Douluo Dalu: Butterfly Dance, Lion's Roar

Her name was Huo Yuhao, and she should have been nothing more than an unwanted bastard left to die in the woodshed behind the White Tiger Duke's Mansion.

Her mother was a sick servant girl, cast into the woodshed to die. With her dying breath, she pressed a dagger into Huo Yuhao's hand and told her to find the father who had never even known she existed. Huo Yuhao went looking for no one. She dug a grave, climbed over the wall, cut off her twelve years of long hair with the dagger, squeezed herself into a drab set of men's clothes, and walked alone into the Star Dou Great Forest.

She needed power. Even if she had to give up everything for it.

What she didn't know was that the moment she killed that Ten-Year Wind Baboon and collapsed in the mud, her fate had already become entangled with three forces from different times and places: a million-year-old soul beast, a fragment of the soul of an unknown godlike powerhouse, and an Ice Jade Emperor Scorpion sleeping beneath the ice of the Far North. They took root inside her, recasting her from a gaunt shell into someone entirely different.

What she knew even less was that, the moment she opened the dormitory door at Shrek Academy, a boy with blue-and-pink hair was sitting on the bed opposite hers. His family had carried on its legacy for ten thousand years, and at first sight of her, he caught the scent of wood warmed in the sun. Before long, another boy, with short golden hair and amber eyes, came before her too. When he looked at her with eyes that seemed cool and distant toward everything, there was a warmth in them he hadn't even noticed himself.

As the three went from disliking one another to competing with each other, and then to standing side by side on the same field, Huo Yuhao learned one thing: she could cry in front of others, and when she was done crying