The peak of ambition on the Starlight Summit was not a place, but a day: the Autumn Tide Tournament.
For weeks, the mountain had hummed with a different energy. The disciplined drills became sharper, louder. The air crackled with nervous Qi as disciples pushed for last-minute breakthroughs. Whispers of rivalries, secret techniques, and favored candidates wound through the corridors and practice yards like ghostly vines.
Wei Fan's role in this spectacle was predefined and peripheral. He was part of the silent machinery that made the pageantry possible. In the days leading up to the tournament, he and a small army of other menial workers scrived the grand procession stairs until the stone gleamed, erected banners of celestial blue and silver, and prepared the vast tournament grounds—the Field of Falling Stars—clearing every pebble and patching every scar in the packed earth.
On the morning of the tournament, he was assigned to the contestant's preparation gallery, a long, stone cloister where the participating disciples made their final adjustments. His task was to ensure the water basins were full, the benches clean, and to remain an invisible presence.
The gallery was a study in controlled tension. Disciples in pristine robes stretched, practiced breathing cycles, or stared into the middle distance, their faces pale with focus. The air was thick with the scent of sandalwood calming incense and the sharper, metallic tang of adrenaline.
Wei Fan worked at the far end, refilling a basin from a heavy stone jug. His eyes, as always, noted details. The disciple who checked his sword's edge for the twentieth time. The one who muttered a familial mantra under her breath, her knuckles white. The small group from Verdant Sword Valley, among whom he saw Fen.
The boy looked like a drawn bowstring. He wasn't participating—his realm was too low—but was there as an attendant for his senior, the same bully who had ordered him to sabotage a rival. The senior, a sneering young man with a carefully crafted aura of arrogance, was berating Fen for the tightness of his vambrace. Fen's face was a mask of stoic humiliation, but his eyes held a brittle, desperate light Wei Fan recognized.
Then, a shift in the gallery's energy. A subtle parting of the crowd, not through force, but through gravitational pull.
Su Jianling entered.
She moved with an unthinking, effortless authority. Her robes were not the standard issue, but a subtle variation of celestial blue, edged with silver thread that caught the light like water. She carried no visible weapon, but the air around her seemed sharper, clearer. Disciples nodded respectfully, some with genuine admiration, others with masked envy. She acknowledged no one.
Her gaze swept the gallery, not seeking reassurance, but assessing. It passed over Fen's miserable tableau, over the nervous competitors, and for the briefest moment, rested on Wei Fan as he lifted the water jug. There was no recognition in it, only the automatic cataloguing of a functional object. Then she moved to a quiet corner, closed her eyes, and began a breathing exercise that seemed to draw all the chaotic Qi in the vicinity into a calm, ordered vortex around her.
The tournament itself was a distant roar to Wei Fan. From his assigned post in a service corridor, he heard the swell of the crowd, the amplified announcements, the distinctive crack-shimmer of clashing sword auras. His work was now about aftermath and flow: delivering clean towels, removing used ones, ensuring the healers' station had a steady supply of hot water.
It was during one of these errands, carrying a basket of soiled linens towards the service wash, that he crossed a secluded courtyard used for private meditation. There, slumped on a bench in the shadow of a ornamental rock, was the young disciple Su Jianling had defeated in her first match.
He was not badly hurt, but he was utterly broken. His shoulders shook with silent, ragged sobs, his face buried in hands that still bore the faint energy-burns from his shattered defensive technique. The proud disciple from hours before was gone, leaving only a hollow shell of failure.
Wei Fan stopped. He set his basket down quietly. His eyes scanned the courtyard. On a low stone table, forgotten amidst the excitement, was a small lacquered tray. On it sat a few Sun-Pearl Berries, a minor restorative snack meant for VIP observers. They were now wilted and overlooked.
He walked over, picked up the tray, and placed it on the bench beside the weeping disciple. He did not speak. He did not offer a hand. He simply created the opportunity, then picked up his basket and continued towards the washhouse, his footsteps silent on the mossy stones.
He had not taken five steps when a voice, cool and clear as a mountain spring, cut through the quiet.
"You."
Wei Fan turned. Su Jianling stood at the courtyard's moon gate, her arms crossed. She had changed from her competition robes into simpler, but no less elegant, training clothes. Her expression was unreadable, but her eyes were fixed on him with an intensity that felt like a physical touch.
"Young Mistress Su," he said, giving a shallow, correct bow.
"You gave him the berries." It was not a question.
"They were discarded, Young Mistress. The mountain's gifts should not be wasted, especially by those who need them."
She stepped into the courtyard, her movement fluid and predatory. "Sentimentality is a luxury the weak cannot afford. It only prolongs the inevitable."
Wei Fan met her gaze, then let his own drop respectfully back to the ground. "Is it sentiment," he asked, his voice as calm as if discussing the weather, "or is it efficiency? A disciple who collapses from despair on the path tomorrow is one more person who must be carried. A berry today may prevent a burden tomorrow."
He heard a faint, almost imperceptible hitch in her breathing. The argument, the entire philosophy of ruthless meritocracy she lived by, was being dismantled not with a competing ideology, but with the plain, unassailable logic of a groundskeeper. It was an answer from a worldview that operated on a different axis entirely.
The defeated disciple, sniffling, had noticed the berries. With a trembling hand, he took one and ate it. A faint trace of color, subtle as a dawn blush, returned to his cheeks.
Su Jianling watched this. Her sharp eyes flicked from the disciple to the berries to Wei Fan's placid, dust-streaked face. For the first time, the certainty in her expression wavered, replaced by a profound and unsettling confusion. She was used to people arguing with her, flattering her, or shrinking from her. She was not used to someone rendering her perspective irrelevant with a single, pragmatic observation.
"What is your name?" she finally asked, the command in her voice now layered with something else—genuine, baffled inquiry.
"Wei Fan, Young Mistress."
"Wei Fan," she repeated. The name meant 'ordinary' and 'common'. On her tongue, it sounded like a paradox. A question. "You see the mountain differently."
"I sweep it every day, Young Mistress. One learns its moods."
He gave another small bow, picked up his basket of linens, and walked away, leaving her standing in the courtyard with the weeping disciple and the tray of wilting berries.
Su Jianling did not call after him. She watched his retreating back, the unassuming grey of his servant's robes blending into the stone. The brilliant, undeniable logic of his words echoed in the quiet space he left behind. For a prodigy who had mastered every technique, solved every puzzle of power put before her, he represented something entirely novel.
He was a problem that could not be solved with a sword or a pill. And in that moment, for Su Jianling, that made him the most compelling thing on the entire mountain.