Semua Bab Beneath the Immortal Sky: A Heart Left Burning: Bab 1 - Bab 10

In a world where everyone chased immortality like it was the only answer, she learned something quieter—and way more dangerous. Turns out the only thing worth trying to reach… was the heart she’d left burning in her wake..............................................................................On the morning the Wen Clan’s eastern wing burned, Wen Lihua, sixteen, lay trapped under a fallen pine beam. Her mourning robes—bright white, now streaked with ash and blood. She still had her hand out, reaching for her mother’s jade tablet. No one bothered to check if she was breathing.Flames wrapped the wooden halls, eating up everything. Smoke thickened the air until every breath scraped her throat. Her eyes stung. Her chest ached. Still, she bit her tongue—she wouldn’t scream.Three days before that, Elder Wen Zhaoqing—her great-uncle, the same man who once taught her to hold a calligraphy brush, called her a curse before the clan. During the annual ceremony, her spiritual root came up

Thirty days slipped by.At first, she didn’t keep track. Then she couldn’t help it.It wasn’t that she was eager to leave—far from it. The mountain was quiet in this unfamiliar way, thick with a stillness that felt more like waiting for a storm than any ordinary silence. She counted the days because she waited for him to tell her to go. For the moment when his patience would run out. For that look Shen Yijun might give her—the exact relief she’d seen in her father’s eyes in Elder Zhaoqing’s hall, the look of a man finally able to put down something heavy.She was waiting for that. She was still waiting.— ❧ —She picked up a lot over those thirty days.She learned he was up before dawn each morning, practicing sword forms in the clearing behind the peak. It wasn’t hurried. His movements were precise, almost meditative. She’d stand at the stone doorway, tea cooling in her hands, watching him, and feel something inside herself shift just to try and match his pace—a magnet pulling at a h

She didn't go to his room that night.They just stayed where they were, in the mellow pool of lamplight, holding each other. Her head rested against his shoulder, and his arms circled her, loose in a way that only happens when you forget there's even a reason to be tense. They listened as the rain outside faded, grew gentler, and eventually disappeared.After a long time, she pulled back to look at him. He met her gaze."I should sleep," she said."Yeah." He lingered, not quite letting go."Yijun.""Yeah?""You're still holding my hand."He glanced down. Sure enough, he was. He let go, very deliberately, and something about that made it both tender and kind of funny—more than if he'd just dropped her hand by accident."Goodnight," he said."Goodnight," she answered, and went to her own bed. She lay there a long time, wide awake, some warm, steady light burning inside her chest—like a lamp you leave on for someone coming home.—What happened next wasn’t a storm. If anything, it was th

By autumn, she was moving faster than anyone had thought she would. The Primordial Void Cultivation—like Yijun kept warning her—was wildly out of fashion, but it got results. The usual way took years, slow steps, always controlling your Qi, relying on discipline and patience. Her path asked for something else. It wanted her to feel, all the way. To drag out everything she’d stuffed down, sort through it, and turn it into power.Grief—she’d barely touched it. Rage—there was more of that than she liked. Love—the biggest, and hardest, by far.You can’t cultivate what you refuse to feel, and you can’t feel what you won’t name. So she started naming all of it.—She spent three days with her mother’s death, and when she came out of the chamber, her meridians had stretched a whole level further. She sat with the fire for two days. Then she sat with the memory of her brothers’ faces—how relieved they looked—and for the first time, let herself be completely furious about it. Not the tight

The letter came on a Tuesday morning. Lihua never liked Tuesdays because she felt it was the day when the universe liked to shake things up, right when you finally had your week steady.It wore the Tiancang Sect’s vermillion crane—wings wide, painted with that almost arrogant elegance that only people wielding real power ever bother with. And it had both their names there on the front. No pretending this was just for him.Shen Yijun stood by the window reading it. Lihua watched his face—she’d spent a year learning that face, the subtle shifts in muscle, the weather of his moods. He never spilled much in words, but you could read him if you watched: the jaw set harder, his breath going uneven, like watching a storm coming in. The third line did something to him. By the fifth, he was holding his shoulders tighter. The eighth line hit, and that was the look she’d only seen in rare moments—the look of a man realizing it doesn’t matter how carefully you redo your life; the world just goes