Chapter 1

After ninety thousand love letters from my disciple Blaze, I finally agreed to meet him.

When the appointed day came, I had just sealed away an ancient fierce beast and needed to close myself off to heal.

So I went to him in my true beast form instead.

I never imagined that the very next day I would hear he had turned his back on the sect,

sworn himself instead to my junior Serena, and won the Immortal Sword Tournament.

Now he was the prodigy everyone praised.

When someone asked why he had changed his allegiance, his face went cold.

“Before, I was blinded by greed and didn't realize the one teaching me was a mangy fox from the Demon Realm.”

“She forced me to wait on her for a thousand years, only because she coveted my looks and wanted to make me her immortal consort.”

“Just thinking that I was taught and pined after by a beast like that makes me sick.”

I was shaking with rage.

I hated him for having no eyes to see. I hated that he was taking the cultivation arts I had taught him and using them to win glory for someone else.

Worst of all, he had dared to call me a mangy fox.

My true form is the ancient auspicious beast Phoebe.

1

Inside the Mirror of Heavenly Secrets, Blaze went on tearing me down,

and as I listened my blood churned, until the meridians torn from sealing the fierce beast began to loosen again.

Better not to see and not to hear at all, I decided, and shut it out.

But something still sat lodged in my chest, and I could not make those words match my Blaze.

Blaze was not only my sole disciple.

He was also the first being to ever stir the root of feeling in me, in all the ages since I was born at the dawn of heaven and earth.

He was a little monkey-spirit I had saved on a whim. Coming down the mountain one day, I found him about to be devoured by a higher demon-beast, and thinking how hard it must have been for him to have only just taken human form, I felt a flicker of pity and saved him then and there.

Who could have known that from that day on he knelt at the foot of the mountain, day after day, begging bitterly to be taken as my disciple, to learn cultivation.

At first I refused him. I had lived countless ages and grown used to my own freedom, and as an ancient auspicious beast, my every move touched the fortune and misfortune of the world. Taking a disciple would surely change his fate and bind me to his karma.

That day I had shown no true face and given no name. I thought his interest was only a passing fancy, and that if I ignored him, he would leave on his own in a few days.

After all, no one entrusts their whole life to a stranger they know nothing about.

But I never expected such perseverance. For ninety-nine years straight, through wind and rain, through the blaze of high noon, he stood quietly at the foot of the mountain every single day, with no sign at all of giving up.

By the hundredth year, I finally resolved to drive him off by force.

He was only a little monkey-spirit of thin spiritual energy, with a lifespan of a few hundred years at most. It truly was not worth his while to keep wasting his time on me.

But when I came down the mountain, the sight before me stopped me cold.

For five thousand years my Mount Yuheng had grown wild and untended, yet somehow it was now covered end to end with blooming spirit-orchids, and even the demon-beasts that used to prowl and provoke me were nowhere to be seen.

I looked up. Blaze stood among the flowers, just cutting down a bird-spirit that had tried to steal a spirit-herb. He was dressed in white, his moves clean, his bearing bright and clear, like a green pine under the moon. But the moment he saw me he lost his footing entirely, and all that ease turned clumsy.

“I'm not doing this to force you to take me as your disciple.”

“I only didn't want these creatures to disturb your peace, Immortal Sovereign.”

His eyes shone as he said it, and the tips of his ears went red, and it was, I admit, a rather pleasant sight for a lonely old creature of ten thousand years.

Beauty misleads, and the days of cultivation had been too dull, so at last I nodded and kept him as my disciple.

Blaze truly did have a gift. A word of guidance from me and his cultivation soared a thousand miles a day.

He was devoted too. I always kept my face veiled in white before him, yet he held to his place and never once asked more.

From the day he came up the mountain, he learned to make mortal foods for me, saw to my daily needs, brought all manner of strange little things to make me smile, and every day wrote out his thoughts in a letter and set it before me.

Only, little by little, those letters turned from gratitude to telling me the stories of mortal men and women who loved and stayed by each other, and then to acting them out in his own gentle way.

Ninety thousand letters, and not one of them spoke of love, yet every line was about staying by my side.

Even I, who had long grown numb to love and hate and parting, felt him thaw my heart with his day after day.

When he begged me once more to meet him with my true face, in the end I was persuaded, and I agreed.

I only never thought it would fall on the very day a fierce beast broke loose.

So that Blaze would not have to wait too long, I used the most brutal method to pin the beast down. It drained my spiritual power dry and cost me my right arm, and for three whole months I could not hold human form.

But I remembered the promise I had made him.

Afraid too that my wounds would frighten him, I forced up my last shred of strength to shift back into my true form, meaning to explain everything once we met and to come to him with my real face after I left seclusion.

I never thought I would wait through a night of bright moon and thin stars, and he never came.

The next day, he betrayed the sect and turned to swear himself to my junior Serena.

And using the skills he had learned from me, he seized first place at the Immortal Sword Tournament.