Winter had become permanent on Moon Peak. It was no longer a season; it was an
atmospheric condition generated by the entity living in the central palace. Even the sun seemed
pale and distant here, its warmth stripped away before it could touch the ground.
Li Wei sat in the small, drafty shed he now used as an office. The guest room had become too
cold to sleep in, the walls coated in a layer of permafrost that defied even the System's heating
charms. He had moved his bed here, among the sacks of spirit rice and dried herbs.
He was organizing the tribute from the subsidiary sects. Since the destruction of the Blood Fire
Sect, the Azure Cloud Sect had become the undisputed hegemon of the region. Su Mei was its
god. And Li Wei was her priest—the one who collected the offerings.
[System Alert: System Upgrade Complete.] [Version 5.0: The Soul Bridge.] [New Feature
Unlocked: 'Soul Resonance'.] [Description: The Host can now synchronize with the
Beneficiary's emotional state to better anticipate her needs and cultivation bottlenecks.]
Li Wei stared at the glowing blue text.
"Synchronize?" he whispered.
For months, the distance between them had been a physical and verbal chasm. He guessed at
her moods. He walked on eggshells, terrifyingly unsure if his wife was happy, angry, or
contemplating killing him to sever her mortal ties.
"System," Li Wei asked, his voice trembling with a mix of hope and dread. "Will she feel me,
too?"
[Negative. The connection is unilateral. The Host is the observer. The Beneficiary is the
observed.]
"Of course," Li Wei laughed bitterly. "I am the audience. She is the play."
He hesitated. Did he want to know? Did he want to see what was inside the heart of the Ice
Fairy?
"Activate Soul Resonance."
[Activating...]
The world tilted.
Li Wei gasped as his consciousness was yanked out of his body. It wasn't a visual hallucination.
It was a sensory override. Suddenly, he wasn't sitting in a cold shed.
He was the mountain.
He felt the wind howling around the peaks not as sound, but as a tactile sensation against his
skin. He felt the flow of the ley lines deep underground, pulsing like thick veins of mercury.
And then, he felt Her.
He expected a storm. He expected the raging fire of ambition, the sharp jagged edges of
arrogance, or perhaps the buried, weeping child he remembered from Cloud Sparrow City.
He found... silence.
It was a terrifying, absolute silence. Imagine a vast ocean of dark water, perfectly still, stretching
out for infinity. There were no waves. No fish. No light. Just depth.
Li Wei drifted in this void. This was Su Mei's emotional landscape.
Is there nothing? he panicked. Is she dead?
Then, a ripple.
A thought formed in the void. It wasn't a sentence in human language. It was a concept.
Power.
The concept rippled through the dark water. It wasn't accompanied by joy or excitement. It was simply a directive. A hunger. More. Higher. Clearer.
Then, another ripple.
Li Wei.
Li Wei's heart (his physical heart, miles away) hammered. She was thinking of him!
He focused on the ripple, desperate to feel the emotion attached to his name. Love? Nostalgia?
Annoyance? Even hatred would be something.
He touched the ripple.
Utility. Maintenance. Logistics. Anchor.
The concepts washed over him. There was no color to them. They were gray. He was a tool in
the inventory. He was "Li Wei" in the same way a sword is "Iron". He was necessary, but he
wasn't... felt.
There was a small, walled-off section in the deep dark—a block of ice floating in the ocean. Li
Wei moved toward it.
Inside the ice, he saw a flicker of color. A memory. It was the day he bought her a candied
hawthorn stick on their first date. The memory was bright, warm, and smelled of sugar.
But the ice around it was thick. And the ocean was slowly eroding it.
She is freezing her own memories, Li Wei realized with horror. She isn't forgetting. She is
actively putting them in stasis so they don't touch the rest of her.
[Resonance Limit Reached. Disconnecting.]
Li Wei was slammed back into his body. He fell off his chair, hitting the wooden floor hard. He
vomited bile.
The emptiness he had felt was worse than any hatred. Hatred requires passion. Hatred implies
that the object matters.
Su Mei didn't hate him. She had simply... outgrown the capacity to feel him. He was a pixel in a
4K image—present, but invisible in the grand scale.
The door to the shed opened.
Li Wei looked up, wiping his mouth. Su Mei stood there. She looked exactly as she had in his
vision—pristine, vast, and unreadable.
"Husband," she said. Her voice was melodic, perfect. "The Tribute from the Iron Mountain Sect.
Did it include the Void Stones?"
Li Wei looked at her. He looked at the eyes that he had just seen from the inside.
"Yes," Li Wei croaked. "Twelve stones. Top quality."
"Good," she nodded. "Bring them to the main hall. I need to reinforce the perimeter. My
tribulation is approaching."
She turned to leave.
"Mei'er," Li Wei called out.
She stopped. She didn't turn around. "Yes?"
"Do you remember..." Li Wei swallowed. "Do you remember the candied hawthorn? The one I
bought you by the river?"
He waited. He activated the Soul Resonance for just a second, risking the nausea.
He felt the ripple in the ocean. The consciousness scanned the 'Memory Archive'. It found the
'Candied Hawthorn' file. It analyzed it for relevance to the current situation (Void
Stones/Tribulation).
Result: Irrelevant.
"I remember," Su Mei said aloud. Her voice was flat. "It was sweet. It made my teeth hurt."
She walked away.
Li Wei curled up on the floor of the shed. She remembered the data. She had lost the feeling.
The sweetness was just a descriptor now, not a memory. "She's gone," Li Wei whispered to the dust motes. "The system didn't kill her. It deleted her."
[System Correction: The Beneficiary has evolved. The caterpillar dissolves to become the
butterfly. You are mourning the caterpillar.]
"I loved the caterpillar!" Li Wei screamed, throwing an inkstone at the invisible screen. "I married
the caterpillar!"
The inkstone passed through the hologram and shattered against the wall. The System didn't
reply. It just updated the quest log.
[New Objective: Prepare for Nascent Soul Tribulation.] [Survival Probability for Host: 5%.]
[Suggested Action: Run.]