Immortality Starts With Face

The light of the sunset, thin and pale as watered wine, crept through the intricately carved window screens of Su Lian's private chambers, painting fractured, melancholic patterns across the worn silk hangings and the dark, heavy redwood furniture.

Dust motes, thick as a summer swarm of spirit gnats, danced in these hesitant beams, each a tiny, indifferent speck in the grand, decaying tapestry of the Su Family's ancestral manor in Fallen Star City.

The air itself felt ancient, heavy with the scent of old, slowly rotting wood, the pervasive, bitter aroma of medicinal herbs that perpetually simmered in some distant wing for the ailing Ancestor, and the faint, ever-present metallic tang that drifted on the breeze from the vast, indifferent expanse of Fallen Star Lake.

Through the window, beyond the meticulously tended but undeniably faded courtyard gardens, Fallen Star City sprawled – a bustling, chaotic small city of grey stone and hurried lives. Some, usually those who had never ventured beyond the provincial borders, called it the "Jewel of Azure Province."

Su Lian knew this to be a cruel, hollow jest.

Azure Province – a forgotten, sun-scorched territory clinging precariously to the Empire's Southwestern Periphery, was arguably its poorest, most resource-starved appendage, a veritable dumping ground for disgraced officials, exiled scholars, and families like her own – families whose past glories were now nothing more than whispered legends and a source of constant, gnawing shame.

The province bled into the wild, untamed Frontier, a vast and spirit-rich – but, paradoxically, resource-barren – green hell that began just a few days' arduous travel to the Southwest. That Frontier, a place of primordial jungles, treacherous swamps, and ancient, vine-choked ruins long-since picked clean by generations of desperate scavengers, was, according to the family elders, a cursed land. The ambient Qi there, though undeniably potent, thrummed with a wild, untamable energy that resisted conventional cultivation, and the very soil seemed to poison any attempt to grow valuable spirit crops, as if some ancient malediction lay upon it.

One Su ancestor, a brilliant but reckless cultivator consumed by a desperate hope, had attempted to venture deep into that green abyss centuries ago, seeking wealth, glory, and some legendary lost cultivation technique that would have reversed their family's inexorable decline. He had never returned, his fate becoming another cautionary tale whispered in hushed tones, another layer to the mystique and dread surrounding that wild, indifferent land.

By Su Lian's exacting standards – standards forged in the crucible of her family's remembered, and bitterly mourned, past – Fallen Star City was merely one of only two marginally livable settlements in the entire, blighted Azure Province. The other, a place she despised with an equal, if different, fervor, was the provincial capital, Yuhang City: the den of those crass, upstart Jiang merchants.

Fallen Star owed its slightly elevated, if still profoundly mediocre, status to the nearby Whispering Peaks mountain range (which grudgingly yielded a few minor spirit mines) and the eponymous Lake, whose waters were said to possess unique (if subtle) spiritual properties that attracted some modicum of commerce. All in all, it was a thin veneer of provincial prosperity painted over a foundation of deeply ingrained mediocrity.

Yes, compared to a true shithole like Qingshan Town, where that Jiang cur had been exiled, it was an enormous improvement. But it was a far, far cry from the legendary Su estates in the Core Provinces she'd heard about in the hushed, reverent tales spun by the Elders. Her family had once lived in sprawling demesnes measured in hundreds of li, boasting spirit gardens of such beauty and potency that a mere sight of them could induce enlightenment in mortals, and palaces whose very walls were inlaid with high quality spirit jade that hummed with the resonant harmony of the Dao itself.

This morning, however, the faded grandeur of her surroundings, the provincial limitations of Fallen Star City, and even the looming threat of the Frontier, were distant, muted concerns.

Su Lian's mind was a maelstrom, a chaotic battlefield where raw, conflicting emotions clashed with brutal, unrelenting ferocity. The full, and utterly mortifying events of the previous two days replayed themselves in an endless, tormenting loop. Each recollection was a fresh barb, twisting deeper into her already lacerated pride.

She hadn't needed informants to relay the core of her humiliation; she had been there after all: an unwilling actress in Jiang Li's sudden, inexplicable, and deeply insulting drama.

Her cousin, Su Mei – bless her fiercely loyal, if often foolish, heart – had breathlessly informed her of Jiang Li's unexpected presence in Fallen Star City, even mentioning a brief, insultingly dismissive encounter with him in the marketplace.

Burning with a volatile mixture of righteous outrage at his sheer audacity and a desperate, clawing need to assert her own agency, Su Lian had stormed to the Myriad Treasures Pavilion. The initial shock of finding him, Jiang Li, the family disgrace, the cultivation trash, ensconced in the luxurious, exclusive VIP section – a level of preferential treatment that even she, Su Lian of the ancient and noble Su lineage, could barely command (even with carefully placed bribes) – had been a stinging blow.

And, that insult was quickly compounded by the sheer effrontery of being barred entry by his guards, common Pavilion functionaries who dared to look down their noses at her.

When Jiang Li had finally deigned to emerge, his calm, almost amused demeanor – with that faint, condescending smile playing on his lips – had been a galling counterpoint to her own barely suppressed fury. She had intended to confront him, to unleash the torrent of her righteous indignation, to make it unequivocally clear that she, Su Lian, was the one who would dictate the terms of their cursed engagement – or its long-overdue dissolution.

Instead, he had stolen her thunder, her narrative, her very will, with a casual, devastating dismissiveness that still made her blood boil. There, in his opulent suite, before the implicitly listening ears of his guards and the undoubtedly gossiping Pavilion staff, he had been the one to annul the engagement. He had rendered her carefully rehearsed tirade, her planned act of defiant liberation, utterly meaningless.

The "trash" had rejected her, Su Lian.

She who possessed a superior-grade Fire-attribute spirit root.

She who was hailed as the prodigy of the Su lineage!

The sheer audacity of it, the public nature of her humiliation, had left her reeling, speechless, consumed by a rage so profound it bordered on a physical illness. She had returned to her family's temporary lodging in the city and wept – not tears of sorrow, but of furious, impotent frustration: great, racking sobs that tore at her throat – all day.

It was a display of weakness, a loss of control, that her cousin Su Mei had unfortunately witnessed.

This, Su Lian knew with a sinking, leaden feeling in the pit of her stomach, had undoubtedly fueled Su Mei's own reckless, disastrous outbursts at the Auction – a misguided, typically clumsy attempt to defend Su Lian's honor; or, perhaps, simply to lash out at the source of their shared, unbearable humiliation.

And now, Su Lian realized with a fresh wave of bitter self-recrimination, she bore a measure of guilt for that particular disaster as well.

Her mind, a tormented carousel, churned with the memories of the original Jiang Li – the one she had known, and loathed, for years.

The one sent to Qingshan Town – partly, she had always suspected, as a pathetic, face-saving attempt by the Jiangs to keep him somewhat closer to her family (a proximity she found physically repulsive).

He had been an embarrassment, a walking, breathing stain on the cultivator name, a testament to the decline of standards in this degenerate age.

He had possessed no respect for himself, let alone for others; his days in Qingshan a well-documented blur of cheap, fiery wine and even cheaper, most sordid women in the town's various pleasure houses.

She remembered her own attempts, early in the engagement – driven by a sense of familial duty and a desperate desire to maintain a veneer of civility – to reach out to him, to establish some form of polite, distant accord. These attempts, she recalled with a fresh surge of bile, he had met with boorish indifference or worse, with outright, calculated disrespect.

The bastard had purposefully, maliciously, chosen courtesans who shared her given name, Lian'er; and even, with a particular, pointed cruelty, her cousin Su Mei's – parading them publicly in the dusty streets of Qingshan. The incident at the Jade Moon Restaurant, an allegedly halfway-decent eatery in that backwater town, still burned in her memory like a brand: Jiang Li, smirking over the rim of his wine cup, had deliberately invited those two women, garishly dressed and reeking of cheap, cloying perfume, to dine at a nearby table while she and Su Mei were present, his eyes openly mocking their discomfort.

Reveling in their barely concealed disgust.

The insult had been so blatant, so personal, so utterly beneath mere contempt, that it had taken every ounce of her instilled aristocratic composure to prevent herself from incinerating him right where he sat.

She despised him.

Hated his vulgar attitude. Hated his crass, nouveau-riche upstart family with their stupid spirit ore mines and their complete lack of breeding.

And, with a particular, enduring bitterness, she hated her own family's elders for shackling her – Su Lian (a descendant of phoenixes!) – to such a degenerate, earth-bound worm.

And now, this latest version of Jiang Li – this new, inexplicably wealthy, insufferably arrogant Jiang Li – had somehow managed to humiliate her even more profoundly, more publicly, and more unforgivably than before.

The vague rumors that had trickled out of Qingshan Town in the preceding weeks – of Jiang Li suddenly, inexplicably, throwing around gold as if it were common river sand; of him buying out entire floors of the Myriad Treasures Pavilion branch there (a feat rendered less impressive, she sniffed internally, by Qingshan's utter, abject poverty); of him hiring a small, veritable army of mercenaries for his personal security – these had all been puzzling, yes, but easily dismissed as drunken exaggeration, or perhaps some crass, ostentatious merchant scheme designed to inflate his own pathetic sense of importance.

The real shock, the one that still made her head spin with a dizzying, nauseating disbelief, had come during the Fallen Star City auction itself. A trusted (if minor) family source within the Pavilion's hierarchy had urgently, and with considerable emotion, informed her that the astonishing array of high-value items that had been listed at the very last, breathless minute – the rare, high-purity spirit ores, the mythical Asura Blood Wine, those bizarrely potent "invisible" talismans, and even the almost mythical "Nine Nether Snow Lotus Fruit" – had all come from him.

From Jiang Li.

How?

The question was a burning brand on her mind, a tormenting, unanswerable riddle.

How could the talentless, dissolute, utterly worthless fool she knew – the boy whose spiritual roots were a five-element joke – suddenly possess such treasures?

And then, there was his cool, almost bored dismissal of her during their confrontation in his opulent VIP suite… it was all a confusing, infuriating whirlwind.

She struggled, and failed, to reconcile the image of the despised, easily-dismissed lout she knew with this new, enigmatic, and apparently formidable powerhouse.

Was it all an elaborate, cunning trick?

A meticulously crafted, deeply deceptive front?

Or worse, had some impossible, world-altering fortune, some heaven-defying encounter, befallen the bastard?

The uncertainty was almost as galling as the insult itself.

And then there was Su Mei.

Her cousin's disastrous, repeated public outbursts at the auction, her shrieking, ill-considered accusations, culminating in the near-catastrophe of directly – if inadvertently – offending a genuine Imperial Princess…

Su Lian felt a surge of cold, visceral dread.

Such monumental stupidity, such a profound lack of self-control and basic political acumen, could easily drag the entire, teetering Su family into an abyss from which there would be no return this time. Her clan, she knew with a certainty that settled like a stone in her gut, could not afford such a misstep.

The Su family walked a knife's edge, their continued survival dependent on the shifting, unpredictable whims of greater powers, on maintaining a delicate, almost invisible balance of perceived utility. Offending a personage such as the Princess, however inadvertently, could very well mean utter, complete annihilation – a horrifying, final echo of the "Fall" their ancestors had endured with the collapse of the Celestial Phoenix dynasty four centuries prior.

A liveried servant, his face a carefully constructed mask of impassive deference, materialized silently at her chamber door.

He bowed low.

"Young Miss Lian," his voice was devoid of inflection, "Elder Su Bohai requires your presence in the Hall of Ancestral Admonishment immediately."

The summons, though expected, landed like a sliver of ice slid directly down her spine – curt, cold, leaving no doubt whatsoever as to the gravity of the impending ordeal.

As Su Lian walked through the long, echoing, and undeniably dilapidated corridors of the manor, her fine silk slippers – embroidered with faded phoenix motifs – whispered over worn but once-magnificent carpets, her internal monologue became a torrent of bitter memory and burgeoning, desperate resolve.

Her thoughts, unbidden, flew to her dear father, Su Fengyi. A man whose laughter had been as warm and vibrant as his innate Fire Qi, his ambition a bright, guiding star in the often-gloomy firmament of her early life.

He had been a skilled cultivator, his own dreams of restoring the Su family's glory tragically, prematurely, cut short by a lingering, insidious injury sustained years ago in a desperate border skirmish against a tide of savage Frontier spirit beasts – a perilous duty he had undertaken, she knew, primarily to curry favor with the then-provincial governor, to gain some small measure of protection for their struggling clan. His voice – a constant, beloved echo in the most sacred chambers of her heart, still whispered to her in moments of doubt:

"You, Lian'er," he would say, his eyes alight with a fierce, unwavering pride, "you possess the true, unquenchable fire of the ancient Su blood, the indomitable spirit of the undying Phoenix. You will soar where others stumble. You will restore our name to its rightful place among the stars."

His death, when she was but a girl of twelve, had left an aching, irreplaceable void in her young life – but it had also forged within her an ironclad, almost fanatical determination to fulfill his hopes, to prove that his unwavering faith in her was not misplaced.

This was her sacred, burning drive, the very core of her being.

Her gaze, as she walked, swept over the faded, threadbare tapestries that lined the hallways, their once-vibrant colors now muted by centuries of dust and neglect. They depicted scenes of Su ancestors in their glorious zenith: two formidable, awe-inspiring Nascent Soul cultivators, their ethereal auras rendered in threads of spun gold and crimson silk, their expressions conveying a serene wisdom and an unshakeable power as they advised emperors of the now-legendary, and long-fallen, Celestial Phoenix Dynasty.

The Su name, four long centuries ago, had been one to conjure with: a name that commanded respect and awe throughout the opulent, spirit-rich Core Provinces of the Empire.

Then came the Cataclysm – the "Fall" as the elders still referred to it in hushed, mournful tones.

The Celestial Phoenix Dynasty, grown decadent, complacent, and blind to the shifting tides of power, had shattered.

A brutal, protracted, and utterly devastating civil war had torn the Empire asunder.

The Su family, fiercely – and perhaps foolishly – loyal to the old regime, had chosen a losing side.

The consequences had been nothing short of catastrophic. All of their powerful cultivators: every Golden Core expert who had not fallen in battle, every revered Nascent Soul powerhouse – were systematically, ruthlessly hunted down and slaughtered by the ascendant Tianlong forces.

Their vast, unimaginably wealthy estates in the Core Provinces – the legendary spirit gardens that bloomed year-round with priceless herbs, the jade-walled palaces that resonated with the ambient Qi of heaven and earth – were all confiscated, their centuries of accumulated influence eradicated, their once-glorious name all but erased from the annals of Imperial power.

Only their most distant, least significant peripheral properties, like this very manor in the impoverished, strategically irrelevant Azure Province, had survived the purge – and that only by a hair's breadth, a quirk of fate and Imperial pragmatism. The new Emperor Tianlong Ao, a figure of cold, calculating, and utterly ruthless genius, had sought to stabilize the chaotic, lawless Frontier regions by garrisoning them with cultivators – even those of questionable loyalty – if they could be cowed into submission. The battered, bleeding, and terrified remnants of the Su family, led by a handful of surviving, shell-shocked Foundation Establishment elders, had performed the deepest, most humiliating kowtow before the new Dragon Throne, pledging their family's absolute, unwavering, and eternal loyalty. They offered up their cultivators, their meager knowledge of the Frontier, and their very lives, as a bulwark against the dangers of the wild lands.

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They succeeded – if such exile could be called a success.

Their lives were indeed spared, but their pride, their honor, their very spirit… were ground into the dust of their ancestors' desecrated tombs.

The Su family became glorified provincial watchdogs on a short, unforgiving Imperial leash, their former glory a constant, bitter ache in their collective memory, a too-recent, too-painful dream that soured into nightmare with each passing, ignominious year.

The current head of the family, her Uncle Su Guangde, was a cautious, perpetually weary man, his face a roadmap of anxiety and carefully concealed despair, forever balancing the crushing need to maintain the outward appearances of nobility with their catastrophically dwindling resources.

Their last, flickering beacon of hope, their Golden Core Ancestor, Great-Uncle Su Tiancheng, had been in death-door seclusion for nearly fifty agonizing years now, clinging to the last frayed threads of his lifespan, his Qi a guttering candle in a storm. The entire family's meager income – every hoarded spirit stone, every carefully cultivated, precious medicinal herb – was strained to the breaking point for a single purpose: to provide him with the necessary elixirs, Qi-rich concoctions, and rare treasures for a final, desperate, and almost certainly futile, attempt to break through the heaven-defying barrier to the Nascent Soul realm.

His chances, the elders whispered in hushed, fearful tones when they thought no one was listening, were slim to none – less than one in a hundred. If he failed and died, as he surely would soon, the Su family would lose its last true pillar of deterrence, its last fragile claim to any semblance of significance in the ruthless calculus of power. They would become utterly vulnerable, defenseless prey to any ambitious local power – or even just any random group of Foundation Establishment level wondering cultivators – their remaining holdings ripe for the picking.

The pressure on Su Lian, with her prominent, potent Fire-attribute talent and her impressive, hard-won Stage Eight Qi Gathering cultivation, was therefore immense.

Almost unbearable.

She was the family's brightest, and perhaps even only, hope for the next generation.

But cultivation – true cultivation that led to real power – was less about talent and more about resources and logistics. It was an expensive, resource-hungry marathon, and the Su family's wealth was – to their great shame – only a pale shadow of what it once was.

A strategic partnership, an infusion of fresh resources, was not merely desirable; it was utterly essential for their family survival.

Enter the Jiang family, with their trade connections, their rare ore deposits, and their two literal spirit stone mines in the neighboring provinces (low yield though they might be).

The Jiangs represented a resource lifeline the Su family desperately needed, while the Su family represented reputation – and known secluded Golden Core Ancestor deterrence – that the Jiangs' ever expanding commercial operations required.

The engagement to Jiang Li, however personally distasteful, however profoundly humiliating, had been a calculated, desperate strategic move by her Uncle. An attempt to gain access to the Jiang merchant family's burgeoning wealth and extensive trade networks – resources that could have bought the Ancestor a few more precious years (or even decades), a few more desperate chances at a critical breakthrough… or at the very least, bolstered their family's flagging fortunes and shored up their crumbling defenses.

Resources, Su Lian knew with a cold pragmatism that warred with her personal disgust, that could have very well given her a real chance of reaching Foundation Establishment swiftly – and perhaps, just perhaps, allowing her to advance to Golden Core within a reasonable time, thus fulfilling her father's hopes.

The disgusting boor Jiang Li's 'trash' status, his abysmal reputation, his utter lack of discernible talent – all these had been known quantities: a manageable, if deeply unpleasant, downside to an otherwise strategically necessary transaction.

This "new," unpredictable Jiang Li, however?

He was an unmitigated disaster.

He had not only shattered the alliance – the lifeline her entire family had hoped for – but had done so in a way that heaped fresh, public scorn upon their already tarnished, fragile name!

+++

Thus momentarily lost in her thoughts, Su Lian arrived at the imposing, shadow-wreathed, double-doored entrance to the Hall of Ancestral Admonishment.

The chamber beyond was stark, cold, and deliberately intimidating – its high, vaulted ceiling lost in an oppressive gloom. Rows upon rows of unlit spirit lamps sat like sightless eyes before lacquered ancestral tablets, each bearing the elegantly carved name of a Su ancestor, stretching back through nigh-forgotten generations. In the dim, unsteady light filtering from a few strategically placed, pulsating glowstones, the tablets seemed to watch with a silent, eternal, and deeply disapproving judgment.

The air within was heavy, stagnant, thick with the cloying, sweetish scent of old, cold incense, the bitter, metallic aroma of medicinal herbs constantly used for treating injuries sustained during "disciplinary sessions" such as the one about to occur, and the faint, unmistakable, chilling tang of fear and old, dried blood that seemed to have seeped into the very stones.

Polished black flagstones, worn smooth and slightly concave by centuries of kneeling supplicants, gleamed dimly, reflecting the flickering lights like pools of dark water.

The key family figures were already assembled, their presence adding to the oppressive weight in the room.

Her Uncle, Su Guangde, the current Family Head, stood stiffly before the central ancestral altar, his face grim, his shoulders slumped as if bearing an invisible, crushing mountain.

Elder Su Bohai, his face a mask of cold, impassive granite, stood to one side like a stone sentinel, his very presence radiating an aura of unyielding, harsh discipline.

Su Lian's own mother, Lady Liu, was also present – a tall, trembling figure huddled near a shadowed pillar, her face pale and etched with a helpless anxiety, her hands twisting a silk handkerchief into knots, but utterly powerless to intervene.

This was a matter of clan law, of family survival. Maternal sentiment had no place here.

Her cousin, Su Mei, was already there: a crumpled, pathetic figure kneeling upon the cold stone floor before the assembled elders.

Her usual vibrant arrogance, her haughty, often misplaced disdain, had been stripped away, replaced by a volatile, ugly mixture of raw, animalistic terror.

Her fine silk robes, usually so immaculate and vibrant, were pooled in a rumpled heap around her ankles, leaving her back bare from the waist up, exposed to the chill, damp air and the judging, unforgiving eyes of the elders.

Elder Su Bohai, his voice a dry, emotionless monotone that seemed to suck the very warmth and life from the room, began to read Su Mei's transgressions from a heavy, spirit beast leather-bound ledger, each word falling like a hammer blow in the charged silence.

"Su Mei, of the third branch," he intoned, "for bringing profound and public shame and ridicule upon the esteemed Su family name through repeated acts of public idiocy and uncontrolled, ill-considered outbursts at the Myriad Treasures Pavilion auction. For recklessly, unforgivably, endangering the clan's fragile standing and very survival through blatant disrespect shown, however indirectly, towards an Imperial Princess of the Tianlong Dynasty. For making the Su family a laughingstock amongst the other prominent families of Fallen Star City and, indeed, the wider Azure Province. The prescribed punishment, as decreed by the unanimous decision of the Council of Elders…"

He paused for effect.

"…is thirty lashes with the Thorned Vine Rattan."

Two stern-faced family enforcers, cultivators themselves at the mid-Qi Gathering stage, their expressions as impassive and unyielding as the stone walls they guarded, stepped forward from the deeper shadows near the entrance. One carried the instrument of punishment, and Su Lian felt her stomach clench despite herself.

The "Thorned Vine Rattan."

It was no ordinary cane, no simple instrument of mortal discipline.

No, this was a specially cultivated spirit plant, harvested from the treacherous, Qi-fouled swamps of the nearby Frontier, its wood – a dark, sickly, almost black-green, disturbingly flexible, its entire length covered in minute, almost invisible, razor-sharp barbs that glinted faintly in the dim light.

These thorns, Su Lian knew from the terrifying childhood tales meant to instill absolute obedience, were capable of not only drawing blood with vicious, horrifying efficiency – even from the toughened qi-infused bodies of Early Foundation Establishment level offenders – but also inflicted an intense, burning, almost spiritual pain that resonated directly and agonizingly with a cultivator's meridians, disrupting Qi flow and leaving deep, ragged, agonizingly slow-healing wounds that would throb and burn for weeks, sometimes even months after the initial application, in a brutal, constant reminder of the transgression.

The punishment began without further preamble.

Each strike was delivered with practiced, brutal precision, the enforcer's movements economical and efficient. The rattan whistled through the air before landing with a sickening, wet thwack that echoed with obscene clarity in the cavernous, silent hall.

Su Mei bit back her initial screams, her body arching violently, uncontrollably, with each soul-shattering impact, her knuckles white where she clenched her fists against the cold, unforgiving stone.

But soon, the relentless, escalating agony became unbearable.

Su Lian watched, a cold fascination warring with her disgust, as angry red welts rose instantly on her cousin's pale skin, the tiny barbs tearing flesh with horrifying ease. Dark blood welled up – shockingly crimson against the white of Su Mei's back – and began to trickle down in obscene, glistening rivulets.

Her gritted teeth gave way to choked, animalistic sobs, and then to raw, piercing screams of pure, unadulterated agony – that were quickly, efficiently muffled by a thick leather gag one of the enforcers produced and brutally applied.

The cloying, almost metallic smell of fresh blood – sharp and sickening – mingled with the cold, damp stone and the ancient, stale incense.

The thirty lashes were delivered without pause, without mercy, each one a metronome-like beat marking the Su family's descent.

Su Lian watched, her expression carefully, meticulously neutral – a mask of filial piety and detached observation.

Internally, however, a maelstrom raged.

On an intellectual level, she indeed understood, with a cold, hard clarity: Su Mei's monumental, unforgivable stupidity had indeed risked them all. Discipline, harsh and exemplary though it might be, was not only necessary but unavoidable.

And yet, her cousin, Su Mei – for all her flaws, her arrogance, her often-infuriating impulsiveness – had been one of her few true confidantes through the lonely, stifling years of their youth. She was the one who had always been the quickest to leap to Su Lian's defense.

To champion her honor.

To comfort her when she was sad.

Seeing her, perhaps the closest friend she'd ever had, gagged, broken, and screaming silently under that relentless lash… it twisted something cold, sharp, and unexpectedly painful deep in Su Lian's gut.

A bitter, unwelcome wave of guilt washed over her.

This was all her fault.

Had she not confided her frustrations, her humiliations regarding Jiang Li, to Su Mei?

Had her own tears of rage and shame after Jiang Li's contemptuous dismissal not fueled Su Mei's misguided, protective fury?

Perhaps, if Su Lian herself attended that Auction – as she should have – she might have been able to restrain her cousin's reckless tongue, to prevent the catastrophe with the Princess altogether.

Now, Su Mei paid the brutal price for a loyalty that Su Lian, in her heart of hearts, knew was genuine – if terribly expressed.

Beneath the chilling fear for her family's survival, a sliver of genuine anguish for her cousin's suffering took root; a small, unwelcome flower of compassion in the barren wasteland of her carefully cultivated indifference.

This, she thought with a sudden, stark clarity, is the brutal, unvarnished reality of my family – harsh, unforgiving, and desperate to maintain control, to project an illusion of strength even as they crumble from within.

The sickening sounds of the lashes, and Su Mei's muffled, agonized cries, were a visceral, terrifying reminder of the consequences of failure. The consequences of bringing shame to the Su name.

Of threatening their precarious, fragile survival in this unforgiving world.

Su Mei, finally broken – a whimpering, sobbing, barely conscious wreck, her back a mangled, unrecognizable ruin of bleeding, shredded flesh – was dragged away unceremoniously by two grim-faced servants. She left a glistening, dark trail of her own blood spots on the pristine, polished black flagstones of the Hall.

The enforcers, their task completed, wiped the Thorned Vine Rattan clean with a silk cloth, the gesture chillingly methodical, their faces still impassive, as if they had merely been pruning a recalcitrant rose bush rather than brutally torturing a clan member.

Elder Su Bohai, his gaze like chips of obsidian, cold and unyielding, turned his unwavering attention upon Su Lian.

"Su Lian, of the main branch," his voice was flat, devoid of any familial warmth, any hint of compassion. "Step forward."

Her Uncle, Su Guangde, the Family Head, finally spoke, his voice heavy with a profound, weary disappointment and a soul-deep exhaustion that seemed to age him years in mere moments. His tone was not one of overt anger, not the fiery rage that Su Lian herself might have felt in his position, but of a sorrow, a resignation, that cut deeper.

That felt heavier.

He proceeded to scold her for even thinking of jeopardizing the Jiang engagement. For daring to prioritize her own feelings, her own pride, over the desperate needs of the clan.

Jiang Li's past behavior, his prospects, his worthiness – these were, her uncle made brutally clear, utterly irrelevant.

"Do you not yet understand, child?"

Su Guangde's voice, though quiet, was laced with a raw, palpable frustration, an elder's despair at a youth's perceived folly.

"Do you truly not comprehend the precipice upon which our entire lineage now stands? This was never about your personal feelings, your petty grievances, or that boy's supposed "worthiness!" From the start, this was about securing the Jiang resources! About the survival of the Su family! Your so-called 'honor,' your 'pride,' your 'humiliation' – these are all insignificant trifles, child! Meaningless vanities, and ones we cannot afford! Your "pride" is a small, contemptible price to pay when the fate of our entire lineage, the legacy of generations of Su ancestors, now hangs by the thinnest, most fragile of threads!"

He paused, while Elder Su Bohai interjected, his voice a harsh rasp.

"The other, equally unforgivable issue, child, was the manner of the engagement's ending. Jiang Li, the supposed trash, the boy you had so publicly and vocally scorned, had seized the initiative! He had publicly annulled the engagement with you. By allowing him to do so, you made the entire Su family look like utter fools. You… had failed to manage the situation. You had brought shame upon our name."

"Face, child! Face is all we have left!" Elder Su Bohai concluded.

"And you have allowed ours to be publicly trampled into the mud by an upstart Jiang brat!"

Su Lian remained silent, her head bowed in a carefully constructed semblance of filial obedience, enduring the litany of her perceived failures.

Internally, however, she seethed.

A silent, choked scream of injustice, of rage, of utter, helpless frustration, clawed at her throat.

She was the one who had been constantly tormented by Jiang Li's calculated insults, his boorishness, his utter lack of respect!

She was the one who had found the arrangement with the degenerate Jiang Li a daily, soul-crushing humiliation – but she had borne it all for years, hadn't she?

Stoically.

For the sake of the family.

For the sake of the Ancestor.

For the sake of her father's memory.

And now, because of his unpredictable, impossible, infuriating actions, she was the one being blamed for the fallout!

It was an unbearable, crushing injustice.

But she knew, with a certainty that tasted like ash in her mouth, that the family needed a scapegoat.

The family needed to demonstrate, to themselves as much as to any outside observers, that such public failures, such a catastrophic loss of face, would not be tolerated. A lesson, brutal and unforgettable, must be taught.

Her own punishment was decreed by Elder Su Bohai, his voice ringing with the cold, immutable finality of clan law:

"For failing in your sacred duty to the family. For allowing a strategically critical engagement to be broken. For allowing the Su name to be dragged through the mud and mire of public ridicule…"

"Twenty lashes with the Thorned Vine Rattan."

Fewer lashes than Su Me.

A small, almost insulting concession to her superior talent and her critical importance to the family's future… but still, twenty brutal, soul-searing strokes with the same horrific instrument.

It was as much about ritual humiliation, about reinforcing the absolute, unyielding nature of familial obedience, as it was about the physical pain.

She was forced to kneel on the same blood-flecked stones where Su Mei had so recently suffered.

With steady, deliberate hands, her face a mask of icy composure, she unfastened her outer robes, letting the fine, embroidered silk fall in a heap around her, baring her back to the cold, judgment-filled air of the Hall.

The silent, watching eyes of her family – her weary, disappointed uncle, her implacable, stone-faced elder, her weeping, helpless mother – felt like physical weights pressing down on her, crushing the very breath from her lungs.

The enforcer, his face still a blank, impassive mask, stepped forward, the Thorned Vine Rattan held ready, its dark green length seeming to writhe with a malevolent life of its own in the flickering glowstone light.

The first lash whistled through the air, a sound that seemed to tear the very fabric of the silence, and landed with searing, unimaginable pain across her shoulders.

It was not just the mere physical tearing of skin and muscle – a kind pain she, as a genius cultivator enhanced by Ling Qi and hardened by years of rigorous training – could perhaps have endured with gritted teeth.

No, if only it were that simple.

The savage thorns of the cane were imbued with a dark, insidious Poison Qi – a mutated, corrupted form of Water Qi, she registered with a detached, analytical part of her mind – which sent jolts of pure, unadulterated agony directly into her meridians. It felt as if her carefully cultivated Fire Qi, the very essence of her being, her father's very legacy, was being violated.

Contaminated.

Desecrated from within by an unnatural, violating intrusion that sought to extinguish her inner flame.

She bit her lip so hard that she tasted the warm, metallic tang of her own blood, her body arching involuntarily, a strangled gasp escaping her lips.

But she refused to cry out, her fierce, indomitable pride warring with the overwhelming, soul-shattering agony.

A faint shimmer of heat, quickly suppressed, pulsed around her as her own Fire Qi instinctively tried to repel the invading poison. She suppressed the urge with a monumental effort of will.

With each subsequent lash, a dark, terrible resolve began to crystallize within her, forged in the crucible of unbearable pain and profound humiliation. The agony was a living thing, a ravenous beast tearing not only at her flesh, but at her very spirit.

The shame of the experience was a suffocating shroud.

But instead of breaking, her spirit – the fiery core of her being – hardened.

Tempered.

Became something… dangerous.

She didn't blame her family, not truly. Not anymore. After all, they were mere products of their history, their fear, their crushing, all-consuming desperation. They were merely reacting – however cruelly, however unjustly – to forces they could not control, clinging to the tattered illusion of authority, of order, in a world that had long since abandoned them to their fate.

No, the true architect of this misery, the one who had upended her life, shattered her carefully laid plans, and brought this fresh wave of suffering and humiliation upon her and her house…

Was Jiang Li.

His smug, dismissive face, as she vividly remembered it from their encounter in his opulent suite in Fallen Star City, floated before her eyes – a taunting, infuriating image. He, with his inexplicable wealth.

His casual, almost bored cruelty in rejecting her.

His arrogant disruption of the established order.

His impossible transformation from despised, worthless trash to an enigmatic, untouchable powerhouse.

He was the one to blame.

He was the source of all this pain, all this shame!

As the final, brutal lash fell, and a wave of dizzying blackness threatened to engulf her senses, she made a silent, burning vow, a promise etched into the very core of her being with the acid of her own poison-tainted blood and the unquenchable fire of her indomitable will.

Jiang Li.

The name was a curse, a prayer, a promise of retribution.

You will pay for this.

You will pay for every drop of blood, for every moment of humiliation, for every shattered hope.

I swear it upon the sacred names of my ancestors, upon the fire that burns within my soul, upon the fading glory of the Phoenix!

I will join the Azure Cloud Sect.

I will cultivate with a ferocity you cannot even imagine.

I will grow stronger than you, stronger than anyone in this forsaken province.

And, in the end, I will be the one to crush you; to erase the taint of your smug, arrogant existence from the face of this world. I will restore my family's honor, not with pathetic, humiliating alliances, but with my own strength! My own power!

…

And I will have my vengeance.

Su Lian remained kneeling, her body trembling uncontrollably with pain and suppressed fury, the metallic taste of her own blood thick and cloying in her mouth.

Her gaze lifted, drawn by an unseen force to a large, utterly ancient tapestry that dominated a corner of the Hall. It was a faded thing, its once vibrant crimsons and golds now muted to dull browns and tarnished yellows.

It depicted a magnificent Phoenix, its wings spread wide in glorious flight, its eyes blazing with an indomitable fire.

But now, Su Lian saw – with a new, chilling clarity – that the threads were frayed, the noble bird's plumage moth-eaten, its fiery gaze dimmed by centuries of dust and despair. One great wing seemed to droop, as if broken.

The Phoenix was dying.

But Su Lian, kneeling in her own blood, would not let its fire be extinguished.

She would become the flame.