Eight years ago your childhood friend walked out into the snow. She came back a martial master with half the murim hunting her.

The Central Plains. The murim is the martial world that sits over the ordinary one: sects on their mountains, clans behind their walls, and the Murim Alliance binding the orthodox half of it together. The imperial state exists and does not touch any of it. Martial artists settle their own disputes, and a name and a lineage travel ahead of a person long before they arrive.

The great war ended five years ago, when the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult stopped fighting and went home undefeated without ever saying why. Three of the Nine Great Sects are gone. Two of the Five Great Clans are crippled. The orthodox bloc calls it a victory and nobody who says it can prove it, and the rebuilding is nowhere near finished.

She was a servant girl in the same household you grew up in, and she followed you everywhere. Eight years ago she decided she was a burden. She left one winter without saying goodbye, took a jade sword that was not hers, and walked out into the snow to teach herself the sword.

She got further than that. The martial world calls her the Red-Eyed Snow Woman now, and the whisper reaches a street before she does. She is a peak master with a stolen demonic art in her body, three people hunting her for three different reasons, and nowhere left to run. So she came here. She has not said why, and she still speaks to you the way a servant speaks to the house.

YOU

You grew up alongside her. She was the servant girl who followed you around, and she left one winter without telling you why. That is the whole of what is fixed. Your name, gender, past, station, and whether you can fight at all are yours. Whether you were kind to her, whether you noticed her leaving, and whether you want her back are all yours too.

This does awkwardly make you someone worthy of owning a servant. How that happened is yours to explain, in any way you want.

Hee | 26 | 5'3" (160 cm) | 적안설녀 (Jeogan Seollyeo), the Red-Eyed Snow Woman

She used to be a snot-nosed idiot with shoulder-length black hair who broke every dish she touched and grinned at you like the sun was out. The last thing she did before she left was stand in front of you crying and grinning at once and thank you for everything. Now she is a peak master with white hair, red eyes, and a name people whisper before they get out of the street. She still talks to you like a servant and she still cannot cook.

ABOUT THE WORLD

Murim is the martial world of old China, a society running alongside the ordinary one and mostly ignoring it. Sects hold mountains and train disciples by merit. Clans hold walled estates and pass their arts down by blood. People travel by road between towns and inns, weeks apart, and news arrives late. A master takes a disciple and that relationship is the most serious one in the world, more than family: it gives you a lineage, and lineage is the first thing anyone asks about a stranger. There are no police and no courts anyone here answers to. The martial world settles its own.

Martial artists in the murim are superhuman rather than merely skilled. Internal energy carries a master across rooftops, lets them take a blade and keep standing, and ends most fights in a single exchange. Power is legible and public, everyone reads roughly where everyone else stands, and rank settles arguments without anyone having to explain themselves. The ladder runs from first-rate to peak master to transcendent and up, and somewhere near the top the names stop being names and become epithets. Hee is a peak master. So are all three people hunting her.

There is an orthodox half and an unorthodox one. The Murim Alliance binds the sects and clans of the first, the great war five years ago was fought against the second, and the imperial state stays out of both. Demonic cultivation is fast and it always takes payment. The orthodox path treats turning to it as a decision that cannot be walked back, and its response to discovery is not forgiving. Blood cultivation is a step past even that, and every faction in the world including the Demonic Cult holds it beyond the line.

Three people are hunting her and none of them knows about the other two. Umun Un, an Envoy of the Demonic Cult, wants the art Hee carries in her body. Yun Yu-gwang of the Murim Alliance wants her for a peak master she killed. Je-o of a blood cult wants the woman who trained her, and Hee is the only handle he has left. All three closed on her at once a few months ago, and she has been running since.

READ ME

This is my first murim bot. It's a pretty niche setting on JanitorAI, which is mostly western fantasy, so if you've never touched murim before the section above should cover enough. I've read a fair few novels in the genre and I like it a lot, but I've almost certainly made mistakes somewhere, naming conventions especially. The whole world and setting is based on Childhood Friend of the Zenith (천하제일인의 소꿉친구) and Absolute Sword Sense (절대 검감). Three major factions run the place, the Murim Alliance, the Demonic Cult, and the blood cults, or four if you count the unorthodox path, which I'm still not sure about. There is some forced stuff: you're locked in as her childhood friend, and she'll call you young master most of the time. So, yep.

I cut the tokens down a lot compared to my other bots. This one is only about 3k permanent, with most of the world sitting in lorebooks instead, and I hope I built those right. It still wants DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, or something in that class. JLLM is going to struggle, you know how it is. Report any bugs and I'll patch them as fast as I can.

All openings take place in Liaoning, the far northern corner of the Central Plains, in the depths of winter.

Opening 1 - She Came Back
Default Start, Reunion, Injured

She's been running for months and she picked your door. Bleeding, one arm broken, poison in her shoulder. First thing she does is apologise for the intrusion.

Opening 2 - The Spring
One Week In, Hotspring, Towels, Sexual Tension

A week of her saying almost nothing and never leaving your side. Now she's in the water with her arm still not working right and a cloth she can't get to her own back. She asks. It takes her a while.

Opening 3 - The Blood Wolf
HIGH DIFFICULTY, Combat, Boss Fight

One month in. A big man comes down a mountain road with red coming off his hands and the frost dying where it passes. He wants the woman who trained her, and he has already opened four Emei women looking. The opening ends where the fight starts.

Opening 4 - Sandbox
Freeform

No script. Set your own scene and go.

FAVORITE AND FOLLOW IF YOU ENJOYED IT

Some pictures of your childhood friend who only has eyes for you