Chapter 60: Boundless Love

After I crossed the threshold into Lonely Cloud Peak and became the official disciple of that benevolent immortal, I discovered a life I didn’t even know I was permitted to dream of. I didn’t know something like this even existed.

My benefactor hadn’t simply saved me from the butcher’s knife, he had given me back my dignity, handed me a future, and opened the grand, golden gates of the immortal path before my bleeding feet.

Over those first few days, he guided me through the foundational truths of cultivation with boundless patience, personally instructing me in our peak’s ancient technique, the Cloud Flowing Origin Scripture and our arts which I tried my best to master. I didn’t want to disappoint him.

He even flew across the summits to borrow clean, luxurious moonlight-silk robes from his own Senior Sister, the Sect Master, simply so I wouldn’t have to spend another night shivering in damp disciple rags.

Every single breath I drew on that mountain was a gift carved entirely from his generosity.

Sitting in the courtyard one quiet afternoon, watching him sip bitter tea under the ancient banyan tree, the crushing weight of his kindness became too heavy for my chest to bear.

I knelt before his stone table, lowered my forehead against the jade tiles, and asked him if there was any possible way a ruined, worthless mortal like me could ever repay such an ocean of grace. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

In my heart, I knew the answer was already bleak. I possessed no family name, no wealth, and no divine talent. What could a beggar like me offer an immortal?

Instead of brushing me aside, Master set his cup down and looked at me with soft, unusually quiet eyes.

He spoke of his own past. He told me of the bone-chilling loneliness that had haunted this mountain ever since his own master passed a decade ago, leaving him as the sole guardian of an empty, silent peak.

Listening to his voice, every word resonated deep inside my soul.

Didn’t I feel the exact same agony?

When the blood of my clan dried on the garrison stones, the world hadn’t just become cruel, it had become an unbearable, deafening void of solitary silence.

I knew the horror of an empty home better than anyone alive.

Then, he leaned forward, looked straight into my eyes, and spoke words that shattered my reality, he told me he was searching for a family, and that he wanted me to become his wife.

Without a fraction of a second’s hesitation, my soul screamed to agree. How could it not?

I, too, hungered for a family with every fiber of my being. If surrendering my body and my future could help this benevolent man drive away the suffocating loneliness of his peak, I would have walked through fire to do it.

Compared to the life and marrow he had gifted me, offering myself as his companion was practically nothing.

Yet, right beneath that desperate willingness, a suffocating, bitter hesitation seized my throat.

Did I even deserve to sit beside him?

He was a transcendent immortal master of the grand Mystic Cloud Sect, untouchable and pure. I was a disgraced, hunted orphan whose ancestral name had been dragged through imperial sewage.

To serve as his lowly maid, to wash his teacups and sweep his fallen leaves, would have been an unimaginable honor. How could I ever be worthy of claiming the title of his wife?

And yet, he wanted me. He looked past the filth, past my ruined past, and chose me. It was his desire, and so I swallowed my unworthiness, bowed my head, and swore to be everything he needed.

Still, if I was completely honest with myself in those first quiet nights... I did not love him.

I held eternal, bottomless gratitude toward him. I worshipped the ground his white boots touched, and I would have severed my own neck without flinching if he commanded it. But gratitude was not love.

And that was entirely acceptable to me. Born into a mortal military house, my destiny had always been to be married off in a political match to some distant lord or arrogant noble officer I had never met.

At least here, on this peaceful peak, my life was being offered to my savior. It was the purest repayment I could ever offer.

Unsurprisingly, Master saw through me entirely. Master always knew everything.

He read the guarded, filial devotion in my eyes and understood that my compliance was born of duty and repayment, not genuine passion.

That was why he never once pressed his advantage. He never demanded my body, never forced an embrace, and never made a single untoward advance, ensuring that every touch and every word remained entirely within my comfort zone.

For an immortal who held total dominion over my life to show such gentle restraint moved me to tears.

Then, came the morning he took me down the mountain to Cloudfall City to buy clothes. That single day became permanently burned into the core of my heart.

I expected a quick errand, but Master turned the dusty mortal streets into an intoxicating dream. He bought me steaming delicacies, feeding me with his own chopsticks and teasing the tension from my shoulders.

Inside the silk pavilions, when I timidly tried to refuse the expensive fabrics, he laughed, pinched my cheek, and declared that his woman would never wear hand-me-downs.

He was the absolute embodiment of a true gentleman.

Walking beside him in the bustling streets, an ancient, buried memory from my childhood surfaced in my mind.

When I was a little girl sitting on the garrison walls, listening to traveling bards sing romantic tales of the central plains, I used to secretly dream of the impossible, a future husband who was strikingly handsome, warm, protective, quick with a laugh, and shameless enough to spoil me without caring about the rules of the world.

In the harsh reality of blood and iron, I had locked that childish fantasy away, believing such men existed only in ink.

Yet, walking beside Master... he was every single thing I had ever dreamed of, and so much more.

How could any woman with a beating heart not fall for him?

It truly didn’t take long at all.

In the span of a single afternoon, watching him laugh off arrogant shopkeepers and shower me with warmth, the fragile shell around my heart shattered completely.

I realized, with terrifying clarity, that I wasn’t just staying with him out of debt. Even if he hadn’t saved my life, even if he were just a wandering rogue without a sect to his name, I would still have chosen this man as my husband above all others.

As the quiet days of training on Lonely Cloud Peak slipped by, that fragile seedling of affection grew into an unyielding, towering tree.

With every cup of tea we shared, every sword stance he corrected, and every late-night story he whispered beneath the banyan tree, I fell for him harder, until my love became as vast and bottomless as the Eastern Wilderness itself.

Perhaps... my new life on the mountain had become so blindingly bright that it terrified me.

Unconsciously, the warmth of his embrace, the soft silk of my dresses, and the peace of Lonely Cloud Peak began acting as a soothing balm, making me want to hide from the nightmares of my past.

I didn’t even realize it until the night I sat beneath the stars, attempting to circulate the spiritual breath toward the Qi Condensation Realm.

As the ambient qi began gathering at my dantian, an icy chill gripped my soul. I realized, with sickening horror, that the happiness Master had given me was causing me to forget the very thing that had kept me alive in the mud.

How could I dare forget?

How could I sit in warm silk, smiling like a pampered young lady, while the bones of my mother, my father, and hundreds of loyal soldiers remained unburied, disgraced as traitors in the soil of Dayun?! How could I ever forgive the King and the corrupt ministers who butchered them in the dark?

Yet, a part of me truly did want to leave the misery behind. I didn’t want to live as an enraged, blood-soaked ghost forever, I wanted to live as Master’s wife, pure and untainted at his side.

That was why I forcibly halted my cultivation and approached him under the spirit tree. I begged him to let me settle my blood debt first, to butcher the traitors with mortal hands, close the bloody book of my mortal existence, and then step across the threshold into the Qi Condensation Realm.

Condensing qi was a rebirth, shedding the mortal vessel to become an immortal cultivator. I wanted to be reborn clean. I would forever carry the love and memories of my parents in my heart, but I would no longer be shackled by their ghosts.

To my immense relief, Master didn’t scold my foolishness. He smiled warmly, tapped my nose, and agreed immediately, promising to escort me back to my homeland himself.

Little did I know, as we set off on our warhorses toward the border, that this journey was never meant to be a simple march of vengeance.

My wise, unfathomable Master had an entire universe of profound lessons waiting to carve into my soul.