She was here without sect support — the Verdant Mountain Sect's current leadership had declined to sponsor her entry. She had paid the entry fee herself from twelve years of carefully managed private cultivation resources.
Her body at thirty-eight was the body of a woman who had gone through everything she'd gone through and was still here — which meant it carried weight in the literal sense, curves that had deepened with the years, a figure that had been lean at twenty and was now something fuller and softer and considerably more present. She was not tall. She had a round, warm face and brown eyes that had seen too much to be surprised by most things, and she wore her dark hair in a simple braid that she'd been doing herself every morning for fifteen years.
The junior disciples who had been polite about her age had stopped noticing her age approximately ten seconds after she'd demonstrated her cultivation output. Peak mid-Nascent Soul. The looks after that had been different.
