He bowed, his muscles twitching with humiliation.
"Fan Lin greets Senior. Perhaps… another time. Fate is not bound to a single meeting."
Clenching his jaw, the young man turned sharply and walked away, blending quickly into the bustling market crowd.
'That man… his presence is a stain on my destiny,' Lin Fan thought, clenching his fists.
Inside his sleeve, the Dragon Orb remained silent. Its runes were dark, offering none of the frantic pulsing that usually guided him to hidden fortunes. The quiet from his gold finger unnerved him more than Su Ming's cold gaze.
"No. Impossible. The Heavens chose me," Lin Fan reasoned, his heart pounding with a mixture of fear and fury. 'I will not let some nameless master stand in my way. Lin Yao is mine—destiny says so.'
With one last glance back at Su Ming and Lin Yao, he disappeared into the bustling crowd of Greenwall City.
***
Lin Fan's eyes hardened as he navigated the alleyways. "Master or not," he murmured under his breath, "she is mine, and I will take her. No force under the Heavens will stop me."
But beneath his resolve, unease remained. Su Ming's eyes had regarded him as a minor inconvenience. That feeling of being looked down upon stung worse than any blade, recalling his crippled years.
He loathed it.
Swearing a quiet oath to never be made small again, he resolved to destroy the nameless master and claim Lin Yao.
***
Meanwhile, in the central market, Su Ming watched the boy retreating with a mixture of amusement and mild annoyance.
'Fan Lin?' he thought, holding back a sigh. 'Are you serious? You just reversed your name and called it a disguise. What is this, a cultivation novel?'
He recognized the pattern immediately. A fallen genius who recovers his cultivation, adopts a lazy alias, and starts collecting "destined waifus" while picking fights with local young masters. It was a walking time bomb.
"Master?" Lin Yao's voice broke his train of thought. She was looking at him, her brow slightly furrowed in confusion. "Do you know that cultivator? He felt… strange."
Su Ming turned to his disciple, his expression returning to its usual calm, but slightly annoyed state.
"I do not. But you would do well to avoid individuals like him in the future."
"Why, Master?"
"Because he is a magnet for trouble," Su Ming explained. "Men like that live in constant conflict. Stand too close, and you will find yourself dragged into public duels, clan vendettas, and sudden beast tides. They don't seek strength through steady cultivation; they seek it through drama."
"If a young man with a broken sword and a smug expression approaches you claiming 'destiny,' treat him like a fraud and walk away."
Lin Yao nodded seriously. "I understand, Master. I will focus only on my sword."
"Good." Su Ming turned back toward the inn, his sleeves settling neatly at his sides, thinking, or rather hoping, that it would be their first and final meeting.
***
Back at the inn, Su Ming sat cross-legged on his bed, the shutters drawn against the evening market noise outside.
When he had stepped close to Lin Fan, the Twilight Nether Lantern in his soul had pulsed with a strange resonance.
'That strange Orb', Su Ming thought.
A soft knock interrupted him. Lin Yao entered and set a folded document on the low table beside his bed.
"The inn manager had this ready for you, Master. Local information on the valley." She bowed and stepped back without another word, already learning when to leave him to his thoughts.
Su Ming unfolded the parchment. It was something Su Ming asked the Inn manager to arrange in exchange for a few extra spirit stones.
Among the piles of records, one particular incident caught his attention.
"Incident Report — Regional Administrative Records, Year 620."
He read through it slowly, his brow tightening with each line.
Seventy-eight years ago, a deadly disease had swept through the villages bordering what was then a thriving agricultural basin. The plague had no name in the records - just a description of symptoms that sounded like a sickness that drained vitality faster than any natural disease should.
Entire families had perished within weeks. The regional authorities, lacking the resources or manpower to cremate or relocate the dead during the crisis properly, had decided to bury the victims in mass graves at the basin's lowest point.
The death toll, by the document's conservative estimate, exceeded five thousand mortal souls.
The basin in question was the current Withered Valley.
Su Ming set the document down slowly.
Five thousand deaths. Concentrated in one location. Buried without proper ritual, without dispersal, without anything to settle the accumulated yin-death energy, that kind of event is extremely dangerous.
He activated the Twilight Nether Lantern, letting his mind drift back through everything he had learned about the valley's qi anomaly.
The gradual draining of Qi, the zombie-like withered beasts, and the strange absence of active hostility - all of these point to some sort of natural anomaly rather than some evil person's handywork.
'But I have to investigate it properly.'
He thought of the Nether Ember Pearl sealed in his storage ring - the corrupted, glassy bead he had harvested from the Bone Serpent's throat. He wondered if this Nether Ember Pearl was also related to it. But overall, he was sure the event in the valley was most likely related to the death that happened 78 years ago.
Either way, he needed to see it himself before concluding.
"Lin Yao," he called.
"We leave for the Withered Valley in three days," Su Ming said. "Prepare accordingly. This will be a more demanding mission than our previous assignments."
"Yes, Master." She bowed with hesitation.
"If my prediction is correct, the valley has been dying slowly for the last seventy-eight years," Su Ming said.
"Three more days will not change that outcome. What it will change is whether we arrive prepared or arrive reckless."
As if a sudden enlightenment flashed across her face, Lin Yao bowed.
"I understand, Master."
With that, she left.
***
Su Ming planned to spend the first of those three days in quiet recovery.
It was not a dramatic injury, nothing that demanded urgent pills or immediate care, but the accumulated strain of the past weeks had left a faint fatigue that he did not intend to carry into an unknown environment.
He sat in his room, circulating the Crimson Flame Mantra at a slow, deliberate pace, letting his qi reserves settle back to their proper level.
By the second day, fully recovered, he turned his attention to the Nether Ember Pearl.
He unsealed the dark, glasslike orb from his storage ring and activated his Essence Sight, letting the Halo of Insight wash over its structure layer by layer.
The pearl's corruption was undeniable.
A crystallized form of mutated yin and death qi, probably born from the Bone Serpent's unnatural mutation. But beneath the corruption, Su Ming could sense something purer.
A foundational principle. A certain pattern the cold qi was following.
He had planned to give this to Lin Yao later, but he wanted to make sure it was safe first.
He let his Essence Sight and Halo of Insight run at full power, and for the next couple of hours, he studied it.
Then he used his White Flames to carefully remove the outer corruption.
What remained after was a dark purple bead. It did not glow, but deep within its core, a faint light pulsed like the final, cold ember of a dying fire.
A pure, untouched representation of death.
As he studied its structure, a profound realization settled over him.
'Death is not the absence of Life,' he realized. 'It is simply an energy that has reached absolute stillness.'
He spent the better part of a day and a half, barely moving, tracing the pearl's energy against everything he already understood about his own Crimson Flame Mantra.
His crimson flames were qi in motion, it insisted on existing loudly.
And this dark purple pearl was an ember that had finally gone completely still, a qi that had stopped insisting.
'It was Cold. It was Still. It was Quiet. It was Death.'
By the evening of the second day, something clicked into place in his mind, not like an extreme clarity of a breakthrough, but with the quiet certainty of a missing piece finally fitting together.
He raised one hand and channeled a thread of his Crimson Flame Mantra through it, but instead of letting it burn outward as it always had, he let it fold inward like the principle he had just spent a day and a half learning from the pearl.
The flame that bloomed from his palm was not crimson.
It was a deep, violet-black at its core, threaded through with pale, frost-colored light along its edges, a fire that gave off no warmth at all, that seemed to draw heat out of the air around it rather than add to it.
Su Ming stared at it for a long moment, faintly impressed with himself.
There were no named moves. No flashy techniques attached to it yet.
It was just an extension of his existing powers.
But he could already feel its potential. This was not a replacement for his Crimson Flame Mantra. It was a different power, one that governed yin, cold, and death, domains his bright crimson fire never touched.
Although he felt this cold flame had some sort of resonance with his White Flames, he chose not to experiment further.
Using the Lantern, especially the White Flames, placed a heavy burden on him.
'A different kind of flame for situations where my usual Crimson Flame might not work,' Su Ming pondered.
"The Nether Flame Art," he decided its name swiftly.
With a flick of his fingers, the quiet dark flame dissolved without a trace.
He rolled his shoulders and put back the Nether Ember pearl in his storage ring.
Three days were almost over.
Tomorrow, they would leave for the valley.