Snow Moon City. A tavern near the Ascending Heaven Pavilion.
Xiao Se remained seated at his table. Xiao Chuhe stood roughly a zhang away, facing him across the open space between them. Caught in the middle — Sikong Qianluo, Li Fansong, Fei Xuan, and the donkey — all of them standing very still, heads swiveling back and forth between the two young men with the expressions of people whose understanding of how faces worked had just been quietly dismantled.
(T/N: One zhang is approximately 3.3 meters, or about 10 feet.)
"Okay, no — this is genuinely impossible." Sikong Qianluo looked at Xiao Se, then at Xiao Chuhe, then back again, her eyes doing the work of someone trying very hard to find a meaningful difference and not finding one. "If you weren't standing next to each other right now, I would swear you were the same person."
"Lei Wujie said the same thing." Xiao Chuhe exhaled — not quite a sigh, but close — walked to the table across from Xiao Se, and sat down. He brought his hands together in a measured, courteous bow. "May I ask your name, Senior?"
"Xiao Se," Xiao Se said.
The name landed.
Li Fansong, standing just behind Xiao Chuhe's shoulder, stepped forward immediately, his composure giving way to something considerably more animated. He bowed deeply before he'd even finished moving. "Senior — could you be the Xiao Se? The one who broke the Snow Moon Sword Immortal's Listening Rain Sword at Mount Qingcheng with a single strike?"
"You're Zhao Yuzhen's disciple," Xiao Se said, with the easy certainty of someone confirming something they already knew.
"Senior — it really is you!" The delight in Li Fansong's voice was entirely unguarded. "My master has spoken of you often these past few years." He straightened, and with the slightly flustered warmth of someone who has just met a person they've heard about for a decade, proceeded to introduce himself with careful formality. "I am Li Fansong, a disciple of Mount Qingcheng. This is my junior brother, Fei Xuan." A brief, affectionate grimace. "He has a talent for bossing around our junior uncle that defies explanation. Please don't hold it against him."
"Greetings, Senior Xiao Se." Fei Xuan bowed with clean, practiced precision.
"No need for all that — sit down, both of you." Xiao Se pressed his lips together against a smile. Nephews. The word had a pleasant ring to it.
The group settled. The area in front of the tavern, which had been pleasantly spacious approximately three minutes ago, was now a conversation held at close quarters with a donkey as a witness.
Sikong Qianluo had not stopped looking between the two men. "I don't understand any of this," she announced, with the directness of someone who has decided that confusion is less useful than asking questions. "You look alike. You have the same name. Are you brothers? You can't be twins — you're clearly different ages — but even twins don't usually look quite this—" She gestured vaguely between them, words failing her for once.
"Miss Sikong." Xiao Se's voice was easy, unhurried. "I have no connection to your Xiao Se whatsoever. The resemblance and the shared name are nothing more than coincidence."
Sikong Qianluo turned to Xiao Chuhe with the look of someone seeking a second opinion. "Is that true?"
"This Senior is correct." Xiao Chuhe poured himself a cup of wine.
"Senior again." Sikong Qianluo looked from one to the other with mounting bewilderment. "Li Fansong called him senior, Fei Xuan called him senior, and now you're calling him senior. Who exactly is this person?"
"Ask your father," Xiao Chuhe said, and drank.
"My father?" Sikong Qianluo glanced around. The seat where Sikong Changfeng had been sitting was empty — vacated at some point during the introductions, with the quiet efficiency of a man who knew when a conversation was about to become someone else's to navigate. "When did he—? Where did he go?"
Li Fansong, who had been sitting across from her with the composed patience of someone waiting for the right moment, offered a small bow in Xiao Se's direction first, and then turned to Sikong Qianluo with the measured clarity of a teacher settling a complicated question for a student.
"Allow me to explain. Senior Xiao Se belongs to the same generation as your father, the Spear Immortal Sikong Changfeng, and my own master, the Sword Immortal Zhao Yuzhen. Ten years ago, he sparred with Snow Moon City's Second City Lord — the Snow Moon Sword Immortal herself."
"The Snow Moon Sword she carries now," Xiao Chuhe added, setting down his cup, "was a gift from him. Given after he broke her previous blade."
The silence that followed had a particular quality.
Sikong Qianluo stared at Xiao Se. Then she stared some more. "He's — but he looks—" She pointed at him, then seemed to realize pointing was rude, and lowered her hand. "He looks about my age. He might be younger than some of us sitting here. How is that—"
Xiao Chuhe picked up the thread, his voice settling into the unhurried cadence of someone who has thought carefully about this and arrived at a framework that holds.
"In the martial world, everything below the first rank is simply called a martial artist. Everything above it is a master. And above that, the first rank is divided into four realms." He counted them off. "The Vajra Mortal Realm. The Free and Easy Realm. The Carefree Heaven Realm. These three are rare, but they exist — your father, the Spear Immortal, holds the Carefree Heaven Realm, as does the white-haired elder from Outer Heaven who came through last time."
He paused.
"The fourth realm is the Divine Travel Realm. It exists, as far as most people are concerned, only in legend. Of those alive today who might have reached it, perhaps three. One is somewhere overseas. The second is Snow Moon City's own Second City Lord — Li Hanyi, the Snow Moon Sword Immortal." His gaze moved, almost despite itself, to the young man seated across from him. "The third is sitting in front of you right now."
He said it quietly, and without particular drama, which somehow made it land harder than if he had built to it.
"Reaching the Divine Travel Realm means transcending the ordinary human lifespan. The body no longer ages in the usual way. So." Xiao Chuhe lifted his cup again. "Don't judge him by what you see."
Sikong Qianluo swallowed. Her eyes, when they returned to Xiao Se, had undergone a noticeable transformation — the frank curiosity still present, but layered now with something considerably more reverent.
"Senior Xiao Se," she said, and then caught herself. "Sorry — I mean—" She pressed on regardless, because the question was burning a hole in her composure. "How old are you? Exactly?"
Every head at the table turned toward Xiao Se simultaneously.
Li Fansong and Fei Xuan, who had been maintaining a creditable performance of casual serenity since sitting down, abandoned it entirely. Their attention fixed on him with the unguarded intensity of disciples who had spent years hearing their master speak of this particular senior with a reverence usually reserved for people one had never expected to actually meet.
Xiao Chuhe, who prided himself on an unflappable exterior, had nonetheless allowed one eyebrow to lift approximately two millimeters.
Xiao Se looked at all four of them.
He was, internally, in moderate distress.
The honest answer — if one were to add his previous life's years to his current ones — landed somewhere around thirty-four. By any Jianghu standard of the time, a man of thirty-four sharing a generation with Sikong Changfeng and Zhao Yuzhen was entirely plausible. The title of Senior was not technically an overreach.
He cleared his throat.
"Thirty-four," he said, with the measured calm of a man committing to a position.
The table went very still.
Then, from Sikong Qianluo, Li Fansong, and Fei Xuan, three hands rose slowly to cover three mouths in three nearly identical gestures of barely-contained disbelief. Even Xiao Chuhe's carefully maintained expression did something involuntary at the corners.
Because thirty-four, sitting across from them, looked like nothing of the sort. He looked sixteen. Possibly fifteen if the light was unkind. He looked younger than Sikong Qianluo, who was presently wearing the expression of someone who has just been informed that a classmate is secretly their elder by a decade and a half.
"Senior—" Li Fansong had to regroup briefly. "I mean — my idol — have you truly broken through to the Divine Travel Realm? Because my master, Zhao Yuzhen, is two years younger than you, and he already has a full beard and the air of a middle-aged man. A convincing middle-aged man."
"My father is only a few years older," Sikong Qianluo jumped in, "and he looks twenty years beyond you at minimum. Possibly thirty."
Xiao Se's composure was developing a small, structural crack somewhere around the foundation.
"The path of martial cultivation is long," he said, with the measured gravity of a man retreating to high ground. "Every one of you has exceptional talent. There is every reason to hope that one day you will surpass your teachers and walk that final step yourselves." He delivered this with commendable steadiness.
His lips twitched only once.
Across the table, Xiao Chuhe had gone quiet in a different way.
He was looking at Xiao Se — not with the impressed-but-disbelieving energy of the others, but with the particular stillness of someone who has just heard something slot into place against a problem they've been carrying for a long time. His teacher, Ji Ruofeng, had told him once — clearly, without ambiguity — that only a master of the Divine Travel Realm could cure the hidden injuries buried in his meridians. It was one of the reasons he and Lei Wujie had made the long journey to Snow Moon City in the first place: to find Li Hanyi, who stood closest to that threshold, and hope she had managed the breakthrough.
But a confirmed master of the Divine Travel Realm was sitting directly across from him, drinking wine, looking seventeen.
Xiao Chuhe was not a man easily moved by temptation. His composure was one of the few things he could point to and call genuinely his own. He held it now — but it required more effort than usual.
He was still turning this over quietly when the noise from the Ascending Heaven Pavilion swelled again.
"The red-clothed kid just cleared the twelfth level!"
The crowd at the base of the tower surged with a fresh wave of sound and motion. Then, threading through the commotion at a speed that suggested he was either being chased or deeply excited — possibly both — a flash of red wove through the main road in their direction.
Lei Wujie spotted the familiar cluster of people outside the tavern, skidded to a stop, doubled back, reached past Xiao Chuhe without ceremony or apology, plucked the wine cup directly from his hand, and drained it in a single long pull.
He set it back down with a satisfied exhale.
"I was about to die of thirst," he announced to no one in particular, sounding entirely unrepentant.
(End of Chapter)
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