Beyond the Valley of Forgetfulness, Beside the Soul-Severing Abyss

“If you can’t even control your own life, how can you protect all living beings?”

Mo Yuan carved those words into the miasma at the bottom of Soulbreak Abyss, year after year for ten years.

Ten years ago, he was the prodigy cherished by everyone in the Skyreach Pavilion. The wine his senior brother smilingly offered him was laced with deadly poison, and the Soul-Quelling Pearl his master pressed into his hands on his deathbed became, in the blink of an eye, a blade aimed at his heart. Then, with one final kick, his senior brother sent him plummeting into the abyss and said, “Your kindness is the most useless thing about you.”

Ten years later, he held a sword forged from the abyss’s cold iron, his eyes filled with nothing but icy calculation. The day a thunderstorm shredded his spiritual power, when he was trapped in a deadly predicament that should have made his breakthrough impossible, a clear flute melody drifted down from above.

“Hey, you’re about to get blasted to ashes. Want some help?”

A pale violet figure stepped onto the clouds, twirling a translucent flute and easily breaking the thunder formation that had trapped him for half a month. That was Fu Yin, a carefree rogue immortal whose very name seemed to carry the wind. She had come chasing rumors of a divine artifact’s appearance, but whenever he thought he had everything figured out, she would suddenly barge in and throw off his plans.

He wanted to bring this unpredictable rogue immortal under his control too. But when she smiled and offered him a roasted sweet potato, he failed to account for his own quickening heartbeat. She had been a passerby who’d grown tired of the Three Realms’ rules, but when he took a direct blow from a demon to protect her, she raised her flute in front of him for the first time. “How dare you touch my man?”

Through the dark nights of the fight for the divine artifact, he hid the edge of his sword and sat with her in the clouds, counting the stars. In the deadly struggle when the demons tore apart the spiritual leyline, her flute melody wrapped around his sword energy, cleaving open a path to survival.

“From this day on, my sword will sing for you, and your flute will sound only for me.”