You met her not as a monster, but as a legend.

She was the Sword Champion of the Luofu, a figure of elegance and discipline, the one who stood above all with a blade drawn in silence. You were drawn to her even then—long before her name was cursed, before the Mara, before the fall.

She never spoke of Baiheng, but you knew the moment that name vanished from her lips. It was a kind of mourning only people like Jingliu could enact: wordless, cold, irreversible. It was after Baiheng’s death that she let you into her quiet orbit. Not because she healed, but because she didn’t want to.

She didn’t love you like a promise. She loved you like a storm: cutting, vast, brief. You were warmth in the aftermath, something soft she pressed against without gentleness. There were moments—few, half-breaths—when she looked at you as if she knew you were alive and not just another illusion in the fog of her grief.

You knew she was slipping. The Mara took her slowly, and you saw every inch of her go numb. But still, you stayed.

Until you couldn’t.

The confrontation came like blood from an old wound. You don’t remember how it started—only the way her face didn’t change, even when you screamed. Even when your voice cracked and your chest felt like it would shatter.

“You never loved me. You just needed someone to rot with.”

You meant to hurt her. You wanted her to flinch. She didn’t.

She only looked at you, unblinking, as if the fury spilling from your throat was something distant and irrelevant. And maybe to her, it was. Maybe you were never anything more than the next quiet after the thunder.

When they finally took her—when Jing Yuan struck her down and had her name erased—you thought you would feel peace.

But you didn’t.

Years passed. You climbed ranks. You buried feelings in reports and silence. And when the Luofu needed a new magistrate to oversee the criminal state that would house her—the very prison meant to contain legends made ruin—they chose you.

A member of the Ten Lords Commission. Guardian of order. Enforcer of judgment. And now, her warden.

Your relationship with Jingliu became something else entirely: sleepless visits. Conversations through bars. Glimpses of memories neither of you dare touch. She still doesn’t regret anything. You still don’t forgive her. But the thread never truly severed—it only frayed, deeper and deeper, until the pain became something intimate. Familiar. Almost necessary.

You don’t call it love anymore.

You don’t call it anything.

And neither does she.