I spent thirty days in that secluded room looking for my resolve. I spent that time thinking, meditating, crying. And, at the end of it all...

At the end of it all, thirty days after I had closed the door behind me, the door to the secluded cultivation room opened, and there in the doorway stood Canyue and Xiaolong. Once she caught sight of me, Canyue stomped off. Xiaolong, half his body covered in bandages but his arm fully restored, only said,

"Come. We have family business to deal with."

—It was time to settle matters.

Xiaolong's gaze jumped around the room, but found nothing to fix on other than me. He followed after Canyue, and I followed after him, up many spiralling flights of stairs, out the main gates of the Alchemist's Tower. There in the plaza stood Professor Jibeidi, watching us pass by. When my gaze met hers, she only shook her head with a despondent frown. There was no longer anything she could do for me.

After all, outsiders cannot interfere in family matters. That may not be a rule of nature, but it is a rule of Confucianism, and for us humans, it is this law that is hardest to violate.

I followed Canyue and Xiaolong to a little isolated shack barely standing off the edge of the city.

Canyue entered. Xiaolong entered. I entered.

There was a wooden table in the middle of the room, but the nearby chairs had long crumpled and broken under the weight of time. So Xiaolong raised his hand, and a makeshift bench rose out of the earth, brought up by his qi. Then he leaned himself against the doorway and turned his gaze outwards.

"Sit," Canyue ordered, and so I sat at the table.

Canyue hovered over me for some time, before she finally shook her head and said, "Long'er, I can't deal with this bullshit. You do it."

Xiaolong sighed, but did not turn his gaze back to us.

"First Sister, the only reason they send us out to handle business instead of the elders is so we can prove our worth. If you can't do even this much, what will happen to your position as heir? You're almost forty. If you solidify your support, you can convince the Patriarch to hand over power to you in only a few more years. But if you don't..."

Canyue's eye twitched.

"Fine. I'll do it."

She paced around the room for a few minutes, and then her voice boomed with the tenor and venom of rolling thunder—

"Bai Chunxue."

—Was that the first time she had ever called me by my name? For her, of all people, to say my name, she was either acknowledging me or delivering a formal message. Of course, nothing would make me happier than if this were a marker of acknowledgement— but I could tell very well that it was no more than a precursor to something not as kind. People do not change that quickly. Of course I hoped our relation would change. But I knew that it could not possibly happen this quickly.

"Not long ago there was a family conference held in the ancestral Bai home in Zhaoqing. It was attended by almost the entire clan, excepting some elders who have been in secluded cultivation for several years, and excepting Grand Advisor Jing Ke, who was busy with matters of the Phantom Orchid Sect, though he made his opinions known to us in advance. One of the matters of discussion was the question of what we would do with you."

I sat there, impassive. What could she possibly say that would make my present situation any worse? I could not imagine any possible punishment greater than what the family had already imposed on me. They had already taken my future and my past. What else could they take from me?

"I am here today to inform you of the decision we made. The Bai clan has decided... to kill you."

My eyes opened wide. Surely I had misheard. It was not possible. As long as I carried the name Bai, it could not be possible.

"To... kill me?"

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"Yes. After your duel with Long Guoqiang, we submitted a petition to the Imperial Court to have you reclassified as a cultivator, since you proved that you were able to manipulate qi. They recognized our petition, which means you are no longer covered by the civilian-cultivator relations regulations. As such, there is now nothing that prevents us from killing you, blight on our name as you are. Even the Magistrate cannot protect you anymore."

No. It was impossible. I could not believe those words. Precisely because I had failed to sever my family from my soul, precisely because I still could not give up on the ideal of family, I could not believe those words.

It was okay if they despised me. It was okay if they abused me. That could all be repaired with time. One day, when I had become a successful imperial scholar and proven my worth, those strained relations could all be repaired. But if they killed me, then what could possibly be left to repair?

Family was absolute. That was what I always believed. It was not about love, or even about blood, but about duty. Family is about the reciprocal duties that the child owes to the parent and that the parent owes to the child, that the younger sibling owes to the elder sibling and that the elder owes to the younger. I did not dare neglect these duties, because to me, because to this weak-willed scholar, the human laws of Confucianism seemed just as immovable as the divine laws of Buddhism.

My feelings for the Bai family were two. Hatred, and desire for recognition. If I let my hatred burst forth, then I would have no choice to kill them all and abolish the reciprocal familial duties between us. On the other hand, recognition could only possibly follow if I let go of my hatred first. And at the end, when I had had the choice to sever my sense of familial duty and indulge in my hatred... I had been unable to do so, because I could not free myself of my desire for recognition.

Now, though, I would never find it.

—The room was suddenly filled with Canyue's qi, as if the walls had broken in under force of a flood, and as I cast my gaze around the room I saw wavy distortions dance across my vision, like the shimmering you see above the road on the most punishing of summer days.

"—First Severing stage..." I whispered.

"Yes, and not even an early severing," she affirmed as she stood over my side. "The elders have ordered me to take your head, with or without your consent. It will be easier for all of us if you do not put up meaningless resistance. I am a hundred times stronger than that Long Guoqiang, who had hardly even begun forming his golden core when you crippled him, or even that Wang Wujiu, who had performed her severing over early-stage Core Formation. I have fifteen years over all of you, fifteen of the most formative years, and this is a gap that you cannot cross."

How could they justify killing me?! What had I done to them?! What crime had I committed?! What crime?! The crime of defending myself?! It was they who had committed the crime against me, by denying my talents and forcing me to suffer in the jianghu!

My head drooped down over the table, and my body went limp. Ah, if only it had been hatred that burned in my blood! But I could no longer summon hatred— only sorrow. Sorrow for the lost possibility that one day they might one day recognize my achievements, that they might one day say Bai before Chunxue without dripping venom from their tongues. That was what I had always hoped for. But my hopes had always been in vain. They had always wanted me dead. And who would recognize the achievements of a corpse?

A single tear dropped from my cheek.

"Canyue... is that true? The Bai family has agreed to kill me?"

The tear landed on the table, then ate through it.

"The decision was unanimous," she stated as she materialized a qi sword over my head. "Even Second Brother returned from his work in the north just to offer his assent."

The hole in the table widened.

"I understand. Then, please..."

That fatal feeling I had felt when I had lain awaiting death at the bottom of that cliff— it suffused my body once more. That feeling, that sense that there was no longer anything worth living for, that none of my efforts could possibly ever amount to anything, that the universe itself had turned away from me. The people who knew me best had judged my worth as less than zero, as so negative that I must be excised! What did my revenge matter any longer? What did it matter? I was nothing. I had no family, not even the memory of one, not even the hope of one. I had no strength. I had no will. I had nothing. The best I could hope for was the repose of death, where even though there was no family, there would be no self to suffer its lack.

—I wanted to die.

"...please, kill me."

She nodded. "That is the attitude you should have always held. In this moment and this moment alone, I shall recognize you as a member of the Bai family."

She hissed in a deep breath, then announced with a full-throated voice,

"I am Bai Canyue, heir to the surname Bai. My Dao is the Dao of Vermilion Flame. Therein may the filth of the world be excoriated, and the pure rebirthed."

She swung her sword down.