Long Xiyue's name spread through the sect like wildfire.
A servant girl no more, she had walked from the Ash Trials alive. Alone. Unscathed.
The elders whispered. Disciples watched her pass with a mixture of fear and awe. She returned to the servant quarters only to retrieve her belongings: a chipped basin, a single robe, a threadbare scroll of forgotten prayers. She left the rest behind, including the life she'd known.
The Crimson Lotus Sect, known across the realm for its ruthlessness and tradition, had never seen an ascension like hers. It didn't fit the path. It didn't obey the doctrine. And in a place obsessed with hierarchy and bloodlines, such disruptions brewed unrest.
Her quarters in the outer tier were humble, but better. Stone walls, bamboo mats, a real roof. She trained in silence. When others practiced sword forms, she studied flame sigils. While they meditated to calm their Qi, she challenged the chaotic force within her. Fire didn't calm. Fire danced, fought, and consumed. And so she learned to breathe with it.
In secret, she mapped her inner world: a blazing expanse of crimson mountains and burning skies. Her meridians, once stunted, now flowed wide and hot. The Dragon Vein pulsed within her core, forging new paths through body and spirit alike.
In her fourth week, she broke through to the Fourth Stage of Body Tempering.
By her sixth, she challenged Jian Yu—an inner disciple known for his mastery of Dual Flame Swords. The match was supposed to be a lesson in humility.
It became an execution.
She hadn't meant to kill him. But fire does not know mercy. Her flame devoured his blades. His scream echoed for hours after his body turned to ash.
The sect reacted swiftly.
The Grand Elder summoned her before the full council. A public trial, cloaked in ritual.
Xiyue stood in the circle of judgment, eyes forward, hands behind her back.
"You defy rank," said Elder Tielan.
"You abuse your gifts," added Elder Gu.
"She destroyed a disciple of noble blood," one spat.
"She is a danger to the order."
Her silence enraged them more than words could have.
A sentence was declared: The Crimson Brand.
A punishment not of death—but of shame.
They branded her beneath the courtyard pyre.
Before the watching disciples, two sect enforcers held her fast while a third pressed the burning sigil against her shoulder. It seared through skin and cloth alike, a mark of disgrace.
The crowd murmured. Some looked away. Others smiled.
The Grand Elder's voice echoed. "Let all who see her know she bears the mark of reckless ascension. She is fire untamed. She walks with shame."
Xiyue did not scream.
Her knees did not bend.
But her gaze locked with the Grand Elder's, steady and smoldering.
In that moment, it was he who flinched.
That night, her spirit beast emerged from its flame cocoon. No longer a flickering ember. It had grown—sleek, sharp-eyed, with dark scales that shimmered like obsidian. It coiled at her feet, watching the world through slitted golden eyes.
She named it Yanluo—after the ancient dragon king of the underworld.
Days passed. Then weeks. She spoke little. Ate little. Trained endlessly.
The brand on her shoulder scarred into a permanent crimson spiral, a mark she refused to conceal. Let them see it. Let them wonder.
She meditated beneath the scorched plum tree. Sat unmoving for hours, listening to the flicker of spirit fire. Each day, she remembered more of her sealed past. Each night, the dragon within her whispered clearer.
Rise. You are not forged by the sect. You are carved by the stars.
She began crafting her own martial forms—unorthodox, dangerous. Fire coiled not just around her limbs but flowed through them, her body a vessel of moving flame. She learned to condense heat into blades, into shields, into silent flickers that pierced through walls.
Some disciples watched from a distance.
One approached—a young girl named Meilan, face pale and voice quiet. "Are you really the Dragon Empress?" she asked.
Xiyue looked up, eyes glowing faintly. "I'm not an empress."
"But... they say you will be."
"I don't want a throne," she said.
Meilan hesitated. "Then what do you want?"
Xiyue stood slowly, the air around her humming.
"To never kneel again."
Rumors spread beyond the sect walls.
In the northern provinces, wandering cultivators spoke of a girl with fire in her veins and a dragon at her side.
In the southern courts, old scholars unearthed scrolls about the Celestial Flame Lineage, thought extinct.
And far away, in a palace of shadows, a hooded figure whispered to a pale flame:
"She has awakened."
The flame pulsed in answer.
And began to grow.
By the end of her third month, Long Xiyue's cultivation reached the Seventh Stage of Body Tempering. She no longer used the sect's training fields. The fire she summoned cracked stone and scorched the sky.
She began to attract challengers—disciples seeking fame, elders testing her control. She did not lose. But she did not always win cleanly. Her flame could be wild. Her focus unrefined.
And she knew: she needed to go deeper.
To refine not just her body—but her spirit.
One night, under a blood-red moon, she stood alone before the sealed gate of the Spirit Cavern, a forbidden place where only core disciples were permitted to train.
A talisman glowed on the door, inscribed with protective wards.
She raised her hand.
The flame in her palm danced.
I am not a core disciple, she thought.
But my spirit burns brighter than theirs.
The gate flared with golden light—and opened.
She entered alone.
And did not emerge for seven days.
When she did, her eyes burned brighter. Her flame was quieter now, but deeper. Focused.
She had seen something in the cavern's depths.
A mirror of her fate.
And a choice.
To rise.
To burn.
Or to break.
Long Xiyue did not break.
She walked from the cavern, flames coiled like silk around her arms, her spirit beast following in silence. She returned to the sect not as a curiosity, not as a threat—but as an inevitability.
And when the Grand Elder saw her pass, he whispered to no one:
"The fire does not die."
And the wind replied:
"No. It waits."