Xiuying

Most people don’t think about it, usually because pretty much everyone they know has one, but last names actually matter.

There is an expectation that every person you meet has one, even if you don’t know what it is, and introducing oneself in a formal setting without adding a last name is eyebrow raising at the very least.

Sure, (like most things) it’s easier to get away with if you’re famous; you can call yourself Zendaya, or Beyoncé, or Cher, and no one bats an eye, but here’s the thing, even the Zendayas and Chers of the world have last names.

They’re just not common knowledge.

After all, I doubt that when Cher goes to open a bank account she writes down ‘Cher’, last name blank.

No, rare is the person who truly has no surname. The person who, even if the circumstances of their life leaves them without a family name and history, goes through adulthood without picking one for themselves, if only to make legal documents easier to sign.

The lack of a surname says a lot; it says that you either have no family, or no desire to be associated with them, but, more importantly, it says that you want everyone to know it. And even in a world like ours that’s steadily moving away from such things, the implications of being a person with no family ties still draws notice and, from some, scorn.

Xiuying had no surname, and her world had a decidedly more backwards view of people without (or with bad) family histories than ours.

Xiuying’s lack of a surname was, as one would expect, a personal choice. There had been ample opportunity for her to pick one for herself, but Xiuying always refused.

Some would call it pride, others stupidity, but in truth, it was mostly stubbornness.

See, Xiuying was a gutter rat.

She grew up in the slums of Rainbow City, one of the many children who seemed to sprout out of the very sewers and, all too often, wither away just as quickly, their corpses usually left to rot in those same sewers.

Her birth and how she survived infancy are unknown, even to her, but what she does know is that, by the time she was five-ish, life in the slums of Rainbow City was all she’d ever known.

By all logic, Xiuying should have died. And, as a matter of fact, she did die.

But, dead or not, Xiuying was stubborn to a fault. Stubborn enough that her heart resumed beating after thirty seconds of stillness as she clawed her way back to life.

She was twelve at the time, and she had died to protect a loaf of mouldy bread.

The experience was an eye-opener for Xiuying.

Stubborn enough to claw her way back from literal death or not, life on the streets was untenable in the long term. And, for the first time in her young, harsh existence, Xiuying found herself thinking beyond her next meal.

She wanted more.

She wanted a life.

Being who she was though, Xiuying wasn’t exactly spoilt for choice, so, as soon as they were willing to let her through the doors, she chose the one path that wouldn’t see her joining organized crime or spreading her legs for men four times her age, Xiuying joined The Sunrise Empress’ Army.

The Army took everyone, even gutter rats like Xiuying, and, as long as you could prove yourself a worthwhile investment, everyone had the opportunity to have their cultivation ignited and funded, up until advancement into the Sprouting phase.

It hadn’t been easy; the training, the tests, the rigorous discipline required of soldiers of The Sunrise Empress, but Xiuying was stubborn, and if there was one thing she knew how to handle, it was hardship.

Smart enough to understand its importance, Xiuying traded favours with some of her fellow recruits for lessons, and so it was, that it was while in boot camp, training to prove herself worthy of becoming a cultivator on The Empire’s expense, that the street rat Xiuying first learnt her numbers and her letters.

Boot camp lasted three months, and by the end of it, Xiuying’s efforts had paid off, and she came out the other side to a pat on the back and the resources to get her started on her path to heaven.

Things were looking up for Xiuying; for the first time in her life, she never had to worry about food, about a roof over her head or a bed under her back. For the first time in her life, she had people she could call friends.

But then Xiuying made that most grievous of mistakes that someone like her, with a background so poor she had not even a surname, could make; she began to distinguish herself.

It was with little things at first; she made fewer mistakes, mastered tasks quicker, showed a clear aptitude for leadership, the sort of things that, at first, even earned her the admiration of her colleagues.

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But then the differences began to grow; her cultivation advanced faster, she was indisputably the strongest fighter in her cultivation level, she was winning the approbation of the sergeants.

Xiuying was standing out, and when she stood out enough for her to be rewarded with a peasant rank method upon reaching the fifth layer of the Ignition phase, it became too much for some.

Now, Xiuying was no peerless genius. Far from it. In fact, she didn’t even count as gifted, but, among faceless extras doomed to a life of mediocrity, she had just enough talent to glow like the sun.

Xiuying was a big fish in a pretty small pond, and, as it turned out, some of the smaller fish didn’t much appreciate some nameless gutter rat taking all that space…

Because that’s what it was really about in the end, her background.

If Xiuying had been the daughter of some important person, even just one who was only important in the way that small town politicians are, the same people who hated her would have instead sucked up to her, claiming her ‘genius’ as a matter of course.

But she wasn’t the daughter of someone important. She wasn’t the daughter of anybody. She was Xiuying the nameless. Xiuying the gutter rat.

How dare she stand above her betters?

In the way of these things it started small. And in the way of these things it didn’t stay that way for long.

Within months, what was snide comments behind her back and petty acts of sabotage, became a literal dagger from the shadows.

Being the incurably stubborn person she was, Xiuying would have stayed and fought; her sergeant knew she would have died, and hardly anyone would have cared.

So, he had her reassigned to a regiment in a different city, and it was the first time in Xiuying’s life that someone seriously advised her to pick a surname and make up a family history. Because even the name and history of a peasant family trumped the nothing of a gutter rat.

Xiuying refused.

She would not curate herself to match the tastes of people who simply weren’t worth it.

Fuck them.

Her experience with her first regiment left its impression on Xiuying.

During her time in the slums, there had been no friendships, no trust, not with people who were likely to kill you for literal peanuts.

She’d thought The Army was different. Thought that she’d finally found a place where that secret desire for family she’d held for so long could finally be fulfilled.

She’d been wrong.

So she held back. Treated her colleagues with distrust so she could never be betrayed. She armoured her heart.

As one would expect, this attitude, paired with her talent and the background she refused to hide, did not endear Xiuying to her colleagues, who saw her as snobbish.

Nothing as bad as with her first regiment, but it didn’t need to be. For, while Xiuying had talent, she was still a nobody who had nobody, and nepotism has long legs.

Upon advancement into the Sprouting phase, at the point where her career in the military was supposed to truly begin, Xiuying found herself posted to go serve as Vice Commander in a nameless, little outpost out in the Bloody Fang Mountains.

She had been livid.

She had worked her ass off to stand out, all in the hope that, when she entered the Sprouting phase, she would be posted somewhere worthwhile. Somewhere she could build her career, and maybe, just maybe, earn real power.

Instead, she was being sent out to a place where careers went to die.

She’d hated it. A part of her still did. But, she could never imagine changing it even if she could.

Because, it was at that nameless, little outpost out in the Bloody Fang Mountains that she found the family she’d craved for so long.

Commander Yan (or, Old Man Yan, as the people of Silver Springs called him) was two things; old and nice.

A ninety-five years old beast rank cultivator who never advanced past the third layer of the Sprouting phase, Xiuying was his undisputed superior in cultivation when she showed up there, and like inferior people had always been towards her, she expected him to be antagonistic.

He wasn’t. In fact, he was so welcoming of the young, standoffish cultivator, that she began to feel like the villain.

For the first time in Xiuying’s life, she came to appreciate how exhausting it could be to be discourteous to someone who was nothing but perfectly nice in return, and, powerless in the face of Commander Yan’s divine rank niceness, she thawed.

Those years were the best of Xiuying’s life, and her biggest regret was that she never worked up the courage to call the old man Father.

Not until he was on his deathbed.

Five good years she had with him, and, though, she was still unsatisfied with the posting, Xiuying took pride in knowing that she would be protecting the people that her father in all but blood has loved.

Then Xian Qigang came.

Unpleasant, self-centered… scum. None of those words carried the weight needed to quantify just how obnoxious the individual was.

He was the worst of the worst kind of people that Xiuying had despised so much, and, to top it off, he was weak.

Born into such wealth. All the resources he could ever need or want at his disposal, and yet at twenty-eight he was still stuck in the Weaving phase.

How unsightly.

Of course, a man like him, his ego hadn’t been able to take it. But, when he’d made the mistake of trying to lord his authority as Commander over her, threatening to have her fired for insubordination if she disobeyed any of his commands, she’d told him quite candidly that if he did that, then there wasn’t really anything stopping her from beating him to death.

“Sure,” she’d said, “if I did that my life would be over, since your family couldn’t allow the brutal and public murder of their son to go unpunished. But, here’s the thing though, you’d still be dead. So, I guess in the end the question is, do you want to ruin my life badly enough to sacrifice yours?”

The fear in his eyes in that moment is a memory that she was sure would give her pleasure to her dying day.

While she was safe from Xian Qigang however, others were not, and there wasn’t a whole lot that she could do about it.

It rankled. But she grit her teeth, bore it, and focused on the things she could do something about.

And that was how it was, day after day, month after month, until, two years later, while she training in her private yard, Tao Jin came running up to her.

“Commander Xiuying—” everyone called her that because no one wanted to remember who actually held the position “—you’re not gonna fucking believe this,” he said.

And when he told her, she realized that he hadn’t been exaggerating ; she really didn’t fucking believe him.