The first ray of sunlight pierced through the canopy like a lance of liquid gold, cutting through the mist that had gathered over the stream during the night. Yù Méi sat on the trunk of the tree she had felled the night before, her fists wrapped in strips of cloth her mother had given her, her eyes fixed on the horizon she could barely see through the forest.
Her fists ached. The pain was good. The pain was an anchor that kept her from thinking about what she had heard, what she had felt, what still burned in her chest like an ember that would not go out.
She had not slept. She could not. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw his hands tracing her sister's back, heard the moans echoing through the clearing, felt the heat of his Yang wrapping around her like a cloak that was not meant for her. So she had stayed awake, sitting on the fallen tree trunk, her eyes fixed on the stars she could barely see through the leaves, her fists clenched, her body vibrating with an energy she did not know where to direct.
Breakfast was silent. Zhì Yuǎn prepared the tea with his usual calm, his eyes fixed on the steam rising from the cup, following the movement of the particles as if deciphering an invisible code. Yù Qíng sat beside him, her black hair still loose over her shoulders, her light blue tunic stained with dew. She did not look at her sister. She did not need to. The smile forming on her lips said everything.
Yù Méi chewed the dry bread without tasting it. Yù Qíng's eyes were on Zhì Yuǎn, as always. But there was something more in them, a gleam that was not merely devotion. It was expectation.
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The sound came from the east. Heavy. Wet. The smell of wet fur and coagulated blood invaded the clearing before the beast showed itself.
It was a bear. But not an ordinary bear. Its fur was black as coal, and its eyes glowed with a red light that did not belong to flesh. Its paws left deep marks in the earth, and the foam dripping from its mouth steamed as if the blood in its veins were lava. The Qi emanating from it was dense, heavy, an aura that would make any mortal cultivator of the fifth or sixth realm retreat.
Yù Méi felt it. Her pores opened, and the beast appeared in her perception as a blot of heat, a mass of muscle and bone and raw Qi that knew no fear.
She expected Zhì Yuǎn to rise. To raise his hand, to apply a fragment of the Law of Destruction, to reduce the beast to ash as he had done with the wood the night before.
He did not move. His eyes were on the steam rising from his cup, following the movement of particles dancing in the hot air. The bear advanced, its paws tearing up the ground, its gaping mouth showing rows of teeth that gleamed like blades.
Yù Qíng smiled. Not at the beast. At her sister.
"I don't think you slept well," she said, her voice calm, sweet, as if commenting on the weather. "Go clean the yard."
The bear was ten paces away. Five. Three.
Yù Méi moved.
There was no stance. No technique taught in clans or sects. There was only the strength that four years of fire and Zhì Yuǎn's hands had forged in her. She twisted her hips and launched her right fist at the skull of the advancing beast.
The impact was a dry crack. The bone beneath the bear's snout shattered, and dark blood sprayed into the air. The beast's head was thrown to the side by the force of the blow, and Yù Méi felt the bone fragments pierce her skin, felt the warm blood run down her fingers.
She smiled. She expected the monster to collapse like the oak trunk the night before.
But the bear was not a tree.
The pain did not kill it. The pain enraged it. With a roar that made the earth tremble, the beast did not retreat. It lunged, swinging a claw the size of her torso straight at her neck.
Yù Méi's eyes widened. She had no time to think. She had no technique to block. No experience to predict the movement. It was the first time anyone—anything—had truly tried to kill her.
But her body, with its millions of pores wide open to the world, did not need her eyes.
The skin of her left arm felt the air being torn. Felt the beast's furious Qi compress the wind before the claw even arrived. It was a strange sensation, an alert that came not from her mind, but from her flesh, from the nerves Zhì Yuǎn had awakened the day before.
In an absurd reflex, driven by pure animal instinct and the sensitivity of her newly opened pores, Yù Méi threw her body backward. It was an awkward movement. She stumbled over her own feet, her heel slipped on the damp earth, and she fell flat on her back with a thud that stole the air from her lungs.
But the killing claw passed a millimeter from her nose. It only cut a few strands of her blonde hair, which floated in the air like threads of broken gold.
The wind of the blow sent her rolling across the wet ground. She had no time to rise. The bear, maddened by pain and blood, charged again, its maw open, aiming for her leg.
"Don't touch me!" she screamed, frustration and fear transforming into pure fury.
Still on the ground, she kicked. It was not a martial kick, with stance and precision. It was a desperate buck, a raw movement that used all the strength of her Qi‑dense legs. Her heel struck the beast's ribs with the force of a rockslide.
The crack was sickening. Three ribs snapped at once, and the bear was thrown two meters to the side, whining in pain, its red eyes now clouded with agony.
Yù Méi did not wait.
Adrenaline and Qi boiled in her veins like the fire of the red herbs, but wilder, more alive. She threw herself onto the beast as it tried to rise, its forepaws still clawing the ground, its mouth open in a roar that was now more blood than air.
The fight lost any trace of elegance. It was not the sword duel she had imagined when she dreamed of being a cultivator. It was a street brawl on an epic scale. Yù Méi grabbed the thick fur of the bear's neck with her left hand, anchoring it to the ground, and began to strike with her right.
The first punch caved in the skull on the left side. The force of the impact vibrated through her arm, up her spine, made her teeth click. The bear groaned, its paws trying to break free, but she already had her knees driven into its chest.
The second punch shattered the beast's jaw. Teeth scattered across the ground like shards of porcelain, and blood poured in waves, soaking her tunic, her arms, her face.
The third punch came with a scream that tore her own throat. Her fist sank into what remained of the snout, turning flesh and bone into a warm, dark pulp. The bear did not move again.
She raised her fist for the fourth blow. Her arm trembled. Blood ran down her fingers, dripped onto her thighs, formed dark pools on the earth. The beast did not move. Its red eyes, now extinguished, reflected the light of the rising sun like two dead stones.
Silence returned to the clearing.
Yù Méi remained there, kneeling over the massive carcass, her chest heaving violently. Her fists throbbed. Dark, warm blood soaked her hands, ran down her arms, splattered her face and clothes. Her blonde hair, which had once shone like gold, was now plastered to her forehead by a scarlet crust.
She looked at her own hands. They trembled. Not from fear. From excess. From a pleasure she could not name, that shamed her, that made her want to laugh and cry at the same time.
I killed, she thought. Not with a single blow. With blood. With filth. With desperation. But I killed.
The taste of blood on her lips was sweet. The sensation of bones breaking under her fingers was more intimate than anything she had ever felt. Her body vibrated, not with fear, not with disgust. With power. With a new and terrifying certainty.
On the veranda, Zhì Yuǎn still watched the steam from his tea, indifferent to the carnage. The wind swayed the grass around him, and his hands did not tremble. To him, the beast had never been a threat. Only a test.
But Yù Qíng, seated beside him, was not looking at her husband. She was looking at her bloodied sister, gasping, mounted on the monster's carcass, her blonde hair stuck to her dirty face, her eyes still glazed with adrenaline.
The smile on Yù Qíng's lips was no longer merely that of an observer. It was that of a smith admiring a newly forged blade that had just tasted its first blood. Not the perfect blade, polished and cold, that cuts with a single stroke. But the raw blade, forged in desperation, that learns to kill blow by blow, blood by blood.
"Cleaned up," she said, and her voice was approval. "Now wash those hands. Let's go."
Yù Méi slid off the bear's carcass. Her legs wobbled when her feet touched the ground. She staggered to the stream, knelt at the bank, and plunged her hands into the cold water.
The blood dissolved into red threads that the current carried away. The icy water burned her joints, her swollen knuckles, the marks of her own teeth on her lips. She looked at herself in the stream's reflection.
The face looking back was not the face of the girl who had left Qīngshí. Not the face of the Untouchable Petal, cold and distant. It was the face of someone who had killed. Who had survived. Who was, for the first time in her life, feeling what it was to be alive.
She smiled. The reflection smiled back.
---
The forest began to die in the late afternoon.
The trees, which had once risen like pillars of an endless temple, began to thin. The canopies, which had once blocked the sky like a ceiling of leaves and shadows, pulled apart, letting sunlight penetrate in broad swaths that illuminated the packed earth. The air, once damp and heavy, laden with the smell of moss and decay, became dry, hot, carrying a fragrance of spices Yù Méi had never smelled before.
She was on the cart roof again, her blonde hair still damp from the stream where she had washed off the blood. The tunic she wore was no longer the same; Yù Qíng had given her one of her spare clothes, light blue, that fit her broader shoulders and the full breasts her sister did not have. Her fists still ached, but the pain was good. The pain was a reminder that she could. That she was more than the sister who was left behind.
The sun set behind them, painting the sky red and gold. And when the last tree fell behind, Yù Méi saw.
The horizon had no end.
Golden grass stretched before her like an ocean of light, swaying in the wind in waves that went from pale green to deep gold, from gold to amber, from amber to burnt red where the sun touched the horizon. There were no mountains. No forests. Nothing but that infinite sea of grass that swayed as if the whole world were breathing.
"By the ancestors," she whispered, and her voice was lost in the wind.
The road was no longer the dirt track that disappeared among the trees. It was paved. Wide, gray stones, polished by centuries of use, stretched before them like a river of stone cutting through the golden sea. And upon it, other travelers. Merchants in carts larger than theirs, their goods covered with colorful tarps. Men on horseback, their armor gleaming in the setting sun. And cultivators. Men and women with swords on their backs, silk robes, the posture of those who had never needed to bow to anyone.
Yù Méi felt their Qi. Weak. Sparse. Compared to the Qi that entered through her pores, to the Qi that burned in her bones, to the Qi that flowed between her sister and brother‑in‑law like a river without limits, the cultivators on the road were like fireflies trying to compete with the sun.
She felt pride. And she felt fear.
What have I become? she asked herself, as the cart advanced along the stone road, as the prairie wind tossed her hair, as the dried blood still stained the folds of her tunic. What have they made of me?
"It is the first city of the Prairies," Zhì Yuǎn said, and his voice, always calm, now held a tone she did not recognize. It was not wonder. Not expectation. It was… hunger. "We will need new clothes."
Yù Qíng laughed. It was a low, hoarse laugh that made Yù Méi shiver.
"And a good bath," she said, and her eyes met her sister's. "You smell of blood, Petal."
Yù Méi looked away. Her cheeks burned. Her hands trembled. And deep inside, in the darkness of her chest, the desire she had been trying to bury since the night before pulsed stronger than ever.
The city appeared on the horizon. High walls, watchtowers, flags fluttering in the wind. And behind the walls, stone towers rising like fingers pointing to the sky, red ceramic roofs gleaming in the setting sun, wide streets where hundreds, thousands of people moved.
The world was expanding. And Yù Méi, the Untouchable Petal, the girl who had spent four years burning in a fire no one saw, the killer who had shattered a beast's skull with her bare hands, felt her chest fill with an emotion she could not name.
It was fear. It was desire. It was the certainty that nothing, ever again, would be as before.
The cart passed through the city gates. And the world swallowed them.
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