She saw him execute five men in the span of a breath.
Bandits, they were. Ruthless and armed, yes—but to him, they were paper. Five lives ended in five movements. Bones shattered, throats crushed, weapons never even raised. The last man had tried to surrender.
The killing blow still came.
It wasn't cruelty. It wasn't rage.
It was precision.
Cold. Absolute.
A blade honed so deeply into instinct that even mercy had no space to slip through.
That was the moment Luo Yao should've reported her findings.
She was a scout of the Heavenless temple—trained since childhood to be a silent observer, a mirror to the world, loyal first and last to the mission. And this man—this remnant of a slaughtered lineage, this wandering ghost wrapped in violence and silence—was clearly a threat.
But she didn't light her beacon talisman. Didn't whisper into her jade relay.
She stayed silent.
Something about him stilled her.
Maybe it was the way he stood after the killings—unmoved, unsatisfied. Not basking in victory. Not feeding on vengeance. Just… still.
Like a weapon left too long in the rain.
Like someone who had forgotten how to be anything else.
So, without meaning to, she followed.
She tracked his steps through the fog-drenched woods. She watched him return to a house more ruin than home—walls collapsed, roof patched with straw and silence. She camped beyond the trees, veiled and watching, even though her mission had, technically, ended the moment she found him.
Days passed.
Then weeks.
Still no order came. So she stayed.
Never approaching. Never breaking her silence. Just lingering in the periphery—watching.
Sometimes a mile away, hidden among stone ridges and crooked pine.
Sometimes no more than ten steps from him, veiled in leaf and breath.
She watched him train.
Alone. Relentless. Punishing his body and reshaping it with a cold clarity that seemed inhuman.
But the more she watched, the more she began to see what lay beneath the sharp edges.
He moved with the clarity of a sage—yet at times, he sat like a child who'd forgotten why the world hurt. His eyes, unreadable and old, would sometimes carry the blank weight of someone much younger—someone still waiting to understand what went wrong.
There was no fire in his expression. No defiance. Just a focused silence, almost sacred.
He was unreadable, like a page with the ink wiped clean, and yet somehow heavy with meaning.
Like a child building towers from ash.
Like an old man who had outlived the war, but kept sharpening his blade anyway.
He knew she was there.
She felt it—not just from instinct, but in how he never reacted. Never turned. Never tried to chase her away.
He simply let her be.
As if her presence was another tree. Another shadow.
As if her watching had been part of his world all along.
There were nights when he lay beneath the stars, unmoving. And in those moments, Luo Yao felt something shift inside her—like watching a poem you couldn't read, but still felt something for.
She thought maybe… maybe she could reach him.
But that wasn't why she stayed.
She stayed out of something softer. Stranger. She didn't want to change him. She didn't want to save him.
She simply wanted to understand.
She wished for more time—not for her sect, but for herself. To understand the silence that followed him like a shadow. To understand the man who had no more need for words.
Then the jade order came.
Return. At once.
No reason. No mercy.
She hesitated.
She could've left without a trace—just like he once had.
But something in her refused. After a year of quiet, of witnessing, something connected them. Not a relationship. Not memory. Just a fragile, silent bond.
He hadn't changed.
But he had changed her.
So she walked to the glade.
The place he always returned to after battle, after breath, after everything.
There, she knelt by a worn slab of stone—half-covered in moss, nearly forgotten by the world.
And with her dagger, she carved three simple strokes.
Luo Yao.
Not a message. Not a plea.
Just a mark.
A name left for a man who had never spoken hers aloud.
Then she stood.
Turned.
And left the forest behind.