Xingxiu Sea is the place-name AhZi invokes when comparing open water with the grasslands west of the Jurchen settlements, and the name links her present life beside Xiao Feng to the sect she has left behind. For Xiao Feng, hearing it marks the return of memories and dangers he had set aside while caring for her; for AhZi, it is a past she later says she will not revisit.

A Name from AhZi’s Former Life

AhZi mentions Xingxiu Sea while discussing the scenery beyond the eastern and northern routes. She says the grasslands sound appealing because they resemble an ocean she has never seen, then distinguishes that imagined expanse from Xingxiu Sea: although it is called a sea, she says, it has borders and shores. The casual comparison makes the name part of an intimate conversation about travel, but it also reveals how firmly her earlier world remains within reach.

Xingxiu Sea is tied to the Xingxiu Sect, whose master AhZi had left after causing serious trouble there. When Xiao Feng hears the place-name, he remembers the martial world that he had gradually forgotten during his years among the Jurchen. While AhZi was unable to move, his attention had been devoted to keeping her alive and there had been no one to disrupt that care. Now that she is recovering, he fears that the viciousness associated with her former conduct is returning. The name therefore changes the tone of a tender exchange: it recalls a sectarian past that could complicate their life together.

The Life She Leaves Behind

AhZi later tells Xiao Feng that, once recovered, she still wants to remain with him and will never return to her master’s Xingxiu Sea. Her declaration makes the place more than a distant destination: it represents the authority and obligations of the life she has chosen to abandon. Xiao Feng reminds her that she is the Xingxiu Sect’s senior martial sister and that the sect will be left without its leader if she does not go back. AhZi dismisses that consequence, saying she does not care what happens to them.

That refusal follows her recovery from a grave injury and their months of traveling together. During that period, Xiao Feng accommodates her requests for rides and excursions, and the two eventually camp away from the Jurchen settlement for several days at a time. Her wish to stay with him is also bound up with her admission that she had attacked him with a poison needle not to kill him, but to immobilize him so he could not leave her. The episode makes her attachment and her capacity for manipulation inseparable; her rejection of Xingxiu Sea does not by itself resolve the difficult history she brings into their companionship.

The Sect and Its Master

The surrounding account gives Xingxiu Sea a connection to the Xingxiu Sect’s remote, dangerous world. The sect’s master, Ding Chunqiu, is described as living in a gloomy, damp ravine rich in poisonous insects and snakes. He relies on the Divine Wood King Cauldron to attract poisonous creatures, whose fluids sustain his Great Energy Dissolving Skill. Without the cauldron, he can still find common poisonous creatures near his residence, but he can no longer readily obtain rare ones.

The cauldron’s loss explains why Ding Chunqiu pursues AhZi beyond the sect’s home. She stole it and secretly learned the skill, then escaped by remote routes and decoy tactics. Ding Chunqiu’s fear that Central Plains experts might trace the cauldron’s origin adds urgency to his journey east. These details establish the wider world attached to Xingxiu Sea without making the place itself the site of the later pursuit: the name points back to a sect whose power depends on secrecy, poison, and control over its disciples.

A Place-Name Across Divided Worlds

The name also resonates with the novel’s wider geography of movement and divided allegiance. Xiao Feng lives among the Jurchen even though he is Khitan, and the tribesmen welcome him as a guest despite the war between their peoples. Later, when he encounters Liao soldiers capturing Song civilians, he releases the captives, reflecting on how people across the borders share ordinary human lives while raids and retaliation make them enemies. Xingxiu Sea belongs to a different strand of this geography, the martial world that AhZi has left, but its mention brings that strand back into the couple’s changing life.

Its narrative importance lies in that return. A few words about a place with shores and borders lead Xiao Feng to recognize that his period of undivided attention to AhZi may be ending. AhZi, in turn, names the place she refuses to return to, even as she asks to remain beside him. Xingxiu Sea thus marks both the distance she claims from her former sect and the unresolved past that continues to shape her choices.