Semua Bab Beneath the Immortal Sky: A Heart Left Burning: Bab 1 - Bab 7

Shen Yijun hadn’t talked to anyone in six years, and honestly, he liked life better this way.He was twenty-eight. There’d been a time he was Tiancang Sect’s fourth-ranked disciple. Now? He just kept to a cold, empty mountain they called the “northern observation post,” which was really just a polite way of saying, “a spot nobody wants but we can’t kick you out completely.”Didn’t bother him.He spent his days fiddling with formations the sect elders couldn’t be bothered with, feeding a scrappy little one-eyed fox he’d found his second winter alone, patching things too stubborn to stay fixed. The fox—he called it Nothing, because he was determined not to get attached—only stuck around because it drew blood from anyone else who tried.Yijun didn’t miss people. Sometimes he missed the idea of people, who they could’ve been, if the world was different.He hadn’t brought anyone home in six years.—He found her one early spring morning by the river, searching for minerals for his arrays.

He said he'd teach her.She wasn't sure, after the fact, if he actually chose that or if he simply stumbled into it—like realizing you’d been following a trail without noticing. The training hardly looked like anything she'd seen in cultivation manuals. And she'd read them all, obsessively, desperately, back when she clung to the hope that enough effort could wrestle her body into something it wasn’t. Shen Yijun didn’t ask for control. He demanded honesty.“Tell me something that hurt you,” he said on the first morning. They sat cross-legged in the chilly clearing. You could see their breaths in the air.She blinked. “That’s not cultivation.”“It is now. Tell me.”She almost lied. She thought about giving him something small, something easy to talk about.But she didn’t. “My mother died watching me fail the root test, the second time. She told me it didn’t matter, but she was scared. Not for everyone else. For me. What would happen if I never got a root. She died four months later and

The Wen Clan didn’t announce themselves, they just showed up. Middle of summer, right when everything felt steady for once.Lihua was in the lower clearing that morning, eyes closed, lost in her cultivation—light spinning around her, silver-gold and quiet. She felt them before she saw them: three cultivators, all heavy steps and hard intention. Not just passing through. Foundation Establishment for sure, maybe higher, and every movement screamed they had a name in mind. She’d known this day would come. She’d been waiting for it, really.She let the energy settle, folded it down into her skin, eyes open now. Grass stuck to her borrowed robes—Yijun’s extras, too big in the shoulders, plain gray, tied in at the waist. They were never meant to fit, but honestly, she loved them. Most comfortable thing she’d worn in ages. She stood, brushed herself off, and went looking for him.He was already there—standing at the edge, watching the trail. Face tight with the kind of worry he never voiced.