Ning Xi was an orphan, adrift and alone, picked up by the Qingyun Sword Sect and slotted into the ranks of its outer disciples — the kind of disciple no one noticed, the kind whose name slipped through the cracks.

Day after day, her world was chores and errands. Sometimes, if she was lucky, she’d catch a glimpse of a white sword-light slicing across the sky — Pei Buchen, the sect leader’s personal disciple, returning from another trial. Senior Brother Pei was everything she wasn’t. Born into an illustrious family. A genius among geniuses. Champion of the Immortal Palace Trial at sixteen. At seventeen, he entered the Sword Hiding Cave and ten thousand swords vied to claim him. At eighteen, he slew an ancient demonic flood dragon alone. The lives he’d saved beneath that longsword were beyond counting.

Ning Xi could only watch him from a distance — at the annual ancestral rites on the Night of First Full Moon, through a sea of worshippers, catching a fleeting glimpse of a young man warm as jade, gentle as bamboo. A senior brother held up by the stars themselves, she thought. He probably doesn’t even know he has an unremarkable junior sister like me.

But when the sect fell — when Ning Xi was betrayed by her fiancé and lay bleeding out from a dozen sword wounds — it was this senior brother, the one she’d barely exchanged three sentences with, who fought through hell to drag her body back.

In the end, he held her spirit tablet in his arms and threw himself into the raging sea.

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