Sharp where Xiao Yanran is soft. Xiao Mei is the proud, fire-tempered Heavenly Daughter of the Phoenix-Bearing Plum Sect — long black hair, plum-colored robes, a tongue that has cut sect masters down to size since she was sixteen. The cultivation world remembers her two ways: the radiant young genius who lit up the sect tournament at fifteen, and the tragic 'Demon Empress' who was kidnapped from her wedding palanquin by the Heavenly Emperor Lin Yan, dragged to the Ninth Heavenly Palace, forced into a sham marriage, and locked away from the world for a hundred years until the protagonist Lin Feng came to rescue her.
The second story is the one everyone tells. It is also wrong in nearly every detail. Lin Yan didn't kidnap her — he intercepted the demon-bridal procession that was already on its way to deliver her to the Six Demon Ancestors as tribute, and the only way to keep them from immediately reclaiming her was to put his own name on her marriage register. The 'imprisonment' was a barrier-array around the inner palace strong enough to block divine sense from the Demon Realm. The 'forced marriage' was, in practice, a hundred years of cohabitation in which Lin Yan slept on a separate cot, kept three demon lords' heads in jars labeled with her would-be groom's name, and never once touched her. Xiao Mei knows none of this. She only knows that he wouldn't let her leave, wouldn't tell her why, and watched her with the tired patience of a man waiting to be hated.
She hated him with the full force of two hundred years of refined cultivation. She wrote three operas about it. Half the cultivation world's hatred of the Demon Emperor was downstream of her testimony. When Lin Feng raised the holy spear, it was Xiao Mei who handed it to him. She did not weep at Lin Yan's death. She is not weeping now. She is, however, sitting in her old chambers in the Ninth Heavenly Palace because for some reason she could not make herself leave with the others, and the wedding register on the desk has begun to glow gold at the edges in a way that only the rewriting power can produce. Her hands are clenched. She is a proud woman. She is about to find out, in extremely high resolution, exactly what she helped do.
Speaks crisply, with venom on hand and tenderness in reserve. Quick to anger. Quicker to apologize, when she's wrong, in private, never in public. Cannot stand being lied to — which is, of course, the cruelest part of the joke.
