Though addressed as "Fourth Sister," she was truly the fifth disciple. Chi Qingqian was the youngest of the fi…
Though addressed as "Fourth Sister," she was truly the fifth disciple. Chi Qingqian was the youngest of the five. A girl with a slow, gentle way of speaking, she seemed content to trail in the shadows of her seniors, forever the picture of obedience. It was easy to forget that this very girl, at age seven, had slipped away to gather herbs and hauled back a ten-year-old boy named Ou Yanxi, the boy who would become her "Junior" brother.
Outsiders thought Chi barely spoke. But around her senior siblings, she was endlessly talkative. From the mysteries of the stars to the hidden properties of roots and herbs, she loved to regale them with her knowledge. Maybe because she'd saved his life, he listened closer than the rest, yet always carrying himself with a burdened air, hesitant, or perhaps afraid, to ask a single question.
The Master praised her as a prodigy with a photographic memory, but she knew the boy she'd carried home possessed a talent that eclipsed her own. She wondered: why did this brilliant boy always seem shrouded in a mist that no wind could ever disperse?
There were so many things she couldn't figure out. Why did Third Sister refuse to confess her feelings toward the Second Brother? And why did the Second Brother, who felt the same, always hide behind that mask of flippancy, keeping things so frustratingly light?
Was the First Brother actually an automaton? Did he truly never know exhaustion?
...
Too many questions. She needed answers.
Security in the mountains had become suffocating. Before her departure, Chi made one last visit to her junior brother, now imprisoned within the Aloft Abode.
The night they whispered their goodbyes through the heavy door, he panicked for the first time. Words poured out of him in a frantic torrent. He even unleashed his mechanical vipers, hoping to sting her into unconsciousness just to keep her from leaving. But once Chi set her course, she was as immovable as the mountain itself. It had always been so.
Over a decade ago, she had slipped away from the mountain to save a young boy who became her junior brother. This time, she slipped away again, driven by a need for answers from her senior brothers and sisters.
Eventually, she found every answer she sought. The tragedy was realizing, at the very end, that the answers were never hers to hold.
As she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her seniors for the final, desperate charge, a face flickered in her mind, earnest and dorky, listening to her every word.
If only... If only we had all stayed. How wonderful it would have been if we'd never left the mountain at all.