Chapter 1: The Cry That Wouldn’t Stop

On the back mountain of Qingxuan Sect, at Qingxin Residence.

Deep in the bamboo grove, moonlight flowed like water.

A white-robed figure sat cross-legged on a flat blue stone, his features clean-cut and handsome. The dappled moonlight sifting through bamboo leaves wrapped him in a hazy glow, like a banished immortal who had strayed into the mortal world.

The night was slowly dissolving. On the distant skyline, the ink-blue faded into fish-belly white, and a thin film of light spread across the horizon.

Yan Li’s spiritual energy had been running through his body, and he was just settling into the groove of his forty-ninth circuit, breathing slow and deep.

A harrowing wail suddenly burst out, shredding the silence of the grove to pieces.

Yan Li’s lashes fluttered.

He opened his eyes and sighed. A small silver sword shot out from his sleeve, swelling as it caught the wind, and in a blink it was a long blade three feet in length.

His body never moved, yet he was already standing on the sword. With a swing of his sleeve, a streak of silver light split the bamboo sea and arrived at the door of the inner room in a flash.

The instant the door opened, the sobbing hit him straight in the face.

Yan Li clenched his fist, drew a breath, then another, and managed to beat down the urge to strangle whoever was making that racket.

“…What is it this time?”

The room was almost bare. A woven bamboo couch. A table and a chair. On the table rested half a cup of tea that had gone cold long ago.

Against the wall was a small woven crib, and in it a baby wrapped in a blue swaddling cloth waved two chubby fists, crying so hard she could hardly breathe.

Yan Li walked over helplessly. “You tiny little thing. Your stomach’s barely bigger than a walnut. You’ve eaten. You’ve drunk. I’ve changed your diaper. What else do you want?”

The baby paid no attention to his muttering. She kept on wailing as if the world was ending.

“Can’t you let me finish at least one circuit in peace?”

The crying grew louder.

“Fine. Fine. You win. You’re the little master. I’ll shut my mouth now.”

For all that Yan Li liked to think his Dao-heart was as steady as a rock, this crying had hacked a crack right through it.

He started pulling things out of his storage ring. A rattle, bells, a cloth doll, a small glowing bead, a wooden fish that chirped when you pressed it. Everything he could think of to entertain a baby went onto the pile, until it covered nearly half the crib.

The tiny tyrant wasn’t impressed.

Yan Li grabbed the rattle and shook it with all his strength. The baby kept crying.

He shook it harder. She wailed even louder.

“…Xuan Shiyan, you told me little kids liked these things?”

No one answered him.

The shrill cry went on without pause, slicing at Yan Li’s eardrums one stroke at a time.

The rattle slowed in his hand. It hung mid-air.

Then his fingers squeezed shut. A crack. Wood splinters fell from between his knuckles.

Fine.

Yan Li closed his eyes and let out a long sigh.

“…You win.”

When he opened them, he drew a long, moon-white gown from his storage ring and put it on with a blank face.

The gown was made of some unknown cloth. The moment it touched his skin, it flowed over him like cascading water. Layer after layer of faint patterns surfaced and vanished in the light. When he tied the sash at his waist, his ordinarily lean, upright frame was traced into a shape of surprising softness.

The stern sword cultivator had become, just like that, a fair-faced beauty with features fine as a painting.

Yan Li shot a cold look at himself, bent down, and scooped the little thing from the crib. The crying, sure enough, eased up, turning into hitched little sobs.

He looked down at the tiny face still damp with tears.

“Yan Shu, are you doing this on purpose?”

The baby blinked her misty eyes and blew a spit bubble at him.

Fine. He shouldn’t have asked. The answer was always a wash.

Cradling the child with one arm, he brushed the long, clumsy hem of his gown aside with the other and sat down to begin his daily task.

The sect leader had told him: this child’s spiritual veins were flawed from birth. Whenever her meridians blocked, pain wracked her tiny body, and she would cry without stopping. Only if someone guided spiritual energy through her veins, slowly, gently, could she be kept alive. Otherwise, she would not live to see her third birthday.

Normal cultivator energy was too harsh, too violent. One careless slip and they would hurt her. The energy had to be pressed down to its softest, finest thread, then seeped in bit by bit.

This was far harder than sword practice.

Yan Li shaped a thread of pure spiritual energy at his fingertip and eased it into the tiny body in his arms.

Inch by inch, strand by strand, he worked through the clogged meridians.

Three months earlier, Yan Li had found this child in a secret realm. She had been smaller than his palm, her face paler than paper, curled up in the corner of an abandoned cave dwelling and crying until she could barely catch her breath.

If not for the cry piercing through the dead silence of the secret realm, if it hadn’t dragged him here, the little thing would have cried herself to death in that corner, and no one would ever have known.

But why would there be a baby in a secret realm?

Yan Li frowned and scanned the cave cautiously.

The hollow had no other exit. In the corner, besides this infant, there was only a storage ring on a cord around her neck. Nothing to explain her origin.

Yan Li had meant to leave.

He was not the kind to poke his nose into other people’s business.

In the cultivation world, the strong preyed on the weak, and people died every day. People were abandoned and forgotten every day.

He couldn’t save everyone.

He had never thought he was obliged to.

The moment he turned to leave, the baby, he noticed, had stopped crying. She opened two hazy eyes a crack and strained her gaze toward him.

Just as he looked back, she fought to raise one tiny, pitiful hand, and let out a thin whimper.

Yan Li looked at that shaking little hand and went quiet for a long time.

He had been an orphan too, once.

In the city, beggars fought for scraps. Refugees choked the roads. In a world where a man could barely keep himself alive, nobody wanted another mouth to feed.

He had survived on other people’s leftovers.

When hunger was at its worst, he fought the stray dogs for food. On winter nights, he curled in a broken temple to escape the wind.

Through those years, he had seen too many people die: people frozen stiff, people starved hollow, people wasted by sickness.

A person who had curled up beside him at night would be stiff in the snow by the next morning.

If his master hadn’t happened to pass that ruined temple, and hadn’t picked him up when he’d fainted from hunger, he’d have gone stiff in the snow just the same.

He had no wish to return to those nights of waiting to die in the snow.

That was why he trained harder than anybody. By twenty, he had broken into the middle stage of Foundation Establishment, and was called the finest sword cultivator the sect had produced in a hundred years.

He had thought those days were behind him.

But when he saw that small hand, his feet still stopped.

Two paths: watch her cry herself to death. Or leave her, and let some demon beast take her for a crunchy mouthful.

“Senior Brother.”

Footsteps sounded behind him. His junior brother Xuan Shiyan came to his side, frowned at the pale, tear-soaked little figure in that corner, and said, “You’re not thinking…”

Yan Li said nothing.

“Senior Brother,” Xuan Shiyan said, his tone turning serious. “We came to this secret realm for the spirit herbs, not to adopt a child. She popped out of nowhere in these wild mountains. Who knows what she is? What if she’s bait for some forbidden ritual, a trap laid by a demonic cultivator?”

Yan Li still said nothing.

Xuan Shiyan tried a different approach. “Let’s say she’s nothing at all, just some abandoned… so what? How many children get thrown away in this world every day? Can you rescue them all?”

Yan Li turned his head and looked at him, silent. Xuan Shiyan’s throat worked. He shut up at once.

The only sound in the cave now was the baby’s thin, broken sobbing, echoing off the empty stone walls.

Yan Li looked away, walked forward, bent down, and reached out toward that small, curled-up figure in the corner.

Xuan Shiyan grabbed his wrist, panicked. “Senior Brother! Wake up. If you take her back, do you even know how to raise her? Will the sect leader agree?”

What he did not say: what would the sect brothers who were already jealous of his senior brother think?

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