Delia’s mother had been a beautiful woman, the most dazzling of any that she had ever seen. This beauty had resulted in her death, for although she had possessed an angelic appearance that was rarely seen in this world, she was hardly gifted in cultivation and so had always had a difficult time defending herself from the evils of man. Her father, on the other hand, was a very powerful warrior from a large province of the Thebes Empire, and once the two had fallen in love there was not a single man within thousands of leagues that would have dared to hurt her. That all changed, however, the moment that her mother had caught the eye of her father’s liege lord, who demanded that he send her to his chambers whenever he was in the mood to see her. As an upright person, her father had refused to hand his wife over to the depraved noble despite the fact that he had been branded with a master-slave contract, which had resulted in a tragic, forced suicide.

Miraculously, a close friend of her father’s had caught wind of what had happened and rushed to their home to save a five-year-old Delia and her mother, and had personally escorted them to a faraway kingdom in the central area of the continent. This had been a pretext to steal his friend’s wife for himself, as Delia later found out that this man had been the one to mention her mother’s beauty to his liege lord, and thus began a terrible chapter in Delia’s life.

They lived with this man for four years, during which time he’d taken heavily to drinking. Despite her young age, he’d often leered at her in an uncomfortable and hard-to-understand way, something that her mother didn’t fail to notice. Because of this, she poisoned the man’s wine one night after he had ordered her to bed, using a rare, undetectable poison that her deceased husband had given her several years prior. Taking the man’s spatial bag and anything else of value within their large estate, Delia’s mother had taken her and fled the kingdom, heading eastward and as far away from Thebes as possible.

Unfortunately, those days were far from the end of their troubles, as Delia’s mother was simply too attractive and too weak to travel alone in such a dangerous and disgusting world, something that she learned quick on when they were kidnapped on the road by five brigands, all rugged and angry-eyed, none with good intentions. Unfortunately for them, Delia was no ordinary child. She had inherited her father’s talent and potential as a cultivator, and had been cultivating since she had learned to walk, and thus was stronger than the men that had snatched them in the night while they slept.

That was the first time that Delia had killed somebody, taking five lives before the hour was out. Thankfully both her and her mother emerged unharmed, though the older of the two realized at that moment that if she were to have any hope of escorting her daughter to a safer place where the two of them could live in peace, then she had to do something about her appearance. Delia had never forgotten the wild look in her mother’s eyes as they had settled upon the campfire that the men had started up, the momentary hesitation that had seized her shaking limbs before the gorgeous woman had burned away her beauty. By the end of the night, not a single one of her mother’s snowy hairs remained on her slender head, and one would have been hard pressed to find a spot on her body that hadn’t been marred by the wicked tongue of those terrible flames. The sight of her mother’s anguish, the sound of her screams and the cackling sound of her cooking flesh had been burned into her mind on that terrible, tragic evening, and to this day had never left her.

The medicines that they’d had at the time had saved her mother’s life, but hadn’t been able to retrieve her former beauty, though a young Delia had still believed that she was the prettiest woman in the world. After that they had joined countless caravans in order to make their way to the Easterly Kingdoms, always wearing thick masks and long cloaks that hid their figures and faces. Whenever they were accosted in the same manner as they had been on the night that a nine-year-old Delia had been forced to kill those five men, her mother would simply beg to be spared and claim that both she and her daughter had been badly burned in a terrible fire. Each and every time, the men would leave as soon as she had taken off her mask, and it was in this way that her mother kept her safe throughout the duration of their travels.

Somehow or other, Delia had wound up in a lakeside town within the Falling Rain Sect’s territory, though her mother had died shortly after. Orphaned and alone, Delia buried her mother beneath a sycamore tree in a small field nearby that was close enough to the town that animals and other critters rarely wandered into the area, and it was within this little field that she had lived out many of the younger years of her life.

Having learned from past experiences, she made it a point to never show her face to any of the locals, and soon became known for the dirty robes and mud-stained mask that she relied on to hide her appearance. She’d had no choice but to steal food from local market stalls in order to survive, though nobody in the little town had ever taken pity on her, and she had been beaten unconscious more times than she could count. The people in this area were much stronger than the typical bandits that she had encountered on the road, which left her unable to defend herself despite her tremendous talent and potential. It was in this environment that she had met Tems, someone who was equally disliked in the area but for drastically different reasons. While the locals hated her because she was poor and mischievous, they disliked him due to his spoiled, haughty nature. While she would steal things from them, he would confiscate them—including girls that he was attracted to—and always walked away unharmed due to his status within the sect that lorded over the region.

She had been ten when they had first met, when the then-youth had ironically saved her from a would-be murderer and then casually given her a fortune’s worth in spirit stones. He’d thought she was around his age, since she had grown quite tall for a ten-year-old at that time, and it wasn’t long before the two became close friends. Tems hadn’t had any friends, and had been so lonely at the time that he hadn’t cared what kind of person was attached to the ears that might listen to his problems. This all changed the day that she had accidently revealed her appearance to him. At twelve-years-old, she had fully inherited her mother’s beauty and with it the curse that it entailed. It was on that day that the look within Tems’s eyes had changed to the same sort of leer that she’d seen in the expression of the man that had betrayed her father, and also in the bandits that so regularly troubled her during the years that she and her mother had spent hopping from one caravan to the next. Only, Tems was the sort of person that would do anything to obtain something that he wanted no matter what he had to do to get it, and his prestigious position within the Falling Rain Sect allowed him to do so without any trouble.

Later that night, Delia had fled for her life. In the early levels of Integration, she’d thought that she could handle the animals in the area and so had chanced a long-distance trek through the wilderness, heading south towards a hopeful safe haven. Unfortunately, she had almost immediately encountered a massive snake that would have swallowed her up in one gulp had it not been for that old man, Aven.

“Old Bones,” muttered Delia, her whispers lost to the winds. “What are you doing right now?”

She was currently sitting atop a small rock face at the top of the mountain where the spirit of the lake had lived. The others from the group that she was now travelling with were all practicing their proficiency at using flying swords, though they were so far away that they only looked like dots on the horizon. At least, if she didn’t focus on them.