Su Mei returned to the Floating Fortress of the Frozen Heavens.
She sat on her throne of absolute ice. The hall was empty. She had dismissed the guards, the
servants, and the flattering courtiers.
She needed to think.
She closed her eyes and entered her Sea of Consciousness.
It was a vast, frozen ocean. In the center floated a massive gray sword—the manifestation of
the Heartless Sword Sutra.
"It is done," Su Mei thought. "He is safe. He is hidden."
The sword hummed. A voice, sounding like her own but stripped of all doubt, echoed in her
mind.
"Is he?"
Su Mei frowned mentally. "He is on the Isle of Forgotten Time. No one can find him. The
Time-Lock will keep him alive indefinitely."
"Alive," the Sword mocked. "Existence is not life. You have trapped a bird in a box and buried it.
Is that mercy?"
"It is protection," Su Mei insisted. "He is weak. The world is sharp. I removed him from the sharp
edges."
The Sword vibrated. "You removed him because he makes you vulnerable. You removed him
because when the Dragon King mocked him, you felt shame. You removed him for yourself."
Su Mei opened her physical eyes. She gripped the armrests of her throne. Frost cracked the
jade.
"I did it for him," she said aloud to the empty room. "He was suffering. He was aging while I
remained young. He felt useless."
"And now?" the inner voice persisted. "Does he feel useful now? Alone on a rock?"
Su Mei stood up and paced the throne room. Her reflection in the polished ice floor followed
her—a perfect, beautiful, terrifying entity.
"I cannot release him," she reasoned. "If I bring him back, he dies. If I let him go, he dies.
Keeping him is the only way to preserve his life."
"Why must his life be preserved?"
The question stopped her.
Su Mei stopped pacing.
"Why?" she asked herself.
"Because he is your husband," the old Su Mei whispered from deep beneath the ice.
"Because he is a shackle," the Sword countered. "Look at your cultivation. You are stuck at the
Early Spirit Severing Stage. Why? Because your spirit is not severed. You have hidden the
tether, not cut it."
Su Mei looked at her hand. She remembered the feel of his pulse when he fed her his blood.
"He is a source of Golden Blood," Su Mei rationalized. "He is a resource."
"You have pills for that," the Sword argued. "You have the entire Spirit Realm to harvest. You
don't need him. You keep him because you are afraid of being truly alone."
Su Mei walked to the window. She looked out at her empire. Millions of subjects. Armies of
cultivators. All bowing to her name.
"I am alone," she whispered. "No one here understands me. They only fear me."
"Exactly," the Sword agreed. "And he... he pities you. He looks at you and sees the girl from the shop. He reduces you. As long as he lives, you are not the Eternal Empress. You are just 'Su
Mei', the shopkeeper's wife who got lucky."
Su Mei's eyes narrowed.
This was the crux of it.
It wasn't about his safety. It wasn't about his blood.
It was about her identity.
Every time Li Wei looked at her, she saw her own reflection in his mortal eyes. She saw the girl
who cried over spilled milk. She saw the girl who needed him to open jars.
He was a living mirror of her past weakness.
"As long as he remembers," Su Mei murmured, "I cannot forget."
"And if he were gone?" the Sword pressed. "If the mirror were broken?"
Su Mei imagined it. A universe without Li Wei.
No one to call her "Mei'er." No one to remind her of the rain. No one to look at her with that
devastating, pathetic mixture of love and disappointment.
She would be pure. She would be absolute. She would be the Dao itself.
"He is suffering on that island," Su Mei said, her voice gaining a chilling strength. "Solitude for a
mortal is torture. I have condemned him to a thousand years of torture."
"That is cruel," the Sword said. "You are not cruel, Su Mei. You are efficient. Ending his
suffering... would be the ultimate kindness."
"A mercy kill," Su Mei whispered.
She turned back to the throne.
"Not yet," she decided, but her conviction was weaker than before. "I promised to visit in fifty
years. I will wait."
"Fifty years," the Sword laughed. "To a god, that is a nap. But to him... every second is a knife."
Su Mei sat down. She closed her eyes. She tried to meditate.
But she couldn't. She kept seeing him pounding on the barrier. She kept hearing him scream her
name.
The noise in her head was deafening.
"Silence," she commanded.
But the silence didn't come. Because the silence was on the island, screaming at the top of its
lungs.
Su Mei opened her eyes. They were gray, cold, and resolutely logical.
"The logic holds," she stated. "His existence is pain. My existence is hindered by his pain. The
solution is the cessation of his existence."
She didn't move to kill him yet. The remnant of her humanity—that 5% the System warned
about—held the knife back.
But the logic was planted. It was a seed of ice in her brain. And in the Frozen Heaven Empire,
ice always grew.
[System Alert (on the Island):] [Beneficiary Intent Shift Detected.] [New Objective:
Euthanasia.]
Li Wei, sitting on the floor of the fake shop, saw the notification.
He didn't cry. He just nodded.
"She's figured it out," he whispered to the empty shelves. "Took her long enough."