Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Morwenna didn’t bother answering with polite words.

She marched straight across the clearing, stopping right in front of the slate slab, and aggressively shoved the steaming wooden bowl directly against Rèn’s chest.

”Eat,” Morwenna commanded, her voice dropping into a harsh no-nonsense bark that brooked zero argument. ”I made dinner, and I am not carrying cold broth back through the brambles... Chew every single bite, or I’ll break your fingers and shove the noodles down your throat myself.”

Rèn stared at the bowl pushed against her ribs.

She looked up at Morwenna’s stormy gray eyes, saw the utter lack of poisoned intent or deceptive cruelty in the woman’s beautiful face, and slowly reached out.

Her calloused fingers, still stiff from last night’s bruising, wrapped around the wooden bowl.

She took the pair of bamboo chopsticks resting across the rim, scooped up a mouthful of noodles, and began to eat.

The broth was hot, rich with roasted garlic, sweet root vegetables, and tender slow-simmered beef that melted against her tongue.

”Mmm~”

She hadn’t realized how hollow her stomach felt... she ate with rapid efficiency, finishing half the bowl before she even took a breath, the warm food sending a comforting heat through her chilled meridians.

Morwenna watched her chew, letting out a loud barking laugh that echoed across the pond.

”Look at you,” Morwenna chuckled, shaking her head. ”Snarling like a feral wildcat last night, and now you’re shoveling noodles like a starved tavern hand...”

She took half a step closer, leaning over the sitting woman with her eyes narrowing as she inspected Rèn’s frame in critical disgust.

”Gods above, though,” Morwenna muttered, wrinkling her nose. ”Your body is rough as barnacles, and you’re covered in enough dried muck and crusty blood to grease a frigate’s keel. It’s offensive to look at...”

Before Rèn could swallow her mouthful of noodles to issue a warning, Morwenna’s hands blurred.

With the blinding effortless speed of a seasoned pirate who had stripped hundreds of prize ships, Morwenna grabbed the frayed collar of Rèn’s torn black linen tunic and yanked downward with savage concussive leverage.

The rotten blood-stiffened cloth gave way with a loud tearing screech.

SHRRRRK!

The shredded black rags fell away in a ruined heap around the mossy slab, tumbling to the grass in tatters.

Rèn sat completely naked in the moonlight with her wooden bowl still clutched in her hands and her jaw slacked open in shock.

Morwenna didn’t back away.

She leaned down, propping her chin lazily on the knuckles of her left hand with her stormy gray eyes casually raking over Rèn’s bare frame from her collarbones down to her thighs in unapologetic scrutiny.

”Well now...” Morwenna purred, a slow, low whistle slipping through her teeth. ”You’re actually quite beautiful beneath all that cemetery dirt... Not as sexy as me, of course, because nobody beats an authentic pirate’s hips, but you’ve got serious curves on you. And those muscles along your lats... very nice.”

A delightfully perverted smile spread across Morwenna’s pale face.

”The Captain’s going to absolutely love your body, darling...” Morwenna teased, her eyes glittering with wicked heat as she flicked a finger toward the woman’s head. ”...especially those lovely black horns... He has a terrible incurable weakness for things he can grab onto when he’s driving a girl into the mattress.”

A cold violent chill shot straight down Rèn’s spine, making every hair on the back of her neck stand on end.

Her crimson eyes bulged until her pupils shrank to needles with her breath freezing in her throat.

’Wh-what...?!’ Rèn’s mind screamed in wild disoriented panic. ’Why is she looking at me like that all of a sudden?! What is wrong with these people?! And why am I completely naked in front of this woman?!’

Before she could drop the bowl and throw a fist at Morwenna’s jaw, Morwenna’s hands shot forward again.

Morwenna gave her a solid, two-handed shove right between her shoulder blades, launching Rèn clean off the slate slab into the center of the glittering pond.

SPLASH!

The water was shockingly cool, breaking over Rèn’s shoulders in a foaming crystalline spray that knocked the breath from her lungs.

She breached the surface, coughing and sputtering with her wild black hair plastered across her face and her teeth bared in a feral snarl as she planted her feet on the sandy bottom.

”YOU INSOLENT SEA WRETCH!” Rèn choked out, wiping water from her eyes.

”Oh, shut your trap and soak, you stubborn goat,” Morwenna ordered, casually kicking off her heavy leather boots and wading into the shallows with a bar of herbal fat-soap in her hand. ”You smelled like a slaughterhouse drainage trench... If you walk into the main hall smelling like rotting iron, Eluned will turn you into compost before breakfast.”

Morwenna clamped a firm hand onto the base of Rèn’s left black horn, using it like a convenient handle to tilt her head back into the water.

A violent jolt shot through Rèn’s skull the instant Morwenna’s fingers closed around the horn, the same electric static Silas’s palm had sent crackling through her bones the night before as she gasped and went rigid in the water.

’Don’t... don’t touch those so casually....’ she thought, her ears burning.

Morwenna didn’t even notice.

Rèn tried to swat her arm away, but Morwenna’s other hand was already working vigorously through the matted tangled black mane, scrubbing the thick dried crust of the Heavenly Demon’s blood, the mud from the eastern plains, and the grime of thirty sects from her scalp with rough thorough strokes.

The soap smelled of wild pine needles and cold spring water.

As the suds foamed up beneath Morwenna’s fingers, Rèn felt the suffocating iron crust that had coated her hair for months dissolve away, rinsing into the dark water in pale red clouds that were quickly swept away by the spring current.

Her scalp felt light and oddly breathable for the first time in a decade.

Morwenna gathered the drenched soap-slicked mass of black hair into both hands, running her fingers down the length until her knuckles hit the bottom of the strands.

Her hands stopped nearly six inches below Rèn’s hips.

Morwenna raised a dark eyebrow, letting out an exasperated clicking tut against her teeth.

”Merciful tides...” Morwenna muttered, shaking her head. ”How long has this mess been growing? It’s past your ass! Have you never cut it or styled it in your entire miserable life? You look like a drowning river ghost.”

Before Rèn could pull her horn from Morwenna’s grip, the pirate queen lifted her left hand.

A sharp razor-thin crescent of translucent pressurized water materialized across Morwenna’s fingertips, humming with fluid mana.

She swung her hand across the heavy bundle of black hair.

SHHK!

The pressurized water-blade sheared cleanly through the dense, wet strands just below Rèn’s shoulder blades.

A massive sodden bundle of black hair fell away, splashing heavily into the shallows, which Morwenna casually scooped up and tossed over her shoulder onto the grass like an armful of discarded seaweed.

”Hey...!” Rèn gasped, her hands flying back to touch the suddenly lightened blunt-cut ends brushing her shoulder blades. ”What did you do?!”

”Saved you three hours of detangling every morning, that’s what,” Morwenna replied cheerfully, splashing clean water over her back to rinse away the lingering suds. ”The ladies of Blessed Land have to look cute and presentable, darling... We are the most popular women in the entire world, and everyone loves us. You can’t be dragging five feet of matted corpse-hair behind you when the Captain takes us to the city markets.”

Rèn froze in the cool water, Morwenna’s words echoing strangely in her ears.

’Everyone loves us...?’

The thought was completely foreign and incomprehensible.

In her world, everyone hated her, feared her, or worshiped her with bloody hands... The idea of being ’loved’ by strangers in a marketplace felt like a myth whispered by madmen in the desert.

Morwenna waded behind her, sitting down on the edge of the submerged slate, and began running her fingers through the shortened clean black hair.

Rèn’s shoulders remained tense for three breaths.

She considered leaping out of the pond, finding her notched iron sword, and severing the woman’s throat and she also considered diving into the depths of the spring to escape the touching.

Yet, as the cool water lapped against her ribs and Morwenna’s calloused warm fingers gently worked through the remaining knots, Rèn’s muscles slowly uncoiled.

She gave up struggling and let her head droop forward, staring down into the dark water where the moonlight wavered against the sand.

’What are these people...?’ Rèn thought, her breath trembling softly.

’She threatened to break my skull, stripped my clothes off, threw me in a pond, and now she’s washing my hair like I’m a favored pet... I have never been treated kindly in my entire life...’

She paused.

A cold painful ache twitched behind her temples.

’...or have I?’

Her memories were so hazy.

The faces of her past were flat, gray smears of mist, buried beneath layers of blood, fire, and the deafening screams of the sects she had slaughtered.

She remembered the names on her list, she remembered the thirty silver taels, but everything before the pens was a silent empty hall where the lamps had been extinguished.

Morwenna began softly humming a jaunty sea shanty under her breath with her fingers dividing the damp black hair into three neat, even sections along the nape of Rèn’s neck.

The steady, gentle tugging at her scalp was strangely hypnotic as Rèn closed her eyes.

She crossed her legs in the shallow water, sinking her hips into the sand, and resumed her breathing exercises.

She reached out through her altered spirit root, drawing the cool essence of the spring water and the fragrant vitality of the Spirit trees into her pores.

The energy flowed in through her skin, no longer rejected by her blood root, converting into drops of clean pure qi that began to circulate through her primary meridians.

One cycle passed, then two, then ten...

Morwenna’s hands continued to work behind her, braiding the strands with steady unhurried precision.

Suddenly, deep within Rèn’s dantian, the small sputtering ember of spiritual qi condensed.

The drops fused into a swirling vortex of pale blue mist, expanding outward with a soft internal chime that resonated through her bones.

HUMMM!

A miniature spiritual shockwave rippled across the surface of the pond, sending tiny perfect rings of water radiating toward the mossy banks.

...Her cultivation broke through.

She had ascended from the first layer to the second layer of the Qi Gathering Realm!

And at that exact sacred second of advancement, the ancient promise etched upon the blue summoning tab fulfilled its first term.

A heavy rusty iron door deep within the lightless cellar of her soul groaned, cracked, and swung wide open as a memory woke up.

”...”

The memory came back bright and vivid, smelling of morning pine mist and sweet fragrant camellia oil.

Rèn saw a wooden veranda overlooking a sea of green bamboo.

She saw herself, small and scrawny with dirty bare feet and scraped knees, sitting cross-legged on the wooden floorboards between a pair of slender pale legs and sitting behind her was a girl of fifteen.

The girl was holding a polished wooden comb in her left hand, gently running the teeth through Rèn’s wild black hair, carefully working through the stubborn knots so as not to pull too hard.

In her right hand, she held a long clean scrap of bright red silk ribbon.

Rèn twisted inside the memory, desperate to look up at the girl’s face.

It came to her in soft broken flickers, like moonlight through rippling water... the pale curve of a jaw, the corner of a gentle teasing smile, and a pair of dark adoring eyes that crinkled into sweet crescent moons, each one there for half a heartbeat before the mist rolled back over it.

She couldn’t hold the whole face.

She reached for it again and again, and every time it slipped through her fingers like warm water. But she knew, with every drop of blood in her body, that she had loved it.

”There,” the girl whispered in her memory, her voice like wind chimes in the spring breeze, leaning down to plant a soft, sweet kiss right onto the crown of Rèn’s forehead. ”Now you look like a proper young lady instead of a wild badger.”

The wooden comb... The sweet lingering scent of camellia oil... The bright red ribbon woven into the tight, neat braid resting over her shoulder...

The name, dormant and buried beneath thirty years of ash, detonated in her chest with overwhelming beautiful force.

THUMP!

A hot heavy drop spilled from Rèn’s eyelashes, splashing into the cool water of the pond.

...Then another.

Then a continuous silent stream of tears began pouring down her pale porcelain cheeks, cutting through the droplets of pond water, dripping off her jawline.

She didn’t sob, and she didn’t shake.

The tears simply flooded out of her crimson eyes, born from a well of grief and boundless love that she had thought was lost to the void forever and behind her, Morwenna’s humming stopped.

Her fingers halted, holding the half-finished braid against the back of Rèn’s neck.

The pirate queen leaned over her shoulder, her stormy gray eyes softening into quiet bewildered concern as she saw the tears streaming down the younger woman’s face.

”Hey...” Morwenna asked softly, her rough voice uncharacteristically gentle. ”What’s wrong, wild thing? Did I pull too hard on a knot?”

Rèn slowly turned her head.

She looked up through her blurred, weeping vision at Morwenna’s dark hair, her gray eyes, and her hands still holding the braid against her collar.

The tears spilled down her throat, her lips trembling violently, and Rèn whispered.

”Senior Sister... Qiu Ling...?”

[Author’s Note]

Happy New Month to all of you, see I started with the mass release. I hope you enjoyed Ren’s story as well as the special, did a little twist for it... We also ended in Top 3 Golden Tickets for the month, thank you for all the support! Hehe Might as well start gifting Castles and Gachas again, see you later!