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Now that she was married, Liu Mingyan did not spend much time traveling, especially on her own, but her husband did not completely forbid her from wandering the jianghu. And so, when she got restless, Mingyan would leave the harem behind and roam the way her brother once had, fighting monsters and righting wrongs. It was on one of those rare outings that Liu Mingyan met a man that would haunt her memory for years.
She was seated alone at a table at an inn when the man approached her.
"Immortal Master Liu, isn't it?" he asked, gesturing to the other chair at the table. "May I join you?"
"Is gongzi in need of a cultivator?" she asked him. She was in no need of company, but neither would she turn away a commoner in need of her assistance.
"No," he denied, shaking his head. "Nothing like that. I only recognized Immortal Liu from her reputation and wanted to meet the little sister who argued so passionately against Shen Qingqiu in her brother's memory." As he spoke, he sat down in the chair across from her. "My family suffered at the hands of Shen Qingqiu years ago, and it brings me great satisfaction to know that the bastard has faced justice."
Instantly, Liu Mingyan felt more at ease. This man was a kindred spirit, then. A brother, a son, full of righteous anger for the wrong done to his loved ones. She eagerly told him of Shen Qingqiu's trial and his subsequent imprisonment in the Water Prison of Huan Hua Palace. She even shared with him some of the less publicly known details, sure that this man would appreciate, as she did, the sheer lengths that Luo Binghe had gone to in taking his revenge against Shen Qingqiu.
As the conversation progressed, however, she realized that whatever she told him, the man pressed her for more details. His hungry eyes burned into her, relishing Shen Qingqiu's pain and humiliation to a point that even she found distasteful. Mingyan shifted uncomfortably in her seat, his eyes tracing the movement across her body, and his enjoyment of her discomfort was clear. A new, but familiar, form of hunger crept into his eyes.
It should have been enough that she obviously didn't welcome his attention. And even if he was the sort of man who couldn't respect a woman's refusal—there were far too many of those—it should have been enough that they'd spoken of her marriage to a powerful demon lord! But none of that tempered his behavior. Mingyan wasn't afraid of him, exactly; she was a Xian Shu cultivator who could take care of herself. But how many other defenseless women had he behaved this way toward? How frightened had they been.
Liu Mingyan came to the sudden realization that this man was nothing like her gege at all. He was the sort of man Liu Qingge had despised. A man like the one whose downfall they had just been discussing.
"My apologies," she said, "but what did gongzi say his name was?"
He hadn't introduced himself, and both of them knew it, but she was willing to give him some face if it would get her an answer. It had been rude of him to not give a name, in retrospect, but at the time it hadn't bothered her. Now she could see it was part of a larger pattern.
But whether or not he would have chosen to answer her—and she suspected he might not have—the point became moot shortly after she'd asked.
"Who... who is the immortal master speaking to?" asked a waiter who had approached her table. Concern and fear threaded through his voice, even though he'd tried to keep it steady, and as Liu Mingyan looked between the waiter and the man sitting across from her, she realized that the waiter couldn't see the man there at all. How had she not noticed that she'd been speaking to a ghost?! What kind of cultivator could she call herself?
Mingyan grabbed her sword from where she'd leaned it against the table, but before she could draw it, the man spoke.
"Don't think too badly of yourself," he said with an arrogant laugh that sent chills down her spine. "You're far more observant than Haitang is."
And then in the blink of an eye, the man— the ghost— Qiu Jianluo was gone, and Liu Mingyan was left with a confused waiter and her own troubled thoughts.