Chapter 817: Rèn’s Beginning [Bonus - ]
Chapter 817: Rèn’s Beginning [Bonus Chapter]
From the corner of the room, a soft musical peal of laughter echoed through the quiet room.
“There is no need to suffocate yourself beneath the linen, little sun,” Eluned’s sweet voice chuckled gently.
The comforter shifted slightly.
A tiny round opening parted in the edge of the blanket, and two wide shining golden eyes peeked out like a startled kitten hiding beneath a sofa cushion.
Standing beside the bay window was the breathtaking woman with cascading silver-green hair and emerald eyes, wearing a gown woven from living leaves and morning mist.
“I am Eluned,” the green-haired woman said softly, curtsying with effortless, divine grace. “Goddess of the World Tree, keeper of this soil… and the wife of the Lord who just laid his hand upon your head.”
Lilianel’s eyes widened slightly beneath the blanket, her cheeks burning even hotter at the mention of his touch.
She swallowed hard, her voice coming out as a tiny, fragile, hesitant whisper:
“Am I… am I really out of the dark…?”
The question held no pride and no celestial bravado… It was the raw trembling voice of an abandoned child asking if the nightmare had truly ended.
Eluned’s smile softened into deep aching compassion.
She walked over to the bed, her movements slow and non-threatening, and sat down gently on the edge of the mattress beside the curled-up bundle of blankets.
“You are out now, ” Eluned whispered. “The chains that bound you are broken… The void cannot reach you here… You are standing upon the earth of Blessed Land, under a sky that answers to our Lord.”
She looked like she suffered from void sickness, at least that was what Elu had felt… She would know since she had once faced the entity behind the void.
Lilianel slowly lowered the comforter down to her chin, her wild molten-gold mane spilling over the sheets as she looked up at the older goddess.
“You are… a goddess too?” Lilianel asked quietly, her golden pupils searching Eluned’s face.
“I was,” Eluned answered, looking down at her own pale hands with a faint, nostalgic smile. “Long before Blessed Land, I was the Goddess of the World Tree, and I lost almost everything I had… When I first stepped onto this soil, I was terrified… I carried the weight of an entire lost world on my shoulders, wondering how a foreign sky could ever tolerate my roots.”
She looked back at Lilianel, her emerald eyes glowing with radiant warmth.
“And do you know what I found?” Eluned continued softly. “I found that the sun and the tree need each other to live… Without the earth, the light has nowhere to rest… without the light, the roots freeze in the dark so we were meant to share this courtyard, sister.”
Lilianel blinked with her throat bobbing as the tension began to melt from her small shoulders.
“His hands…” Lilianel murmured, her fingers lightly touching the top of her own head where Silas’s palm had rested. “…they were so warm… When I was trapped in the cold, I used to catch tiny fleeting glimpses of his face in my glimpses of what might come… I thought he was just an illusion born from my own madness.”
“He is very real,” Eluned laughed softly while leaning forward. “And he is very warm… Though if you faint every single time he pats your hair, we are going to need to install mattresses across the entire territory so try not to.”
’…Still at least try not to get pregnant so quickly like Morwenna.’
Lilianel’s face flared red again, but this time, a tiny defiant little smirk cracked through her embarrassment.
“H-Hey!” Lilianel huffed, crossing her arms over the comforter and puffing out her chest with sudden tomboyish pride. “I was disoriented, that’s all! A supreme goddess of the golden dawn does not faint from simple physical contact! It was a rest maneuver!”
“Of course it was,” Eluned teased, her eyes sparkling with delight at the girl’s sudden return of spirit. “A very big nap with a very dreamy smile…”
“I did not smile dreamily!” Lilianel argued, her cheeks burning as she kicked her bare feet under the sheets. “I was planning my retaliation! Next time he reaches out, I’m going to bite his fingers!”
“He might actually like that, so be careful,” Eluned whispered with a conspiratorial wink.
Lilianel froze, her eyes going wide as she processed the innuendo, her entire face turning the color of a ripe cherry once more.
“W-What kind of things do you people do in this place?!” she squeaked, clutching the blanket.
Eluned threw her head back and laughed as she reached down, taking Lilianel’s small warm hand in both of her own, squeezing gently.
“Welcome home, Lilianel,” Eluned said, her voice dropping into a beautiful divine blessing. “The night is over and the dawn has returned.”
Lilianel stared at the green-haired goddess, her golden irises trembling.
A single hot tear welled up at the corner of her eye, spilling down her soft cheek, followed by another, and another.
…She did not wipe them away.
“O…O…”
A wide breathtakingly joyful smile broke across Lilianel’s face, brighter than any noon sky.
“O-Okay, thank you!”
She sniffled softly, letting out a wet happy laugh, and burrowed her face back into the down pillows, letting the warmth of the room wash over her back.
Across the room, perched on the stone windowsill, the young sunflower remained perfectly still with its golden petals tilted faithfully toward the bed, drinking in the only sun it would ever need.
Down in the central courtyard, Silas stood alone before the gleaming quartz pedestal of the Dawnspire Gateway.
The breeze tugged at his dark hair, the cold marble cool beneath the soles of his boots as the girls gathered in a quiet watchful semicircle ten yards behind him.
Silas looked down at the second Hero Summoning Ticket resting between his fingers.
The gold-and-crimson cardstock felt warm, almost pulsing with a heartbeat that resonated against the Mythic Gold Core spinning steadily behind his ribs.
He stepped forward.
With a steady deliberate motion, Silas laid the ticket flat upon the circular silver plate mounted in the center of the pedestal.
The silver surface hummed as the intricate runes etched around the rim flared to life with crisp azure light.
A glowing transparent golden system interface snapped into existence in the air before his eyes.
[Hero Summoning Ticket detected… Begin Hero Summon?]
[Y / N]
Silas did not hesitate.
He raised his right index finger, pressing firmly down upon the glowing golden [Y].
HUMMM!
The Dawnspire Gateway detonated into life.
The towering marble arches glowed with ancient, blinding conduits, the quartz pillars roaring with an overwhelming surge of concentrated spatial mana that rattled the stones beneath his boots.
A towering pillar of blinding light shot straight up from the center of the platform, tearing through the lower cloud layers and piercing deep into the night sky.
Kaelia, Lupina, and Aurelia took an instinctive step backward, raising their hands to shield their eyes.
This summon was completely different from Lilianel’s… The soaring shaft of light was not the warm radiant dawn-gold that had restored the sun goddess.
It was an ominous gold heavily streaked and marbled with deep visceral crimson.
Thick veins of dark blood-red energy crackled through the golden column, radiating a suffocating pressure of slaughter and endless war that made the hair on Silas’s arms stand straight up.
The chatter behind him died instantly.
The girls went completely silent with their bodies dropping into defensive combat stances as the temperature plummeted.
High above the valley, the sky over Blessed Land began to churn.
The dark clouds rolling over the mountain peaks, lit from below by the pillar, twisted into an aggressive unnatural shade of rust and iron.
Within seconds, the entire sky above the territory turned the terrifying color of freshly spilled blood.
Silas stood perfectly still at the base of the roaring pillar, the golden ring in his dark blue eyes flaring with intense light as the wind whipped his coat around his legs.
’What kind of monster is coming through that gate…?’ Silas thought, his fingers twitching instinctively toward the spatial inventory where his sword waited. ’Did we just summon a vampire…?’
…
The water barrel smelled of old river mud and damp rot.
A pair of small filthy hands clamped hard across a little girl’s nose and mouth, pressing so tightly that her fingernails bit into her sun-browned cheeks.
Her heart thumped against her narrow ribcage like a trapped sparrow slamming against a cage as the darkness inside the wooden slats was thick and right outside, barely an inch from the warped pine, a familiar, trembling voice dropped into an agonizingly soft whisper.
“Don’t make a sound… Not one.”
’N-noo…’
Three years earlier, the autumn sun had hung clean and golden over the craggy crest of Mount Cangmu.
Six-year-old Rèn stood barefoot on the cracked flagstones of the main courtyard, her toes curled against the cool granite.
She was a scrawny hollow-cheeked slip of a child, her coarse homespun tunic torn at both knees and stiff with road dust.
Her jet-black hair was an untamed bird’s nest, tangled into wild knots that dropped across her forehead, framing two dark crimson eyes that stared out at the world with the wary unblinking caution of an alley cat that expected to be kicked.
Resting atop a weathered stone pedestal in the center of the courtyard was a smooth, melon-sized chunk of dull gray jade.
…Standing beside the pedestal was the Master of the Quiet Pine Sect.
He was an old man, stooped at the shoulders, with a sparse gray beard that drifted down the front of a faded hemp robe patched at both elbows.
His knuckles were swollen with the stiffness of seventy winters, and his breathing was slow and wheezy, like an old set of fireplace bellows.
“Step forward, child,” the Master said, his voice mild and unhurried. “Lay your right hand upon the Spirit-Discerning Stone… Let your breath settle, and see what the heavens planted in your bones.”
Rèn rubbed her dirty palms against her thighs, hesitated for a second, and shuffled forward.
She reached out with a skinny bruised hand, placing her palm flat against the cool glass-smooth surface of the jade and for three long breaths, nothing happened.
Then, deep within the center of the stone, a microscopic spark of sickly pale light flickered once, like a dying firefly trapped under a wet leaf, before guttering out entirely.
…The jade returned to dull dead slate.
From the covered wooden walkway circling the courtyard, half a dozen older disciples leaned over the railing and burst into collective snickering.
“Not even a grade-nine spirit root…” one of the teenage boys laughed softly, leaning on his broom. “The spark didn’t even reach the outer ring! She doesn’t have enough spiritual aptitude to boil a pot of tea!”
“Where did the old man find this one?” another girl giggled, adjusting her hair ribbon. “A common farmer’s ditch, most likely… She’ll never condense a drop of qi.”
Rèn pulled her hand back, curling her fingers into tight fists with her dark crimson eyes narrowing with sudden defiance as she glared up at the porch.
The old Master did not laugh.
He leaned on his gnarled walking staff, his rheumy watery eyes studying the little girl’s rigid shoulders, her stubborn chin, and the fierce fire burning in her dark pupils.
He looked at her bare, bloodied soles, calloused from weeks of walking along the mountain roads without shoes, and let out a soft gentle sigh that rustled his beard.
The Master reached behind his back, picked up an ordinary straw broom leaning against the pedestal, and held the wooden handle out toward her.
“Well then,” the Master said, his tone as warm and plain as steamed bread. “You’ll sweep the steps… Somebody has to… Three hundred and twelve of them from the main gate down to the village road… Sweep them clean every morning, and there will always be a bowl of rice with your name on it.”
Rèn stared at the straw broom, then looked up into the old man’s wrinkled face.
She took the handle.
…That was how the scrawny stray with wild hair became the eleventh disciple of the Quiet Pine Sect.
It was not a grand or famous sanctuary.
Quiet Pine had no towering jade pagodas, no soaring spirit beasts circling the peaks, and no wealthy merchant guilds showering its vaults with medicinal pills and golden taels.
It was a poor crumbling mountain sect consisting of three drafty wooden halls, an overgrown vegetable garden, a noisy chicken coop, and eleven orphans living under the care of a Master who moved too slowly to catch a runaway goat…
Yet, for Rèn, those three years on the mountain were the brightest warmest days the sun had ever shone upon.
Every morning, before the rooster in the lower coop could even crow, Rèn was out of her bunk.
“Time to get on with morning duties~”
Her straw broom was nearly a foot taller than she was, but she gripped the handle with fierce stubborn determination, starting from the heavy pine gates at the summit and working her way down the three hundred and twelve granite steps that wound through the misty bamboo groves.
SWISH!
SWISH!
SWISH!
She had no idea that one day, she would climb those same three hundred and twelve steps again with a very different blade in her hand.