Pines bowed under a soft morning mist, and the wind, though cool, no longer bit at their skin. The air smelled of earth instead of ice—of roots stirring after long silence.
Lian Xue paused near a fallen tree, her silver hair brushing softly against her shoulder. Beside her, Lian Yue crouched near a pool of water, watching as a pale lotus bud floated across its surface.
For the first time in months, they were leaving the mountain.
And they didn’t yet know where they were going.
“East?” Yue suggested, flicking a pebble into the water. “Toward the forest paths and merchant trails. Plenty of people there. Plenty of rumors.”
“Too noisy,” Xue murmured.
“South, then? Toward the lakes? We could pass through Xiling Marsh.”
Xue didn’t answer immediately. She looked toward the horizon, where distant mountains curled into mist. Her eyes narrowed, thoughtful.
“We don’t need to decide yet.”
“We have time,” Yue echoed.
Their voices fell quiet again. And in that moment of stillness, a familiar silence returned—not the cold kind they had grown up with, but the kind formed between shared breath and memory.
?
The second winter had come bitter and long.
Their cultivation had just broken through to the Foundation Establishment realm, and with it came deeper spiritual awareness—a tension in the mountain itself, as though something waited just beneath the stone.
One night, Yue woke from a strange dream. It felt like hers but not—it was someone’s memory.
She recalled:
A spiral chamber lit by silver fire.
A suspended lotus glowing within.
And a whisper in her blood.
As if by some unknown force, she immediately grabbed Xue by the hand and led them deep into the mountain’s untouched eastern ridge, past ice tunnels and forgotten talismans, until they reached a wall of petrified snow. Where a seal was placed.
Carved upon its surface was two faint lotus pattern—one they recognized not from study, but from instinct. The other was a mystery to them.
Together, they pressed their palms to the mark they recognized.
The wall dissolved into light.
?
Inside the chamber, nothing stirred.
Frost crystals coated the walls like veins in pale marble. At the center hovered a single lotus, frozen mid-bloom, and above it, suspended in radiant soul-light, drifted a manual—its cover woven from lotus-fiber, its title not inked, but etched in memory:
Frozen Petal Scripture: Soul Resonance Path
Beneath it, embedded in the stone, lay two weapons sealed in ice:
- A slender blade of white-glint steel with a faint moon-petal motif
- A pair of mirrored sabers with violet cores and curved fangs of dreamstone
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When they approached, the lotus opened. A voice echoed in the stillness—it was their mother—Lian Fengyu. A soul print that was left behind.
“If you have found this… then you have chosen to live. Not to avenge, but to become more.”
“This scripture does not serve the world. It serves only your bond. Let it guide you—not bind you.”
“The weapons before you is the inheritance left behind by our ancestor. Let them protect what is dear to you.”
The chamber trembled as the resonance between the twins awakened.
The weapons—meant only for them—unsealed with a sigh of frost.
Xue reached for the longsword. As her fingers closed around the hilt, frost bloomed across her palm, then melted.
Yue touched the twin sabers. They pulsed with her breath—responding not to command, but to intent.
They emerged from the chamber in silence, the scripture sealed to their spirits, the weapons sheathed in soul-light.
From that day forward, their cultivation no longer wandered.
It resonated.
?
The mist shifted.
Yue rose from the water’s edge, her sabers at her hips, her smile curved with old memory.
“I had almost forgotten the feeling,” she said.
“I haven’t,” Xue replied.
They turned away from the pool.
A new path opened before them, winding down through the forest.
They began walking—not with hesitation, but with grace.
And behind them, the mist curled gently over the footprints they left in the snow.
?
The forest grew denser as they moved down the eastern ridge, where the wind whispered more softly, and the roots of old trees curled like sleeping spirits beneath the soil.
For a time, the only sound was the crunch of frost beneath their boots.
Even the birds seemed to hush in their passing.
Lian Xue walked ahead, every step precise and fluid. Her eyes never stopped moving—not out of fear, but out of reverence. The world was different now, and even familiar paths felt like echoes of the dead.
Lian Yue followed close, hands behind her back, her sabers swaying gently with each step. Her expression was light, but her eyes were narrowed.
She felt it, too.
A pressure in the air.
Not hostile. Not divine.
But watching.
?
They passed an old shrine tucked in the cliffs, one Yue had once sketched during their childhood lessons. Its roof had collapsed. Ivy choked the prayer stones. Spirit candles had long since melted into the altar’s base.
“Even the ancestors forgot this place,” Yue murmured.
“No,” Xue replied quietly. “They’re waiting.”
They paused there.
Not for protection. Not for prayer.
Just to listen.
The mist thickened.
The path narrowed.
And still, they descended.
?
As they neared the valley’s lip, the trees began to thin—and with them, the silence broke in small, creeping ways.
A twig snapped in the distance.
A faint vibration trembled through the ground.
Yue stopped walking.
“Did you feel that?”
Xue turned, her breath visible in the suddenly colder air.
“Yes.”
They exchanged no more words.
Only a shared look.
A warning.
?
They moved more slowly now.
More deliberately.
The path curved, winding around a slope they hadn’t seen in four years. Familiar trees stood like sentries—but their bark was marked, scarred by spiritual burns.
Something had been here.
Or many somethings.
Xue touched the trunk of one tree, her fingers brushing a scorch line that had melted part of its spirit vein.
“Sword fire,” she said softly. “Too clean for talismans. Too erratic for beast strikes.”
“How old?”
“Years. But not decades.”
“Then someone came back here.”
Xue’s hand curled around her blade’s hilt.
Yue’s smile faded.
They continued on, and though their pace didn’t change, the mountain seemed quieter now—as if it, too, remembered what was buried just ahead.
?
They crested a hill.
And beyond it—veiled in thin mist—lay the remnants of the path that once led to their home.
Stonework choked by moss. Steps split by root and time. A shattered spirit ward, its runes long since bled dry.
They had not yet reached the heart of it.
But it was close.
So close the air tasted like memory.
“We’ll reach the gates before nightfall,” Yue said, voice lower now.
“Yes,” Xue replied. Her eyes never left the mist ahead.
And with that, they walked on.
Beneath their feet, the earth made no sound.
But above them, in the still branches of old trees, something unseen stirred.