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At the top of the Ascending Heaven Pavilion—
Li Hanyi had not expected this.
Sikong Changfeng's sudden outburst had startled her into instinctively scanning the street below — and then she went completely still.
Because there he was.
The boy who had lived in the corner of her heart for ten years, standing in the street below as though no time had passed at all. And in a way, it hadn't — time seemed to have simply declined to touch him. The same face. The same bearing. If there was any change, it was that he had grown taller, and something in the way he carried himself had settled into a quieter, more complete kind of confidence.
Ten years.
She had spent ten years waiting for someone who still looked young enough to be her junior.
Not long ago, Sikong Changfeng had come to her with that deliberately vague smile of his and mentioned that old friends had come. She had assumed, naturally, that it was just Lei Wujie — her nominal younger brother, who had a talent for arriving at inconvenient moments. It hadn't crossed her mind that Sikong Changfeng's old friends might be plural.
That old schemer.
She didn't bother with Lei Wujie. She touched the tip of the ruined pavilion with her toes and dropped.
"Snow Moon Sword Immortal — our match isn't finished!" Lei Wujie's panicked voice floated up from somewhere below.
Li Hanyi didn't even glance back. She raised her free hand and flicked it loosely — a shower of petals cascaded from nowhere, caught the air, and drove into Lei Wujie like a gentle, inexorable wall. He crashed back through the opening of the thirteenth floor with a sound of startled protest.
She landed in the street.
Her sword came up and settled, without ceremony, at Xiao Se's throat.
From the broken edge of the thirteenth floor, Lei Wujie peered downward. "What's going on? Why is the Snow Moon Sword Immortal fighting the person who looks like Xiao Se?"
Luo Mingxuan materialized beside him, leaning forward with the expression of someone who has just been handed front-row seats to something significant. "I know a little about the story," he said, his voice dropping to something between reverence and excitement. "What I do know is — we might be about to witness two Divine Travel Realm cultivators fight each other today."
He was not alone in that assessment. The crowd that had gathered on the street and on every accessible rooftop and balcony in the surrounding blocks had that particular quality of large numbers of people who have stopped breathing simultaneously. Every elder and every disciple of Snow Moon City who was physically present — minus Baili Dongjun, who had already departed the city, and Xiao Chuhe, who was currently unconscious and working through the process of having his meridians reconstructed — had found their way here, drawn by something they couldn't quite name but recognized instinctively as unmissable.
A sword strike from a sword immortal could mark an era.
A clash between two masters of the Divine Realm could split the sky itself.
The air between Li Hanyi and Xiao Se was perfectly still.
Xiao Se looked at the sword at his throat, then at the masked woman behind it, and something warm and unhurried settled into his expression. He tilted his head slightly, as though considering.
"Little fairy." His voice was quiet, and gentle enough that it carried only to her. "All these years — you've become much stronger." A small pause. "And even more beautiful."
The familiar voice reached Li Hanyi like something she had been bracing herself for without realizing it.
Behind the mask, her expression fractured.
Just for a moment — a flicker, rapid and involuntary, there and gone before it had fully formed. Panic, or something adjacent to panic, or something that had lived next to panic for ten years and knew its territory well.
No one else saw it. The mask made sure of that.
Xiao Se saw it.
He had, as a point of fact, a reasonably comprehensive view of her face. He looked at her — the maturity that had settled into her features without erasing anything, the particular quality of someone who had spent a decade growing into themselves rather than simply growing older — and felt something satisfied and quiet move through him.
She was still entirely herself. Time had refined her. That was all.
"Enough talk." Li Hanyi's sword finger tightened. She stepped back one clean pace, sword raised and leveled. "Draw your weapon."
Ten years of waiting had narrowed to this moment. One way or another, today, it ended. She would fight him, and she would win, and then — then he would stay.
Xiao Se looked around them — the street, the buildings on either side, the crowd of spectators covering every surface — and had the expression of a man doing a rapid and unfavorable cost-benefit analysis.
"Are we really doing this here?" he asked. "If Snow Moon City gets destroyed in the process, the Third City Lord will be genuinely devastated."
"He won't dare complain," Li Hanyi said flatly, and turned a single warning look in Sikong Changfeng's direction.
Sikong Changfeng, who had already been in the process of taking several involuntary steps backward, completed the gesture with what remained of his dignity. "Please, please — don't mind me—" He waved a hand and proceeded to shepherd the surrounding crowd away from the blast radius with the efficient urgency of a man who has absolutely no intention of being in this man's path.
Li Hanyi turned back. "Begin."
"After you, then?" Xiao Se offered.
"Stop stalling and move," she said, impatient now.
"Alright." He raised his right hand, extended two fingers — and activated his sword finger.
Every blade in Xiaguan moved.
The Thunderless Killing Sword from the Ascending Heaven Pavilion's thirteenth floor. Li Fansong's peach-wood sword from the eighth. The weapons hanging in shops, resting in scabbards, stored in homes, carried at waists — everything with an edge and a point lifted free and rose, a thousand separate instruments of steel catching the afternoon light as they aligned, tip-forward, into a constellation that stretched across the sky above the street.
Even the Snow Moon Sword lurched in Li Hanyi's grip, responding to the pull before she tightened her hand against it.
The sky darkened with metal.
Thousands of swords, hanging above her head in a dense, silent formation, every point angled downward.
This was the sword-control technique Long Kui had taught him — its ceiling set entirely by the practitioner's soul power. With Xiao Se currently operating at the mid-level of a seventh-grade alchemist, the technique's reach extended well beyond Xiaguan. He could cover all of Snow Moon City if he chose. The limitation wasn't range — it was the soul imprint. Without it, these blades were operating at a fraction of what they were theoretically capable of.
He also had absolutely no intention of harming Li Hanyi. Every sword above her was calibrated precisely to her tolerance — sufficient weight, sufficient presence, insufficient edge. He hadn't even brought his sword intent into it.
"—every sword in the city—" Lei Wujie's voice floated down from the thirteenth floor, stripped of its usual casual confidence. "Is this what a Divine Travel Realm expert actually looks like?"
"Not quite," Luo Mingxuan said, swallowing. "I once saw the Second City Lord take a sword to Cangshan Mountain and remove the summit. This is—" He didn't finish the sentence. He wasn't sure how to.
Xiao Se stepped onto the spine of the nearest sword, rose smoothly into the air, looked down at the arrangement from above, and came up with a name on the spot.
"Sword technique," he announced, with the composed confidence of a man who has thought about this extensively, "Ten Thousand Swords Return to the Origin."
A beat of silence from below.
"What absolute nonsense," Li Hanyi said.
Her voice was perfectly flat.
"These swords have no real substance behind them — there's no true swordsmanship in any of this, no essence, nothing. You made that name up just now, didn't you?"
"I—" Xiao Se's lips twitched. "You saw through it that quickly?"
"Obviously." She stared up at him. "Be serious."
He hung there in the air for a moment, looking down at her, and felt something in his expression give way to something more genuine. She was — exactly the same. Ten years, and still the same. Infuriatingly perceptive, entirely unimpressed by spectacle, incapable of being distracted from the actual point.
He had missed this, he realized. Specifically this.
"Alright," he said, and shrugged slightly.
His fingers relaxed. The formation above shivered — and then, in one smooth collective motion, every blade turned, reversed, and streamed back to wherever it had come from, the sky emptying in seconds. The Fearless Sword dropped into his waiting hand as his feet touched the ground.
He pointed it at her.
Li Hanyi's reply was the Snow Moon Sword leaving its scabbard in a single fluid draw. The temperature around them dropped immediately — a sharp, immediate plunge that whitened the breath of every watcher nearby and spread frost across the cobblestones in delicate crystalline lines.
Then she moved.
Her feet barely touched the ground — a whisper of contact, and then she was smoke, formless and traceless, her silhouette dissolving from its position and reappearing behind him in the same instant, blade already descending.
Clang.
The Fearless Sword was there. She hadn't gotten through.
"You've mastered the Ethereal Smoke Step completely," Xiao Se said, with genuine appreciation, their blades still locked.
"Less talking." Li Hanyi disengaged, shifted her grip, and changed her approach entirely.
What followed was not a duel in any formal sense. It was a conversation conducted in the language of sword edges and footwork and the particular physics of two people who were both genuinely trying and genuinely not trying to hurt each other at the same time.
Gold and crimson sword beams wove across the street in crossing arcs. The cobblestones beneath them split and buckled, carved with deep, ragged grooves that would take weeks to repair. Buildings on both sides of the road shuddered, cracked, and in some cases simply stopped having walls. The space Xiao Se and Li Hanyi moved through became an expanding radius of structural regret.
"Father." Sikong Qianluo's voice was somewhat compressed, as though she had forgotten to breathe somewhere in the last thirty seconds and hadn't gotten around to correcting it. "Can you follow their movements?"
"Barely," Sikong Changfeng said. His expression had the particular gravity of a man stripping away every habit of understatement. "And what I can make out — if it came to a fight, I don't think I would last ten moves against either of them."
Sikong Qianluo stared at him. Her father was the Spear Immortal. He was not a man who said things like that lightly. Or at all. "Ten moves?"
"That's generous." Sikong Changfeng watched the two figures trading strikes below, something in his expression approaching awe. "I can't see the bottom of either of them. And Xiao Se especially—" He paused. "Every time Li Hanyi increases her power, he matches it. Exactly. As though he's measuring the gap and adjusting. As though there is no ceiling to find."
Sikong Qianluo followed his gaze downward, watching the gold and red light cut through the evening air. After a moment, something came back to her. "Father — I remember, when we were small, the Snow Moon Sword Immortal wasn't your match. Not even close. How has she grown so far, so fast?"
Sikong Changfeng was quiet for a moment.
"Because of one person," he said at last. "And one immortal herb."
He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to. His eyes were still on the street below, where two figures moved through the ruins of the lower city like forces of nature that had briefly agreed to wear human shapes.
(End of Chapter)
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