The courtyard became still and quiet as Meng the mad wizard was erased from the world.
As Jian Li stood in shock and took in her awful surroundings. She and Jian Ye had nothing to say to each other as they grieved for the ones that had fallen silently.
As her father slowly started to recover and pick himself back up again, she suddenly got blinded by a flash of light.
Jian Li felt the energy that filled her immediately disappear and she fell to the ground with a thud.
She was weak and tired and for a brief moment, she just wanted to sleep. She felt her consciousness slowly slipping away, but she forcefully held onto it.
"Your sister's Art. She used the Art of the Phoenix to burn that wizard," her father said.
"Father, why would that man do such a thing? Why would he want to kill us?" Jian Li asked her father in a voice that was filled with dread and terror.
"For power. That demonic cultivator was little more than a monster. He consumed the lives of innocents to strengthen himself. Like a monster eating its prey so that its offspring can grow stronger.
Once he found out that there were practitioners of the Arts in the village, he decided to use us to gain power.", her father said, looking at the piles of dead bodies grimly.
"His greed and madness were his undoing. He was bound to meet someone that could take him down. But, imagine if your elder sister Ye was absent today, imagine if this man was able to do this again to other villages after our village.", her father hesitantly took a brief pause as he looked at Jian Li.
"In this world, only personal power is absolute. Even people who have no previous enmity with each other can be at each other's throats for personal gain in seconds. That's why you have to become strong, strong enough to defend yourself on your own terms."
Jian Li was speechless.
"Father, I think... that..." Jian Li began to say but her father put his hand on her shoulder to stop her.
"I don't want to talk about this yet. We will talk about it later. Right now, it's time for you to rest. Even if you got a strong Spirit, it's still not mature.", her father said as reassuringly as he could.
Jian Li had her adrenaline fade away and gradually allowed herself to drift off to unconsciousness in her father's arms.
She had already overdrawn her energy the day before so she was knocked out cold at record speed.
--------------------------------
A dream began to form in her mind.
She was wandering aimlessly through a desert. The desert was littered with bones and debris.
"Help me, please. Please, save me," a light voice called out.
She looked around and saw a woman lying face down on the sand. A sand dragon was flying overhead and the woman was in its sights.
"Please, save me," the woman pleaded with her.
The dragon swooped down and the scorching winds blew across the desert. Jian Li was blown backwards.
"No, please," the woman pleaded.
Jian Li closed her eyes.
"Save me," the woman said.
The dragon swooped down again. Jian Li covered the woman with her body.
"This can't be happening," the woman yelled in disbelief.
The dragon opened its mouth and Jian Li closed her eyes.
"Nooooooooo!" the woman cried.
A deafening scream pierced through Jian Li's mind.
Jian Li opened her eyes with a gasp as she woke up in her bedroom.
She looked around the room. She was all alone.
"Mother," Jian Li muttered. She got up and dragged herself to the window.
A full moon was shining in the sky. Jian Li stared through the window up into the sky and saw her own reflection.
Her hair was still white but with black streaks here and there. But beyond her reflection, she saw the courtyard again.
"Mother," she sobbed, recalling the horrible event from earlier in the afternoon. The courtyard was practically wiped out of any signs that an awful event had happened there.
And still, she felt like she saw that the dark miasma was there, eating away at the children and the adults indiscriminately.
All the excitement she felt before from being able to see the outside world had vanished and instead, had been replaced with dark thoughts and anxiety.
She was terrified by the fact that a random person in this world could wantonly cause a disaster of that magnitude in mere moments.
Jian Li always had missed her own world, but never strongly as she had at that moment.
She wished that she and the others with her did not die in the plane crash. She wished that she was never brought to this horrifying world. She wished that she could just meet with her mother even for a second.
No matter many times she wished for it though, nothing changed. The moon was still full. The courtyard remained empty. And Jian Li was still alone, crying in her room.
All of a sudden, as she was staring down into the moonlit courtyard, thoughts of her siblings began to surface in her mind.
She was ashamed as she had not thought about how they were feeling. She recalled how Jian Ye and her father showed up seemingly from nowhere and thought about how her other brothers were nowhere to be seen.
The panic started to fester in her mind.
Jian Li left her room and walked carefully to her eldest brother Jian Wen's room door first since he was closer.
"Li? Try to get some sleep. You've been through a lot today. Don't walk around at midnight.", a muffled voice briefly said from the inside of the room.
Her eldest brother began speaking even before she knocked on the door. His voice was just as calm as it had always been.
"Okay, I just had to check on you. Good night.", she quickly said back and walked away. Most of her bad thoughts had been dispelled by how calm he had been when talking, but she still felt like she had to check on Jian Chen.
Jian Li knocked on his door and heard nothing in response. She knocked a second time and she still heard nothing. Her anxiety flared up and she burst into his room.
Jian Chen sat on his bed with his legs crossed and his eyes closed on the bed. He had both hands on a short sword sitting on his lap. He did not react at all to the commotion and it seemed like he did not even hear anything.
Jian Li was teary-eyed and lost for words, but still happy as she still had her brothers with her. She watched as Jian Chen deeply meditated in his dark room for a couple of seconds and relaxed as she left the room.
Back in her room, she looked out at the willow tree in the courtyard. She felt like she could recall the happy face of the little red-haired girl waving at her from the courtyard just below the window. Jian Li silently sobbed on her pillow until she fell asleep.