When she handed tea to Master, her fingertips would brush against his hand without meaning to.
When they walked side by side, her shoulder would graze his arm.
Every touch sent a faint current racing down her spine.
She trembled inwardly, secretly lost in that quiet infatuation.
Yet Master's response was always the same: restrained, distant.
Whenever they drew too close, he would casually step half a pace away.
Looking back, she realized that before the incident, Master had never openly rejected her nearness, nor had he ever spoken a word to stop her.
Master had always known that her closeness would only bring him endless impulses and pain, and that the cost would fall on the other two in her place.
To put it bluntly, Xueyi and Hanya had become little more than Master's living blood banks. More harshly still, they were portable medicine he used whenever the symptoms flared.
Whenever the need arose, he would find an opportunity to feed.
The seniors never complained. Yet Masters heart carried only deepening guilt.
Compared to her—an incompetent disciple lost in her own world, blind to so much of the effort and suffering around her—the help the seniors gave Master far surpassed anything she could offer.
But what of the two seniors themselves?
They clearly adored Master as well and gave so much, yet like her, they never received any true response from him.
In that sense, she was the one who had won.
Because Master had once told her, personally, that he might have fallen for her. He had never said those words to the seniors.
All those earlier romantic conjectures had been nothing but misunderstandings.
Sometimes when Master stayed overnight in Xueyi and Hanya's room, he was only teaching them his insights on cultivating the Self-Actualization Aspect.
Time continued to flow until that day finally arrived.
It was an afternoon in early autumn. The sunlight was warm.
While strolling with Master beside a scenic lakeside, she watched others walking arm in arm, leaning close.
She wanted the same. She wanted to take Master's arm and lean against the one she loved the way any ordinary woman might.
Driven by centuries of accumulated impulse, she summoned her courage and reached out, linking her arm tightly with his.
The moment she felt Master's warmth through the fabric of his sleeve, he pulled his arm away as if by reflex.
The movement was swift. The rejection was unmistakable.
Master frowned and asked what she was doing.
She could no longer hold back the flood of emotion that had built for so long. For the first time, she talked back to him.
She demanded to know why, after hundreds of years and every desperate effort to grow stronger and catch up, she still could not earn even a single glance from him.
Why could he dance and share close contact with the seniors, yet avoid her as though she were the plague?
She poured out every doubt she had carried for years, asking without mercy why Master hated her so much.
Looking back, Master's silence and the complete absence of emotion on his face had clearly been the effort of someone suppressing something far deeper.
With only a cold expression on the surface, he told her to let go.
He offered nothing more than a clumsy excuse, cold water thrown over the fire of her outburst.
Heartbroken, she felt as though the entire world had fallen into darkness.
For the first time, the thought of distancing herself from Master arose—of focusing solely on self-improvement so that she might grow stronger faster.
Her obsession did not fade. It grew nearly maddening.
Especially after the new Borisin Warhead appeared.
That hungry wolf named Hoolay became the destination of her pursuit of Master, the place where she could rightfully stand at his side.
Even if that destination was only her own wishful thinking.
At least it gave her something to look forward to.
She never expected that hope would last for hundreds of years without being fulfilled.
Until the century before Master's passing, Hoolay hid himself extremely well, proving to be the most cunning Borisin Warhead in history.
Living on the Luofu was not uncomfortable for her.
On an ordinary morning, the retired Xueyi flipped open a paper calendar for the new year.
Star Calendar year 7200.
There were still 138 years until Master and Shuhu would perish together.
"Xueyi, I will need your help for the coming period."
Kanzaki appeared behind her.
"Just say the word," Xueyi answered without hesitation.
"I want to forge a sword."
"But neither my younger sister nor I know how to…"
"It is not the forging process I need help with. Come with me."
A sudden sense of foreboding rose in Jingliu's heart.
Could the sword Master wanted to forge be Zhanhui?
But Master had only given Zhanhui to her in the winter of Star Calendar year 7277.
What kind of sword required seventy-seven years to forge?
Jingliu clung to a thin thread of hope.
Everything that followed completely shattered it.
She pressed her hand firmly over her lips, struggling to keep herself from crying out.
She watched Master cut open his own body day after day, removing bones from specific places.
For the parts he could not easily reach himself, he had Xueyi and the others do it for him.
Once those bones were gone, they regenerated. Once regenerated, they were taken again.
Master treated the bones as a special consumable material she could not understand, using them to forge the sword Zhanhui.
The blade was melted under extreme temperatures, mixed with powdered bone, and reshaped.
Once Zhanhui completed its second reshaping, it seemed as though it possessed life.
Integrating bones no longer required grinding them into powder. Simply bringing the two into contact allowed Zhanhui to absorb the bone into the blade on its own.
Afterward, Master added many other things.
Blood. Bone marrow. Organs.
He would even snap his own neck so that his head could be integrated into it.
This it was not that Zhanhui merely seemed to have life.
It actually did.
Jingliu's pupils trembled violently as she unbelievingly took out the sword—now broken into several pieces—and gently caressed it.
No wonder she had felt such immense peace every time she slept holding the sword.
The fundamental reason was that this sword had been forged by Master using his own body.
Zhanhui was Master's incarnation, bound by a life link that allowed any damage to repair itself.
To cast this sword, he had spent a full seventy-seven years.
The moment it was finished, Hanya finally could not help but speak, asking him the reason for forging this sword with himself as the material.
Xueyi cast the same questioning look.
Kanzaki did not answer immediately. Instead, he sheathed the yet-unnamed finished product, a look of quiet relief flashing across his face.
"Hanya, some monsters are hard to kill, or even impossible to kill. Those who can easily kill a monster, besides gods, are often only the monsters themselves."
"…"
The two sisters looked at each other in silence and understood at once.
In truth, it was not that they had never guessed the correct answer. They simply had not wanted to believe it.
"So this is a sword you forged specifically for Jingliu, isn't it?"
"That's right."
"Isn't this too cruel for her…"
"Perhaps. But someone has to do it. I've taught her that if I ever fall to the Mara-Struck state on the battlefield, she must show no mercy."
To fall to the Mara-Struck state was to become a monster, and a monster was equivalent to being Mara-Struck.
If I can slay Shuhu, perhaps that day will never come. But if the worst should happen…"
Kanzaki did not continue.
Yet whether it was the two sisters or Jingliu looking back at the past, they all understood the unspoken words.
"…"
Jingliu's emotions completely gave way.
She fell into an uncontrollable breakdown.
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