When the Long family fell, she did as her master had told her: she took the infant heir in her arms, fled Xinglong Manor, and got out for one reason only — to leave the house one last thread of blood.
As instructed, she was to find the Qilin, who had been living quietly in Baihe Township, and the two of them were to raise this last heir of the Longs, so that the family could be restored one day.
But was any of it really going to go that smoothly?
Mo Zhaoyun was the personal maid of Long Wu’s wife, Gongsun Xiaofeng. Her own skill was not first rate, but with the pair of Emei Piercers in her hands she could not always beat a good fighter — and she could always come out alive, or leave him badly hurt.
In the years she and the Qilin raised Long Fuyuan together, the two of them came to an understanding past anything ordinary. In a fight they could strike at the same instant and bring out a combo art of their own, and it hit hard.
In The Order’s twelfth year, a golden blade-aura that looked as though it could split the sky burst open above Xinglong Manor. It was the signal Long Wu had arranged with his wife’s maid, Mo Zhaoyun, and that signal meant exactly one thing: he and his wife were about to die.
Mo Zhaoyun had never believed there would be a day when the Long family’s great house actually came down.
But when she saw that burst of golden aura and understood that the moment had really come, she steadied herself quickly, did what had been agreed, and carried the heir out through the tunnel beneath the rear hall of Xinglong Manor.
“Keep the last blood of the Longs alive.” On that one belief she went days without food and without sleep, and came at last to Yama Valley, in front of Baihe Township.
The plan was simple: find the retainer called the Qilin in Baihe Township, raise the heir with him, and everything would be safe. In time the heir would grow up, restore the Longs and put the house back on its feet.
But she had forgotten that she could endure and the baby in her arms could not. When a cry of hunger went up in the valley, The Order’s people, who had been waiting there all along, closed around them in an instant.
Worn down as she was, Mo Zhaoyun still tried to fight. But she had been running for days with almost no food and no sleep, and had nothing left in her; and The Order’s people in that ambush were plainly no ordinary fighters, far beyond what one woman could deal with. A single blow knocked her out, and when she came to, slowly, there was no sign of the heir. She forced herself up and ran out of Yama Valley after him, but The Order had pulled out completely, and there was not half a trace left.
Knowing she had thrown away the last blood of the Longs, Mo Zhaoyun was eaten by regret and came close to ending herself.
And then, from talk along the road, she learned that the Long family really had been destroyed. It struck her then that in the whole world, apart from herself and The Order, nobody was left who could prove who the child was. Which raised a question: did it still matter whether the blood was real? What mattered now was keeping whatever ember of the Longs was left — so why shouldn’t she relight it herself, and give the dragon-lion its hope again?
So she turned aside to Red Leaf Temple, not far away, which at that moment was taking in many children left homeless by the fighting. Mo Zhaoyun picked out one baby at a glance: healthy, with something noble already in the shape of his face — the perfect stand-in for the heir. She took him in with the monks’ thanks, and carried him on toward Baihe Township.
In the end, following the instructions she had been given, Mo Zhaoyun knocked on that door. She met the Qilin, and the two of them named the child Long Fuyuan.
Neither she nor the Qilin had ever raised a child, and becoming parents all at once, they stumbled constantly and made a great many jokes of themselves.
But as the days went on they worked it out. For the first time Mo Zhaoyun found that ordinary life could be this good and this steady — far better than the storms of the Wulin.
And in day after day of being together, she and the Qilin fell in love and came to understand each other, and became husband and wife in truth. Rough and wild as the Qilin looked, with her he was gentle, careful and attentive.
Under the two of them Long Fuyuan grew up clever, quick and sensible, and even the way he moved carried the bearing of the Long family in its good years. Mo Zhaoyun thought that if the three of them could just live here for the rest of their lives, that would be good enough. She almost forgot the thing she had buried.
But a lie gets found out in the end, and this one had a fatal hole in it from the start.
In The Order’s thirty-first year the Mask Riots broke out, and Long Fuyuan decided to use the moment to walk out into the Wulin, make a name, do something worth doing — and restore the Longs.
Watching him go, Mo Zhaoyun could only pray for him in silence. After all those years she had long since made Long Fuyuan her own child. And he did not let her down: soon word came back that the Nameless Swordsman was saving people, and that everything about him had the Long bearing to it. It looked as though things were going the right way.
Then one day Long Fuyuan turned up at the door alone and asked to speak with her, just the two of them. What he asked, uneasy, was the secret she had kept at the very bottom of herself. Mo Zhaoyun knew that what she had always feared had finally happened.
Frightened, she could not bring herself to tell him where he came from. She only tried to tell him that blood and a name do not prove anything — that if he worked at it and proved himself with his own heart, he could still do great things, and nobody would care whether he was really a Long. And that she and the Qilin would love him and stand behind him as they always had.
She had had all those years to think it through and see it clearly. But Long Fuyuan was young, and could not see it the way she did, or let it go.
When he read the truth out of her evasions, everything he had believed fell in on itself and the fixation took him like an animal. He walked out of the home he had lived in for twenty years without looking back, and vanished.
Sick with regret, Mo Zhaoyun and the Qilin set out to find Long Fuyuan, following the road she had taken when she was young.
This time the search had nothing to do with the Long family and nothing to do with any plan. What they wanted to find was their son.
Mo Zhaoyun knew this might be a journey with no way back.
But at least when the millet dream broke, he would still be beside her.
For what happened next, see the Qilin’s story.