Chapter 3 — Long Meili, Black Dragon
[Qin's Point of View]
The pill lay in the palm of my hand.
Small. Pale orange, almost the color of aged copper. The fine veins running across its surface were not decoration; they were a map of everything compressed inside it. Obviously, it was not a high-quality pill. Any cultivator with real resources would have looked at it and felt nothing. But for me—for Qin Yami now—
It was the thing standing between death and salvation. After all, the person who had lived in this body before me had obviously been a talentless wretch. The reason I had been thrown off a mountain the previous night was simply that I had refused to accept the fact that I was weak.
I stared at it for a while.
Then I swallowed it.
For a few seconds, nothing happened.
I sat on the edge of the bed and waited. I did not know exactly what I was expecting. I had never taken a cultivation pill before; Qin Yami's memories did not include such an experience because he had never managed to obtain one.
A wretch... Poor guy.
What I knew came from fantastical cultivation novels, where slaps in the face were common, and from games and dramas: heat, the expansion of Qi, a gradual increase in cultivation. Something I expected. Something that took minutes or hours but happened progressively. Ah, and it was painful too, like something pricking the body everywhere.
What happened was not that.
It was as if someone had lit an oven inside me.
The heat came from my stomach first—not the heat of physical exertion, like running a long marathon, but the heat of something chemical, a reaction, the kind of thing that could not be controlled and did not care what you would have preferred. It rose through my torso, descended through my limbs, and reached the tips of my fingers and the roots of my hair within seconds. When it reached everything at once, the pain arrived with it.
"AAAAH—"
The sound escaped before I could decide whether I wanted to make it. It was not the kind of pain one endured with clenched teeth and silence. It was the kind the body emitted when the nervous system reached the limits of human tolerance and made the final decision to scream.
I fell to my knees on the floor.
My injured ribs, which until that moment had been operating at an unbearable level of pain, were completely forgotten. Not because they had stopped hurting, but because what was happening throughout the rest of my body was of an entirely different magnitude.
It was like being melted and reshaped at the same time.
I had read about body purification in xianxia stories. I knew the concept: cultivators accumulated impurities throughout their lives, toxins from the environment, residue from improperly processed cultivation, the physical marks of years spent in a body that had never been properly prepared for the path of immortality. Purification was a rare process, expensive for poor people like me, desired by many and achieved by few.
In stories, the description was always romanticized.
The reality was that I was on the floor, tears running down my face without my having decided to cry, my entire body convulsing while something that should not have been there was being torn out from the inside.
This will end, I thought, with the part of my mind that still functioned analytically even amid the chaos. It has to end.
Ten minutes later, it did.
The silence that followed had the particular quality of silence after a storm—not an absence of sound, but the feeling that the world had exhausted its capacity to make noise for a while. I lay on the floor with my face against the cold stone, breathing shallowly and carefully, like someone uncertain what he would find if he took a deep breath.
After a few minutes, I stood up.
The floor was... not pretty. A dark, viscous layer covered the stone around where I had been, accompanied by a smell I would rather not describe in detail, because some details were unnecessary for understanding the situation. What mattered was that it had come out of me, and that I felt different.
Different in a way I still could not completely name.
I dragged myself to the bathroom, cleaned the floor with whatever was available, and then went to the bathtub. I remained in the water for more than an hour, not out of vanity, but because my body needed time to register what had happened and decide how to feel about it.
I was in no hurry. After all, I had no power. It made no sense to try to flee from a Sect when that woman knew I was here. Obviously, it was better to believe that if she had wanted me dead, she would already have drained me dry or done something worse.
When I finally got out and looked at the polished mirror on the wall, I stopped.
Before, I had acknowledged that Qin Yami's face was handsome. It was an objective observation—the kind of face that made people stop anywhere and look twice. Black hair, violet eyes, features defined with a symmetry that required no context to be noticed.
But what was in the mirror now was not exactly the same thing.
It was like comparing a sketch with the finished painting. The structure was the same. The palette was the same. But there was something about the quality of my skin—clean in a way skin normally was not, without the imperceptible accumulation of years every face carried—and the more defined shape of my body, every muscle line present with the clarity of something drawn intentionally, that elevated everything from "very handsome" to a category I had no immediate word for.
The aura emanating from my body had changed as well. It was difficult to describe to someone who did not live in a cultivation world—but there was something in the air around me that was simultaneously pure and dangerous, like clear water flowing over a sharpened stone.
"Ha... ha..."
The laughter was obvious, of course, because this whole aura thing was such a cliché. As a modern human, I was already at the limits of what a human body could be, and yet my aura was supposedly like a sharpened stone hidden beneath water? That was ridiculous. I laughed. Perhaps I was becoming the stupid protagonist who thought the world revolved around him. Obviously, my aura was still that of a weak human, considered trash in this dangerous world.
I stared at my reflection for a few more seconds.
All right, I thought.
I threw myself onto the bed and fell asleep in less than a second, like a child after a long day.
[Long Meili's Point of View]
Several hours before Qin woke up
There was a particular kind of waking up that began well.
The warmth of the mattress. The temporary absence of thoughts. That suspended second between sleep and consciousness when the world did not yet fully exist and the body belonged only to itself.
I opened my eyes.
And the next second was anything but good.
I was in my bed. I was naked. And lying beside me, breathing calmly with the relaxed face of deep sleep, completely devoid of the urgency the situation demanded, was a man who was also not wearing any clothes.
The murderous aura inside me awakened before anything else. It rose like an avalanche, growing even stronger after the betrayal by the sects that had attacked me. Everything had accumulated.
I rose from the bed in a single movement, murderous intent overflowing from my body like boiling water vapor, dense and visible to any cultivator with enough sensitivity to perceive it. I summoned my rapier from the spatial ring on my finger and pointed its tip at the man's neck before my feet had finished touching the floor.
I stood still.
Think, the rational part of me that was still functioning told me. Think before doing anything.
Then the memories arrived like a tide that had been held back, the entire previous night pouring back all at once: the poison, the escape, Yue cutting through the dark air above the mountains, the rear slope of Azure Mountain, and the man.
That man.
Covered in blood and climbing with the quiet determination of someone who had refused to stop even with death waiting for him, his purple eyes meeting mine in the darkness of the forest with that confused, pained expression.
It had been me. It had been my decision. The poison had done what Fire Snake poison did, but I had carried him, opened the door, and initiated everything that happened afterward.
I lowered the blade very slowly.
The feelings inside me at that moment were not simple enough to explain. There was anger—not at him, but at the situation, at the perverted leader of the Heavenly Sword Sect, and at myself for lowering my guard. There was shame, the kind that burned more than an injury, because I was Long Meili and I did not lose control, ever, and that night had been a complete denial of everything I had built my identity upon. There was confusion. There was something else I chose not to examine yet because more urgent matters existed.
I looked at his face.
He slept with the involuntary tranquility of deep sleep, his brow slightly furrowed as if he were solving something, his lower lip still swollen from the previous night, his black hair spread across the pillow in an unplanned disorder. There were scratches I had not noticed before, small ones on his jaw and temple. Marks from something that had happened before I found him on the slope.
He had been beaten. Someone had done that deliberately.
Servant disciple, I thought, studying the torn clothes lying on the floor. And weak. But not a coward.
Any coward would have handed over whatever they demanded. He had not given it up. I knew that because, when I looked at his clothes, I sensed the faint fragrance of a pill. That was the only conclusion I could draw about his condition; after all, such internal conflicts were common throughout the cultivation world. The weak always suffered losses.
I sighed.
I do not care about his identity, I thought, with the kind of honesty one could have only when no one was there to listen. But from the moment this happened, he had no choice. Neither did I.
There was a reason for that. A reason I had carried since I was small enough to sit in my mother's lap and listen to her stories with the attention of someone who did not yet understand that those stories were about her.
I am not human. At least not one hundred percent.
I never was. I was born as what I am: a Black Dragon.
I came from a lesser branch of the great Divine Long family, as I had been taught, in the lower world where we now lived—a small, ancient lineage of members existing on the margins of the cultivation world with the discretion any species learned when it was valuable enough to be hunted.
And dragons were very valuable.
Not because of what they could do, but because of what they were. Every scale, every bone, every drop of a dragon's blood could serve as an alchemy material, a forging ingredient, or the foundation of cultivation techniques that humans took generations to develop on their own. An adult dragon was equivalent to an entire treasure trove. A dragon hatchling was equivalent to a fortune capable of changing the destiny of entire Sects.
My clan was exterminated when I was still a child.
I do not remember everything about that day. Trauma had that characteristic: it kept the outlines but erased certain important details, like protection arriving too late to be useful, though the brain implemented it anyway. What I remember is the sound. The sound of screams, every kind of terrible scream... That destructive frequency of fire and the metallic smell of blood. Disgusting.
I remember running. Being carried by someone whose face I could no longer fully reconstruct. Darkness.
And a name.
Long Nil. The clan chief's son, a distant cousin, a man who had smiled at me whenever he saw me and called me by name with the familiarity traitors always possessed before betraying you. He had opened the gates. He had handed over the defensive formation maps. He had ensured that the attack arrived from within before it came from outside. Our clan had not been weak.
I still do not know what he received in exchange.
One day I will find out. And when I do, I will have my revenge!
I was found by the former leader of the Azure Mountain Sect, Lil Shaun, as I called him—my adoptive father, in every sense of the care the word father carried. He knew what I was: a non-human. He never had to pretend he did not know, and I never had to pretend to be something I was not within the walls he had built around me.
I grew up in the Sect. I learned to cultivate using the Dragon Empress Technique, which my mother had taught me during the few years we had together. I learned to use my rapier. I learned not to reveal what I was to anyone who did not need to know, and the list of people who needed to know was very short. Only my father.
Over time, I assumed leadership of the Sect. Not because of cultivation hierarchy, although my cultivation was sufficient to guarantee it, but because Lil Shaun gradually withdrew, and I slowly filled the space he left behind.
I had never wanted a man. It had never been a priority, never something I had planned or seriously considered. There were more urgent matters: the Sect, my own cultivation, the name Long Nil that I carried like a debt waiting to be repaid. Everything was a higher priority than that sort of thing.
But there was something my mother had taught me, with the particular seriousness she reserved for matters that truly mattered.
"The first man of a dragoness from our clan," she had said, her warm hands holding mine, "is not chosen. He is recognized."
I had thought it was a metaphor.
It was not.
What existed between dragons of our lineage and their companions was not love in the sense humans used the word—with all the lightness and passion the term implied. It was something closer to a life connection. The first man to touch a Black Dragon awakened something sealed since birth, a part of her nature placed in wait for precisely that moment, and when it awakened, it awakened forever.
There was no second. No alternative. No undoing it.
My mother had lost my father, her companion, in a battle years before I was born. She had lasted three years after him; for my sake, I believed, because without a reason she would not have lasted even three weeks. Dragons of our clan without a companion did not die of sadness in the poetic sense of the word. They died in a much more literal way: their Dao slowly dissolved, their cultivation reversed, their bodies continued becoming mortal, until they literally died. My mother had never explained why our clan was like that.
I had spent fifty-five years carefully avoiding this.
And then the Fire Snake poison happened. And the slope behind my Sect's mountain happened. And that injured man happened.
At least he is not ugly, I thought as I looked at him. I do not know why.
It was nowhere near enough to account for what had happened—ugliness or beauty did not change the implications of it. But it was true, and small truths sometimes helped organize the larger ones.
He was weak. That was a fact. A servant disciple in the Human Foundation Establishment Realm was not, by any reasonable measure, a suitable partner for a Golden Core cultivator like me. I had received many proposals, and he would not have been considered even remotely suitable. The difference in cultivation between us was the kind that made the idea of mutual protection sound comical. I would never have looked at him. Perhaps I might have noticed his beauty, but beyond that, he was simply another person.
But... something inside me was different.
That, however, was a problem with a possible solution.
Weakness could be solved with time and resources. I had both.
I will make you strong, I thought, looking at his face with the quiet determination that was the only way I knew how to want something. I have no choice. But I would not mind having you now. It had already happened, and one could say it was an inevitable fate... Even though I wanted to kill him for taking my chastity, and because being my companion had not been my choice.
What was done was done.
I gathered my clothes from the floor. There was no romance in looking at them; they were in the state they were in, and that was that. I stored them in my spatial ring and took out a clean set: a black robe with red details along the edges, light armor covering the important areas, the kind of outfit that suited the situation now. After all, I was the current leader of the Azure Mountain Sect.
I dressed. I combed my hair with my fingers because there was no comb available and because I did not care enough to look for one.
At the door, I stopped.
I looked at him one last time.
He was still sleeping. His face held the expression of complete peace that faces wore when the mind finally shut down for real, when there was nothing left to process, resolve, or hold on to. It was an expression I did not often see in adults. There was something childlike about it, something belonging to a person who could still leave the outside world behind while sleeping.
Idiot, I thought without anger. Unfortunately—or fortunately—perhaps because of my lineage, accepting the situation had not been difficult. As a cultivator, some things were never choices.
Sleeping like that after everything.
I took the room key from my spatial ring and locked the door from the outside.
He could try to break it down if he wanted. The room contained protective formations, and the material of the walls was of a quality that his strength could not overcome. If he tried to leave by force, he would discover that he could not. If he tried to remain calm, he would discover that the key outside was the only way out.
It was not a prison. It was temporary containment while I organized everything else. The Heavenly Sword Sect might attack us, knowing that I was still recovering.
There was work to be done in the Sect. There was the matter of the alliance with the Heavenly Sword Sect, which had now ended in ways that the old perverted leader had not yet fully processed, but would process soon.
...
And above all, there was the fact that Long Meili, leader of the Azure Mountain Sect, had spent the night with a twenty-year-old servant disciple who could barely cultivate and who was now, by every effect recognized by nature, her husband.
The universe sometimes had a very particular sense of humor.
I gave the locked door one last look.
Take care, I thought. As an order. As a request. As both at the same time.
And I left.
In the main wing, the elder responsible for the visitor records looked at the note he had found attached to the door of his office. He immediately recognized the handwriting—precise, without ornament, the handwriting of someone who wrote to be understood rather than admired.
"The occupant of the guest room is my husband. No one opens this door without my presence. No one approaches that wing without a reason I have approved. Anyone who disobeys this order will be punished with death."
—Long Meili
The elder carefully folded the paper. He placed it inside the register. He closed the register.
He had taken the position twenty-three years earlier with hopes of a quiet life managing bureaucratic affairs. For the most part, he had gotten exactly that.
He preferred to keep it that way.
He asked no questions.