The twenty-second of the third month, and the snow still had not stopped.
Jinguan City was nothing like the Northern Lands. In years past, spring would have long since arrived by now, all things reviving, vying to out-bloom one another. This year, however, goose-feather snow had drifted down for nearly four months straight.
“Strange.”
Beside a teahouse packed with people, a diner swirled his tea and shook his head.
He gazed out the window. They said Jinguan City’s scenery changed with every season, and spring mountains should have been lush enough to drip with green—yet right now there was nothing but endless twilight snow.
“Truly strange,” the diner said.
“What’s so strange about it?” the storyteller took a sip of tea, entirely at ease. “Isn’t today the memorial rite of that… ahem, that certain someone?”
The diner blinked. “Which someone?”
“Luo Jiao.” The storyteller lowered his voice. “Ah, do you all know of Luo Jiao?”
A guest at the next table smacked his lips. “Never heard of her.”
The storyteller frowned. “Tsk. You don’t know Luo Jiao, but surely you’ve heard of the Unending Sword. ‘One cannot know how fair the clear day, until one has seen the aged Everlasting’—surely you know that? A Unending Sword, a Everlasting Sword…”
The Everlasting Sword was a name that thundered in everyone’s ears, and its Sword Master made people shrink back at the mere mention.
At these words, the earlier listeners smacked their foreheads and leapt up. “Ah! Ye Qingzhou! Ye Qingzhou of the Everlasting Sword—of course we know her!”
“Right.” The storyteller smiled lazily. “The Unending Sword, Luo Jiao—Ye Qingzhou of Fengyi Sect’s own Senior Sister.”
The storyteller adopted the theatrical lilt of his trade. “Speaking of Luo Jiao… her life, one might say, should have been a saga of sweeping grandeur.”
“Luo Jiao was poor in her youth, scraping by in the streets, snatching food from the mouths of stray dogs, never once tasting a bowl of hot porridge. Passing through Qianli Slope, with nothing but that ruthless fire in her eyes, she unexpectedly won the regard of the Daoist of Sanqing. The Sanqing Sword Art—one vertical, one horizontal, one yin, one yang…”
“I hear that in this sword art, Ye Qingzhou followed the yin, the vertical,” someone interjected. “Then Luo Jiao was the yang and the horizontal?”
“Right,” said the storyteller. “Luo Jiao studied under the Daoist of Sanqing, mastered the Sanqing Sword Art, and at the age of budding promise, took her leave of her master.”
“From there—south to Qianli Slope, north to Mojiang City—one frost-cold blade of hers, and her name shook the Nine Provinces.”
Here the storyteller seemed to sigh. “…Yet at twenty-seven, she perished at Qianli Slope.”
“Luo Unending began here, and ended here. Brief as morning dew—yet in the end, each found her place.”
“They say on this day a hundred years ago, also the twenty-second of the third month, when spring catkins swirled, Luo Jiao died at Qianli Slope. They say when Dou E cried injustice, snow fell in June—look at this blinding white covering the skies…”
The storyteller sighed, and when he raised his eyes again, his expression was tinged with feeling—and unmistakable mockery besides. “Who knows whether this Luo Jiao, too, had some injustice to cry.”
The words had scarcely fallen when a gust of wind swept through.
The storyteller’s hand shook as he held his tea; scalding water spilled over his sleeve, and instantly went cold as ice.
He glanced toward the draft and glimpsed, faintly, a figure outside. He did not think much of it—until he turned back and met a room full of gazes growing ever more terrified.
“…What’s wrong?”
Everyone around had frozen mid-motion. They stared in unison at the storyteller, eyes fixed, pupils ink-black, expressions dull and numb, all like souls snatched away.
The storyteller drew a sharp breath. “What—what’s wrong with all of you?”
Not a single person spoke. The teahouse plunged into silence in an instant; only outside the broken window did the wind whisper on.
Whether it was his imagination or not, the storyteller felt as if the whole teahouse had begun seeping cold, as if he’d fallen into an ice cellar.
He looked instinctively out the window. Intuition told him the phenomenon was tied to that figure—
The instant he turned, the blizzard stopped dead.
The storyteller saw the figure walking toward him.
It was a woman—white hair, white robes, a white sword of clear frost, untouched by worldly dust. A white-veiled hat hid her brows and eyes, making her impossible to read.
And sweeping in with the icy aura around her came an endless killing intent.
The storyteller saw only a glint of cold light pass before him.
The next instant, the sword’s edge was upon him!—
CLANG!!
The storyteller was thrown backward by the sword qi, table, chair and all, and crashed onto the floor.
And the blade stopped, a hair’s breadth from his suddenly bulging pupils.
He lay sprawled, shaking all over, unable to speak.
Cold sweat dripped from his forehead and slid into his eye.
The woman in white stood beside him, her sword pointed at him.
“You don’t remember? I recall making myself clear.”
Her voice was ethereal, devoid of any emotion—no rage, no irritation, no sorrow, no joy. “Mention ‘Luo Jiao’ again in these idle chatterboxes of taverns…”
“…and what happens?”
The pale blade reflected in glass-colored eyes. The girl’s face was lovely—yet like a vengeful spirit—
A hundred li from the teahouse, on a desolate mountain, the woman in white stood at the top of the slope.
She pulled off the white-veiled hat, revealing a pair of glass-colored pupils. “The deeds of the living, the names of the dead…”
“Nothing but passing smoke.”
She sighed, then murmured on, “Still, they’ll always be crushed and spooned into tea, for others’ idle amusement.”
The woman ground the teacup she’d shattered earlier into fine powder, held it in her palm, then raised her hand.
A wind passed, and the powder scattered with it.
Her motion was solemn—solemn as pouring a pot of clear wine before someone’s grave.
And so those scattered fragments of gossip dispersed into the air.
“Senior Sister,” she called softly, almost a whisper.
“You were right. Every word.”
# Volume One · Luo Unending · Three Thousand Moons
