I am the Heroine’s Master?

Wei Shentong emerged from meditation with frustration burning in his belly.

It wasn't working. The bronze jade he had extracted from the Kanchi mine – the one upon which he had pinned so many of his newfound hopes – simply refused to yield. He was close, so, so agonizingly close. He could feel the breakthrough lingering just beyond his reach, taunting him, yet that final step continued to elude him as it had for centuries. Only his mastery over his qi kept him from reducing the flying carriage to a cloud of splinters as he opened his eyes. That, and a healthy dose of respect for certain other passengers aboard.

It should have worked. He didn't know where the obstacle lay, but the logic was sound. The bronze jade he was attempting to weave into his natal artifact had clearly been fashioned using xian – xian that was, to his knowledge, literally otherworldly. If anything, the material was beyond reproach. Once, he had blamed the jade itself. He had believed it simply wasn't pure enough, wasn't sufficient enough to support his breakthrough. He no longer believed that.

Which meant that the bastard Mo Jian had been right.

Nurture your soul.

The words echoed in his mind, accompanied by the irritatingly composed expression Mo Jian had worn while offering advice he claimed to have received from a far greater cultivator within the palace. Wei Shentong had scoffed at the time. Every Nascent Soul cultivator worth the title knew those words. They were a poetic way of describing the accumulation of qi within one's nascent soul until it crossed the threshold for advancement. Wei Shentong had spent centuries hovering at that very threshold, needing only a final push to ascend into the mid-stage.

He did not need basic, useless advice from Mo Jian to tell him to cultivate harder. Except-

"You might reach the mid-stage by continuing as you have. The bronze jade may very well be enough. I wouldn't have offered it if I didn't believe that."

"But even if it is... you'll never progress beyond that. And there's every chance you won't progress at all."

"We're about to fight a war together. Despite my reservations, I'm sharing the same lesson that was given to me."

"Qi is only one side of the coin. The other is nurturing your soul."

"What changes you as a person will determine how your nascent soul grows, just as the person you once were shaped the nascent soul you first awakened."

"Abandon your pride and truly try to understand what I'm saying."

Taking a breath, Wei Shentong thought back to the man he had been three centuries ago: young, foolish, idealistic, and so hopelessly naïve that the memory made his teeth ache. He had been born in the same district of the Imperial Capital he had only recently resigned from governing (because he was now chasing folly on the strength of that bastard's promise). His parents had long since faded into little more than indistinct faces. He had been fewer than ten winters old when a passing cultivator from the Green River Sect had discovered his talent and taken him away.

Within the sect, he had flourished. He had always stood a cut above his peers; the pride of his teachers, the delight of the elders. He reached Foundation Establishment in barely two decades and had already begun laying plans for Core Formation. Had anyone asked him then what he wanted from life, he would have answered without hesitation: to spend the rest of it within the Green River Sect.

Then came the mission to the Jade Wyrm's nest.

The sect needed an egg for an alchemical elixir, and Wei Shentong had been volunteered. Only later did he learn why: Ruan Du. He doubted another soul in the world still remembered that name. After all, Wei Shentong had erased the man and his entire clan from existence. Back then, however, Ruan Du had merely been a fellow disciple whose envy festered beneath a smiling face. His uncle had been one of the sect elders and had known details of the mission that few others did.

Wei Shentong had known none of it. Even had someone tried to warn him, he doubted he would have believed them.

Instead of an abandoned nest, the expedition found an enraged Jade Wyrm waiting for them. Wei Shentong was the only one who returned. He came back broken, with both legs torn away, a jade fang lodged through his abdomen, barely enough life left to stagger through the sect gates. The blame settled neatly upon his shoulders. After all, if it did not, it would have fallen upon the elder who had organized the mission.

In a single day, the future he had envisioned withered. His friends drifted away. The woman he had hoped to marry found comfort in Ruan Du's arms. The sect quietly cut off the resources once lavished upon its prodigy. Bitter, humiliated, and consumed by a hatred that eclipsed everything else, Wei Shentong buried his pride, lowered his head, and vowed that one day he would have his revenge.

The Green River Sect boasted six Core Formation elders, while the Sect Master himself stood only at the peak of that realm. To them, the Nascent Soul realm was little more than legend. Even in the Imperial Capital, none of them had ever laid eyes upon such a cultivator. So when, a century later, Wei Shentong returned as a newly ascended Core Formation cultivator, it seemed to everyone as though he had risen from nothing to the top. No one knew what he had endured, or that he had forged his natal artifact from the jade fang of the very wyrm that had nearly killed him.

The sect did not know how to receive him. His ascension brought them prestige and power, elevating the Green River Sect's standing among the lesser sects of the capital overnight, yet he was also the unwanted black dog they had mocked and cast aside. Ruan Du had never reached Core Formation, but his influence within the sect had only grown. Many of those who had once spat upon Wei Shentong had done so merely to curry favor with him.

Now they smiled.

The Sect Master personally welcomed him back, burying him beneath lavish praise. The elders showered him with congratulations, priceless gifts, and honeyed words – bribes, thinly veiled. Let the grudges of youth remain in the past. Surely a venerable senior such as Elder Wei would never stoop to taking revenge upon juniors for childish mistakes.

They assured him that those responsible would be punished; assigned unpleasant duties or made to clean the sect from top to bottom. Wei Shentong scarcely heard a word. The moment the ceremony investing him as an elder concluded, he departed.

He returned to the Jade Wyrm's nest. For three years he hunted the beast that had nearly devoured him, descending through the Capital's vast underbelly until he found it deep beneath the earth, slumbering amidst the buried ruins of an ancient city entombed within an immense cavern.

There, they fought. It was the second time in his life he had come within a hair's breadth of death. But when the battle ended, the Jade Wyrm lay dead, and Wei Shentong still stood. He fed the wyrm's corpse to his natal artifact – the Unbroken Jade Coronet – and felt its power swell as it devoured the ancient beast. Only then did he return to the Green River Sect.

Two days later, nothing remained of it but dust carried on the wind. The Ruan clan was erased from the world alongside it. The handful of survivors who escaped scattered to the far corners of the Empire, disappearing into the countless districts of the Imperial Capital, never again gathering beneath the Green River Sect's banner.

Yet even then, his naivety had not been entirely shed. Instead of fleeing, Wei Shentong remained where he was and surrendered when the cultivators of the Capital came to arrest him. The trial was swift and without ceremony. The destruction of a single sect was too minor a matter to reach the Imperial Court, and so judgment fell to the district's governor: District Magister Cang Lian.

His sentence was simple – a century of service. Wei Shentong would aid in governing the district and spend those hundred years repaying the lives and livelihoods he had destroyed. He bowed his head and accepted the judgment as just. He did not know, then, that the man before whom he knelt would become more of a father to him than the one whose face he could no longer remember.

Cang Lian took him under his wing. He taught Wei Shentong everything he knew: not only cultivation, but governance, diplomacy, leadership, and above all, patience. He spoke of his own dream – one day to earn a place within the Imperial Palace itself, serving among the Court. More than anything, he taught an angry young man how to become someone better than his hatred. Under Cang Lian's guidance, Wei Shentong became a familiar face throughout the district. Mortals sought him for justice, cultivators for arbitration, officials for counsel, and the poor for alms. He devoted himself to the work, determined to repay the debt he owed the man he had grown to admire – the man he had come to love as a father.

It was a debt he never managed to repay. Even by the standards of a Nascent Soul cultivator, Cang Lian was already an old man when they met. His lifespan reached its natural end before the Imperial Court ever recognized his talents. Wei Shentong wept as his mentor's body was committed to the flames.

It was the last time he ever cried.

Afterward, he entered seclusion, and when he emerged, he had broken through to the Nascent Soul realm. The Imperial Examination that followed was brutal. At times he suspected the examiners had passed him only because a Nascent Soul cultivator was too valuable to waste as a lesser administrator. Whatever the reason, he passed, and to his quiet, unsurprised satisfaction, he was appointed District Magister of the very district Cang Lian had once governed. He spent the next three centuries learning how little the world cared for good intentions.

That, more than the betrayal of the Green River Sect or the death of his mentor, was what finally killed the last remnants of his youthful naivety.

What had truly made him grow? The death of a man he had loved? The revelation of an uncaring world? Or the first lesson Ruan Du had ever taught him – that in this world, only strength commanded respect, and nothing else? He could not say. Mo Jian – that utter bastard – had told him to make amends. To offer reparations to those he had harmed, apologies to those he had wronged, and to mean every word of them. Wei Shentong had called him a fool to his face, and he refused to revise that judgment.

Advancement did not require pandering to stilted notions of morality that had already been ancient when the First Emperor was a child. It required strength. Commitment. A will as hard and unyielding as stone.

Yet the thought lingered. What if he was failing not because his younger self had been wrong, but because he had abandoned those ideals too soon?

His irritation mounted. He shook his head, casting the thoughts aside. What nonsense. Rather than waste any more time dwelling on it, he looked around the carriage.

The first thing he noticed was Qing Zhanyue's absence. It would be a lie to say he breathed easier, but without such a monster in the carriage, the atmosphere was undeniably more comfortable. The Tiger General had been an unpleasant surprise. The Peacock General was worse. He could not understand why poets across the empire swooned over that woman's beauty. It was like calling a dragon beautiful because of its fangs. Fan Mei, from the islands, had been a far more pleasing sight.

That thought naturally drew his attention to the two other absences. Mo Jian and his student, Bai Ning, were gone as well. He did not particularly care where either of them had gone, except in the most general sense, but all three disappearing at once gave him pause. He had paid no attention to the outside world during his meditation – not even extending his spiritual sense through the carriage walls – so whatever had transpired since boarding remained unknown to him.

The thought of Mo Jian threatened to drag him back to their earlier conversation, but he had already opened his eyes, and that gave him a convenient excuse not to dwell on it. He seized the excuse without hesitation and turned his attention elsewhere.

Duan Cheng stood by the window, though no sunlight streamed through it now. He looked pensive, which was a rare expression for him. Duan Cheng had been a valuable find in a bed of mud, though only to a point. Still, they had known each other for decades, and the man's departure from his service lingered in the back of Wei Shentong's mind like an unacknowledged bruise. Duan Cheng was not alone. One of the younger cultivators from the Thousand Shattered Islands – Chen Zhuhe, his memory supplied – stood beside him, also gazing out the window. The two had evidently been talking, though whatever conversation they had shared had already run its course.

Liu Rushi sat beside the princess. That sight held his attention a moment longer than he intended. The remaining two – Yue Shuangyi and Li Kang – occupied one corner of the carriage, whispering to one another with their hands entwined. His gaze lingered there as well, both at how painfully obvious the pair were and at the display itself. He made a deliberate effort to look away.

He reached into his natal artifact. Despite his lingering frustrations, a Jade Eared Mouse emerged as flawlessly as ever, clinging to his wrist with its tail wrapped around it like a bracelet. Their voices reached his ears as though he sat beside them.

"...leader of one of the minor hordes, the Gray Horde. While the Khan has changed, the general structure of the plan my father drafted has not. He never had the chance to put it into motion, but we do, along with several advantages he never possessed. Besides, everything I have heard about Tayang Khan paints the picture of a reluctant warrior, a man who follows the customs of the steppes because they are all he has ever known, not someone who believes in them with the same fervor as Jorduk or Chiggis Khan."

"Still," Liu Rushi pressed, with a boldness that Wei Shentong found surprising given that her interlocutor was a princess, "that alone does not guarantee victory. Even if Brother Mo could kill every Khan alive except this one, such a state of affairs would last for less than a generation."

Wei Shentong felt the urge to snort, but restrained himself. Once, he would have called that degree of faith in another person naïve. Now he knew better. Mo Jian truly did possess the ability to kill cultivators of the same realm with effortless ease, something he knew because the bastard had demonstrated it as proof, a way of assuring everyone on his side that he possessed the strength to lead them to victory. Wei Shentong's blood had run cold when he watched the Spirit Ox – a third-rank beast – collapse dead from a single gesture of Mo Jian's hand, despite the full force of his spiritual sense being fixed upon it. There had been no warning or discernible cause. Nothing.

In that instant, he had understood, with unpleasant clarity, just how close he had come to dying during their confrontation long ago beside his pavilion overlooking the Heilongtan Spirit Pool.

The princess answered. "You're right, which is why simply wiping the board clean is only one part of the plan. To truly succeed, we will need to venture into the heart of the plains, to the corpse of the immortal buried beneath them. Navigating the feral qilins that roam those lands will be no small matter. Even the Khans have avoided that place since Jenghiz's death, but-"

The carriage lurched. It shook violently, like a mortal cart caught broadside by a gale, and Muxue broke off mid-sentence. Every spiritual sense in the carriage swept outward at once, searching for the cause. After a moment the shaking subsided, and nothing seemed amiss. Gue, the driver, had not even bothered to turn around.

"It looks like Brother Mo's breakthrough to the mid Nascent Soul stage is going well." Liu Rushi's tone was dry. Muxue answered with an equally wry nod.

Wei Shentong went still.

A breakthrough to the mid Nascent Soul stage. That was impossible. Mo Jian had only recently advanced to Nascent Soul – it had not even been a full year since he had left the Core Formation realm behind. To speak of reaching the middle stage already was not merely absurd. It bordered on fantasy.

Something hot and sour burned in his stomach. It wasn't jealousy. He was not afraid the younger man would succeed. At this stage of cultivation, Mo Jian stood no chance. No, what infuriated him was that the bastard was attempting it at all. That enough people believed it possible to speak of it so casually, as though discussing the weather. Wei Shentong had scraped and clawed his way forward for centuries, yet he had never once felt confident in his own ability to make that same breakthrough. For some people, he thought bitterly, the Heavens laid the road themselves. Foreknowledge of the future, stumbling upon a gui, somehow making it all work, achieving in months everything Wei Shentong had spent centuries pursuing, and now this. Had the bastard somehow convinced the Peacock General to assist him? Had she agreed simply because he carried the princess's backing?

A worse thought followed, quieter and more cutting than the rest.

What if he succeeds?

"No," Wei Shentong said. "That is impossible."

It took him an embarrassing moment to realize he had spoken aloud.

Every eye in the carriage turned toward him. The wiser passengers quickly looked away, unwilling to draw attention by judging a Nascent Soul cultivator. But there was someone aboard before whom even Wei Shentong could do nothing but lower his head, regardless of the gap between their cultivation.

"Jian's breakthrough is impossible?" Xiang Muxue regarded him with a raised brow, meeting his gaze without the slightest trace of fear. There was something quietly challenging in her voice, not anger, precisely, but a steady, patient look that told him that she had already decided she was right.

Wei Shentong felt the urge to lecture the girl but restrained himself. Not only was she a princess, not only was his fate now tied to her ambitions, but the familiar ease with which she spoke of that bastard made it abundantly clear that reasoned arguments would never sway her.

Still, he was Wei Shentong, not a dog to be tugged around by the leash. He met her gaze without flinching, making no effort to conceal the quiet weight of his aura. "Yes. No cultivator can advance through the stages of the Nascent Soul realm so quickly. Accomplishing such a feat even in the Core Formation realm borders on the impossible. If he attempts to force the breakthrough, his soul will be destroyed."

"'Impossible' is not a word cultivators should use lightly."

The cheerful voice made every eye in the carriage snap toward the speaker. General Qing Zhanyue lounged in her stone seat as though she had been there all along, looking thoroughly amused by the conversation she had apparently strolled – or perhaps simply materialized – into. Wei Shentong's aura collapsed inward at once, his qi following suit. He made a deliberate effort not to look directly at her. Inwardly, he cursed his own mouth. That bastard had managed to get him into trouble yet again.

Unlike him, Xiang Muxue showed no such restraint. "General!" she exclaimed. "Are you done with Bai Ning?"

The Peacock General looked immensely pleased with herself. "That girl has an exceptionally strong work ethic once she stops overthinking and puffing herself up. She won't be coming down until she finishes the first stage of the training I assigned her, that much is certain."

Before Wei Shentong could begin to unpack any of that, the General turned toward the young couple in the corner. "I actually came down for two reasons. The first is that I heard you two whispering my name rather a lot, and what you were saying caught my attention." She smiled. "So, I approve."

Li Kang and Yue Shuangyi stiffened. They had watched the previous exchange with wary curiosity, but now they looked like deer that had just noticed a wolf. Li Kang froze outright, his mouth hanging open, while Yue Shuangyi possessed enough presence of mind to attempt a denial.

"N-no, General, that isn't – we're honored, of course, but surely-"

"So," Qing Zhanyue continued, effortlessly steamrolling over her, "I've asked Hui and Yun to oversee some training for the two of you as well. You made a fair point – you shouldn't be left behind." She waved a hand at them with casual indifference. At some point a sword had appeared in it. The blade traced a lazy arc through the air.

Li Kang and Yue Shuangyi vanished.

Liu Rushi was halfway out of her seat before either of them disappeared, alarm flashing across her face, but Muxue caught her arm and gently drew her back down, whispering something into her ear. Wei Shentong realized his own mouth had fallen open.

Teleportation. That had been teleportation. How?

A hesitant voice broke the silence. "Uh... Great General, I was wondering..."

Chen Zhuhe stood with all the confidence of a condemned man, his face pale with what already looked like profound regret.

"You too," Qing Zhanyue said brightly.

He vanished.

Silence settled over the carriage. Wei Shentong could not decide whether to be grateful that the General's attention had shifted elsewhere, or simply bewildered by everything he had just witnessed.

"You said there were two reasons, General," Muxue reminded her.

"Ah." Qing Zhanyue smiled, and her gaze drifted toward the carriage door. "The second is because he's here." Her smile widened ever so slightly. "I wanted to congratulate him in person."

Wei Shentong's stomach sank.

Surely not.

The carriage door swung open, defying the impossible speed at which they tore through the sky. Mo Jian stepped inside, and the conversation died. Everyone rose. Congratulations filled the carriage, voices overlapping with warm sincerity, the atmosphere transforming in an instant in a way that even Qing Zhanyue's arrival had not managed. Even Wei Shentong felt it, that subtle, involuntary shift of a room adjusting itself around a presence it cannot ignore.

He didn't need his spiritual sense. His eyes were enough.

The pressure rolling from Mo Jian was deeper now. Denser and effortlessly contained, yet unmistakable like a river being unmistakably deep, even when it ran smooth and still. Still waters run the deepest.

His impossible attempt had succeeded. Mo Jian had reached the mid-stage of the Nascent Soul realm.

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AN:Extra chapters are up on Patreon for anyone who wants to read ahead (15 of them right now). Thanks for reading!