━━━𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐒𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐅𝐈𝐑𝐄𝐅𝐋𝐈𝐄𝐒
❝the woods have remembered you
ever since the first time you got
lost in them.❞
Fate knows what it's doing. When fourteen-year-old Su Lin breathed her last as a mortal human and ascended after successfull...
EVEN HEAVEN HAS THINGS it would prefer to hide and pretend like it does not exist. The only distinction between heavenly officials and the humans and ghosts who walk the mortal realm is that heavenly officials are required to be more devious about how they do it.
How does someone who faced a Heavenly Calamity and ascended as a god sweep something under the rug?
Where amongst the capital in the sky with the array of divine palaces, beautiful pavilions and kiosks lining its grand avenues can someone keep something shameful hidden?
It's almost ironic, really.
But also entirely true, because deep within Heaven and beneath a daunting floor-to-ceiling mountain of scrolls, one in particular is hidden away, intentionally and meticulously buried where no one will ever care to look.
The contents detail a story — from 700 and some many years ago — about a young girl. Born to a hunter from a small village with no noble blood or title to her name, she lived secluded the forests surrounding her home. She had no formal education, only barely considered literate, and she possessed not a shred of understanding for the practice of cultivation.
Yet when faced with a Heavenly Calamity upon her dying breath, she succeeded, ascending in a pillar of golden light after turning fourteen only a few months prior. It was a feat no one ever thought to be possible. Who would consider that kind of possibility?
It was unprecedented. Unheard of.
Unacceptable.
The girl had created an uproar in Heaven with her presence alone.
All the other deities refused to accept her as one of them. A martial god? Her? Of where? Don't make them laugh. The Heavenly Emperor eventually put his foot down to put an end to their incessant complaints and demands that she be banished for her audacity.
He declared for all of them to hear, "Like every one of you who have ascended, the girl is equally bound to the whims and laws of fate and thus she is welcome to stay."
But fate, they'd rather think, perhaps had finally made a mistake, someone managed to slip through the cracks.
(Fate doesn't actually make mistakes, but they were content to believe otherwise.)
The story continues, detailing the lengths they went to deny the girl of mistaken ascension any dignity, how they ignored her presence until it finally seemed as though she had disappeared. No one could recall what she looked like, what her voice sounded like, or even what her name had been. They never wanted to know because it would mean acknowledging her when they wanted her gone.
And the scroll holding any records of The Girl Who Fought An Army and the day they all claimed that someone managed to slip through fate's fingers has been buried, long since forgotten.
Well, almost forgotten that is.
The hunter's daughter was the one responsible for burying the scroll within Ling Wen's palace after all. She was playing the long game, a charade to keep them all fooled for centuries while she remained doing her duty as the martial god of forests.
Standing in the center of their crowd, she had once declared, "I am a god."
"We beg to differ," They replied.
She stared at each of them, unwavering, and said back, "Then beg."
They laughed at the time, but centuries later, they wouldn't dare think of doing so. They would beg, not for her to leave, but for her to stay and fight what they could not.
· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·
a/n:
hi, hello, yes, welcome. I have started a new fic. no, I will not stop.
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