The horizon paled to a fish-belly white, and a faint breath of Spirit Energy spread from the eastern coast like a slow tide of mist.

Whoosh—

As if tugged by a hidden current, Nana Toki snapped her eyes open; confusion clung like morning dew to her lashes. Spirit Energy? So it’s a fantasy plane again?

A clamor rolled up from below Majestic Peak, noisy as sparrows in a storm, each shout carrying a ripple of Spirit Energy that slapped her awake like cold water. Someone’s here already? I haven’t even received the plane storyline.

“Azure An, get out here! Or we level your Majestic Peak today!”

A crowd came like a muddy wave. From the summit, Nana Toki looked down with calm eyes, as if watching street jugglers toss cheap torches in the wind.

Azure An? Are they talking to me?

Also, if this is a Spirit-infused peak in a xuanhuan world, why am I the only disciple here, a lone lantern in an empty hall?

Before her thoughts could settle, disciples from Boundless Peak surged up like ants boiling from a nest. They ringed Nana Toki on the summit, fists flexing and faces dark as thunderheads.

“Azure An! If you don’t give Boundless Peak a proper explanation today, don’t blame us for being rude!”

“An explanation? What explanation?” Nana Toki arched a brow, eyes flat as a winter lake cutting through fog. She hadn’t even gotten the plot brief—how was she supposed to explain anything?

“Your slow-witted little sister trashed every last Spirit-Gathering flower we planted on Boundless Peak yesterday. You, as her sister, can’t tell me you didn’t know!”

His temper toward the original owner burned like dry brush; his tone left no room like a door barred from within. “If you don’t repay the Spirit-Gathering flowers she destroyed, we’ll flatten Majestic Peak today, leave you and that dim little sister with nowhere to roost!”

“You dare?”

She only slanted him a glance, a blade of ice across the face. The chill of her voice made the hotheads flinch as if a shadow passed over the sun.

“I—”

Li Qian—and a few others behind him—choked on their next lines, stunned by one look that felt like a gust off a cliff. Azure An was still Azure An, and yet… there was a new cold edge and a wicked tang to her, a familiar face wearing winter.

“We’ve got disciples without number at Boundless Peak—why would we fear some minor peak lord of Majestic Peak?” someone barked from the crowd, tossing a spark into dry straw.

“Yeah! Boundless Peak ranks among the top in the sect. You, a peak that can’t even make dead last, aren’t fit to carry our shoes. What wouldn’t we dare?”

“Then why don’t you try?”

The taunter looked up and fell straight into a pair of calm eyes, as still as dead water that had swallowed centuries, and his heart shrank like a leaf in frost.

Under that cold gaze, his scalp prickled, but with all his brothers watching he stiffened his neck anyway. “T-try what?”

“Try giving Boundless Peak its ‘explanation’.” Nana Toki took one step forward, and the ring of disciples split left and right like reeds parting for a boat.

“Let’s make a wager, so no one says I’m unreasonable. Seven days from now, at the sect’s duel platform. If you beat me, I’ll hand you Majestic Peak for free. If you can’t, then the matter of my sister and your Boundless Peak’s Spirit-Gathering flowers never happened.”

Her voice was soft, but it carried clear as a bell through the pines around Majestic Peak. The Boundless Peak disciples blinked, stunned that she’d open with a spirit peak as the stake, a jade mountain laid on a board.

Majestic Peak wasn’t top-tier, true, but a spirit peak was still a spirit peak—its worth was a deep well most disciples couldn’t even see the bottom of. Boundless Peak wouldn’t be losing in that trade.

If—like a boulder on a narrow bridge—they could actually beat Nana Toki.

“Is that for real?” Li Qian asked despite himself, greed flaring like dawn through cloud. A whole peak—if they gained Majestic Peak as a branch, Boundless Peak might take first on the spirit-peak rankings this year.

“Of course it’s real. I’m a peak lord; my word stands like iron.” Nana Toki smiled, bright as a blade. Li Qian didn’t answer right away; a spirit peak wasn’t something an inner disciple could promise on a whim. This stake needed their peak lord’s nod, or the river would drown them both.

“Peak Lord Azure An, your terms are generous, but the matter is weighty. Whether it’s on or not depends on our peak lord’s approval.” His tone had softened, like rain after hail; between a spirit peak and a few spirit flowers, the peak won by a mountain.

“Suit yourselves. When you’ve thought it through, come find me.”

She let a thin, dismissive smile cut the air, then turned to head into Majestic Peak like a white crane folding its wings. At the end she tossed a clear order over her shoulder. “If there’s nothing else, please leave. This peak lord’s sleepy. The duel’s still a ways off.”

The Boundless Peak disciples: “...”

This is a xuanhuan tale.

The male lead, Tianqi Yu, once stood half a step from the Immortal Realm, a thunderhead about to break. He failed his tribulation; his body scattered like ash on the wind, and a shred of soul clung on through a century of samsara. He seized a body in the mortal world’s Heavenly Ascent Sect—a waste of a youth with his same name—and rose again, climbing to the peak to carve out a legend.

He’s the male lead, but not the usual golden hero. He is ruthless and venomous, tempest and knife, treating everything like grass underfoot. You could say a villain’s mold was used to cast a righteous protagonist’s face.

The original Azure An was Blue Magpie’s sister without blood ties, and the peak lord of Majestic Peak—a first stepping stone for the Protagonist Lord’s return to the Dao. When Tianqi Yu seized his body and returned to the mortal world, heaven and earth shook; the anomaly blasted Boundless Peak’s fields, turning spirit herbs to powder. Blue Magpie happened to be playing near their outer grounds and became the perfect scapegoat, a lone tree in a lightning field.

In the original plot, to repay her sister’s scapegoat debt, Azure An scraped coin from every corner like picking rice from cracks. She was robbed on the road, the pot smashed before the water boiled. Blue Magpie was beaten half to death, breath thin as a candle in wind. The sisters had no choice but to sell Majestic Peak just to survive this wave. But the story’s tides didn’t spare them. Later, because Azure An’s cultivation was low and her looks were dazzling, disciples of powerful sects used tricks and took her as a kept plaything, a bird in a gilded cage. Her sister Blue Magpie, whose mind was not right, met trouble on the way and was seized by bandits, violated and killed in a mountain den.

Neither sister met a good end. Their fate was misery piled on misery, a winter with no spring.

[Ding! Main Quest Triggered: Blue Magpie on An]

[Quest Description: Protect Blue Magpie until this plane ends.]

A cold, mechanical voice chimed in her mind, and Nana Toki felt a prickle of wrongness, like frost in summer. It was the first time her System had used that ice-cold tone; it didn’t match its salted-fish laziness at all.

“Host!”

She was just about to ask how far the System’s upgrade permissions had gone when a young girl’s voice called to her from far off, bright as a sparrow in a courtyard. Nana Toki glanced around; there wasn’t another soul in sight.

“Host! I’m right here!”

Plop—

By the time Nana Toki processed it, Xiao Yi was already falling out of the sky and smacking into her like a dropped dumpling.

Face-to-earth, Nana Toki: “...” Damn. My back.

Wait—wasn’t this thing the System? Why does it have a body? And why is it a girl?

Nana Toki stood, her face dark as a stormcloud, grabbed the wide-eyed, dopey-looking Xiao Yi by the scruff, and smiled like a wolf showing teeth. “You gonna speak honestly, or do I have to beat the truth out and then you speak honestly?”

Now that this busted System had a body, she could finally settle every tab it had run up across worlds.

Xiao Yi: “...” Host, calm down! Host, please calm down!

“My System Master worried you might run into trouble in this plane, so they sent me to protect you the whole way!” Xiao Yi still remembered how off Nana Toki had seemed in the independent space before.

“Heh. You?” Nana Toki looked her up and down with open disdain, like flicking dust from a sleeve. “You don’t even hit five feet. Besides curling up and covering your head like a liability, what can you do?”

“Don’t underestimate me, Host! I’ve had a full-on epic upgrade this time. Giving you some extra perks mid-plane is totally no problem at all.”

Xiao Yi’s grin was smug, like a cat that thought it’d swallowed a dragon.

“Talk is cheap. If you’re that powerful, hand over the newbie gift pack.” Nana Toki’s smile was cold as snowmelt.

Xiao Yi: “...”