"I knew they were crushing you. But the Emperor had decreed my deployment, my duty chained me."

"I could not stay to protect you, and I knew that if I left you in that house, you would not survive the winter. Your spirit was too fragile. The beatings, the starvation, the isolation... it was going to kill you.

He stepped closer, his imposing frame blocking out the rest of the world, leaving only him and her in the moonlit pavilion.

"I wasn’t able to protect you here," Lin Feng confessed, the admission clearly tearing at his soul. "So... before I left for the North, I sought out the Grand Oracle of the Star-Seizing Tower. I paid the price needed to protect you."

Ji’an’s vision began to blur as the words were hitting her ears, but her brain was entirely failing to process the magnitude of the revelation.

"I sent you away, Ji’an," Lin Feng whispered, his thumb gently swiping a stray tear that Ji’an hadn’t even realised she had shed from her cheek. "I sent you to a new life. To a world far beyond the boundaries of our Heavens, where the air was clean of spiritual warfare, where there were no orthodox sects, no abusive stepmothers, a peaceful place. A world where you could grow up safe, strong, and untouched by the cruelty of the Azure Empire."

The earth beneath Ji’an’s feet completely disappeared. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

The memories, the towering skyscrapers of Earth, the bustling commercial kitchens, the smell of rain on asphalt, the sound of her friends laughing over a hot stove, surged forward with catastrophic violence.

She had spent months grieving her transmigration, believing that she was an accidental casualty of cosmic coincidence, a random soul from Earth yanked into a lethal web novel to play the role of a doomed cannon fodder.

She had carried the suffocating guilt of the imposter, believing she had hijacked the life of a tragic, innocent girl.

But the truth... the horrifying, beautiful, reality-breaking truth...

Earth wasn’t her original home.

This Xianxia world wasn’t a novel.

She was the original host. She was the fragile, weeping child herself?

And Lin Feng had essentially used a forbidden cosmic spell to put her soul into a witness protection program in another dimension, allowing her to live an entire, safe, modern life on Earth, growing strong, confident, and arrogant, far away from the abuse of the Lin Estate.

But the array had seemingly failed, or run its course, violently snapping her soul back into her original body at the exact moment the original host was supposed to die.

"I gave you a new life," Lin Feng murmured, his voice cracking with a mixture of overwhelming adoration and confusion. "I watched the light leave your eyes that night, knowing you were waking up somewhere safe. But then... the reports reached me at the border. You had awoken, and changed..."

He gripped her shoulders gently, as if terrified she might dissolve into mist.

"Why did you come back, Ji’an?" Lin Feng asked, his eyes searching hers with desperation. "Why did the Heavens return you to this hell? I paid the price so you would never have to suffer again. Why are you here?"

Ji’an was completely paralysed; her mouth opened, but no sound came out.

The sheer volume of questions exploding in her mind was astronomical, a chaotic, deafening hurricane of cognitive dissonance.

’I am her? Is she me? The memories of Earth... were they the secondary life? How is that possible?! What about my parents there? What about my career? Was it all just a magical simulation?!’

And then, a darker, infinitely more terrifying question breached the surface of her panic.

’What price?’ Ji’an thought, her eyes dropping to the faint, silver scar cutting through his eyebrow, suddenly realising it wasn’t a sword wound. ’He said he paid a price most men would shatter under. To move a soul across dimensions... what did he sacrifice? His lifespan? His karma? A piece of his own soul?!’

She wanted to scream. She wanted to grab him by the collar of his heavy armour and shake him until he explained the exact metaphysical mechanics of the universe.

She wanted to demand answers about the plot, about the "novel" she thought she had read, about the reality she was currently standing in.

But as her lips parted, a sudden, suffocating wave of paranoia crashed over her.

They were in the Imperial Gardens, surrounded by thousands of palace guards, hidden shadow-assassins, and the listening arrays of the Emperor’s paranoia.

If she screamed about alternate dimensions, Earth, and forbidden soul-displacement arrays, she wouldn’t just be admitting to a high crime; she would be branding her brother as a heretic who had tampered with the laws of reincarnation.

They would both be executed before the sun rose.

Ji’an snapped her mouth shut. She swallowed the hurricane of questions, her entire body trembling violently with the effort of keeping the words contained.

Her silver-flecked eyes were wide, brimming with tears of shock, fear, and overwhelming confusion.

Lin Feng watched the violent struggle play out across her face.

He was a master tactician. He saw the questions burning in her eyes, and he instantly recognised the suffocating, paralysing fear of the Imperial environment choking the words in her throat.

He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t ask her to speak softly.

Lin Feng’s eyes hardened. He released her shoulders and took a half-step back.

He raised his right hand, his index and middle fingers extended in a classic sword-seal. He didn’t chant a spell or draw a talisman, just unleashed his cultivation base.

The air in the pavilion didn’t just shift; it completely vanished.

A dome of pure, solid, translucent silver energy erupted from Lin Feng’s boots, expanding outward at the speed of light.

It swept over Ji’an, encompassing the stone table, the jade benches, and the entire circumference of the wooden pavilion.

It was a Void-Sealing Barrier, executed with the effortless, terrifying mastery of a cultivator who stood at the absolute pinnacle of the mortal realm.