Before.
Before Lin Feng.
Before the Heavenly Demon.
Before whatever had happened — she did not know exactly what had happened, had never been told the full account, had pieced together the available fragments over the last two years from sources that were not consistent and were not complete — before the event that had left her daughter crippled.
Crippled.
The flat, clinical, devastating, precise meaning of the word as it applied to a cultivator — the specific, permanent, severe, cultivation-path damage that had taken her daughter from Nascent Soul Early to Foundation Establishment Mid in whatever had happened to Lin Feng, the specific, enormous, irreversible gap between what she had been and what she was.
She watched her daughter listen to the elders.
She watched her daughter's face — the flat, present, jaw-set, eyes-forward, attending face of a woman who had been crippled and had decided that crippled was not final.
She watched one of the elders gesture.
