The world passed judgment on a sword, sealing her away in the blackest depths of a mountain cavern.
They claimed her steel was steeped in a lethal, biting frost, potent enough to ravage the mortal realm.
They said that when she was drawn, blood flowed for a thousand miles, leaving hundreds of innocents dead in her wake.
But the sword asked, "Why do you not hunt the one who poisoned the blade?"
She asked, "Uncle, will even you refuse to seek the truth?"
Through the long, sprawling years that followed, only a faint, broken hum echoed through the dark, repeating a single plea:
"Is anyone there? Is anyone out there...?"
A sudden crash of thunder rolled across the peaks, swallowing her fragile voice without a trace.
She was the Supreme Swordswoman.
But who truly cares about the Supreme Swordswoman?
Yuzhen often wondered if this wretched fate was her punishment for arriving too late, for keeping her Master and the Sage waiting in vain.
In their fading eyes, she had recognized a shared sorrow, the look of craftsmen mourning a piece of rough jade they would never have the time to polish, an unsharpened blade they would never forge.
She chose to believe that this torment was a crucible meant to temper her spirit, and that her current karma was the seed of her future reckoning. And so, she lived for the lightning to strike Mount Tai. With every deafening crack, the iron chains that bound her flesh and choked her inner breath weakened by a fraction.
She had calculated it with absolute certainty: one thousand thunderclaps, and she would shatter the mountain. She would break free and make those who framed her pay in blood.
Summer nights on Mount Tai were thick with storms. Wide awake in the dark, she held her breath, listening to the sky.
One. Two. Three. Four.
One thousand strikes of thunder. That would take about a decade, wouldn't it?
At the mouth of the cavern, a spider rode the gale to escape the storm, dropping down on a silken thread until it dangled beside her ear. She raised her eyes, meeting the vivid, warning patterns stretched across its abdomen.
A venomous spider.
The mere sight of a poisoned thing roused a fierce, untamed violence in her blood. With a careless flick of her finger, she swatted the creature from the air, sending it tumbling back into the curtain of rain.
She was consumed by hate. It churned in her chest, as wild and violent as the tempest outside. Turning her face to the gale, she threw her arms wide. The shrieking winds tore her long hair loose and sent her robes snapping furiously around her.
Such relentless, punishing rain would surely bring the rivers down upon the world. In her mind's eye, she conjured a glorious deluge swallowing the realm, masts splintering, ships shattering, and the masses drowning in the rising tide. Amidst the phantom ruin, she threw her head back and laughed.
Retribution! This is their retribution!
Lightning ripped across the night sky, throwing her jagged silhouette against the cavern wall. In that blinding flash, she looked like an Asura, a demon of vengeance come to collect her due.
And beneath the roar of the storm, the Asura kept counting.
Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine.
One hundred twenty-seven. One hundred twenty-eight. One hundred twenty-nine.
A decade had passed.
She had miscalculated. The summer monsoons arrived without fail, year after year. With her unnervingly sharp hearing, she could trace the muffled, distant rumbles of thunder and know that the waters were flooding the Henan Circuit once again. But the lightning almost never struck here.
The oppressive, damp heat seeped deep into her bones. She lay on the floor, her hair splayed across the cold stone, watching the spider crawl near the back of her hand.
At least you stayed to keep me company, little thing.
The iron chains had suffocated every last drop of her martial energy. Had they not, that careless flick of her finger ten years ago would have shattered the tiny bug instantly.
Perhaps a plague of locusts had swept the foothills. Gorging itself on the storm's refugees, the spider had grown quite plump.
But little spider, you shouldn't be satisfied with just this.
Years ago, while escorting Princess Taiping's royal procession, she had seen an elephant offered as tribute from Jiaozhi. It was a breathing mountain, the most colossal beast she had ever laid eyes upon.
You should crawl into the elephant's ear, she thought. Find its softest, most vulnerable flesh, and empty every last drop of your venom. Give it a fatal strike.
Outside, the rain fell in a ceaseless, maddening drone. The skies offered no thunder.
One hundred twenty-nine.
She was so tired of the endless rain. She wanted to hear the earth-shattering crash of an elephant falling to its knees.
Time lost its meaning. Through a haze of shifting shadows, she saw Ayao walking toward her, haloed by the light. Gently, he lifted the heavy iron shackles from her flesh.
They found a thatched cottage beside a river and turned their backs on the jianghu forever. He healed the sick, while she practiced her sword and caught fish. It was a simple, joyful life.
Three years slipped by like falling leaves.
One winter night, beneath a sky vast and sharp with starlight, he asked her to walk with him.
They stepped out onto the frozen river. The ice was so pristine, so glass-clear, that they could watch black fish gliding silently beneath their feet.
In the old days, she would have broken the surface to catch them, but he told her there was no rush tonight. He wanted to show her a tree.
It stood impossibly in the middle of the frozen river, draped in heavy, immaculate snow. From its branches hung dozens of little bells, chiming softly in the bitter wind.
Captivated by the strange sight, she wanted to leap up into the boughs for a closer look. Instead, Ayao took a bell threaded with a crimson cord and tied it carefully into her braided hair.
She shook her head. "If you wrote a prayer on it, you should hang it on the tree. The branches reach higher. Only then can heaven hear it."
He smiled faintly. "Is the Greatest Under Heaven not high enough?"
...When had she ever become the Greatest Under Heaven?
She turned to press him for an answer, but his lips remained sealed in that quiet smile.
Crack. Crack. The ice groaned. It sounded as though the black fish were battering the frozen ceiling, fighting desperately to tear through the surface. A biting wind swept past, and the bell in her braid jingled lightly.
"Don't I look strange to you?" she asked suddenly. "Dressed like this?"
He merely shook his head, the smile never leaving his face.
Crack, crack, crack. The splintering grew frantic. Fractures webbed outward from her boots, crawling across the ice like jagged vines. She took a step toward him.
"I am more than half a century old. Why am I still dressed like a young girl?"
The moonlit ice stared back at her, laying bare her reflection. Her hair was threaded with ash, her skin weathered by the deep, cruel ravines of time. And there, dangling mockingly from a young girl's braid, was the little bell.
With a deafening roar, the ice gave way.
She plunged backward into the bone-chilling depths. A churning swarm of black fish instantly surged over her, violently severing Ayao from her sight. Just before the dark waters swallowed her entirely, she whispered:
"It's a dream, isn't it? Just a dream."
She had known it all along. The surreal perfection of the last three years and his gentle evasions every time she sought the truth had long foretold the end. It was all a fragile, fleeting illusion, destined only to shatter.
She gasped, tearing herself from the dream. Beyond the cavern mouth, the world lay buried under a silent, frozen expanse of snow. The brittle chime of bells drifted on the wind. Perhaps a new temple had been raised at the foot of the mountain, its eaves catching the winter gales. It made sense. The waking world always found a way to bleed into slumber.
Yet, she realized with a hollow ache, her dream had held no sound of rain. No crack of thunder.
Her count had stalled at two hundred and five. For three empty years, she had blamed the silence on a cloudless drought. Now she understood. It was a suffocating, soundless blanket of snow that had buried the heavens, sealing away any hope of lightning.
The little spider that had once kept her company was long dead. The creatures spinning silk in the gloom of the cave today were generations removed.
She raised a hand, brushing aside the thick webs. Beneath them lay the tallies she had carved into the stone, the grim ledger of her imprisonment. She had endured exactly thirty years before falling into that long slumber. The dream had tangled the years beyond reckoning, rendering the count meaningless. With a single, decisive sweep of her hand, she wiped the dust and the marks away entirely.
She had drowned in a hollow, useless fantasy for far too long. But as she turned her gaze back to the cavern mouth, she beheld a sight of rare, breathtaking beauty. She knew with absolute certainty that it was real.
High in the clearing sky, where the snow had just ceased falling, a pale rainbow arched beside the winter sun.
Yu, the ancient word for the rainbow. Her very name, Yuzhen, had been plucked from the ethereal light that bridged the earth and the heavens.
Lifting a finger, she traced a phantom arc across the sky. That was the height she was meant to reach.
Her thoughts drifted back to the dream one last time. She spared no thought for the chiming bells, the splintering ice, or even the man who had stayed by her side. She remembered only his question:
Is the Greatest Under Heaven not high enough?
That was the grand wager she had staked her life upon, an eternity ago. She had not yet won the bet. But mercifully, she had not lost it, either.
She did not know if Hu Lingfei still walked the mortal realm. But she knew that when the day finally came, when she gathered her thousandth thunderclap and shattered this mountain, tracking him down for one last, glorious duel would be her life's ultimate joy.
She found a jagged shard of stone. Stroke by stroke, gash by brutal gash, she began to carve her sword manual deep into the cavern wall.
She would prove to the world that the blade once crowned the Greatest Under Heaven had not yet rusted.
