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Su Xiyan never knew exactly what started it.
One moment she was dying. She was furious. She wrapped her baby awkwardly in her outer robes, hoping the half broken protections woven into them would keep him safe from the cold for long enough for someone to find him.
She held him close for a moment, trying to put every bit of warmth she had into him in those last moments as the poison and rage ran through her and--
And then it was gone. Su Xiyan panicked, for half a moment, because she was kneeling in a very familiar cell and her baby was gone and a familiar figure was walking out of the door.
She wasn't tied in immortal binding cables, like she had been for most of her time in the prison once it was obvious she had no intention of repenting. In that moment it didn't occur to her to wonder why, she only noticed it for long enough to realize that there was nothing to stop her from launching to her feet and rushing forward. If she had to kill him with her bare hands she--
Her shifu probably hadn't meant to send the curtain of acid down onto her.
A moment later she was back, kneeling in the center of the cell. This time she paused after she leapt to her feet, glaring as her shifu walked away and the acid curtain came flowing down.
Her original instinct had been that Huan Hua had found them on the river, locked her up, and done who knew what with her baby.
But now the same thing had happened twice.
Su Xiyan considered and quickly discarded the idea that she might be in an illusion. She was--she used to be head disciple of Huan Hua and even the most perfect illusions couldn't fool powerful cultivators for long. If she had been poisoned, she would be able to feel echos of the effects in an illusion or dream even if they had given her an antidote. If she hadn't, then no known method of illusion could have possibly kept up for a whole week of hypervigilance. Not even the most insidious of dream demons could do that.
Which left...a few things.
She took a deep breath, knelt back down on the platform, and took stock of herself.
She was healthy, she was unhurt, she was not poisoned, she was--she was absolutely pregnant, but so early on that if she hadn't known to check she wouldn't have realized for at least a month yet.
That, and the state of her clothes (still wearing her head disciple robes, her hair still pulled back with the golden adornments she wore when accompanying her shifu to official functions, everything all nice and neat and in order as though she was kneeling in her own rooms to meditate and not trapped in a prison) narrowed the options considerably.
The simplest answer, the answer that answered all of the questions, was that she was in a time loop.
The question was how.
She choked down her anger and determined, in the simplest way possible, that the Palace Master hadn't set the time loop.
Her shifu liked to think that he was unreadable, and he may have been to an outside observer, but she'd spent her whole life watching for subtle changes in his moods. He was pleased when he walked into the cell the next day and she was kneeling there, face carefully neutral and requesting to speak. He was annoyed when she started laying out why the saintly ruler was not in fact evil, with the same range of emotions she remembered him having the first time they'd had this conversation.
When she casually dropped the existence of the baby into the conversation, the palace master's shock and fury made it very obvious that he'd had no idea prior to that moment that she was pregnant.
The resulting fight killed her, but that was probably for the best.
Su Xiyan tested it a few more times. She watched carefully for adjustments in emotions. She said the same thing, the same way, and kept an eye out for frustration or impatience. She made the same moves in the fight, and watched him respond in exactly the same way each time. The last two times, she caught the startled horror on his face as he realized he had killed her.
If the Palace Master had set the loop, he wasn't in it. Which meant he hadn't deliberately set a loop, because there was absolutely no possibility that he would set a loop which he had no control over.
She gave herself a loop to just be angry. To scream. To be a mad thing full of rage. She screamed every frustration she'd ever had at her shifu, who seemed to not have any idea what to do with her in this state. She screamed at the disciples who came to deliver her food and didn't even feel that bad as they startled and ran off.
None of them listened to a word that she was screaming.
It was very tempting to give in and vent her rage violently. The disciples tending to her were among the strongest of Huan Hua, but she was the strongest. Even trapped here without a weapon, they weren't a match for her.
And they had been her martial siblings, once.
Su Xiyan still ended the loop by attacking her shifu. She managed to rend the flesh of his shoulder with a blast of qi and she refused to feel bad about it.
The next loop she settled down. The Palace Master had a nasty streak she hadn't been aware of...but in the end of it he hadn't wanted to kill her. He'd wanted to kill her love and her child, absolutely, but that was because they were demons. Surely, with the luxury of what at this point was clearly a very stable time loop, she'd be able to figure out how to persuade him to see things differently.
She had several months each time. She was an immortal cultivator who had been trained to be calm and patient and use her head to carefully reason things out.
She was pissed off but she couldn't let that color things if she wanted to solve this.
It got harder and harder to remind herself of that, each time the Palace Master would dismiss what she was saying and refuse to even consider that Tianlang-jun might not be evil.
Forty six loops later, she finally put many lives worth of hints together and realized abruptly that the Palace Master already knew Tianlang-jun wasn't evil and that was why all her attempts to persuade him were failing.
She calmly accepted that she had been very wrong. She calmly accepted that her shifu was in fact an asshole who would condemn innocent and gentle people to a horrible fate for seemingly no reason but their species.
She not so calmly threw a blast of qi into his face while he was in the middle of taking a sip of tea.
She still lost the fight, but Su Xiyan liked to think that if this was the sort of time loop that resulted in diverging timelines, her shifu had come out of it with some permanent scars.
For the next five loops she refused to speak. She meditated, ignored everyone no matter what they did to try to force her to interact, and then picked a fight to the death to end the loop before the baby started to show each time.
(She didn't know for sure, how far she could let time go. Would it always reset at a certain point? Was there a trigger that would stop the loops? Would it just keep resetting on her death forever? It wasn't worth the risk to let it stop until she had a solution.)
A few months of time to think separated by violent outbursts wasn't much--not compared to how much time cultivators would normally spend in the sort of contemplation that Su Xiyan needed--but it was the best she could get.
Su Xiyan determined that she had a few options to escape before Tianlang-jun was trapped. Most of those she threw out, because while she would be more than happy to murder her shifu, she wasn't so far gone as to kill someone else who thought they were doing good.
That left lying.
She was very bad at lying.
She had plenty of time to learn.
The first time she managed to convincingly act like her shifu had persuaded her to turn against Tianlang-jun, stepping in her room felt like some sort of dream. She stood and breathed air free of the sting of acid for the first time in years. She washed up and let herself linger in the bath. She slept her nights in a soft bed for a week while saying and doing the right things during the day.
And then the moment her shifu wasn't paying attention she went out the window.
In theory this should have been it.
This should have been enough.
The chances of them stopping her were miniscule, and even when they did, that first time, she learned the way everyone moved. She lied like breathing, she memorized the schedule of every last disciple, she memorized every patrol route, she memorized the patrol routes of every other sect that she encountered, when she ran into something she couldn't fight nor avoid she'd spend a loop training and then reset and fight again.
In theory it should have been impossible to stop her from reaching Tianlang-jun long before her shifu could even start to muster the other sects to attack him.
Eventually it was.
And then the endless abyss opened underneath her feet and threw her into a realm of nothing but pouring lava.
Su Xiyan spent another loop screaming and fighting. The disciples had reason to fear her this time. She still didn't kill them, but if she wounded them, she didn't care.
The Palace Master accused her of turning to demonic cultivation--there was no other logical explanation for what seemed like a very sudden increase in power--and all she could do was scream that if she did it would be worth it.
It was clear at this point that there was some outside influence controlling the loops. The two possibilities were that the world was trying to reassert itself to what it was meant to be, and the only way out would be to play along with what she'd done the first time (she refused)...
...or that a powerful spirit was resetting time with a specific goal in mind.
Her choices were to try to figure out what it wanted--if it even wanted anything and hadn't just trapped her in an unending loop of pain--and then to either do what it wanted or to destroy it.
Actually contacting one was complicated. In theory she could do it, given enough time to meditate and locate it, but she didn't have that time in a single loop. A demonic cultivator could do that more easily, but despite her shifu's accusation she had boundaries. She was a righteous cultivator and she would figure this out. She had all the loops she needed to figure this out, and access to Huan Hua's libraries for months at a time if she just spent a month or so lying first to get to them.
No one cared that she was researching spirits. She made up a different lie each time, and by now she lied so easily that they believed her.
Everything she tried, failed.
Once, in desperation, she tried to talk to Master Wu Chen when he was there to help plot against Tianlang-jun.
She qi deviated before she could even enter the room, which probably meant that Wu Chen had the answers and whatever was controlling this hell didn't want her to be able to ask.
Eventually she had gone through every bit of literature they had and every book they could possibly borrow from other sects without speaking to someone in person, and none of them gave her answers. The only other resources were ones the spirit wouldn't allow her, and her only other ideas were ones she already knew would fail.
Which meant she was back to trial and error.
Hiding a pregnancy was difficult, but not impossible. She researched illusions under the cover of researching spirits, failed to hide it well enough a few times, and eventually found herself on Bailu Mountain.
Rage was so thick in her throat she could barely breath for it. They had an army laying in wait for someone who was coming here expecting nothing but some romance. Tianlang-jun wasn't bringing his black armored army with him, and what's worse was they knew that. They knew that they'd somehow tempted Tianlang-jun out unprotected. They knew.
None of them bothered to stop and think how incredibly unlikely it was that he would do that, if he were actually in conflict with them.
None of them bothered to think anything but 'demon bad' and she hated them. She had gone into this thinking that ideally she'd be able to cause enough chaos to turn the tide of battle, allowing Tianlang-jun to win, and then they could escape. Hopefully with minimal deaths.
But the sects were fucking heartless and all of a sudden she didn't care. They could all die and they would deserve it for not even pausing to ask if they were doing what was right.
The other cultivators stayed clear of her, likely assuming that the steel in her movements was preparation for the coming battle. It was easy enough to use the rage to keep her face blank.
She held back as the fight started, needing them to startle as they realized that Tianlang-jun could tear through most of their defences even without his army to back him up. Once they were already having to regroup, she would turn, and--
And that fell apart the moment he saw her.
She froze as she caught his eye, her heart clenching as a look of sheer betrayed devastation crossed his face.
His shields wavered, and the old Peak Lord of Bai Zhan took the opening to strike Tianlang-jun dead.
Su Xiyan's vision went white and she heard a scream that she dimly recognized as her own voice. The last thing she remembered before the qi deviation took her completely was drawing her blade and launching at the Peak Lord.
She probably didn't last long.
Su Xiyan didn't go back to Bailu Mountain. She didn't try to lie again. Instead she waited three days and killed the Shidi that brought her food.
She left his body on the platform and walked out into the prison. Most of the disciples guarding it didn't yet know that anything was out of the ordinary with her. That knowledge was kept to a careful few at first--her shifu's most loyal.
All she had to do was smile, present the token her Shidi had been carrying, and lie her way into the depths of the prison where the worst sorts of artifacts were kept.
If her shifu wanted to accuse her of demonic cultivation? She'd learn demonic cultivation.
The thing about being in a time loop was that it didn't matter how many times she had to restart it. If they caught her--and they did catch her--she would just go back down the next day with the same lies in a new loop. Her shields got better each time. Her wards improved. Within a few dozen loops she was able to ward off the doors to the places the darker artifacts were kept and peruse them at her leisure over the course of weeks, kept safely free of distractions beneath a shell of wards. She learned which ones they could break easily, which cultivators they could call in with skills she didn't know.
She still had lines she wouldn't cross, but it turned out demonic cultivation didn't actually require crossing those lines.
And it also turned out that when you were carrying a heavenly demon's baby, it did some strange things to your blood. Her blood had more power than any other part of her except her golden core, and that was enough to turn her in that direction. Su Xiyan needed all the power that she could get, right now.
Su Xiyan waited until she knew she would have a week of no one opening her prison cell before she attempted to contact the spirit with blood. She wasn't expecting it to work immediately--nothing seemed to--but trial and error was an old friend by now. She had no idea how long she had been reliving the same few months, it had probably been decades of just reading and learning and slowly building up what she could do with her own blood by this point, but she had plenty longer if she needed it.
It worked the first time.
[Congratulations, congratulations, congratulations!] it said chipperly, materializing in the air as a strangely geometric pattern of moving lines of blood. [You are well on your way towards balancing the scales of fate!]
Su Xiyan was startled out of the dark determination she'd been stuck in for she didn't even know how long, and left staring at the strangest spirit she had ever encountered.
Maybe demonic spirits were always this way, if you encountered them in friendly situations?
It would explain why demonic cultivators had such strange motivations and illogical reactions. She'd need to be careful that she didn't fall into that; that sort of behavior usually got the demonic cultivators killed.
"Exactly what lines of fate am I fixing?" she asked, careful to keep any resentment out of her voice.
[A satisfactory conclusion must be obtained,] it told her, as though that was obvious.
"I've obtained 'conclusions' I would see as satisfactory."
[Conclusion must bring the weight of glory equal with the line of fate that was abandoned! Luo Binghe was fated to take glorious revenge against the righteous cultivation sects and shake the very fabric of this world. You must match the weight of that fate if you are to live.]
If she had any doubt that she was dealing with a spirit aligned with demonic cultivation, the focus on destroying the righteous sects would have done away with those doubts.
She should probably ask why the spirit wanted them dead so badly.
She really didn't care.
For a moment Su Xiyan almost did ask who 'Luo Binghe' was, because she'd never heard the name...but she caught herself as she put that one together. The baby. Her baby was fated to take revenge if she couldn't.
...It was a little satisfying to know that someone would, either way, but she intended to solve this herself.
"What about Tianlang-jun?" She asked, because she had to know.
[Fate variable,] it responded.
The fight at Bailu Mountain was apparently a 'fixed point in the lines of fate', which meant she needed to be able to deal with it without Tianlang-jun dying. Su Xiyan had to be able to fight her own sect, dozens of smaller sects, and, most importantly, several Peak Lords and the head disciple of Cang Qiong.
She was powerful, especially now with years and years more of study behind her, but not that powerful, not yet.
So she started working on it.
Su Xiyan started with her shifu. If she couldn't beat him alone, she wouldn't be able to defeat an army. If she couldn't defeat him along with the rest of her sect, then she wouldn't be able to defeat Cang Qiong.
It took almost distressingly few loops before she was able to kill him. Not even a dozen.
She left this body cooling on the platform, took his head out into a courtyard, and let her former martial siblings come to her.
They weren't a match for her when they came at her in small groups--not with the skills she'd gained or the blood wards drawn onto her robes or the increasing number of tricks she was learning--so she'd ward herself off and wait for them all to get there and then start the fight when there was a proper sect-sized army.
Sometimes she'd take a break for a loop to study, or to make blood techniques of her own. Su Xiyan didn't know if she'd still be able to use these after little Binghe was born, but if she took out enough people in the fight at Bailu it wouldn't matter.
Eventually the cultivators of this region weren't a match for her, not even when she allowed her shifu to live past the prison, so she let someone escape to draw others in.
It was the right choice. Cang Qiong came.
She didn't know how many lives she spent learning their fighting patterns, but when she started to see fear on the faces of the younger generation, she knew she was getting somewhere. After a few hundred loops of battle she felt like she knew them. At some point she started and stopped resenting their head disciple for making his name by taking out her love. It was hard to keep hating someone who was very earnestly trying to talk her back to righteousness for years and years, only stopping on the loops where she killed his green clad shidi.
She got a real fight from him then. He was terrifyingly strong when he had a personal motivation.
He was also incredibly easy to distract if she hurt his friend without killing him, which made him easy to disregard if she timed things correctly. Su Xiyan felt like she knew him, somewhere deep down. She wondered how terrible he would become if pushed, or if he'd shy away from it.
It took hundreds of loops, thousands of adjustments to her wards and spells and even the very blade of her sword. But eventually she won. It was on a loop where she waited, impatiently, until later in her pregnancy to start the fight. The baby was stronger, and so was the power in her blood.
Also, righteous cultivators were a lot more hesitant to kill a heavily pregnant woman. She had no qualms about manipulating that, at this point.
Not everyone died. She had injured Yue Qingyuan this time, and the green robed boy had simply grabbed him and dragged him off away from the battle. A lifetime ago she might have called that cowardly, but now she just cheered him on in her head for his good choices even as she sent blasts at his fleeing back.
Given the choice, she would absolutely drag Tianlang-jun out of a battlefield, honor be damned.
Which, well, that wasn't saying much when she was covered in blood runes, but it still held.
Waiting for the fight at Bailu Mountain seemed to take forever, now that she had to actually let it happen. She'd gotten so used to simply walking out of her cell whenever she couldn't bear waiting, letting her emotions decide the timing of the battles rather than logic, that now that she had to wait it seemed impossible.
She spent the time pretending to be recalcitrant while someone was watching and carefully tracing layer upon layer of blood wards into the inside of her robes while they weren't. When the time drew closer she drew them onto her skin as well.
It had been so long since she'd allowed the battle to happen that she was almost surprised when her shifu came to see her prior. He hadn't told her it was the eve of the battle--it was a distant memory by now but she was fairly sure he hadn't even come to see her in the first loop, when she'd been trying to persuade him as to Tianlang-jun's goodness--but she knew what it was.
"This master will beseech you once more," he said, affecting an old and despairing air in the face of the glare she'd been leveling at him this entire loop, "repent and rejoin the sect. Your martial siblings miss you--they need you--and the demon has poisoned you against them. Surely you can see how much you've changed."
"I can," Su Xiyan agreed, and killed him.
She left the palace silent behind her, blood running down the corridors and flames rising in the windows. Huan Hua Sect would never reach the battlefield.
When she reached the edge of the battlefield, she wanted nothing more than to go find Tianlang-jun and flee with him. The look on his face when he'd seen her that first time was etched onto her heart, and the only thing she feared was seeing it again.
Well, no, that was a lie, she feared a lot of things, including his death, but it was fairly heavily weighted on the list of things Su Xiyan never wished to see again.
Half the battle was over by the time she fought her way to him. He looked up, saw her, then tilted his head up and laughed at the sky.
"Watch your back!" she yelled, keeping half an eye on a very startled Yue Qingyuan. When she got her opening she twisted her blood in the air, ripped his sword arm off, and left him unconscious for his green clad brother to rescue. "I don't need you to die on me after all this!"
"I won't, I won't!" he promised, light and airy. "I got your letter."
"It wasn't my letter!"
"Ah, that makes sense!"
She gave up trying to get him to focus. Su Xiyan hadn't, for some foolish reason, factored banter into her battle plans, but no matter how terrified she was that it would mess everything up and leave her to repeat this over and over and watch him die over and over--she couldn't not respond.
Luckily, Tianlang-jun was just as formidable as she remembered. More so, even, as though he'd gained strength the moment she had shown up to support him. She kept a careful eye on him and Zhuzhi-lang, wishing she had time to grab them and draw blood wards across their backs, but they held their own.
She ripped apart a monk's shields and let him fall to Zhuzhi-lang's blade in his back. Tianlang-jun was fighting off in her peripheral, but she couldn't see who because Cang Qiong's sect leader was right there and this was someone she hadn't had the chance to test herself against yet. Someone who could very well lead to her having to repeat this day over and over with months of waiting between.
It could take centuries.
"Leave and I'll let you live!" she called, knowing he wouldn't. Knowing it was a foolish thing to say, even with decades and decades of knowledge and practice from the loop.
It was a long fight. He was better than her shifu. Far better. Of course he was, if he was good enough to ascend.
Su Xiyan couldn't focus on the rest of the battlefield, not with this against her. She couldn't even keep track of Tianlang-jun.
If he had died, then this would be practice.
She threw herself into it, putting her everything behind her blade and her blood.
She won.
He fell, but he didn't die. She stared down at him, everything in her wanting to kill him because--because--
Because she wanted to kill him. Even though he hadn't actually done anything wrong. Even though he was defeated and not a threat to her. Just because he might be.
She closed her eyes and stepped back, centering herself, then snapped them back open as she heard him move.
Dodging was easy, keeping herself from striking back was much harder, "Just accept that you've lost," she said coldly, "I don't care if I kill you, but I don't need to. Accept it and go home."
"What treasures did you help him steal from Huan Hua," he demanded, a strange look on his face as he climbed to his feet.
She really didn't understand why that would have been important at this point, even if she had been helping him kill people. Nor why he hadn't made the connection that the palace master had insisted on all of this based on a report in her name.
"The only treasure I want from Huan Hua is standing before you." Tianlang-jun said coldly from behind her, having apparently won his own battles without her watchful eye just in time to show up and say something stupidly romantic.
The odd look didn't leave the sect leader's face. The whole battlefield seemed to be paused as everyone waited to see what they would do.
Su Xiyan shifted her stance, already regretting not killing him. Doubly so when she saw Bai Zhan's peak lord come in from the side, bloodied and limping but not dead from whatever clash he'd had with Tianlang-jun.
A disturbing amount of cultivators were still alive.
If she needed to balance the lines of fate, Su Xiyan probably had to kill them. The 'glory' of the situation had to match whatever her son would have done--if she had died--and she wasn't sure if leaving her sect broken and defeating the leader of another sect was enough. It didn't feel like enough.
Everything in her was screaming to grab Tianlang-jun and flee.
The Cang Qiong's sect leader nodded, suddenly. Like there had been an actual conversation at some point. "Go then."
She took a long breath, considering that she might have to redo this loop again if she agreed, and then released it. "Fine."
Then she turned around, grabbed Tianlang-jun, and kissed him. It had been so long since she had kissed him and if the cultivators stabbed her in the back--well--then she wouldn't feel bad about killing them next time.
Su Xiyan didn't--couldn't--relax until days later, when she tried to summon the spirit again. Tianlang-jun was hovering off to the side, watching the blood cultivation in fascination. She'd told him about the time loop, something that had taken a significant amount of time because he kept interrupting to get upset over some different way she'd died.
He made a delighted nose as the spirit responded. Not by appearing as it had before, but by drawing 'Congratulations, congratulations, congratulations!' on the floor before all the blood she had shed for the summoning disappeared in blue wisps of fire.
That had better mean she was out of it, or next time she was going to take up spirit destroying.