Cultivation

I run a science-debunking channel.

I’m also a Taoist priest.

Every day, I livestream ways to expose feudal superstition for what it is.

One day, a young woman asked me to help sever a toxic romantic entanglement.

The next day, her boyfriend was dead.

My younger sister gave birth to a son in the Eastern Palace.

I brought a fortune in family wealth and cartloads of rare medicinal pills with me to the palace to visit her.

The moment she saw me, she nestled into my arms and began to cry, tears falling one after another.

Her movements were intimate, her voice soft and spoiled. There was not the slightest trace of distance or unfamiliarity between us.

And yet my entire body went rigid, a chill crawling up my spine and sinking into my heart.

Because the face before me, identical to my sister’s in every way,

was not the dead woman’s skin I had sewn onto her with my own hands.

Fu Qiu had always accepted her lot in life.

When she was a child, a blind man read her fortune through bone-weighing and said her bones were light, her fate was lowly, and that in this life she could only sell her body.

As it happened, her family was going through hard times, so her father simply sold her to a brothel.

When she was still young and first put on display, the madam said that although she was beautiful, her face carried a pitiful, sorrowful look, and the customers she attracted would never be decent men.

Sure enough, every few days, she suffered another bout of abuse.

By middle age, her looks had withered, and she married a merchant. The neighbors said her thin lips and fox-like eyes meant she would never be the faithful sort.

Before long, rumors were flying everywhere. The merchant could not bear it, and on a rainy night, he drove her out of the house.

Even so, she never hated anyone. She only hated that her own fate was so poor.

As she lay on the verge of death, the Old Blind Man happened to pass by drunk, bragging to the crowd.

“Twenty years ago, I saw a little girl in another town. She was so young, but she already had the looks to topple a kingdom.

“So I pretended to be blind, did a bone-weighing for her, and told her she had a lowly fate-that in this life, she could only become a whore.

“And guess what? Her whole family believed me!”

In the unluckiest year of my life, a wandering Daoist priest came to town.

He gave my father an idea: have me worship a Household Guardian Immortal to suppress my bad luck, and maybe I would live past the age of ten.

My father was a rough man who had made his fortune in troubled times by the barrel of a gun.

He called his adjutant over and did the math for him. “One Household Guardian Immortal keeps her alive to ten, two keep her alive to twenty, and twenty keep her alive to two hundred. Right?”

The adjutant counted on his fingers. “Marshal, your math is absolutely correct.”

My father hardened his heart and rounded up all the pigs, cattle, and sheep from miles around as offerings.

“My damn girl is going to live ten thousand years!”

That year, my father rode into the old mountain forest on a pig with me and took eleven Household Guardian Immortal into our household.

He flew into a rage. “Damn it, that’s still one short of the twelve zodiac animals!”

Later, who knew where he bought a Daoist boy from, but that made the twelfth.

Disciples knelt all across the mountain, crying out in unison, “We respectfully send off the Patriarch on his ascension!”

But what I saw was a silvery-white hook piercing Master’s throat, dragging him up into the clouds.

His feet had left the ground. He couldn’t make a sound.

Like a fish.

I lunged forward and wrapped my arms around Master’s legs. “Let him go!”

Eldest Senior Brother struck me with his palm and sent me flying. “You madwoman! Can you bear the consequences of ruining the Patriarch’s ascension ceremony?”

Blood spilled from the corner of my mouth.

I laughed.

“Ascension? Are you all blind? That’s fishing!”

I transmigrated into a tragic romance world trapped in an endless cycle and became the city spirit of the Liang Kingdom.

Again and again, the heroine, Bai Ruohuan, leapt from the city wall.

Again and again, the emperor, Liang Qingci, marched toward the ruin of his nation.

At first, I only wanted to sit back and watch the spectacle unfold, but I was forced onto the stage to change their fate.

Alongside that cold-hearted, impassive emperor, I fought to survive through countless cycles, until at last I glimpsed the truth hidden behind Heaven’s Love Calamity.

The year I turned eighteen, my mother took five taels of silver and married me off to Ji Songzhu, a man infamous far and wide for bringing death to his wives.

Before me, both of his previous wives had died of sudden illness three days before the wedding.

Five hundred years after my death.

The people who had once benefited from my kindness had long since forgotten me.

Only my sworn enemy crouched at my grave, huffing and puffing as he dug for three whole days.

And dug me out.

As twelve bolts of tribulation lightning crashed down,

I saw Ye Yu’s face-unchanged from five hundred years ago.

The moment he saw me, his face lit up with excitement. “Shen Xi, come fight me!”

My gaze drifted past his shoulder

to the nervous members of the Righteous Path hurrying over behind him.

Those people had once been my master and fellow disciples.

They were also the ones who had killed me back then.

At the sight of them, I suddenly clutched my chest and collapsed into Ye Yu’s arms while he was watching the show.

In a soft, delicate voice, I said, “Big brother, this freshly reconstructed body is still so weak. Be a dear and take care of those small fry for me, will you?”

In an instant, I felt the body I was leaning against go completely rigid.

When I lifted my head again, the arrogant, untouchable Demon Lord was blushing so hard he looked ready to burst into flames.

They told me it was only a game, and had me wipe out the male lead’s entire household.

But when the NPCs’ blood splashed onto me, it was so scalding, so searingly hot, that I finally realized this so-called full-dive game was connected to a real world.

A real village. Real people. And a real young male lead who blushed as he asked me what flowers I liked.

Behind me came the sound of frantic, uneven footsteps.

Covered in blood, I turned around-only to see the young man staring at me in a daze.

In his hands, he was still holding a bouquet of dew-damp white begonias.

The Supreme God cultivated the Path of Ruthlessness. He was without desire or longing, stern and impartial.

To prove that she held a place in the Supreme God’s heart, the Fairy Maiden deliberately slaughtered Meng Family Village.

Kneeling on the ground, she wept like a rain-drenched blossom. “Your disciple has committed a grave sin. Master, please punish me. Grind my bones to dust and scatter my ashes.”

The Supreme God stared blankly at that beautiful face. In the end, he could not bring himself to do it.

He summoned the Nine Nether Yin Fire to burn the village and destroy all evidence, then ordered his disciple to return and copy scriptures in repentance.

I crawled out from a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, selling my soul to the Evil Demon for one thing alone: revenge.

The Evil Demon’s voice was beguiling. “What do you want?”

I looked back at the roaring flames behind me. “I heard that a thousand years ago, the Supreme God killed his wife to prove his Dao. Give me a face identical to his dead wife’s.”