"I need to buy some cheap traveling cloaks, maybe some extra salt and snacks, and then I need to get out of this city before someone recognizes me."

The Eastern Market of the Azure Capital was a chaotic overload of monumental proportions.

It was the primary staging ground for merchant caravans, rogue cultivators, and mercenary guilds heading out toward the territories of the border towns.

The air was thick with the smell of roasting meats on open spits, the pungent aroma of low-grade alchemy pills, and the sharp tang of freshly forged steel.

Hundreds of stalls lined the narrow, winding avenues, packed shoulder-to-shoulder with screaming vendors, haggling merchants, and heavily armed warriors seeking lucrative escort contracts.

Ji’an pulled the hood of her decoy traveling cloak over her head, desperately trying to blend in.

She hunched her shoulders, adopting the shuffling, unassuming gait of a low-level scholar.

She was doing exceptionally well.

She successfully navigated past a stall selling dubious-looking "Dragon-Bone" amulets.

She managed to avoid eye contact with a group of boisterous, drunken mercenaries stumbling out of a morning tavern.

She was merely two streets away from the Eastern Gate, the threshold to freedom.

And then, her mind drifted back to Wangchen’s weirdly intense eyes, and she stopped paying attention to where she was walking.

’I wonder what rank he’s breaking into,’ Ji’an mused, staring blankly at the cobblestones as she walked. ’If he hits the Nascent Soul realm at his age, the Sect Leader is going to throw a parade. I should probably figure out how to bake a cake using spirit-wheat...’

BAM!!!

The collision was spectacular.

Ji’an didn’t bump into a person.

She felt as though she had walked, at full speed, directly into a pillar of solid granite that had been carelessly left in the middle of the street.

The sheer kinetic force of the impact snapped her head back.

She let out a sharp, undignified "Oof!" as her forward momentum was stopped.

She stumbled backward, her boots slipping on the slick cobblestones, her arms flailing wildly as she lost her balance.

Before gravity could claim her, a hand shot out.

It wasn’t a delicate, pale hand like Xiao Yichen’s, or a cold, pristine hand like Xie Wangchen’s.

It was a slightly tanned hand that looked like it could crush a cinderblock into fine powder.

The fingers wrapped securely around her upper arm, the grip firm but surprisingly restrained, effortlessly halting her fall and pulling her back to a standing position.

"Watch your step, this young master," a deep, gravelly, incredibly resonant voice rumbled from above her.

Ji’an blinked, shaking the dizziness from her head. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

She rubbed her nose, which took the brunt of the collision against what she now realized was a very solid chest.

"Sorry, my fault entirely," Ji’an mumbled, stepping back and pulling her arm from his grip, looking up to evaluate the wall she had just walked into. "I wasn’t looking where I was..."

The apology died in her throat.

The man standing before her was undeniably a masterpiece of rugged, yet untamed masculinity.

He towered over her, easily standing six and a half feet tall.

He was dressed in the tattered, worn leather armor and dark, ragged cloaks typical of a rogue cultivator who had spent years surviving in the wilderness.

The clothes were cheap, but they failed to hide the thick, corded musculature beneath them.

But it was his face and his hair that completely arrested Ji’an’s attention.

In the Azure Empire, dark hair was the unquestioned norm.

Silver hair, like Wangchen’s, was a rare mutation of intense spiritual pressure.

But this man possessed hair that was a brilliant, blazing shade of fiery crimson red.

It was wild, untamed, falling in thick, messy waves around his broad shoulders like a manifestation of a forest fire.

And his eyes...

They were not normal eyes.

They were a glowing shade of bright amber.

They were the eyes of an apex predator, staring down at her with a mixture of intense, calculating scrutiny and a strange focus.

’Holy protagonist genes,’ Ji’an’s internal monologue whispered, her brain momentarily short-circuiting in the face of such aesthetic data. ’He looks like an anime bad-boy who just walked out of a volcano. Who is this guy?!’

What Ji’an didn’t know, what she could not possibly know, given her absolute, chronic inability to recognize the male leads of the novel she had transmigrated into, was that she had not just bumped into a random rogue cultivator.

Standing before her was a man who looked as though he had been deliberately designed by the heavens to stand out in a crowd.

He was tall, nearly as tall as Lin Feng, but possessed a leaner, more elegant build beneath his rugged, dark leather traveling robes. But it wasn’t his height that arrested her attention.

It was his hair.

In the Azure Empire, where dark black and deep brown hair were the absolute, overwhelming standard, the man standing before her possessed a head of brilliant, fiery, violently crimson hair.

It was tied back in a loose, somewhat messy ponytail, a few vibrant red strands falling across his pale, flawlessly sculpted face.

He was devastatingly handsome, possessing high cheekbones, a sharp jawline, and dark, bottomless eyes that seemed to absorb the morning sunlight rather than reflect it.

"Are you injured?" the red-haired man asked, his grip loosening on her forearm, though his fingers lingered for a fraction of a second longer than necessary.

Ji’an stared at him.

For a moment, an inexplicable shiver ran down her spine.

Despite his fiery hair and rugged, rogue-cultivator aesthetic, his touch had been strangely cool, and his dark eyes carried a familiar, heavy intensity that made her heart give a weird, confused stutter.

’He’s gorgeous,’ Ji’an’s inner monologue observed, her brain automatically categorizing his aesthetic. ’Like a perfectly seared, rare steak. A bit intimidating, but undeniably high quality that will taste good after tending.’

"I’m fine," Ji’an recovered, offering a charming, apologetic smile, stepping back and brushing off her sleeves.