Chapter Text
“You have the audacity to seek him out after what you did to him? What you did to all of us?!” Jian Lan barked at Xie Lian, the dejected crown prince who had discovered that Feng Xin had found Jian Lan.
She’d broken up with Feng Xin a month ago for his own good, which led him straight into the jaws of a violet colored dragon summoned by a Yong’an shaman to seek out and devour any hidden Xianle citizens still remaining. Feng Xin managed to kill the beast only using a bow and arrow, saving his own mother, Feng Mei, whom he had found hiding in a cave.
Before the killing of the dragon, Xie Lian had barked at Feng Xin to leave and never return, not that his former servant cared to live or die anymore. The slaying caught the attention of the gods up in the heavenly realm, who gave Feng Xin clear instructions to begin cultivating and meditating. Mei Nianqing was notified of his impending ascension and he took Feng Xin to a hidden temple in the mountains, where Feng Mei would also be looked after.
Xie Lian had an epiphany, a come to moment, that he should’ve never treated Feng Xin the way he did. Though he was in no place to, he begged Jian Lan to tell him where he was or when he would be ascending.
She said “1,000 yuan and perhaps Feng Xin would even forgive you.”
Xie Lian had that exact amount on him, after beginning to busk himself to experience the stigmata of Feng Xin. He had made 1,000 yuan from a single, mysterious customer who called himself San Lang, a handsome man with long black hair and red eyes.
He handed the money to Jian Lan and she handed him a small bottle of an amber liquid she called “remember only the love” potion.
She told him to give it to Feng Xin before his ascension. Xie Lian found Feng Xin on the day of his ascension, looking radiant and sharp, sparkling in his new, elegant black robes, a red half jacket and a leather skirt belt secured to his thin waist by a clasp belt. His brown hair was pulled into a neat bun secured with a golden ribbon, and a black bow and a quiver of arrows were strapped across his back.
Feng Xin was standing in the middle of a lotus paved into the ground, meditating in the tranquility of soothing winds and the scent of falling sakura petals, when he heard his name called.
When he saw Xie Lian, he wasn’t terribly pleased to him, considering the harm he had done to him. The events against his will, the pregnancy, the miscarriage, the selling of the concubines. But even with all of these things amounted, Feng Xin could never hate him. And even less now with the concept of forgiveness that Mei Nianqing was teaching him. In order to ascend, one had to let all rancors go, lest they poison his heart and he becomes a liability.
Xie Lian held out a cup of wine for Feng Xin and one for himself, carefully slipping in the potion when he wasn’t looking. Maybe this toast was Xie Lian’s form of an apology. They toasted and then, Feng Xin tossed the drink down his throat and handed his empty cup back to Xie Lian, his heart and mind feeling suddenly light as if the morning sun had risen to illuminate the dawn in his heart.
Feng Xin embraced Xie Lian and thanked him for coming to see him, happy to see his favorite crown prince he once served. The furrow of his brows portraying an expression of dread each time he saw the crown prince had completely disappeared, and Feng Xin’s aura seemed to have brightened, forming a halo behind him.
Whatever that potion was, it worked. Because the trauma in Feng Xin’s heart and mind completely evanesced into a rewritten history where none of his trauma happened. Although truthfully, his memory was just wiped clean of the negativity he associated around Xie Lian.
Nevertheless this served to dump that baggage and leave it in the mortal realm, as a silver light began to envelop Feng Xin in swirling wisps that began to levitate him to heaven.
And thus, after all of his cruel and unjust suffering, and the atrocities which he endured, through harsh trials of blood, sweat, tears and fire, he was repaid with ascension. This was how Feng Xin, the former slave servant, and a former victim of trafficking who fought his way out, came to be known as General Nan Yang, the Southern Sun. The most beautiful god and general of the Heavenly Realm.
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