Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

Chapter 157: Frostmoon Leaves, Winter Stays

The next morning, Frostmoon Ridge made ready to leave.

Their banners had already gathered in the lower courtyard by the time Xuan came down with Su Qingyue. The pale blue cloth swayed in the mountain wind, carrying the faint chill of their sect’s Qi into air that was cold enough on its own this high up, while Frostmoon servants worked steadily down a list of travel cases, medicine boxes, and the lacquered chests that had survived the banquet wine in rather better condition than several of the elders had. There was a particular quiet to a sect about to leave, Xuan had come to notice, a held-breath sort of busyness where everyone moved fast and nobody quite looked at the people they were leaving behind.

Skyedge had turned out to see them off. Even at this hour the courtyard was full, disciples lining the wall in black and red while the sun climbed toward the peaks and the last of the night’s frost burned off the worn stone steps.

Lin Zhen stood near the front with Madam Yu and Madam Lin Hua at his side, looking far more sober than Xuan had any right to expect, given the way last night’s bottle had died with honors. Su Han, by contrast, wore the face of a man who had found excellent wine, approved a marriage, praised his future son-in-law in front of witnesses, and regretted not a single moment of any of it. His wife stood beside him in Frostmoon colors, elegant and unhurried, with the air of a woman who had spent all morning making certain her husband drank his tea and ate something solid before he opened his mouth to anyone important.

Su Han looked at his daughter first.

For all his volume the night before, there was no smile in him now. The road lay open at his back, his disciples stood ready, and the simple arithmetic of the morning had arrived to be paid. He was leaving. She was not.

"You know what you are doing?" he asked.

Su Qingyue inclined her head. "Yes."

"That was not an invitation to answer me like a disciple."

Her gaze came up to meet his, level and unbothered. "I know exactly what I am doing, Father. I am staying as Frostmoon’s heir, not as decoration for Skyedge’s alliance. I will wait here until our disciples are sent, and when they arrive I will command them properly, answer for them properly, and make certain no one in this sect mistakes their presence for weakness."

Xuan kept his eyes forward and his face still. He had watched her take apart a market full of people without once raising her voice, reading every player at the table before they knew they were sitting at one. He was not about to interrupt her doing the same to her own father.

Su Han watched his daughter the way he read winter skies, sure of them and checking anyway. "Forgive me for leaving you so soon, and under another house’s roof at that." He said it without softening it, the way he said most things. "I would rather have stayed longer than a single day. But the war is nearly on us, and in the season that’s coming it pays to move fast. If two houses can settle everything worth settling between dawn and dusk, we are better served on the road than wearing out a guest chair."

"You do not need to worry about me, Father." Su Qingyue dipped her head, unruffled. "I am a grown woman now."

"Yes." Su Han let the word hang, and what came after it came quieter, more to himself than to her. "And that’s exactly the part that worries me."

His wife laid two fingers on his sleeve. "Let her breathe before you start lecturing her again."

"I am not lecturing. I am leaving guidance."

"You are leaving volume."

Across the courtyard, Madam Yu lifted her sleeve a beat too slow, and the sound she hid behind it had nothing to do with a cough.

Su Han turned to Xuan next. The warmth from the night’s wine had not left the man, only cooled into something steadier in the daylight.

"Patriarch Su," Xuan said.

"My daughter has made her choice, the same as you made yours. You are both adults." Su Han’s voice stayed level, but his eyes did not move off Xuan’s face. "This is not an alliance she was dragged into, and she does not stand here as a hostage."

"I would never have taken someone like her that way." Xuan held the look without sliding out from under it. "I agreed because I want the chance to know her better. That is the whole of it."

"I know. That is why I am leaving her with you." Something in Su Han loosened, though only by a degree. "I have watched you long enough now to be sure my daughter has not chosen badly. So look after her. Do not let her be treated poorly under this roof. It is the first time in her life she will live this far from home, whatever she would prefer the rest of us to believe."

Color climbed the edge of Qingyue’s cheekbones. "Father. You do not need to hand my future husband the entire list."

Xuan laughed before he could think better of it. "Don’t worry, Patriarch. No one here will mistreat her, me least of all. And if anyone is foolish enough to try, I will see to it personally that they answer for it."

Su Han laughed as well, low and pleased, and there was something in the way he caught those words and set them aside somewhere safe. He was not taking them as comfort. He was filing them as a promise, the sort a man comes back to collect on, and he wanted Xuan to know he had heard it as one.

And under all the wine and the volume and the dry jokes, Xuan caught the thing the man would never say in front of this many witnesses: that he was handing his only daughter to a half-stranger’s mountain with a war coming over the hills, and choosing to trust it would hold her safe.

Xuan understood. He had meant every word of it as a promise of his own.