"It's me — though the Xiao family and I have nothing to do with each other anymore." Xiao Se said it lightly, with a small laugh, as though the matter were of no more consequence than commenting on the weather.
Yun Yun understood immediately. She felt no particular surprise at his detachment from the Xiao family. After everything he had endured growing up within those walls, the fact that he hadn't turned around and burned the place down was generous enough.
To think that the Xiao Se who's been making waves out here has actually become a Dou Huang powerhouse, she mused quietly. What terrifying talent.
"And you, Miss?" Xiao Se asked, his smile easy and unhurried. "What's your name?"
"Me?" Yun Yun hesitated for just a breath, then gave the pseudonym she'd used for years. "Yun Zhi. My name is Yun Zhi."
"Brother." Long Kui's voice bubbled up inside Xiao Se's mind, bright with barely-contained laughter. "Isn't that just a little bit wicked of you?"
"Is it?" Xiao Se replied inwardly, doing his best to look perfectly innocent. "I'm being completely serious, thank you."
He turned his attention back to Yun Yun. "So, Yun Zhi — what possessed you to go picking a fight with the Amethyst Winged Lion King?"
"I need Purple Spirit Crystals," Yun Yun said, a slight hesitation in her voice.
"Purple Spirit Crystals?" Xiao Se stroked his chin thoughtfully, his expression shifting into something more contemplative. A faint light pulsed from his storage ring — and then, resting in his open palm, was a semi-transparent rhombus of deep violet crystal, roughly the size of his hand, catching the light with a soft inner glow. He held it out toward her without ceremony. "Here."
Yun Yun stared.
"How do you have a Purple Spirit Crystal?!" The words came out before she could stop them.
Xiao Se smiled faintly. "I found it a few years back. The Amethyst Winged Lion King had wandered off from its cave, so I slipped in and helped myself to everything inside." He turned the crystal over once in his fingers, then set it on the table between them. "I have no use for this one. If you want it, it's yours."
For a long moment, Yun Yun didn't know whether to laugh or groan.
She had spent the entire day locked in brutal combat, pushed to her absolute limits, very nearly gutted by a six-hundred-pound magical beast — all for a single Purple Spirit Crystal. And here it was, produced from a storage ring like an afterthought, pushed across a table with a casual "here you go."
She accepted it quietly and tucked it into her own storage ring. Then she reached back in and withdrew two fifth-tier magic cores and a pair of scrolls, setting them on the table with deliberate care.
"I can't just take something for nothing," she said firmly. "Two fifth-tier magic cores and two high-grade Xuan-rank combat techniques. Consider it a trade."
"Fair enough." Xiao Se didn't even glance at the items. He swept them into his storage ring in one motion and moved on without missing a beat. "One more thing — next time you decide to pick a fight out here, check your surroundings first. That old beast we crossed paths with today has a gift for drawing in bystanders. If it hadn't been for some business I had in this direction and my taking a longer route getting here, I might not have come across you when I did."
The casual words landed with quiet weight. Yun Yun felt a chill settle over her — a delayed, creeping kind of fear that hadn't had the chance to surface during the battle itself. She exhaled slowly.
"Thank you," she said again, and this time she meant it with every word. "Truly. For saving me."
Gurrrrgle.
The sound that followed was neither dramatic nor subtle. It resonated through the small wooden cabin with impressive clarity.
Silence fell.
Yun Yun's hand flew to her stomach. Her cheeks, already faintly pale from the ordeal, flushed a warm rose. She had been fighting the Amethyst Winged Lion King from morning straight through to mid-afternoon. Under normal circumstances, a Dou Huang cultivator didn't need food the way ordinary people did — battle qi sustained the body effortlessly. But with her Dou Qi sealed completely, she was no different from any other young woman who hadn't eaten in a full day. Her stomach, apparently, had decided the diplomatic silence had gone on long enough.
Xiao Se's lips curved upward.
"Hungry? That's fine — give me a few minutes." He was already on his feet and heading outside before she could protest, setting up a small outdoor stove with brisk efficiency. He drew ingredients from his storage ring, kindled the flame with a touch of his strange fire, and got to work.
It didn't take long.
He returned carrying three dishes, a soup, and a generous pot of rice — all balanced with the practiced ease of someone who'd done this many times before — and arranged everything neatly on the table.
Yun Yun leaned forward before he'd even set the last bowl down.
"What is all this?" she breathed. The aromas hit her in layers — savory, rich, faintly smoky, with an undercurrent of something warm and sharp that made her mouth water embarrassingly fast. "It smells incredible."
"White-cut chicken, beef with bok choy, shredded pork in garlic sauce, and tomato egg soup." Xiao Se produced two sets of bowls and chopsticks from his storage ring and set them down with a small gesture. "Help yourself."
Yun Yun didn't need to be told twice. She picked up her chopsticks, selected a piece of the beef—
And the moment it touched her tongue, her eyes went wide. Heat detonated across her taste buds like a small, very enthusiastic fire, scorching straight to the back of her throat. Her eyes immediately prickled with tears.
"Ah — spicy, spicy, it's so spicy!" She set down her chopsticks to fan her open mouth vigorously, which did absolutely nothing useful.
Xiao Se was already pouring tea. He offered her the cup with the measured calm of someone who had seen this reaction before.
Yun Yun seized it and drained it in one long, grateful swallow. She set the empty cup down, exhaled a slow, trembling breath, and then — after a beat of silence — picked her chopsticks back up.
"…It's fine," she decided. "Don't make anything else. It's unbearably spicy, but it's also—" She paused, searching for the word. "Surprisingly delicious."
And she took another piece.
This time the heat was still there, still fierce — but it came with everything else underneath it, the richness and the depth and the faint sweetness of the beef, and it was undeniably, infuriatingly good.
"The stir-fry pairs better with rice," Xiao Se said, and ladled her a bowl without being asked.
"Mm." Yun Yun accepted it, scooped up a bite of rice alongside the beef, and found herself entirely unable to stop. "Your cooking is genuinely wonderful," she said, between mouthfuls, with the full sincerity of someone who had entirely forgotten to be composed about it.
"Eat as much as you like." Xiao Se leaned back slightly, watching her with quiet amusement.
Gone, completely, was any trace of the noble and untouchable Dou Huang powerhouse. Gone was the serene, dignified Sect Master of Yunlan. In her place was a young woman with rice on her lower lip, chopsticks moving at a frankly impressive pace, wholly absorbed in the business of eating.
It was, Xiao Se thought, rather endearing.
Before long, most of the food on the table had vanished. Xiao Se glanced at the few remaining dishes, then at Yun Yun's stomach, which remained as flat as ever beneath her robe. He considered this for a moment.
Could it be, he thought, that Yun Yun has the same dimensional stomach as that little female dragon?
That night.
The moon hung full and bright like a polished silver plate, and stars blanketed the sky from edge to edge in an unbroken sweep of cold light.
In a small valley on the outskirts of the Monster Mountain Range, a young man sat cross-legged on a broad, jutting rock of black stone before the wooden cabin. His eyes were half-closed, his hands arranged in an intricate cultivation seal, his breath steady and unhurried. Wisps of faint golden energy drifted through the valley like morning mist, drawn inward from the surrounding world as though the air itself were offering them to him. They spiraled around his body in lazy, luminous threads — and one by one, were drawn inside, refined and absorbed through the workings of his high-grade Earth-ranked cultivation technique.
When the last wisp disappeared into him, he was still for a long moment.
Then he opened his eyes — and faint golden flames rose in his gaze, burning quietly before fading.
He rose to his feet in a single unhurried motion. A soft breeze moved through the valley, lifting the dark hair that fell across his forehead and draped past his shoulders, sending the hem of his black-and-gold robe drifting gently at his sides, tracing the clean, spare lines of his tall figure.
"It's late," he said, without turning around. The golden light had left his eyes entirely. "Aren't you sleeping?"
He turned.
Standing in the doorway of the wooden cabin was a woman whose figure and face seemed to belong to a different order of things than the rough mountain night around her.
She wore white — a white inner robe and a flowing white skirt, her long black hair unbound and falling in a loose, glossy wave all the way to her slender waist. Her face was tranquil and achingly lovely, the kind of beauty that didn't announce itself but settled into you quietly, like the surface of a still spring deep in a mountain valley — and once you noticed it, you couldn't quite look anywhere else.
It was Yun Yun.
"You're not sleeping either," she said. She tilted her head slightly, her gaze moving over him with unhurried curiosity. The fluctuations of battle qi that had emanated from him during his cultivation just now — she had felt them even from inside the cabin. Whatever technique he practiced, it was far beyond anything she had encountered before, deep and strange in ways she couldn't quite name, which only deepened the quiet intrigue she already felt toward him.
And there was something else. Something harder to explain.
From the first moment she had looked at his face properly, there had been a faint, nagging sense of familiarity — a feeling that she had met him before, or known someone very like him, though no matter how many times she turned the question over, she couldn't place it.
It was that question, still unanswered, that had kept her staring at the ceiling long after she'd lain down. Eventually she had given up on sleep altogether, slipped out of the cabin — and found him there.
A gentle breeze passed through the valley. The clouds overhead shifted and parted, and moonlight fell between them in a wide, silver beam, settling softly over the stone and the grass and the two figures standing across from each other.
In that light, they could finally see each other clearly.
(End of Chapter)
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