Xue Yanli

The Xue bloodline has been well known amongst the cultivators and even the common folk for ages. Their contribution in the fields of arts, literature, and their finesse in warfare has attracted attention of many. Known to bear wisdom and knowledge in their blood, the Xue lineage still stands prominent both in reality and in the minds of the people.


Xue Yanli was the youngest daughter of the Xue family, and she was expected to grow up like other girls at that time.... attending etiquette, language, dance, music lessons, and then eventually finding herself a suitor and getting married. Xue Yanli, however, was an open thinker from her very childhood, and she dreamt of becoming a cultivator like her elder brother, Xue Lan, as she watched him swing his sword with her dreamy gaze. But back then, women did not dare dream of becoming cultivators. The orthodox society held them back from being as free minded and willing to pursue 'danger' as the adventurous Xue Yanli.

The society could not hold Yanli's imagination back.

When her parents found her a suitor, she refused and expressed her wishes to become a cultivator...and her words shook everyone.

"A female cultivator..?"
"Cultivation and swordplay are not women's matters."

Heads turned, voices whispered. Xue Yanli was faced with great opposition. But the ambitious young lady refused to follow the rules. She disappeared from the Xue residence overnight. There were searches made everywhere...and even other significant clans joined in the search for the young lady. But the search proved to be futile. Lament seized the little world inside the walls of the Xue household as Xue Yanli's absence for years was interpreted as the loss of the beautiful and fragile young maiden....for no one believed that a woman could survive in the wilderness, cultivating in assumed serenity.

Several years later, an all-devouring spirit conjured from resentment that had been sealed by the ancestors together, was let loose.....was it an accident, or on purpose..? No one knows....but the morphing spirit was the harbinger of all danger. Lives of many cultivators were lost. When the shapeless beast had cornered yet another group of cultivators who had been trying to suppress it, the returning cultivators later claimed that they saw flashes of light, and all they knew the next moment, was that the spirit beast had vanished, nowhere to be sensed.

The monster had not caused any trouble since then. A week later, a woman clad in scarlet with a white mask, armed with a sword sheathed in white and golden, claiming to invited to the masquerade, stepped back into the holy city, and her sword next to her sent whispers across the streets. When this young lady found her way to the gates to the masquerades, she pushed open the gates, and as all eyes drifted to the new arrival, and then to the pendant of her necklace, which looked like a small, smooth stone with a spirit mark on it, glowing a deep red... spirit marks denoted the presence of a captive spirit, and the pattern of the spirit mark resembled the pattern on the seal which had kept the shapeless monster sealed for so long....and then to her sword, she took off her mask, revealing her identity as the youngest daughter of the Xue lineage, Xue Yanli.