Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Yan Er’s Story

It sounded long, but it really wasn’t.

Twenty-five years earlier, after Gu Shi Yi took the Mystic Profundity Bright Mirror into her body to nourish it, the old Daoist priest laid down a hard rule: every full-moon night, she had to bring out the treasure mirror and draw in moonlight essence. At first, he watched her like a hawk, terrified she’d botch the method. Later, once she grew used to it, he stopped hovering. Most nights, he snored like thunder on the other side of the room while Gu Shi Yi sat cross-legged by the window, facing the moon, breathing in and out.

Then one day—Mid-Autumn, full moon, moonlight essence at its richest all year—something went wrong.

After she brought out the treasure mirror and cycled the moonlight through her body thirty-six full times, Gu Shi Yi opened her eyes and saw a little girl—five or six years old—reflected in the mirror.

The child wasn’t pretty. Her face was grimy, her hair was a knotted mess, and she looked like she’d crawled out of a dust heap. Gu Shi Yi’s first thought was that she’d accidentally drawn in a wandering ghost while cultivating. She even considered chanting a scripture to send the poor thing on to the cycle of rebirth.

But the more she looked, the stranger it got. The child’s clothes weren’t anything from this realm, and there wasn’t a trace of yin aura around her. She wasn’t dead—she was alive. And behind her, the room in the reflection was filled with odd furnishings Gu Shi Yi had never seen in her life.

Curiosity won.

Logically, with Gu Shi Yi peering through the treasure mirror, the other side shouldn’t have noticed a thing. Yet the little girl’s eyes flicked around, then snapped straight to Gu Shi Yi’s gaze. They stared at each other.

And the little girl screamed.

“Ghost!”

She practically bounced off the floor as she ran to drag in a middle-aged woman with a slightly swollen belly. The woman looked around, baffled, then turned and shouted for a burly middle-aged man. Their clothes were bizarre, and even stranger—both adults wore the same kind of short hair.

Gu Shi Yi stared, fascinated. The two adults swept their eyes over the mirror’s surface with blank confusion, clearly seeing nothing at all. Only the little girl pointed straight at Gu Shi Yi and shrieked, “There’s a ghost! A ghost! A ghost!”

Her voice was sharp enough to stab holes in the air. The man’s face tightened, impatience boiling over. He lifted his hand and slapped her across the face.

Smack.

The child clapped a hand over her cheek, and the room finally fell silent. The man looked vicious—thick features, hard flesh, the kind of face that always seemed one breath away from rage. The slap left the girl’s cheek red and swelling. She didn’t dare cry out loud, but tears trembled in her eyes.

Gu Shi Yi—who was only six or seven herself—found it outrageously funny. She even pulled a face at the girl through the mirror, sticking out her tongue like a little ghost.

The girl gasped in terror. But when she saw her parents’ backs as they left, even though she shook all over, she didn’t call anyone again.

After that, whenever Gu Shi Yi cultivated at night and ran moonlight essence through thirty-six cycles, the little girl’s face appeared in the mirror. At first, the child told everyone she could, dragged people over, swore up and down there was a ghost. No one saw what she saw. Gu Shi Yi watched the girl flail and point while the adults stared at her like she’d lost her mind.

It was hilarious.

And, frankly, it made Gu Shi Yi’s wandering life a lot less boring.

Over time, the girl’s courage grew. She stopped screaming about ghosts to the whole village. Once the two of them had seen each other enough times, they actually started talking—through the mirror.

That was how Gu Shi Yi learned the girl’s name: Li Yan Er.

Li Yan Er lived in a small mountain village with her parents and grandparents. She was the eldest daughter. Her family wanted a son so badly it bordered on obsession. They’d had one before, but the baby hadn’t lived past his first year.

“My dad and my mom are working in town now,” Li Yan Er told her, eyes bright, like this was the grandest secret in the world. “They’re saving money to have a brother. The little brother in my mom’s belly is already six months along!”

Gu Shi Yi curled her lip.

“Your family’s that poor and you still want a son? Can you even afford to raise him?”

She could tell at a glance the Li family was truly poor—mud walls, a cramped dark house, broken furniture, clothes patched until they forgot what “new” ever meant. Even Gu Shi Yi, roaming with the old Daoist priest and sleeping in ruined temples and haunted houses, had lived better than that. At least her master could catch ghosts, and in every town they passed through he’d sniff out trouble—some petty spirit, some minor demon beast—and earn enough reward money to keep them fed. If they met a generous wealthy patron, a single payment could be a whole gold ingot.

The only reason they never stayed anywhere long was the treasure mirror. They had to keep moving, hiding, slipping through the world like smoke.

So, in Gu Shi Yi’s eyes, the Li family insisting on having a son despite being that poor was incomprehensible.

“My grandpa says if we have a son, the Li family can carry on the family line,” Li Yan Er said stubbornly. “Otherwise, our Li family will be cut off.”

Gu Shi Yi couldn’t wrap her head around it.

“Where I’m from, a daughter can inherit the family too…”

In her world, as the legitimate eldest daughter of the main branch, she could even bring in a husband and keep the children under her line. If she was capable enough, she could run the entire clan. In fact, she’d had a great-grandmother who had done exactly that, and the Gu family had enjoyed a glorious stretch under her hand.

Still, whether Gu Shi Yi understood it or not, the Li family’s luck actually turned after Li Yan Er’s parents started working in town. Li Yan Er’s father looked fierce, but he had brute strength and the willingness to grind himself into dust. He made money. After Li Yan Er’s mother gave birth to a son, they bought a small courtyard in town, brought the grandparents and Li Yan Er to live there, and even sent Li Yan Er to school.

When Li Yan Er moved, she carried a little mirror with her. Back in the village, she’d picked up a broken shard from the roadside—someone else’s shattered mirror. Her family was too poor, and because she was a girl, no one cared enough to get her even a cheap mirror to comb her hair. So she’d kept that shard like treasure.

She never could have guessed that piece of broken glass would give her a best friend.

Gu Shi Yi couldn’t jump rope with her, couldn’t kick shuttlecocks, couldn’t play games in the dirt. But she could whisper with her through the night, hidden under quilts, sharing secrets like contraband.

And so the two girls—separated by worlds—grew up together.

Through Gu Shi Yi, Li Yan Er learned the other world was like a myth come alive: there were thousand-year spirit foxes, ten-thousand-year old turtles, people who wielded Daoist arts, rode wind and fire, and sent flying swords to take lives.

Through Li Yan Er, Gu Shi Yi learned to read and write—and learned about a world that didn’t cultivate at all, yet still built machines that could move mountains, fill seas, and change everything.

As Li Yan Er’s family grew more comfortable, Gu Shi Yi watched strange “treasures” appear in their home: a television, a refrigerator, a washing machine—things Gu Shi Yi’s world didn’t have. Through that small box of light and sound, she discovered there was an enormous world beyond Li Yan Er’s small town.

Gu Shi Yi loved the convenience.

“Your world is amazing,” she said once. “You don’t need to ride the wind, but you can still travel a thousand miles in a day!”

That world’s spiritual qi was barren. Cultivation had long lost its inheritance. But technology had taken a different road and built a different kind of power.

Li Yan Er, on the other hand, envied Gu Shi Yi’s green mountains and clear waters.

“Your place is better,” she said. “Spiritual qi is everywhere. Even plants can become spirits. Here… these days we can’t even see blue skies or clean water anymore.”

Gu Shi Yi couldn’t argue. The pollution on Li Yan Er’s side was real enough that even Gu Shi Yi—who’d never set foot there—felt like she could taste it through the mirror.

They bonded in the strangest ways: reading books and chasing dramas together, ranting about scumbags and green-tea girls together, mocking cheap special effects together. They were perfectly matched—so long as you didn’t bring up men.

Li Yan Er liked fair, handsome, scholarly-looking types—like certain ancient-drama actors who never got tanned. Gu Shi Yi preferred older, rugged men. Faces didn’t matter much to her. Give her a six-pack and sharp abs and she was happy. And her taste ran heavy—she especially liked the western muscle-man type, like The Rock.

Gu Shi Yi sighed about it often.

“Your world is the best. Summer hits and there are shirtless men everywhere—legs, chests, all of it. In my world? Everyone wraps up like they’re afraid of air. If I want to see muscles, I have to sneak around and climb walls just to catch the house guard taking off their shirts to practice punches.”

Li Yan Er snorted.

“I think your world is better. Everyone keeps to manners and respects the dao. Here? Everything’s falling apart.”

Once they started on that topic, they both felt like they’d been born into the wrong world. If only they could switch.

But as they grew, the joke stopped being funny on Li Yan Er’s side.

Li Yan Er’s family valued sons and treated daughters like extra weight. After her brother was born and the grandparents got old, her parents were constantly busy making money. The household work fell on Li Yan Er’s small shoulders. Even as a child, she cared for the old and the young—and still got beaten and cursed by her father.

Li Yan Er’s father had a violent temper. Once he started making money in town, he started drinking too. After he drank, his wife and daughter became punching bags. He adored his son, though—always calling the boy the Li family’s root. He spoiled him until the child grew into a little tyrant, climbing roofs, tormenting animals, making the neighbors hate him.

When Li Yan Er was twelve, her grandparents died one after the other. With no elders left to restrain him, her father grew even more reckless. The town got more “open.” Little hair salons and massage shops popped up, and Li Yan Er’s father started visiting them. Before long, he took up with another woman.

In a place that small, gossip flew faster than crows. Li Yan Er’s mother found out quickly, but she was timid. She didn’t dare confront him. She swallowed it all and comforted herself with a bitter kind of hope.

“I have a son to protect me. No matter what he does outside, for our son he’ll come back in the end.”

She wasn’t entirely wrong. No matter how wildly he played outside, he still had to feed the boy. He claimed work was busy and came home two days a week, tossing down some money to support the three of them.

But Li Yan Er’s mother was a plain rural woman who’d borne children. Next to the salon girls, she couldn’t compete. When Li Yan Er’s father came home, he didn’t want to touch her. He drank, then slept.

If it had stopped at drinking, it would’ve been bad enough.

But after drinking, he hit people.

When Li Yan Er’s mother saw his mood turning, she grabbed the son and fled outside. Li Yan Er couldn’t run. She was left behind to “serve” her father, so she took the blows instead. Gu Shi Yi watched helplessly, anger burning hot in her chest. She tried teaching Li Yan Er a few self-defense tricks, but across a mirror she only had her mouth. There was only so much she could do.

She wanted to teach spells, too, but Li Yan Er’s world had no spiritual qi to speak of. Even if Li Yan Er learned them, she couldn’t use them. And a few fancy moves meant nothing against a tall, strong man. Worse, any resistance only earned her worse beatings.

The next day, once her father sobered up, he’d curse and shout again. Sometimes her mother joined in, turning fear into blame.

“So what if your dad hits you a few times? He gave birth to you, raised you—why can’t he hit you?”

“It’s your fault! Your dad works hard outside. If he gets angry out there, what’s wrong with him coming home to scold you and hit you a bit? Let him vent and he won’t run outside! Now he’s gone to that woman again. If your dad stops supporting the three of us, how are me and your brother supposed to live?”

Li Yan Er was small and weak. In the end, she endured it.

She just told herself she had to grow up faster.

She would take her little mirror shard and leave—leave the town, leave the house, and never come back.

Once she made that decision, she studied like her life depended on it. Her grades stayed at the top. Her college entrance exam scores were excellent. She got into a famous university.

Her father didn’t want to pay for a daughter to study.

“What’s the point of a woman learning so much? You’re already eighteen. Hurry up and marry, and stop eating my food.”

A business friend of his tried to talk sense into him.

“Who doesn’t send their child to school these days? Your Da Niu gets good grades—let her go. If she becomes a college student, she can marry into a good family later. You’ll have a good son-in-law, you’ll look good, and he might even help your business.”

Her father mulled it over and decided it sounded reasonable. If she married well, she could support her brother later, right?

So, grumbling and cursing the whole way, he paid for her education.

What he didn’t know was that Li Yan Er had already decided: after graduation, she would find work far away, and she would never come back.