บททั้งหมดของ Beneath the Immortal Sky: A Heart Left Burning: บทที่ 41 - บทที่ 50

The independent observation session happened on a Thursday morning in the fourth month, and it was one of the hardest things Lihua had done since the fire.Not because it was physically difficult. Because it required her to be completely emotionally open in front of three people she did not know, whose presence she could feel the entire time — their watchfulness, their skepticism, their careful clinical distance — while also accessing the genuine, unguarded feeling that her cultivation required.It was like being asked to cry in front of an audience. Not perform crying. Actually cry.She sat in the cultivation chamber with Su Fengling to her right and three of the First Elder's senior advisors arranged along the far wall with their observation instruments and their careful, neutral expressions. Yijun was outside. He had asked if she wanted him present and she had said no, because having him in the room would have made the session too easy and she needed it to be real, not comfortable.

Jing Yue's response to the letter Yijun sent came three weeks later and it was not kind.Lihua was not in the room when he read it. She came into the study and found him sitting at his desk with the letter open in front of him and an expression she could not immediately read — not devastated, not angry, but the face of someone who has received a truth they were not fully prepared for even though they had asked for it.'Can I read it?' she asked.He handed it to her without speaking.She read it.Jing Yue wrote well. That was the first thing she noticed. She was precise and articulate and clearly intelligent, and her precision made the things she said land with the full weight they were intended to carry.She wrote that she had heard about Yijun's return to the sect and his new research and the bonding with his remarkably talented partner, and that she was glad for him, and that she hoped he understood that glad and fine were different things and she was the first but not always the se

Luo Yanmei came back exactly one month after Lihua had told her to.She arrived at the seventh peak on a clear morning in the fifth month with no basket of fruit this time and no constructed smile. She was just herself — slightly nervous, slightly uncertain, dressed in plain traveling clothes rather than the polished presentation of her first visits.She looked, Lihua thought, much more real.'You came,' Lihua said.'I said I would.' Yanmei paused at the door. 'I want to be clear about something before I come in. I am not here as any kind of representative of Elder Peng. I ended that arrangement. It cost me the grant renewal but I —' She stopped. 'I do not want to be the person who does things like that anymore. I am trying to figure out who I want to be instead.''That is a good place to start,' Lihua said. 'Come in.'— ✦ —They spent three hours working through Yanmei's cultivation root.It was an empathic variant — different from Ruoxuan's but in the same family, a root that respon

Chenzhou was a mid-sized merchant town three days south of the Tiancang mountain, and it looked exactly like what it was — a place where ordinary people lived ordinary lives without any of the elevated drama of cultivation sects.Lihua found it refreshing.The streets were busy with commerce and noise and the specific cheerful chaos of a market town doing its daily business. Nobody looked at her with the cautious respect of someone aware they were near a powerful cultivator. Nobody looked at Yijun at all except to note that he was tall and move around him. They were just two people walking through a market town.She watched Yijun walk through the streets he had grown up in and tried to read him.He was processing. She could feel it — the particular quality of attention that came over him when he was absorbing something that required adjustment. This had been his world before the sect. These streets, this noise, these ordinary people going about their ordinary lives.'Which way?' she a

Luo Yanmei moved to the seventh peak in the sixth month.This was not the original plan. The original plan had been for her to visit monthly for consultation sessions. But the Qinghe Sect, upon learning that Yanmei had ended her arrangement with Elder Peng, had terminated her research fellowship entirely, which meant she had no position, no funding, and nowhere to go.She appeared at the seventh peak bridge on a Tuesday morning with two bags and the expression of someone who was not going to ask for help but who had come to the only place where help had previously been offered.Lihua opened the door before she crossed the bridge.'Bring your bags inside,' she said.'I should explain —''You can explain while I make tea. Bring your bags.'Yijun, to his credit, took the situation in without comment and went to set up the spare room that had been theoretically available since they moved into the peak and had in practice been used as overflow storage for research documentation.Within an