the lowest caste within the Sect's hierarchy, regarded by their superiors as little better than pack animals. Each received an earth-grade cultivation technique. Basic. Functional. The kind of technique that allowed you to grow to a limited extent, but never allowed you to reach anywhere interesting.
Six years later, Qin Yami was sixteen and still trapped in the Human Foundation Establishment Realm. While other ordinary disciples climbed the cultivation stages with the ease of people who had resources and support, he clawed at every inch of progress with his fingernails. No patron. No resources. No one who cared whether he stagnated or advanced.
But he continued.
Because stopping was not an option he had considered since that day when he was ten.
The memory that came next was from yesterday.
A Human Foundation Pill. Small and pale orange, with the subtle, earthy aroma of the herbs that composed it, covered in faint veins that showed it was not of high quality. It had come into Qin Yami's possession through circumstances he had not questioned. One day, after passing by a beggar and giving him his only remaining coin, the beggar had given him the pill in return—sometimes the universe settled its debts in unexpected ways. That pill was exactly what he needed to break through the bottleneck that had held him at the same cultivation level for more than a year.
The other disciples found out. Of course they did.
Behind the mountains, far from the eyes of the Sect superiors who oversaw the lower area, a group of servant and lower-ranking disciples cornered him. The demand was simple: hand over the pill. Qin Yami's answer was equally simple: No.
What happened afterward was not a fight. It was an execution that had gone unfinished.
They beat him with the cold efficiency of people who knew no one would ask questions afterward. Every blow carried years of resentment—the kind weak people accumulate toward someone who refuses to bow despite having no more strength than they do. Qin Yami endured as much as he could, returning what blows he managed, pathetic scratches, and when his body finally gave out, they threw him down the mountainside the way one throws away the remains of a meal.
Gravity did the rest.
The trees saved him—that dense, disorderly forest growing wild along the slope of Azure Mountain, the branches breaking one after another as his body crashed through the canopy. It was a brutal, chaotic descent that ended with him on the forest floor, his back against the cold earth, staring at the sky broken apart between the treetops.
Consciousness did not return all at once. It came back in pieces—first sound, the wind moving through the trees and the distant song of some bird that cared absolutely nothing about what had happened down there. Then smell: damp earth and rotting leaves, the dense and inelegant perfume of the forest. Then pain.
Pain came last, but it arrived with everything he had endured while unconscious.
Each rib was a separate and terrible piece of information. His right side burned with the particular heat of something broken, or very close to it. There was a cut on his forehead—he knew because he could feel dried blood stiffening his eyebrow—and his lip was swollen at the corner, the metallic taste of old blood still in his mouth. His arms responded weakly, accompanied by brutal pain at the slightest movement. His legs did too, which was technically good news, but his left leg sent a dull ache through him with every millimeter of movement—the kind of warning the body gives when it wants no responsibility for what happens next.
He would probably have been worse off if it weren't for something called adrenaline, as we know it.
Qin Yami lay there for a while. Not because of weakness—or not only because of that—but because his body had made the executive decision not to move anything before completing a full damage report.
The sky above him was an irregular grid of treetops and light. The sun was descending. He didn't know how long he had been there, but the angle of the light told him it had been hours. Hours spent lying on the forest floor like a discarded sack of rice.
They really did throw me, he thought, with the kind of calm astonishment that comes when something bad you already knew was possible finally happens.
He raised his torso first, bracing himself on one elbow—and stopped when his ribs protested with an intensity that made his vision darken around the edges. He breathed. Waited for the darkness to pass. Tried again, this time more slowly, distributing his weight differently, like someone negotiating with his own body instead of simply issuing demands.
He managed to sit, in endless pain. That was already something.
His left leg was not broken—when he tested it carefully, it hurt but bent and supported pressure. Probably a deep bruise, the kind that stays purple for a month and several weeks and makes people ask whether you were hit by a car. His ribs were the real concern. Every deep breath was a conscious decision.
He stood with the slowness of someone assembling a human being from scratch, testing each piece before adding the next. First his knees. Then his hands against a nearby trunk. Then, finally, upright—swaying slightly, the forest spinning for a second before stabilizing.
He stood still, waiting for the world to choose a position and stay there.
All right, he thought. I can do this!
It wasn't a matter of being fine. It was a matter of being functional enough to move, and that would have to be enough. The Sect was uphill, far above him. Returning in his current condition would probably change nothing—no one would ask what had happened, and if they did, no one would care about the answer. But staying alone in the forest, injured and without supplies, was not an alternative that appealed to him. If he was going to die, he might as well fight for survival. His life had always been like that, as far back as he could remember.
He began to climb.
Slowly. One step at a time, choosing where to place his feet, occasionally using a tree trunk or stone to redistribute the weight from the leg that complained. The slope was steep in that section, and the ground was uneven, with moss-covered roots and stones that slipped treacherously beneath him. Every stumble sent his ribs another reminder of the situation. He ignored it and continued.
That was when a hand grabbed him.
I had never felt a hand like that.
It wasn't merely the touch—it was its quality. Gentle with almost impossible precision, as though that hand knew exactly how much pressure to apply without causing harm. Delicate, but not fragile. And warm. Warm with a heat that wasn't fever or exertion—it was a warmth that came from within, constant and intense like a well-fed ember.
Before I could react, process, or formulate any kind of response to what was happening—I was inside a huge room in those memories.
The chamber was large enough to defy any expectation I might have had about the local architecture. High ceilings, carved wooden columns in the corners, candles burning in finely crafted bronze holders and casting golden light over everything they touched. And in the center of the room, a bed wide enough to be a territory.
I was pushed onto it with a firmness that allowed no argument.
And then I saw her.
There are moments in life—rare, disturbing moments—when reality presents you with something that completely transcends the frame of reference you have built over the years. It isn't that the thing is more beautiful than the other beautiful things you have known. It is that it belongs to a different category. A category you never knew existed.
She was that.
Black hair fell to her waist with the lightness of heavy silk, shining with bluish reflections in the candlelight—each strand perfectly in place, seeming less styled than governed by physics. Green eyes of a shade I had never seen anywhere: not the ordinary green of leaves or stone, but the precise green of an emerald held up to the light—deep, layered. Smooth, white skin with the uniformity that does not come from makeup, but from structure. Red lips of a red that needed no assistance to be what it was.
Without the slightest ambiguity, she was the most beautiful woman I had seen in either of the two lives now sharing the same skull, while I lived through everything.
Two lives. Yes. Because my other life was still in there with me, trying to make sense of everything at once.
But then she kissed me, and the two lives silently agreed on the matter.
Her kiss was like her—impossible to categorize in ordinary terms. It carried her scent, something slightly floral and slightly wild at the same time, like a garden at the edge of a forest. Her lips were exactly what they appeared to be. And she was not passive. She was warm and direct and completely free of hesitation.
Ahem.
Ahem.
She tore my clothes off with an efficiency that suggested practice or extreme determination, possibly both. She removed her own with the same lack of ceremony. And there we were, beneath the cold white light entering through the window like a silent guest.
Her beautiful "peaches" had long awaited being picked, and she was already overflowing with the moisture of her desire. She was warm inside and out, with the particular heat of someone who carried fire in her very constitution. And I, like any man faced with such a woman, completely forgot to ask what was happening, even despite the pain in my body.
I kissed her forehead. Moved down to her lips. Lower still. I reached the most beautiful parts of her and appreciated them like someone who understood that certain fruits appear only once in a lifetime. My "Dragon" had already found its way to her valley; from there, the night followed its own logic.
Moonlight illuminated us until exhaustion overcame us.
The petals fell until dawn.
[Point of View: Long Meili]
Several hours earlier—Heavenly Sword Sect
"I'll be first!"
"What a beautiful woman."
"How lucky we are... laughing."
The voices reached me like dirt that clings even when you do not want to hear it. Men who had never accomplished anything in their lives speaking in the tone of people who believed entitlement was the same thing as power.
Son of a mare. That perverted old leader of the Heavenly Sword Sect had drugged me. Fire Snake poison—discreet, efficient, specifically designed to paralyze without leaving a mark. I had lost seventy percent of my cultivation strength. The environment was hostile. The exits were being watched.
My face hardened into an expression of displeasure that I did not bother to hide. The thought of those men touching me with their filthy eyes and hands that should never have existed.
No. That is not going to happen.
"Where do you think you're going, oh great Immortal Mistress who thinks she's above everyone else? Don't you want to stay with Daddy?" one of them said, wearing a smile that would have been better off never leaving anyone's head.
I almost vomited. Not from fear. From pure revulsion.
Thirty percent of my strength was still thirty percent, I thought as I calculated distances and obstructions with my eyes. And my thirty percent was probably enough to ruin at least one of these vermin's day.
But the poison was treacherous. I had to get out of there first—then heal as soon as possible. The effect was obvious.
There was an exit. Small and inconvenient, requiring me to get past two of them before reaching the corridor. Feasible. Painful for them, most likely. Excellent.
My eyes swept across the hall one last time—cold and calculating, with that particular gleam that comes before several people regret something at the same time—and I moved.
Outside the Sect walls, the night was quiet.
And she needed to find someone who wasn't trash. She knew it. She needed help... The escape had begun.