I. Do You Know of the Herb of Immortality? (1)
A young man living out his days in the modern world was struck by a truck while crossing the street.
And then he was reborn as a little girl in ancient China.
Was it the will of heaven, or nothing more than coincidence? No one could say.
Not even the young man who had been reborn.
………
The child had no name until she turned five.
It was said that children who died young were named late, but the child had never once met another of her age who was still nameless at five. Even the younger sibling born later was given a name before she was.
Anyone could see it was egregious favoritism, yet the child bore no great resentment. If anything, she felt only understanding—and a quiet pity.
"You demon-spawning witch! What on earth did you couple with to bear a thing like that!?"
So the mother was whispered about wherever she went. Once the lawful wife of a high Song official, she had borne the child only to be so despised that she was demoted to concubine.
She hated the child, and would not even grant her a name.
The occasion that finally earned the child her name was the visit of a fangshi—a wandering master of occult arts—to the estate. Chancing upon the girl, the fangshi remarked as though it were nothing at all.
"She was born carrying the Great Yin. It is no outer deviation. She is merely cursed—though perhaps that is worse than deviation. Look how her household has kept her. Is it any wonder heaven laid a curse upon the child?"
Hearing this, the high official glanced at the girl passing through the corridor, and the very next day he summoned her.
In a narrow room, the child faced her father for the first time. It was the first for him as well.
Blue eyes met black ones. The depth of years the two of them carried was curiously alike. Whether he grasped this by instinct or not, the official's gaze was thick with discomfort. He wrestled with himself for a long while before the words finally came.
"………Your name is Socheong."
Socheong—plain azure. Hair white as undyed silk, eyes of pale blue. It was hardly the name a beloved eldest daughter ought to receive, but even that filled the child with gratitude.
It meant, at the very least, that she would now be treated as family.
The child—carrying what the fangshi called the Great Yin, and what she herself would come to name the Nine Yin Severed Meridians—bowed her head.
"Thank you, Father."
"……Now go."
After that exchange, the child had a name. She became Socheong. Nothing else changed.
………
Socheong's previous life had been ordinary. A university student whose only hobby was reading web novels—that was all the young man had been.
But from the moment she was reborn, Socheong was anything but ordinary.
Setting aside her memories of a past life, her very appearance was extraordinary. Hair white as snow, eyes blue as frost. Socheong knew what albinism was, but this was something else entirely.
So she gave the constitution a name of her own: the Nine Yin Severed Meridians.
It was a term that surfaced only now and then in the martial arts novels she used to read for fun, but nothing fit better. Born of yin energy, beautiful, and brilliant.
She could say with certainty that at barely five years old, her memory and reasoning already surpassed those of her previous life.
Of course, it was not all good. Had it been, she would hardly have called the condition severed. She might instead have preened over being blessed with a Great Yin body or some such thing.
But a constitution that brought chronic frailty and cold, numb hands and feet, combined with an unfamiliar face that earned her a family's resentment and neglect, made positive thinking rather difficult.
And so: the Nine Yin Severed Meridians. Though it was not, thankfully, a death sentence.
The real problem was that being named changed nothing about her life.
Had this world been the kind found in the wuxia novels Socheong had read, someone with such a unique constitution might have trained in martial arts, made something of it…
"No Bodhidharma? No Zhang Sanfeng?"
The world Socheong had been born into had no martial arts. She wondered for a moment whether it was some entirely different setting—until she recognized the names of the states.
Qin. Chu. Qi.
Names she had heard somewhere before. The first two especially.
The First Emperor of Qin. the Hegemon-King of Chu. Famous figures anyone fond of wuxia—or anyone with a passing knowledge of Chinese history—would have heard of at least once.
"………"
So she looked further, and found that this era had its very famous men as well.
A certain someone whose disciples quoted him with "the Master said…" had died a few decades back, it seemed. And so had a certain someone who declared that the Dao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Dao.
Upon learning this, Socheong sat flabbergasted for a moment—but there was nothing for it except to accept reality.
The age into which Socheong had been reborn was the age of the Spring and Autumn period passing into the Warring States.
………
Once she understood her era, Socheong set about searching for a way to make use of her constitution and talent.
If she had merely been reincarnated, fine—but she had white hair and blue eyes into the bargain. If there were no way to turn that to account, it would be a waste.
And so she investigated, and found that even in the present age there existed the concepts of qi, of meridians, of breath and the nourishing of life.
"…Is this not all quackery?"
It was nothing but dubious claims stacked atop one another. Still, she chose to believe that anything so famous must have some reason for it.
Thus five years passed. At the end of five years of study and research, Socheong was summoned before her father once more.
"…I truly do not know what to do with you."
The reason was an accusation: that Socheong was pursuing a scholarship that only resembled the truth without being it—specious learning, plausible and false.
The official looked at his daughter, and spoke with a long sigh.
"Whew… Soon, a renowned sage from the lands of Meng will grace our family with a visit. Do nothing rash. And after that, I shall decide your punishment."
The official was ashamed as he said it. What if, heaven forbid, this daughter caught the sage of Meng's eye?
Socheong read that feeling without the slightest difficulty, and answered evenly.
"I shall bear it in mind."
And then a few days passed. Socheong's family completed every preparation for receiving the sage of Meng.
Socheong had been told to keep to the detached hall, so she did not go out to look. Even a renowned sage was no concern of hers.
Thinking so, she sat upon the floor as always and unrolled her bamboo slips.
Records she had gathered and written down over the past several years—records laced with knowledge from a previous life, judged by the world as far-fetched and false precisely because they strayed so far from common sense.
From among them, Socheong picked up her treatise on the method of circulating qi and guiding the breath.
It was her own theory, built not upon the Eleven Vessels doctrine of the age, but upon the Twelve Principal Meridians and the Eight Extraordinary Vessels.
Gazing at the diagrams and characters carved into the bamboo, Socheong followed them and breathed, slowly and deeply.
Innn… and ouuut…
Years of research had given the method its shape. All that remained was proof—and that single step had been wanting until now.
Socheong poured herself into her breathing for a long, long time. Then, at last, she sensed it: a single strand of strange energy, impossible to put into words, drawing near.
Socheong did not let the moment slip. She opened herself and received the energy whole—free and boundless, like a great bird so vast that a single one of its feathers could blanket a house.
The moment Socheong opened her eyes, she saw the door of the detached hall standing open.
Beyond it, the high official was pacing in an anxious flutter, and inside the room there was someone besides herself.
A middle-aged man in dark, faded robes, his hair and beard white-flecked yet still bearing streaks of black.
"Interesting."
So he said, looking down at her—and then their eyes met. His eyes were as clear as mirrors.
"Ah."
Deep in the folds of Mount Nanhua stood a small hut. Inside it, a snow-white girl who had been sitting cross-legged suddenly lifted her head.
Her half-lidded eyes opened, and clear blue pupils took in her surroundings. Rolling those eyes around, the girl muttered to herself.
"I dozed off… Have I been sleeping too recklessly lately?"
Yet even as she said it, a faint smile hung on the girl's lips. For in her dream, she had met a memory from the very distant past.
The day she first met her master. Socheong the pseudo-scholar was acknowledged for walking the true path, and became his disciple.
It was an old story, but Socheong's memory of it remained vivid.
After becoming her master's disciple, Socheong left her family behind, and once she had passed beyond his elementary teachings, she was granted a courtesy name as well: Xiaoyao—the Free Wanderer.
Even the method of circulating qi and guiding the breath, which her family had scorned as specious learning, her master did not dismiss; he studied it alongside her.
The result never reached the transcendent heights of the martial arts or spellcraft Socheong had once imagined, but it did become a method of meditation that aided the nourishing of life.
And Socheong had kept practicing that method of breath circulation, steadily, ever since she came to Mount Nanhua.
"………"
That had been decades ago.
A practice as much a part of her daily rhythm as breathing itself—kept up even before she realized she had eaten the herb of immortality.
Recalling the span of it just now, Socheong found herself curious how effective the practice really was.
Training in the arts of nourishing life did not make one stronger. It would, presumably, simply be good for one's health.
But having eaten the herb of immortality, she was hardly in a position to know for certain.
If she took a disciple and taught them the method of breath circulation, she could learn in detail…
"…But if I took a disciple, strange rumors would start."
The very moment she realized what she had eaten, Socheong had moved her dwelling from the mountainside deep into the interior, and rarely went out at all. She had no wish to multiply needless risks.
And so Socheong sighed and resumed the practice of breath circulation she had briefly abandoned to her nap.
Deep in the mountains, there was little else by way of amusement.
………
So time flowed on.
When the fires of war began to spread across the world, Socheong kept to her solitude all the more strictly. And as she lived in seclusion, a piece of news swept across the Central Plains—news so vast that even Socheong, hidden in the mountains, could not fail to hear it.
No—it was not mere news. It was the tide of the age itself.
Nearly a hundred years had passed—and the First Emperor had arisen in the Central Plains.