Even in the freezing rain, a drop of sweat dripped down Qian Shanyi’s hot forehead. She controlled her breathing, taking stock of her situation.

Cultivators faced death calmly, and slaughtered the reaper as it came for them.

The first thing she did was pull out her divination bottle, and check that her luck still held, and the vow in her mind was still whole. Only then did she breathe a sigh of relief. This was not some bizarre hitherto unknown form of the heavenly tribulation, but a perfectly ordinary weather event.

It would still kill her, of course, unless she came up with a plan - but at least the Heavens didn’t have their finger on the scales.

Really, it could have been much worse. After the initial wave, the water was rising slowly - at a guess, she had some twenty minutes to think before it started to lap at her toes. Furthermore, the shrinking island of glass around her was at almost the exact center - and thus the lowest point - of the valley. If she managed to cross over this one stream, her road should go uphill from there, and away from the water.

She sent her sword over the roaring stream separating her from Glaze Ridge, and with some horror, saw that the transparent glass was only barely visible beneath the clear rain waters. The stretch of water ahead of her was easily fifty meters wide, and slowly widening as the water rose - suicidal to try to swim over blindly. The one behind her was wider still.

Wang Yonghao could have simply walked on air over all this, the lucky fuck.

Her sour thoughts briefly turned back to Junming sending her out into the valley, but they must have simply not known this could happen. They said they were only here for a couple months, and had not seen any local rain before. Their postmaster could have no doubt warned them, but who would decide to head into the valley in the rain at night? Ordinary people would hardly do so except when working, while most cultivators would have been warned off by their sects. Loose cultivators, on the other hand, were sure to wait for daylight, or stick to the edges of the valley. The question of those in her exact circumstances might have simply fallen through.

If only her flying sword technique was strong enough to carry herself - but no. It could perhaps lift a cat, not a full-grown woman.

“Enough self-pity,” she hissed at herself, “How do I get out of here?”

As she saw it, she had two options.

She could stay on the island and hope that someone came to her rescue. Cultivators did not leave other cultivators to die: if someone with a flying sword technique saw her - the local sect elders, at least - they were sure to help. The only problem was being seen.

She doubted her little sword lantern could be noticed through the thick downpour, but she could circulate the Crushing Glance of the Netherworld Eyes and cover the entire island in glowing powder. Even if the water would wash it away, the sheer size of the area should let some light through, and perhaps someone could see her.

There was only one problem: time. Eyeballing it, she had perhaps twenty minutes until water would cover the top of her little island. In these twenty minutes, someone had to notice the glow, find a cultivator with a flying sword technique, and convince them there was a person in danger.

The chances of her rescue coming along before she was swept away were… not ideal. Of course, the rise of the waters might slow as time went on - but there was no way to predict this.

The other option was to try to get across herself.

When she decided to set off across the field of glass, she felt safe, knowing that she could protect herself from any falls with her spiritual shield. But a swim was not the same as a fall at all: when falling, she only needed to protect her body for a split second, before getting back on her feet. But if she went into the water, she would need to burn her spiritual shield at full power for the entire duration, lest a wave throw her into a sharp glass spike when she least expected it.

Spiritual shield techniques have been known since ancient times, the basics so simple they have been independently rediscovered by dozens of sects. They covered a cultivator’s body and clothing with a porous, protective membrane, capable of withstanding even the hardest blows, but this protection came at the cost of rapid spiritual energy consumption. The stronger the membrane, the harsher the cost; so much so that until the last hundred years the technique was dismissed as useless in combat - after all, if you had spent spiritual energy on shielding, then all your opponent had to do was stall you out until you ran out of reserves.

Later improvements allowed cultivators to vary the amount of spiritual energy flowing through their spiritual shield on the fly, and strengthen different parts of the membrane independently from each other - so much so that nowadays, most cultivators tended to keep their shield active in a weak form all day long, instantly strengthening it if the need called for it - yet the fundamental limitation of spiritual energy drain had remained. In a fight, she could choose to strengthen exclusively the parts of her spiritual shield that were about to be hit by an attack, for only as long as the enemy’s blade would stay in contact - but keeping it active at full power for the entire minute it would take her to swim across was well and truly beyond her.

But she had to keep it active. She couldn’t see the glass under the water, nor sense it in any other way, and so couldn’t predict when she would need her shield - and if a wave tossed her directly into a glass spike with no protection, then she could die in an instant.

She paced alongside the edge of the waters, thinking things over. She couldn’t safely go into the stream, but she also couldn’t stay: death lay in wait around every corner.

The biggest problem, really, was the depth of the water. If it was shallow enough to walk across, then she could have leaned into the stream, dug her heels into the glass, and kept her balance. Even if it was at merely chest height, she could have at least made sure to always keep her legs under her, keeping her relatively safe as she could not be tossed into the river bed by an errant wave. But with an unknown depth, and unforeseeable terrain lower down the stream, this was hardly possible. The roiling waters would spin her around, and she could be thrown onto a glass outcropping at any moment. She would be rolling the dice with no control over the outcome, and praying they came out right.

Control…

She reached out around her waist, and drew out her Silvered Devil Moth Silk rope she always kept with her.

Hmm.

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Qian Shanyi checked herself over one last time. Her time was running out, but when dancing on a razor edge above an abyss, rushing would only make you slip.

Her idea was simple: she would hook a rope on the glass shards at the bottom of the stream, and anchor herself in place, safe from being swept away. That way, she would have plenty of time to check exactly where the glass was under the waters, and by keeping her legs under her, could make sure her sandals were always the first thing to come in contact with the glass.

Of course a single rope would not be enough: after all, she needed to move, not simply stay in place. She tied the center of her rope around her shoulders, and made a loop at each of the free ends. Her hope was that by changing which of the two loops took her weight and which was free to move, she could slowly shimmy across, one step at a time.

She tested it on the comparatively dry ground of her island, and the idea worked - if barely. The glass cracked, and the loops would occasionally slip around, some shards shattering while others took her weight - but that was fine. She didn’t need to stay completely still: as long as she avoided an uncontrollable spiral at the speed of the water currents, she should be fine.

She could use her rope control technique to move the loops around, but after her experience with fishing lines, she knew that doing so underwater would be ten times as difficult. The technique relied on mirroring the shape and orientation of a piece of string she held in her hands onto the larger rope she wanted to move, and in the rapid water currents, this small piece of string would surely slip out of her hands. Instead, she tightly wound a long piece of thread all around her fingers: by mirroring the orientation of one of its segments onto the larger rope, she could control it quite easily. Her precision suffered, but at least there was no danger of slipping.

Over the thread, she layered pieces of tough fabric, cut off the hem of her cultivator robes, and tied down securely with strips of leather. She doubted her makeshift gloves could withstand glass sharpened to a knifepoint by spiritual energy, but perhaps it could help lessen the damage - cultivator robes were made for that express purpose, after all - and she suspected she would have to grab onto the glass to scamper up the opposite shore.

Longer strips of leather tied her sleeves in place, and the hem of her robes was cut in half, each piece wrapped around one of her legs, formed into a pair of pants. Mostly, she just wanted to lessen the drag - if she didn’t cut it up, it would have billowed in the water.

She glanced behind herself, where she drew a long line of glowing powder all across the island before she started working. Nobody came to her rescue, and by now, the glow looked dim, most of it washed away by the rain.

She was on her own.

She looked out over the stream, still doubting herself. If she screwed this up, she would be shredded by the glass - she could hardly imagine a worse death for anyone, short of being turned into a cauldron by a demonic cultivator.

But there was no better way out, and stalling would only make the river wider.

She hooked her first loop on the ground of her island, tested it once again - it was secure - and sent her flying sword deep into the water, the second loop trailing behind it. Her rope control technique, by itself, wasn’t strong enough to resist the force of the stream - but her flying sword very much was.

It took her a couple tries, but eventually, she got the second loop hooked on the bottom of the stream. She tested it by yanking on it. It was secure as well.

She breathed in one final time, and glared up at the clouds, rain streaming down her face.

“Somehow, this is all your fault.” She scowled at the Heavens, and stepped into the freezing, rushing waters.

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Halfway across the river, Qian Shanyi was no longer sure being cut into ribbons on razor sharp glass was the worst thing in the world.

The glass in the valley grew over any dirt the winds might have brought in, and so the waters around her were clear as ice - and felt almost as cold. Her entire body was growing numb, shivering uncontrollably, and even the frostbite pill she swallowed well in advance was only doing so much to help.

Through all of it, she had to keep careful control of four separate techniques - two to control each of her rope loops, her sword control technique, and the unnamed technique Hui Yin taught her for keeping rain and wind out of her eyes. Thankfully, the last one was so easy as to be merely an afterthought. The sword control technique alone pushed up against her limits, and with the others added on top, her focus kept slipping, parts of techniques unraveling and making her lose spiritual energy that she really couldn’t spare.

And on top of it, simply getting the loop to catch was a matter of chance, especially with her numb fingers, and working completely blind.

Hook a loop - again - again - secure. Slowly, carefully, unhook the previous one. Swim as far as she could - only a couple meters, with how fast the stream was - then call the free loop back to her. Thread her sword through it, and send it upstream, through the water, so that she could hook the loop on the ground. Call her sword back.

Again.

Again.

Again.

The petulant rope refused to obey her clumsy fingers. The glass at the bottom of the stream shifted, cracked, and made her rope slip - only for her to hook it back in. The roaring waves around her dunked her in and out of the water, and though she could stay above the surface, with her focus split five different ways, she couldn’t help but swallow some of it.

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Once, she descended into a coughing fit when it went down her lungs, and thought that would be her end.

Hook. Again. Secure. Unhook. Swim.

She kept her head down, not looking towards the shore. Her world narrowed down to the flow of water, threatening to make her slip and send her careening towards her death, and her slow, inexorable movement across it.

Again.

Again.

Four separate techniques were not only a drain on her mind, but also her spiritual energy, and even the spiritual stone she held safely under her tongue was doing little to make up for it. It would take a good ten minutes for it to fully dissolve, an agonizingly slow rate of recovery - and with how feeble her hold was on the stream’s bottom, she couldn’t risk taking a rest right in the middle.

She had calculated it all neatly over on the island, and this rate of use should have still been much less than needing to maintain her spiritual shield at full power - yet she didn’t account for needing to recirculate the techniques when her control slipped, and now there was no space left in her mind to recalculate, or even to doubt her decision.

Besides, what was she to do? Swim back over to the island? It must have sunk underwater by now.

Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. She secured both of her ropes on the river bed below her, and paused to take stock of her situation. When she glanced over to the shore, she saw it was now perhaps only fifteen, twenty meters away. She briefly considered saying fuck it and just swimming the rest of the way, but her exhaustion - mental much more than physical - did not change the math, and even though a treacherous voice in the back of her mind whispered at her to hold still, to rest more, she knew she had to keep going.

Hook. Secure - no, the glass sheared, her loop is floating free. Retract the loop, attach to the sword, send it out, hook. Is it secure? Yank to make sure. Okay. Unhook -

Ten meters from shore, with only a quarter of her spiritual energy left, the glass under her only secure loop cracked, and the current threw her downstream. She scrambled in the water, trying to push the loop down, re-secure herself, but it was far too late.

All in.

She grit her teeth, and motioned for her sword to fly towards the shore on its own, and followed after it, swimming as if her life depended on it - because it did. She pushed spiritual energy through her limbs to move faster, the rush of power dilating her blood vessels and bringing feeling back into her limbs through painful tingling. She just had to guess where the shore would begin and activate her spiritual shield in time -

She smashed her knee directly into the glass, and knew she guessed wrong. The pain of it made her blank out for a split second, and when she came back to it, she felt the current already drawing her further away from the shore.

No! I was so close!

Thinking quickly, she pulled back one of her loops, and tossed it above the waters, onto the ground. It slipped, but she had already pushed spiritual energy into it, making the rope dig into any tiny crevice it could find, and it caught.

The rope went taught, and slowly brought her closer and closer to the shore, and she did her best to bring her legs under herself.

The spot she ended up at was a poor one - a turn of the river, where the rushing water tossed and turned in a fierce vortex right next to the shore, but she couldn’t risk letting go and trying to find a better spot. As soon as she felt her sandals touch down on the glass beneath, she pushed the last of her free spiritual energy into her shield - if she failed here, she was dead anyways.

The waves smashed her into the glass ground once, twice, beating the air out of her lungs, her spiritual shield holding on until she was smashed the third time. Her shield shattered, but by then she had managed to grab onto the ground with both her hands and feet, the water beneath only knee deep. She felt the glass cutting into her fingers, but she didn’t care, because finally she was secure, past this hellish stream of slicing death.

She grinned, slowly rising to her feet, on hand on the rope holding her stable. Just a couple more steps -

The entire sheet of glass underneath her feet sheared, and she slipped, plunging head first into the shallow waters, smashing her face into the glass beneath. She felt a hundred stinging lines open up across her skin, but this was nothing, and she stood up again, and drove her sandal deep into the ground to fucking secure it. Her lips - cut open in two places - were split into a feral scowl, blood dripping down all over her skin and obscuring her vision, making her wipe it away with her free hand just to see where she was going.

Thank her luck that at least the water in the way had slowed her fall.

One step.

Another step.

And then finally, she stepped out on solid ground, and she was free. Her legs shook from the stress as much as the cold while she hobbled away, reeling her rope back in, and climbed up the hills of glass, high enough to feel safe. She slowly took her knife chest off her back, placed it on the ground, and carefully sat down on top of it to rest. Her hands - still numb and shaking from terror, adrenaline and pain that slowly started to spread through her body - rested on her knees, blood dripping quietly onto the glass below.

“Fuck you.” She scowled up at the clouds above. “Whatever godling brought this weather along, I will rip your tongue out through your bowels.”

The spiritual energy in the air was fairly dense, so once the spirit stone in her mouth completely dissolved, she didn’t go for a second one. Instead, she closed her eyes and concentrated on the flow of spiritual energy through her body, analyzing the damage.

Luckily enough, most of it seemed to be superficial. Her knee took the brunt of the abuse, but even there, the cuts didn’t go deep into the bone. Tendons in her hands were still whole, and while her skin bled a lot, it should also heal quickly. The healing pill she took earlier in the day was already doing the work - by the time the sun rose, most of it should already be scarred over, and in another couple days, even the scars would be gone.

She opened up her eyes, breathing deeply, and started to use her spiritual energy to slowly push the shards of glass out of her skin. Perhaps showing up to Yonghao with her face in a mess of cuts was not the best impression, but on the other hand, perhaps it would also help to convey her message.

As she worked slowly, giving her body all the time it needed to recover, her thoughts turned back to spiritual shields. Ironically enough, if she had been wearing armor, like cultivators in ancient times, then this river crossing would have been much less of a problem.

The dominant paradigm at the time was that energy spent on defense was entirely wasted unless it actually prevented an attack: even if you managed to guess when you would be attacked, if you had underestimated the strength of the attack, then your shield would shatter and you would still die. On the other hand, you would also waste energy if you had overestimated the attack’s strength, and committed too much energy to the defense. And of course, at the end of the day, your opponent could simply stall you out, wait until you ran out of reserves, and kill you like a defenseless dog.

The same was not true for offense. A sword slash that wasted some energy would still cut off your enemy’s head, and nobody cared how much energy the victor was left with. Even a weak slash would force a parry or a dodge, giving you an opening - and if they tried to resist it with their shield, then you were at least trading your spiritual energy against theirs. Of course, your enemy might have allies - but faced with strict numerical superiority, defensive techniques would fare no better.

Attack with your whole heart and die with no regrets - or cower, and be slaughtered like the pig you are.

Because of this, cultivators either relied on enchanted armor to resist attacks, their speed to avoid them, or their skill with the sword to parry them. The use for shields was extremely niche, mostly having to do with resisting environmental dangers or training aggressive demon beasts.

Despite this prevailing philosophy, some sects continued to develop the spiritual shield technique, refining it, reducing the cost and maximizing the effects. The first breakthrough allowed the strength of the membrane - and thus the energy drain - to be varied on the fly. The second made it possible to strengthen individual segments of the shield independently from each other. Simultaneously, development of training methods for spiritual energy senses had allowed cultivators to judge the strength of oncoming attacks with unprecedented precision. It finally became possible to break the cruel asymmetry of spiritual energy use, spending much less energy on the defense than on the offense.

Yet the perception that spiritual shields were useless stuck around, until a little-known sect that focused on their development had capitalized on an incidental civil war and managed to place their patriarch on the imperial throne. By relying on their spiritual shields, they could forgo armor entirely, wearing comfortable - and more importantly, light - robes into combat, their maneuverability on top of a flying sword impossible to compete with. This was the first brick on the path to the era of reformation, some fifty years later, and the establishment of the modern empire.

Nowadays, this “basic” spiritual shield technique was made available to all cultivators in any imperial library. Most sects - her own included - did not consider their inner disciples fully taught until they had mastered it, and could keep a spiritual shield active at the lowest level of spiritual energy consumption throughout their entire day.

“I wonder what they were thinking, when they put it in libraries -” she laughed softly, the shock and fear of the river crossing now safely behind her “- that the lives of us cultivators would be safer if we learned it? From the demon beasts, perhaps. But in the end, danger doesn’t find us - we push ourselves into it.”

This entire incident was more than a little bit her own fault. If she had thought more about her environment, she could have predicted the flash flood, and waited for the morning - or sought assistance in crossing from a sect elder in Reflection Ridge.

She sighed, and slowly got up off her knife chest. Her robes - ones gifted to her by Wu Lanhua - were thoroughly ruined, torn into shreds on the glass, and she stripped down, taking out her second, far more expensive and durable set. The same ones she couldn’t wear in front of Liu Fakuang, lest he recognise her description as Qian Shanyi.

The same scarlet robes she wore when she first left the forest with Wang Yonghao. It was only appropriate for their reunion, she mused, as she dressed herself again, and put the ruined robes in her pack - there was no sense in throwing away the fabric.

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It took her twenty minutes to find her sword, simply lying on the glassy ground of the valley, light from the bottle lantern she tied to its guard easily visible once she crested over another hill. She was worried she had lost it entirely - there was no time to catch it back into her sheath in the river, so she had sent it flying blind towards the shore. If it fell into the water, she doubted she could have ever found it again. A sentimentality, perhaps, but it was hard won.

Her knife chest and scroll case survived the ordeal surprisingly well, even managing to keep their contents dry - though she supposed her face took the brunt of the hits. Her normal bag was likewise somewhat torn, though she thought she could repair the green dress Lanhua had gifted her.

Having checked her things, she spent several hours simply resting on top of her knife chest, letting her body heal and recovering her spiritual energy from the air in the valley. The rain around her even started to feel somewhat pleasant - she couldn’t get any more wet after the river, and the enhancements of the robes had quickly warmed her body up, if not so much that she felt dry.

Once she felt ready, she got up, and headed towards Glaze Ridge, surprised to notice the dawn beginning to break through the clouds ahead as a sun rose above the town. Had she really rested that long?

The rain did not let up as she approached the town. This side of the valley sloped gently, compared to the abrupt drop of Reflection Ridge, and so she didn’t even need to find a particular path. Once the buildings rose up over the top of the hill in front of her, in the distance, she heard screams, clash of blades, and a surprisingly loud honk of a goose.

“Then again,” she mused, a light smile playing on her lips. “Perhaps the danger does seek out some of us.”

She headed for the screams, and soon came across a small square. An enormous creature of glass, with thin limbs but lumpy body, like a cross between a spider and a ball of clay, was laying down on the ground, cut cleanly in half. When it stood tall, she had no doubt it could have reached up to the third story.

In front of the corpse, she saw Wang Yonghao, his hands raised up deferentially, arguing with another cultivator she dimly recognised. He was dressed strangely - narrow sleeves, pants, and some sort of thick leather jacket over his chest, glistening with jewelry, that called back something from her memory. It took her a moment to realize she had seen it on actors in plays - this was armor, or an imitation of it. On his back was a sword with a wide guard, wavy blade almost as long as he was tall. A practical belt of pouches and talismans was strapped across his chest, and by the flow of spiritual energy around him, she would have guessed him to be in the peak refinement stage.

Wang Yonghao had his back turned towards her, and she sneaked up on him quietly.

“What was I supposed to do?” Wang Yonghao pleaded, “It was going to burst into the houses! I couldn’t just let it kill people!”

“My formation would have caught it, you imbecile!” The other man roared. “Can you not even see your own stupidity with both eyes open? Then pluck them out, they are of no use to you!”

As she came closer, she finally recognised him from the portraits. It was, of course, none other than Jian Shizhe, the man of a thousand duels.

“Now, now, fellow cultivators, there’s no need to fight,” she grinned, catching Wang Yonghao’s neck in the crook of her elbow and pulling him closer, “we wouldn’t want to duel over a dead demon beast.”

“Qian Shanyi?!” Wang Yonghao tried to jerk away from her, but she held him securely, grinning at him. His face went through an entire pallet of emotions, shock, fear, joy, guilt, before he finally settled down on sheer bafflement. “How - how did you find me?”

“I followed the scent of Heaven-defying arrogance,” she snorted, “now come, we have a lot to talk about.”