I awoke within the stone walls of a cave, lightly lit by the dancing flame of a campfire set up a few feet away. My muscles were slow with lethargy, but I could move them enough to tell that my right arm was no longer broken, and that the wound in my collarbone had closed up without leaving a trace behind.

I could not see anyone else in the cave.

I turned my head left, towards the shadow that my body cast on the wall. I turned my head right, towards the fire. Nobody was there.

Then I turned my head left once again, and I observed my shadow closely. A shadow flickered within the shadow, the same way the sun's flares flicker within their own overpowering light— darkness within darkness, light within light, a boundary invisible to all but the imagination.

"Are you there?" I whispered.

"Yes."

A voice at once scratchy and smooth, like the sound of winter radishes being grated, crawled into my ear from my right, and I thrust myself up on my elbows to take a look. I saw a figure standing behind the campfire. Though she was well lit by the fire, her clothes were so dark that they blended into the very shadows they cast. Of her, I could only see her face, blurry and bloodless and pale, and— and her horns, the twisted and curling horns of a markhor, spiraling out from above her ears and curving forward so they both pointed at me, as if accusing me of a crime I did not have the power to commit.

"Child of man," she rasped as she stepped through the fire towards me, "You have deceived me. You promised me the souls of your family, but you have no family to offer me. How shall you compensate me?"

"You—" I squeezed my eyes shut, and when I opened them again, she was hanging over me, frowning. "You're the demon?"

"I am not a demon, but yes, I am the one to whom you have promised the souls of your family, a family that you do not have."

"That's not right," I objected. "My family is the Bai family. If I promised you my family, then—"

I was unable to finish the phrase— You can take their souls. I despised the Bai family for what they had done to me, and I would not even mourn their deaths, but now, now that I had enough blood in my body to think straight, I did not have the confidence to ask for their deaths. After all, even if I hated them, even if they hated me, they were my family, and family was absolute.

The demon grasped my skull in her palm and pushed me back down onto the stone. Her glove glowed dully, and in its light I was able to see the darkness of her eyes. Against sclera that were as black as a starless night, her irises shone like the stark glow of a full moon. They were not the eyes of a human.

"No," she finally pronounced. "There is insufficient emotional bond between you and them. They are not your family." She released her hand from my skull and stood up. "I cannot consume their souls via a contract with you if such a bond exists not. However, I have already saved your life. Seeing as that your death is no longer ripe, there is little point in revoking our contract now. Instead of your family's souls, then, I will have you offer me the deaths of the targets of your revenge."

"...What?"

She raised her eyebrows. "You said you wished to take revenge. So when you kill those who have wronged you, I will consume their deaths, as I had offered to consume yours. On this condition, I will consider our contract fulfilled."

"Ah... uh... sure," I mumbled, though I could not imagine how I, having no qi and no cultivation base and no taste for blood, could ever manage to kill anyone.

"—Wait!" I cried out, jumping up to a standing position. "How long has it been?! How many days have I been away from the sect?! Did I miss Pill Distribution?! Aaaahhhh...."

"About seventy-four hours have passed since we formed our contract," the demon said calmly.

"So I missed three days? Then— Pill Distribution was yesterday... No, no, no... I need that pill, otherwise Hanfeng will... No, no, no..."

Every time there was a pill distribution, Jiang Hanfeng would, without fail, come to collect what I had received. There was no hope in resisting. He was a real outer disciple, and because of my gifts to him, he was in the Blood Tempering stage and would no doubt soon break through to the Foundation Establishment realm, thus attaining the right to become an inner disciple.

And what about me?! I should not even have been an outer disciple, but because of my name, because of my cursed surname, they had brought me in as an outer disciple without verifying my qi. Yet I was merely a rabbit with a lion's title. Because I had no power, because I had not even opened up one meridian, this title only made my suffering worse!

I cradled my head in my hands and thought about how I could possibly avoid this future. But nothing came to mind.

"Do you wish to return?"

I looked up at the demon. "...Yeah. I need to go back as soon as possible. Where is this? How do I get back to the Phantom Orchid outer sect grounds? Do you know?"

The demon reached out and grasped my skull in her hand once more. "No need," she intoned. "Simply think of where it is you wish to go, and I shall take you there."

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So I thought of my home, the little shack on the edge of the edge of the outer sect fields, far separated from the rest because nobody wished to live near someone with so little power, and—

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and I was there, standing in the middle of my room, which was far more disorderly than I had left it.

"I—" I looked around my room, dimly lit by only the ambient moonlight. "What happened here...?"

Nobody responded, but I knew the answer. Someone had been here, with the goal of— not destruction, otherwise they would have just burned the straw walls to the ground, but rather locating something. But why? What did I have that anyone could possibly want? Some bedsheets and some books— that was all that was in this room for someone to take.

—"There's a disturbance in the qi flow there," came a voice from outside the hut, and then came the sound of many sets of feet stamping towards the door. I felt my knees locking under me as the rest of my body shivered in fear. I looked around the room again, the bones of my neck chattering louder than my teeth. Should I hide? Was there even any place for me to hide?

I heard the sound of a boot striking the diseased wooden floor of the hut, and then the room lit up with the power of materialized qi. There at the entrance stood several figures, and I, accidentally, looked too far up and made eye contact with their leader, none other than— Wang Wujiu, one of the most prominent of the inner sect cultivators, the princess of the fallen western provinces, the one who had killed me.

Her eyes locked with mine, then grew wide with disbelief. She grimaced, and only a moment later, she broke out into uproarious laughter. "Bai Chunxue!" she cried out, holding one hand to her forehead. "I drove a poisoned sword through your heart and threw you off a cliff, and yet here you are, standing before me! If it were not for the fact that your life-thread is yet intact, I would think you to be a ghost. But no, you are just a cockroach."

"My life-thread?" I staggered back. "Were you— were you after the book I bound with my life-thread?"

After all, if my life held any value, it was in that I had used my life-thread to seal a certain book, the only one of my possessions that held any value. I alone could open the book as I wished, but even I could never remove my life-thread from it— not without dying!

"What?" Her gleeful smile soured in an instant. "Why would I ever deal with someone like you if it were not for the foreign cultivation manual sealed by your life-thread? Do not put me in the same lot as your other friends, Bai Chunxue. I would not go out of my way to crush an anthill, so what makes you think you deserve any more from me? And yet the ants— even the ants carve kingdoms of sand underground with only the force of their own skeletons! Tell me, Bai Chunxue, can you even measure up against an ant?"

"I—" I winced. How could I possibly answer that? I had no achievements to my name and never would. She was right. Even an ant had more ability than me. If anything, I had never been anything more than an eyesore for those who did have the power to mark the world with their own accomplishments. Grimacing, I could only cough, "There's nothing special about my book. It's just a tome on comparative linguistics. You don't need it."

Wujiu sighed. "Bai Chunxue, you only say that because you do not have the power to understand the importance of knowledge. You may consider knowledge nothing more than a curious pastime, but to those of us who will be lords and rulers, knowledge is heavier than life itself. Especially knowledge of the world west of A'erjin-Shan. Ah, if I could, I would go back to when I first stepped in the Treasure Pavilion, and I would have taken that dusty old book instead of this Rose-Thorn Severing Sword. Now that you have taken it and sealed it with your life-thread, I have no choice but to kill you for it. But, in accordance with the universal law of equivalent exchange, I will at least lay this sword by your tombstone, if the Bai family deigns to offer you one."

She silently unsheathed her sword and stepped towards me. I could feel the pressure of the qi emanating from her body. She was going to kill me. I fell back, unable to hold myself up on two feet.

Two steps. Three steps. And then—

One of her followers grasped her robe and held her back. "Lady Wang," he whispered into her ear, "Do not forget the rules of the sect."

Wujiu stopped and raised her eyebrows. "What? Which rule am I breaking?"

For a moment I wondered if this was a sarcastic setup of some sort. I thought that they might quote one of the platitudes the sect elders offered before every ceremony, then laugh at its implications, and then slit my throat as they laughed. That was what I thought.

"Oh, uh, well, uh..." The follower stumbled over his words. "It was something like, uh... one disrespects the chef by slaughtering the pig within the kitchen."

"They said to keep it off sect grounds," another one of her followers chimed in.

But when I heard these responses, I knew it was more than a sarcastic comment: these were the elders' actual words, what they had actually said, in the most concrete terms they could offer, regarding me. The sect and even the Bai family would not protest my death, or perhaps they would even welcome it, as long as my blood did not stain their floors. They had probably signed off on my death the other day too.

With such allies, who could save me but the demon?

Wujiu frowned. "Yes, there was something like that. Then—" She suddenly froze, as did I, as did everyone else in the room, because we all felt another presence in the room, a presence standing right behind me. It was the demon. I did not need to turn my head to be sure. I could feel her presence the way a deer feels the presence of a lion.

"It is commonly held as an impugnable truth that the people of the land east of Altyn-Tagh understood better than anyone in the world in the five virtues of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and fidelity," she rasped with an audible sneer. "But it seems that this is no more than a misunderstanding— or perhaps, less charitably, propaganda."

Wujiu turned her piercing gaze up from me to the demon. "You—" She paused, unable to get a read on the demon. What would you think if you saw someone shrouded in darkness thicker than morning fog, with eyes deeper than the night sky and horns sharper than mountain peaks? Certainly you would not think them to be a demon, as we are in an enlightened age, and it is common knowledge that demons are nothing more than superstitions of the past.

Perhaps, then, if you have never met one, you would think them to be a foreigner.

Wujiu's voice tapered down with uncertainty. "Are you... from Nalantuo?"

The demon let out a roaring guffaw that shattered the silence with the force of an earthquake, and which like an earthquake resounded for several seconds against the walls of the room, before she finally calmed herself and said with an ear-splitting smile, "No, no, of course not. I come from a plane far farther from here than Nalantuo, far farther from here than even Agai'er. To put it in words you may comprehend, I suppose you may say that I come from the other side of the impassable wall of fog that lies there where the eastern seas come to an end, from the place that some call Penglai Island, the home of the gods, and others call Pandæmonium, the land of the demons."

Wujiu stepped back, her initial confusion morphing into something halfway between fear and disgust. Fear? She was so strong; what did she have to fear? No— it was not a matter of strength, but of presence. Who would dare raise a sword against someone who could speak with such force? You would have to be a fool, and though you could call Wujiu evil, you could not call her foolish.

"So you're from the archipelago, then," Wujiu coughed. She turned around and quickly strode out of the room. "Bai Chunxue, we'll settle this another time."

Her followers filtered out of the room, which in a few moments was once again empty— but for me, the demon, and the silence.