Survive the Trial of Love, Cultivate Heartlessness

Atop Mount Taixuan, on the Cliff of the Heart’s Trial.

Tonight marked Xie Lin’s ninety-ninth severing of romantic attachments.

Snow fell without a sound.

Beneath the moonlight, the thousand-year-old wintersweet at the cliff’s edge bloomed in silence.

The black-robed Sword Venerable sat cross-legged beneath it, an unsheathed longsword laid across his knees. Its name was Dustless.

Wind and snow swept over his brows and lashes, freezing into frost before crumbling away in a soft shower, as if time itself were sighing.

His eyes were closed.

In his sea of consciousness, threads of affection formed a web.

The first was scarlet, burning hot: three hundred and twenty years ago, when he had first entered the mountain sect, his junior sister had risen on tiptoe to tuck a peach blossom into his hair. The blossom had long since turned to mud, but the faint tingle where her fingers brushed his temple had never faded.

The second was azure, faintly bitter: two hundred and forty years ago, on his first trip down the mountain to exorcise demons, he had rescued a blind zither player. The musician had said, “My benefactor must have such a gentle voice.” Yet for the next hundred years, he never spoke another word with warmth in it.

The third was moon-white, cold as ice: one hundred and eighty years ago, beneath a glacier in the northern frontier, he had met a merfolk maiden. Weeping pearls, she had given him one and said, “This pearl is called No Regrets.” But in the tenth year of his seclusion, it had crumbled to dust.

The ninety-eighth was golden, dazzling to the eye: thirty years ago, at the Eastern Sea’s Daoist debate, a female cultivator from the Joyful Union Sect had glanced at him from across the crowd. Her eyes had lingered, as if she had words she could not bring herself to say. He had drawn his sword on the spot and severed a strand of his Dao foundation, only then suppressing the unfamiliar stir in his heart.

Ninety-eight threads of affection, ninety-eight ties to the mortal world.

Some shallow, some deep; some born of gratitude, others of resentment; some no more than a fleeting glance, others entangling them for a hundred years