While Sikong Qianluo and her father were still mid-conversation, the two figures in the street below separated.
The sword light faded. The air settled. Xiao Se and Li Hanyi stood several paces apart, both of them breathing easily, as though the last several minutes of mutual destruction hadn't cost either of them anything worth mentioning.
"Little fairy." Xiao Se's expression was composed, unhurried. "You've genuinely gotten stronger."
Li Hanyi lowered her sword. Something in her posture had loosened — the sharp, coiled readiness of the fight giving way to something lighter, almost reluctant to admit satisfaction. "You're not bad yourself. It seems you haven't let your swordsmanship go to waste these past years."
It had been a good fight. A genuinely good fight — the first time since breaking through to the Divine Travel Realm that she had found an opponent who could keep up with her as she climbed, matching her step for step without ever revealing a ceiling. She hadn't known how much she had missed the feeling until just now.
But enjoyment aside, there was still the matter of the terms.
A faint light pulsed from the ring on Li Hanyi's left hand. She reached in and withdrew a longsword — and the temperature around her, which had already recovered somewhat from the battle, dropped again. The blade that emerged was pale and cold and carried the particular stillness of deep winter ice.
The Iron Horse Ice River. Once ranked third among the ten most famous swords in the known world. Currently fourth, through no fault of its own.
"I'm going to use my strongest sword technique," Li Hanyi said, her voice carrying the clean simplicity of a statement rather than a warning. "If you lose, you will not leave Snow Moon City. Ever."
Xiao Se looked at the sword. Then at her. "And if I win?"
"As you wish," she said, with a lift of her chin that managed to be both proud and perfectly aware of what she was offering.
"Alright."
He raised the Fearless Sword in a slow arc, and golden light bloomed along its edge — not the searing, uncontrolled blaze of a strange flame, but something more refined. Battle qi compressed into heat, heat shaped into intent, intent crystallized into something that danced along the blade like fire that had learned patience.
"Sword name: Crimson Flame."
The golden light didn't spread. It went up — a single column of concentrated radiance that punched through the overcast sky above Xiaguan and kept going, parting the cloud cover like a blade parting cloth. The sword qi that followed spiraled outward from the point of contact, churning the clouds into chaotic, thickening formations. In the churned sky above, some atmospheric instinct stirred — and a bolt of lightning came down in answer, striking toward Xiao Se with the conviction of something that had been waiting for an excuse.
Xiao Se raised his free hand and deflected it. Casually. The way one waves away a persistent insect.
The lightning scattered. The clouds dispersed around the point of impact. Xiaguan shuddered beneath them.
"The city is not going to survive this," Sikong Changfeng said, watching from the edge of the cleared street, in the voice of a man who has made his peace with a fact. "He just brushed aside rolling lightning with an open hand. What that sword strike is going to actually produce—" He exhaled through his teeth. "I genuinely don't know."
Li Hanyi's white robes snapped in the wind the technique had stirred. She looked at the golden light still threading upward through the sky, and her brow drew together slightly.
"What a terrible name," she said, with feeling.
She raised both swords.
"I also have a technique," she said. "Its name is: Moonlit Evening and Flowery Morning — True."
The contrast was immediate and complete. Where Xiao Se's technique was vertical, concentrated, aggressive — hers was horizontal, spreading, unhurried. It moved the way early morning moves, the way moonlight moves, without urgency, without gaps. Beautiful and slow and elusive, like trying to catch smoke with both hands, like the specific feeling of a spring morning that makes you forget everything that came before it.
And then the flowers came.
Every camellia in Snow Moon City — every single one — responded. Petals lifted from stems across the entire city without wind, without reason, without any visible mechanism except the will of the sword technique drawing them in. Millions of them, spiraling inward through the air from every direction, converging on Li Hanyi in a vast, slowly turning constellation of pink and white and deep red, until the city seemed to be unmade of flowers and then remade.
The petals formed. Compressed. Structured themselves into something vast and deliberate — an enormous cross-shaped sword aura of pure camellia, each petal carrying the edge of a blade, bearing down on Xiao Se with a force that felt less like an attack and more like a season arriving.
Xiao Se recognized the core of it. He had seen the rough sketch of this technique at Mount Qingcheng, ten years ago — the same woman, a rougher version, still beautiful but still carrying the self-consciousness of something that hadn't found its final shape yet. Back then he had thought it too focused on aesthetics, too in love with its own appearance to be as dangerous as it wanted to be.
She had taken the Ghost Valley Vertical and Horizontal Sword Technique he'd given her. Sat with it for ten years. Rebuilt this from the ground up.
The result was something genuinely comparable to a low-grade Earth-rank combat skill. It had found its shape.
He considered his options for approximately half a second.
He was deliberately holding his cultivation back. No strange fire. No full domain. Forty percent of his sword intent, applied through the Crimson Flame Sword — a high-grade Xuan-rank technique, working from within its proper constraints.
The golden sword aura that answered her technique was simply larger. Not dramatically, not insultingly — simply larger, the way a river is larger than a tributary, in a way that was clear without being cruel. It met the cross-shaped camellia aura at its heart and broke through it, the petals scattering in every direction like something released rather than destroyed, filling the air with the smell of flowers and the cold brightness of dispersed sword qi.
The golden aura didn't stop. It continued — carried forward by its own momentum — and met Li Hanyi's protective true qi like a tide meeting a seawall.
The seawall held. Barely.
The Snow Moon Sword left her hand. The Iron Horse Ice River followed. Her mask came loose and fell. The impact caught her fully and sent her backward through the air — not controlled, not composed, the pure physics of a technique that outweighed her defense expressing itself honestly — like a kite whose string had just been cut, graceful and helpless at once.
Xiao Se was already moving.
The Ethereal Smoke Step took him from where he was standing to exactly the right place — beside her, at the right height, with both arms open — in the time it took her body to finish its first arc of flight. She landed in his arms with a solidity that felt like inevitability.
Above them, petals were still falling. Millions of them, slow and aimless now, released from the technique's purpose, drifting through the air of a thoroughly destroyed Xiaguan in lazy spirals of pink and white. The two of them revolved once, slowly, in the center of it — borne upward for a moment by the last of the sword qi's momentum — before descending together through the camellia rain.
Around them, an entire city forgot to breathe.
"Little fairy." Xiao Se looked down at her, his voice soft and even. "You've lost."
Li Hanyi lay in his arms. Her mask was gone. Her face — the face she kept behind the mask for reasons the whole city understood and none of them would say aloud — was flushed from the crown of her cheeks to the line of her jaw, her eyes refusing to settle anywhere near his.
"What do you want, then," she said, quieter than she'd intended.
"What do you think?" he said.
"How would I know." Her voice had dropped further, the arch of it losing its edges. She pushed herself upright, turned away from him, folded both hands in her lap with the careful deliberateness of someone managing a situation — and her face, in profile, was deeply, completely, unhelpfully red.
The Snow Moon Sword Immortal. Terror of the known world. First ranked among the Five Great Sword Immortals. The woman who had casually decapitated a mountain.
She looked, at this particular moment, exactly like a young woman sitting very still and hoping the ground would have the decency to do something about the situation.
From the edges of the cleared street, the crowd began to move — cautiously at first, and then with the gathering momentum of people who have decided the dangerous part is over. Sikong Changfeng arrived first, accompanied by Sikong Qianluo. Behind them came Yin Luoxia, Luo Mingxuan, Lei Wujie, Tang Lian, Li Fansong, and Fei Xuan, converging from various points of the wreckage with varying expressions of awe.
Sikong Changfeng brought his hands together in a bow that carried genuine weight. "To witness a sword strike like that today — I can say without reservation that my life has been well spent."
"Yin Luoxia has learned much from this." Yin Luoxia inclined her head in agreement, her voice carrying the measured appreciation of a person who deals in swordsmanship professionally and knows what she has just seen.
To the untrained eye, Xiao Se's final technique might have appeared simply powerful — overwhelming force, decisive outcome, clean result. To someone like Sikong Changfeng or Yin Luoxia, who had spent their lives among sword cultivators and knew the texture of what genuine mastery looked like — there had been something else present in that strike. Something that only appeared in the old accounts, the stories passed down from cultivators who had lived in an earlier and more concentrated age.
Sword intent.
"A minor skill," Xiao Se said, pleasantly.
"Senior Xiao Se—" Lei Wujie materialized at his elbow with the irrepress of a man constitutionally incapable of hanging back, eyes bright with everything he'd just watched. "That was incredible. You just broke the Snow Moon Sword Immortal's strongest technique and made it look easy."
"Want to learn?" Xiao Se asked.
The crowd went very still.
Lei Wujie's mouth opened. He looked at Xiao Se. He looked at the sword aura still fading from the air. He looked back at Xiao Se. "Let me— yes. Yes, I do."
"Then there's a condition." Xiao Se raised the Fearless Sword — and with a flick, sent it spinning through the air toward Lei Wujie, who caught it on instinct. Then Xiao Se turned his gaze to Li Hanyi. "Become her disciple first. Then I'll teach you."
Silence.
Li Hanyi went still.
She turned to look at him with an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral and was not succeeding. "How did you—"
"How did I know you wanted a disciple?" Xiao Se met her eyes. His voice was quiet, meant for her. "I haven't been beside you all these years, but I've never stopped paying attention."
Li Hanyi looked at him for a moment. Something moved behind her eyes — something she didn't say, and didn't need to.
She reached into her ring and retrieved the Snow Moon Sword and her mask, settled the mask back into place, and turned to Lei Wujie with the particular manner of someone who has made a decision and is implementing it before she has time to second-guess it.
"Would you be willing to become my disciple?"
Tang Lian stepped forward immediately, with the urgency of someone watching a rare opportunity about to be fumbled. "Wujie — outside of this Senior Xiao Se, the Snow Moon Sword Immortal is peerless in this world. Do not let this pass."
Lei Wujie stood there for exactly three seconds.
Then he dropped to his knees, pressed his forehead to the ground three times in the proper apprenticeship ceremony, and raised his head with an expression of complete, unguarded sincerity. "Disciple Lei Wujie takes the Snow Moon Sword Immortal as his master. Once I have mastered my skills, I will return with my Master to Lei Family Fortress. If Master Lei Hong finds fault — I will answer for it with my life."
Xiao Se looked at him for a moment.
"He really is endearingly foolish," he said, with the fond helplessness of someone who means it as the highest possible praise.
Li Hanyi's expression, behind the mask, was unreadable. But her voice, when she spoke, was steady and certain. "Change into proper clothes. Find me at the back mountain tomorrow."
She turned. Both swords came to her hands — the Iron Horse Ice River horizontal beneath her feet, the Snow Moon Sword held loose at her side. She stepped onto the Iron Horse Ice River and rose.
Then she looked back at Xiao Se.
"Come with me."
"Alright." He stepped onto the Snow Moon Sword without hesitation and rose to meet her, and together the two of them banked and disappeared into the distance above Snow Moon City, their figures shrinking until they were points of light, and then nothing at all.
Below, the wreckage of Xiaguan settled into its new configuration.
Sikong Qianluo stared at the empty sky for a long moment.
"Father," she said, "what is their relationship? Senior Xiao Se and the Snow Moon Sword Immortal?"
Sikong Changfeng smiled — the specific smile of a man who has been watching something develop for a long time and has the satisfaction of knowing he was right about it. "The kind you're thinking of."
He looked around at the aftermath of the battle, and the smile developed a rueful edge. Nearly two-thirds of Xiaguan had been reduced to extremely expensive rubble. The storage ring on his finger suddenly felt rather more provisional than it had twenty minutes ago.
A hand appeared in his peripheral vision — slender, unhurried, extended palm-up with elegant patience.
Yin Luoxia.
"Give it to me," she said pleasantly.
"Give you what?" Sikong Changfeng looked at her with genuine bewilderment.
"The gold coins." Her smile had the particular quality of someone who knows exactly what they heard and is simply waiting for the other person to stop pretending otherwise. "My Luoxia Palace has just been destroyed and requires rebuilding. Xiao Se gave you one million. Don't bother denying it — I was standing right there."
The silence that followed lasted approximately two seconds.
Then, from every direction — from the ruins of shops and toppled storefronts and half-collapsed houses and the general debris of an afternoon that had gotten completely away from everyone — hands began to appear. Business owners, homeowners, tavern keepers, the man whose entire roof was now a memory. All of them turning to face Sikong Changfeng. All of them with the same expression of people who have recently suffered a loss and have identified a party with resources.
Sikong Changfeng stood in the middle of it all, storage ring on his finger, surrounded on all sides by the extended palms of his own citizenry.
I've really done it this time, he thought.
(End of Chapter)
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