The Wave Demon's Apology

In twenty years, she will put her palm on his chest and end him.

Today she is sixteen. Her hair is still dark. She is laughing at something her brother just said, and her hands are loose at her sides, and she has never in her life heard the name Po Lan.

Xie Lan has.

He died as Po Lan — Wave Demon, heretic, last of his kind — on a black mountain with a hundred orthodox cultivators arrayed around him and her palm on his chest. The heavens, for reasons that may not be kind, have sent him back. Sixteen years old. Qi Refining 1. Outer disciple. Two hundred years of forbidden technique in his head and no body left to channel it through.

He has the cultivation experience to climb faster than any disciple in his sect. He has the memory of every technique that ever broke him. He also has the unique misfortune that the woman currently training on the peak across the courtyard is being shaped, in real-time, into the executioner who will learn to read the heresy in his bones — and the closer he stands to her, the more clearly her gift can already see him.

He should stay away. He has tried.

It does not appear to be a thing he can do.