The encounter with Xuan left a chill in Li Yao's soul that the heat of the forges could not dispel. Her gaze had been a violation, a silent acknowledgment that his most carefully guarded secret—the true depth of his progress—was not entirely hidden. He had been so focused on the obvious threats like Hong and Kang that he had overlooked the quiet, deep-running currents.
He began to discreetly gather information on her. The snow-haired girl was an enigma. She had no powerful family backing her. She had entered the sect through the public trials a year before him, her talent immediately catapulting her into the Inner Sect. She rarely spoke, attended no factions, and her cultivation method was a mystery. Some whispered she was a descendant of a lost lineage from the Northern Glaciers, others that she was a spirit of ice given human form. Her missions were always solo, and she always returned, her aura as cold and impenetrable as when she left.
She was, in many ways, his mirror—a solitary ascendant walking a path apart from the sect's orthodoxy.
This made her infinitely more dangerous than Kang or even Hong Li. She was an independent variable.
He adjusted his routines. He varied the times he visited the library, the routes he took to his pavilion. He used his Soul-Sight sparingly in public, keeping its "volume" low, like a barely-open shutter. He was a mouse that had sensed the presence of a silent, patient owl.
A week after the forge, the summons came. Not a jade slip or a verbal message. A single, perfect snowflake, carved from crystal, appeared on the windowsill of his courtyard. It did not melt. When he picked it up, a single word formed in his mind, clear and cold: Observatory. Midnight.
It was her. There was no question.
He contemplated not going. It was undoubtedly a risk. But avoiding her would be an admission of fear and, worse, of having something to hide. He had to face this, to gauge her intent directly.
At midnight, the sect was asleep, blanketed in a silence broken only by the sigh of the wind. The old observatory was a skeletal structure of white stone on a lonely peak, its dome long ago shattered by a forgotten tribulation. Xuan stood at the edge, looking out at the star-dusted void, her white hair and robes seeming to glow in the faint light. She didn't turn as he approached.
"You see the strings," she said, her voice the soft crunch of snow underfoot. "The desires that pull them. The fears that anchor them."
It was not a question. It was a statement of fact.
Li Yao said nothing, simply stopping a few paces behind her. His senses were stretched taut, reading the space around her. Her aura was perfectly contained, a sphere of absolute cold that gave nothing away. His Soul-Sight could not penetrate it.
"You look at me and see a mystery," she continued, still not turning. "I look at you and see a paradox. A core of stellar density, an arm woven from nothing, a soul freshly tempered by a method that does not exist in this sect's records. You wear the skin of an orthodox disciple, but you move like a ghost through the spaces between their rules."
Every word was a hammer blow. She saw too much.
"What do you want?" Li Yao asked, his voice flat.
"To understand the variable," she replied. "The sect is a stagnant pond. Elder Hong clings to the past. Elder Guo plays with the pieces on the board. They breed competent disciples, but not transcendent ones. You… and I… are different. We are mutations. And mutations are either culled or they redefine the species."
Finally, she turned. Her eyes were the pale blue of ancient glacier ice, and in their depths, he saw not malice, but a profound, alien loneliness.
"I have no interest in your secrets, Li Yao. Only in your trajectory. The Orthodoxy Faction will move against you soon. Hong Li's failure in the Blighted Grove has made you a symbol that must be broken. They are preparing a challenge—a public duel in the Arena of Ascension during the upcoming Sect Tournament."
This was news to him. A public duel was the one place where his heresy would be impossible to fully conceal. It was a perfect trap.
"Why tell me this?" he asked.
"Because a culled mutation provides no data," she said simply. "I wish to observe your continued evolution. And…" she paused, the first hint of something resembling emotion in her voice, "...the pond is less stagnant with you in it."
She was offering a non-aggression pact. Acknowledgment from one outlier to another. She would not be his ally, but she would not be his enemy. She would watch, and in her own cold way, she preferred that he survive.
"What do you know of the duel?" he pressed.
"Hong Li will be your opponent. He has been granted access to the 'Ancestral Soaring Cloud Armament,' a spirit sword that contains a wisp of the founding patriarch's will. It will resonate with the orthodox techniques, amplifying his power exponentially. It is a tool designed to crush anything… unorthodox."
A spirit weapon with a will of its own. That changed everything. It wouldn't just be a test of power, but of doctrinal purity.
"He will use it to force you to reveal your true self," Xuan said. "To make you defend yourself with methods that will brand you a heretic before the entire sect. Then, Elder Hong will have the justification he needs for an 'enforcement purification.'"
The trap was even more sophisticated than he had imagined. It wasn't just about winning or losing; it was about forcing a confession through combat.
"Can it be defeated?" Li Yao asked.
"By orthodox means? No." She looked at his spatial arm, then back to his eyes. "But you are not an orthodox cultivator. The weapon is a key for a specific lock. You… are a lockpick. The question is, can you pick the lock without breaking it, and without showing the crowd your tools?"
With that, she turned back to the vista. The conversation was over.
Li Yao descended the mountain, his mind racing. The Sect Tournament was in one month. He had thirty days to find a way to defeat a empowered Hong Li using only the Soaring Cloud Sect's orthodox techniques, a task that was, by Xuan's account, impossible.
He could not use his spatial arm. He could not use resonant cancellation. He could not use any law-based manipulation. He had to win, or at least survive, looking like a loyal disciple.
It was the greatest challenge he had ever faced. He had to become a master of the very orthodoxy he despised, to find a flaw in their perfect system, a crack in the Ancestral Armament's divine will, using nothing but the limited, clumsy tools they had given him.
He went straight to the training grounds. The night was his. He drew his standard-issue spirit sword and began to practice the [Soaring Cloud Sword Art]. Not with the efficient, deadly fluency he had cultivated, but with the raw, unadulterated form. He performed every block, every thrust, every sweep exactly as the manuals dictated, feeling the inherent waste, the predictable rhythms, the rigid structure.
He had to find the soul of the orthodoxy, not to embrace it, but to defeat it from within. He had to become a perfect mirror, and then find a way to make the reflection crack.
The slow, meticulous burn was over. For the next month, he would immerse himself in a fire of someone else's making, and he had to emerge not burned, but tempered into a flawless, deceptive replica of what they wanted him to be. The duel was no longer just a fight; it was a performance for his life, and the script was written by his enemies.