"I never truly left the Bamboo Silk House," Wu Ningli explained. "Oh, publicly, of course I did. But once you enter the Dark Half of the House, you don't ever 'leave' as long as you're alive. Hall Master Bian granted me leave to follow my husband as long as I continued to provide intelligence and support to the sect. I hadn't become a person of any great importance by marrying Yun Kong but the people I came in contact with in the Shining Blade Hall were the sort of people that other members of the sect would find it difficult to reach so my position held enough value to the sect to allow me the freedom to marry and raise Ling'er outside of the sect."
"But when Father died, you went back." Wu Ling said, his heart beginning to grow numb to the shock of revelation.
"It took a while to make it back to the sect. All the other places we went along the way were an attempt to throw off pursuit from the Sanguine Blade Hall. Once we did reach the sect, however, I threw myself into cultivation with a fierceness and sense of purpose that I'd never had before," she explained. "I changed my cultivation manual from the Phantom Soul Blade to the Vengeful Wraith's Nightmare Blade. I gave a part of my heart over to the darkness and the thirst I had to avenge your father and free your sister. The manual suited me terrifyingly well. I broke through to the fourth stage and became an Elder three years after returning to the sect. Three years after that, I felt I had mastered my powers well enough to rescue your sister and her mother."
"You said you almost succeeded," Wu Ling said. "How close did you get?"
"Close enough that Hong Xuefeng, Yun Xuejing, and I had reached the sect's outer gates," his mother answered. "Hong Du, however, was more ruthless than I gave him credit for. I could have fought off most of the cultivators he brought to stop us," she explained in a tone that contained a hint of pride. "Few of them had mastered techniques that would allow their blades to actually touch me instead of passing through me. A wraith isn't easily cut by normal steel and at that point, I was capable of manifesting four phantoms of myself to fight alongside me. Even outnumbered I had a fighting chance. At least, I did until Hong Du took your sister hostage."
"He threatened his own granddaughter?" Su Xiang exclaimed, mortified by the apparent treachery against his own family. "How could he?"
"Maybe because he doesn't really see her as his granddaughter," Wu Ningli speculated. "Or perhaps he was bluffing the entire time and never intended to harm her. Knowing how much he hated Ling'er's father and by extension his bloodline, I couldn't help but take him seriously enough that I hesitated, and that hesitation proved fatal."
"Why didn't they kill you like they killed father? Why did they do… do what they did to you?" Wu Ling asked, gesturing to her hands and feet.
"Because they're afraid of me becoming a True Wraith," Wu Ningli said flatly. "They're afraid that I'd be even stronger if I wasn't tethered to my body and that the desire to avenge my own death would give me even greater power. They're not wrong," she added softly. "If they killed me that night, Hong Du would have been dead by dawn, though I'd likely have followed him into oblivion in order to achieve it."
"So the Sanguine Saber Sect crippled you," Wu Ling said, arranging the pieces of the story in his mind. "And the Bamboo Silk Hall cast us out, why? To avoid retribution from the Sanguine Saber Sect?"
"Exactly," his mother said with a gentle smile. "The wounds they inflicted on me carry a Blood Curse that's a specialty of the Sanguine Blade Hall. They told the Bamboo Silk House that if they cured me then they wouldn't spare the sect in their quest to eradicate me. With that kind of threat, Hall Master told me that I would have to take you out of the sect for a time. As before, I've never stopped being part of the sect but I'm much more limited in what I can do. I never resented that though because even though these years have been hard, they've belonged almost entirely to us. It wasn't until recently that I learned that someone," she emphasized the word 'someone' with a pointed look at Wu Ling. "Someone stole one of the Hall Master's treasures when we left. She's been waiting all this time to see if you could awaken using the manual you stole from her. Now that you have, I'm afraid things have become more complicated for both of us."
"She knew?" Wu Ling burst out. He thought he'd gotten away unnoticed by anyone. He never imagined that the Hall Master had known all these years that he'd taken the manual and the zither that went with it when he raided the treasury for money to fund their lives outside the sect. The money he'd taken had been mostly taels of gold and silver anyway, useful for a humble mortal home and basic living expenses but hardly a valuable resource to powerful cultivators. The spirit crystals he'd stolen had only barely been enough for his mother's medicine at the time and the manual had been left to gather dust in a corner of the treasury. He'd thought its absence would go completely unnoticed. Clearly, he'd been very wrong.
"Of course, she knew," Wu Ningli said. "You underestimate senior cultivators too much, my child. That's one of the first things I'm going to have to teach you in the days to come. Look in the top drawer of my nightstand," she said, gesturing at the familiar piece of furniture that had sat at her bedside even when she'd lived in the Shining Blade Hall.
Opening the drawer, Wu Ling stared at the dark piece of jade that bore his name along with the name of the sect. He'd seen enough identity tokens to recognize it for what it was but several of the markings were unfamiliar to him. "Mother, is this?"
"Since you've stolen her manual, Hall Master has claimed you for the Dark Half of the Bamboo Silk House. She's been kind enough to bestow on you the status of a Direct Disciple of an Elder, in this case, me. From now on, you're no longer a loose cultivator, you're an Outer Sect Disciple of the Bamboo Silk House."