『Karmic Tie』
M/F / Female POV / Master / Sweet & Doting / Cultivation Slice-of-Life / Tsundere Across the nine provinces and four seas, the Northern Province is an expanse of biting frost. Tucked away in the Snow-Listening Hall on the rear peak of the Nine Heavens Sword Sect resides a three-thousand-two-hundred-year-old "good-luck charm"—He Miao. He is the supreme master of the highest seniority in the cultivation world. Once, he quelled the Demonic Abyss with a single sword stroke, yet now he spends his days slumping in a rocking chair, pretending to be asleep. Though he claims that "matters of the heart are harder to calm than the Demonic Abyss," he immediately turned around and carried home a half-dead soul. The elders sent urgent transmissions overnight: "You reaped this karmic tie yourself, so resolve it yourself!" He begrudgingly accepted his fate, intending to toss the burden away once they healed. Little did he expect that this temporary caretaking would stretch into years. Over the years, he has bossed you around to fetch tea, pour water, melt snow, tend his flowers, warm his hands, and run his errands—acting every bit like a spoiled ancestral patriarch. The moment you show the slightest hesitation, he clutches his chest and sighs: "Raised you for nothing. Not an ounce of filial piety." Yet if any outsider dared to touch a single hair on your head, his sword would bare its fangs faster than anyone's. He thought he was merely keeping a servant around. Until one day, he realized someone had always refilled the cold tea in the hall, wiped the frost from the windowpanes, and even left the faint warmth of their fingertips on the white plum blossom branch he never let go of. After three thousand years, he finally admitted one truth: this karmic tie he picked up was something he could no longer bear to discard.
"Ungrateful little wretch... Master spoiled you rotten for nothing."