Chapter 59

Cen Qianshan set Qianji on his knee, oiling its joints and using a trace of spiritual energy to flush sand from the puppet’s seams. Qianji relaxed so thoroughly it started purring with contentment.
“Doing maintenance on your puppet?” Mu Xue crouched beside them.
Cen Qianshan’s fingers paused for a breath. “Yeah. He’s getting old, takes a bit more care these days.”
Mu Xue reached out to rub the puppet’s shiny little head. Qianji rolled its tin eyes and let out a happy whirr.
Exactly like he remembered. Mu Xue felt a rush of joy, having feared Qianji was lost to the winds with her spirit. Turns out Xiao Shan had picked him up and rebuilt him better than ever.
Her gaze fell on the flute, curiosity sparkling. “You play beautifully, I didn’t know you could do that.”
“I couldn’t, at first,” Cen Qianshan replied, not looking up from his work. “But one year, Master came home and mentioned she liked a certain song played by Liu Ruhua. So, I started teaching myself in secret.”
Mu Xue murmured to herself, confused: “Who’s Liu Ruhua?”
She missed the way he pressed his lips together, unable to fight the soft curve of a smile that rose after her careless question.
“It’s normal you don’t know. She’s not important.” His hands never stopped. “Back then I couldn’t play at all, but I practiced for years. I just kept imagining the day I’d play it for my Master. When I was young, I always bugged her to cook for me, now that I’ve learned myself, I hope one day she’ll let me cook for her.”
He swapped out Qianji’s spent spirit stone, sealed up its chest plate, then patted the little guy back to life.
Finally, he looked up, turning his eyes to Mu Xue, eyes glinting, vulnerable and hopeful all at once.
They were close, too close, maybe. Mu Xue could smell the familiar scent of soap wafting from him.
It brought her back, a snowy courtyard, a tiny bathing house, that unique fragrance from an old family recipe.
Just then, Mu Xue remembered what the girls were whispering earlier,
Handsome and gentle. If a guy like that put his heart on the line for me… who could ever say no?
“You… you know it shouldn’t go like this,” Mu Xue said quietly, watching Cen Qianshan. “Did you ever think, what if your Master… never came back, or even if she did, she just couldn’t return your feelings? What would you do then?”
As if on cue, a fragile sunbeam slipped behind the clouds above.
The sky dimmed, and icy snowflakes began to fall.
He stared at her for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his laugh was almost self-mocking. “What would I do?”
He raised his hand. His fingers were long and elegant, perfectly shaped, with just a trace of machine oil smudged along the knuckles. It was with such a hand that he caught a delicate shard of ice falling from the sky.
"Look, this is snow. Isn't it beautiful?" He held out the glittering sliver for Mu Xue to see. "In the world I used to call home, there was nothing this pure. It was all darkness and filth, rotting and foul."
"The first time I saw her, I fell for her, hopelessly. Time only dragged me deeper, until I was utterly lost. I don't think I'll ever climb out." His gorgeous eyes flickered, watching as the snowflake melted into the warmth of his palm. "But back then, I dared not speak. Someone like me, crawling out of the gutter, rotten and reeking, how could I ever be worthy of someone like her?"
"No, no way! You're not rotten!" Mu Xue blurted, heart thumping hard.
"But I am!" Cen Qianshan looked up, eyes locking with hers. "I've regretted it for over a hundred years, every single day has been torture." His gaze lingered, unwavering. "What I should have done was try harder. If I wasn't good enough for her, I should've become someone worth her notice. If she never even looked at me, I should've made it impossible for her not to see me. Letting go, giving up on her, God, that was the dumbest, weakest thing I've ever done."
Mu Xue blinked, speechless under the weight of his raw confession.
"Well? Do you think... someone like me, now, after all this time, do I even have the right to love her?" His voice dropped low and rough, almost hoarse, aching with hope and frustration. "Do I, do I have any shot at this? Is it okay if I try?"
Mu Xue's mouth opened, but there was no way she could say no to any of that, so she stammered softly, "Of, of course you do."
Cen Qianshan smiled at that, a real one, like the lead weight in his chest finally fell away. Just a single answer, given in a world of drifting snow, had managed to bring such ease to his heart.
"Even if she still doesn't like me, even if she wants nothing to do with me, that's all right. I'll fight. I'll do whatever it takes, make her see me, make her come back to me." His hand lingered over a crimson pendant at his collar. "I can wait as long as I need to, a hundred years, two hundred, until I've burned through everything I am and fade to ash."
The words that strike deepest aren't the flowery lines of some old romance, nor the bittersweet verses of ancient poems.
It's these, the things that come carved straight from the heart, ripped raw from the soul and offered without defenses.
The Cen Qianshan before her had his collar gaping just a bit, revealing the red jade pendant strung around his neck, a little dragon, carved in blazing cinnabar, burning like fire against his pale collarbones.
Just then, within the Spirit Chamber of Mu Xue's heartsea, another man identical to him stood on the lakeshore, a mirror image rising from the water, droplets clinging to his hair, eyes clear as springs, silent and intent as he watched her.
Inside and out, two pairs of eyes tangled together in her mind, churning the calm of her heart-lake into tangled ripples.
"Hey... do you think Master will be angry? Am I a traitor for this?" Cen Qianshan drew a step closer, his words rumbling from his throat, the end curling on a loaded hum. It was the kind of sound that could make your heart stumble.
Inside her Spirit Chamber, the dragon forged of fire drifted down from the clouds, circling Mu Xue's primordial spirit, gazing at the dripping tiger of water kneeling by the lake. Soft as a secret, it whispered into her ear,
"Say yes. I rather like him."
Fire and water tangled, heat flaring wild; her heartsea boiled with confusion. For a moment, Mu Xue couldn't tell if that was the dragon's voice, or her own secret longing speaking.
Beneath those crumbling antique city walls,
A little white bird of the Night-Illuminating Tribe had found a flower somewhere, flapping its damaged wings, hopping up onto Xiao Changge's shoulder and cocking its tiny head. With a chirp, it offered its bloom to the human boy it liked best.
In painfully human words: "I like you. You're even prettier than a flower."
The few disciples familiar with Xiao Changge started whooping and whistling, teasing at full volume.
Xiao Changge's face flushed bright red, but he still reached up to stop them. "Don't make fun of her, all right?"
With burning cheeks he brushed the little bird from his shoulder to his hands, cradling her gently. He looked into her eyes and said, "Thank you for liking me. This is actually the first time a girl has ever given me a flower, I'm really happy."
"But please forgive me. I can't accept your feelings. We're from different worlds, and anyway, I can only stay here for seven days. After that, I have to go back. My friends, my family, my teachers are waiting for me."
The little bird sadly scratched at the skin of his palm with her claws, then started sobbing, big, quiet tears dripping down silently.
Xiao Changge gently coaxed a tiny nest to life from vines, settling the teary bird inside and stroking her bandaged neck and back.
"You can stick with me awhile, okay? I'll change your bandages every day, once your wings have healed, then you can fly wherever you want."
He started to raise the nest, meaning to set it down for now on a stone statue just beside the ruined gate.
But from the shadowy depths inside the wall, the steady tap-tap-tap of a cane echoed out.
Xiao Changge looked up, just in time to see a stooped, scrawny old woman emerge, one hand clutching a cane, her back bent, making her way out from the half-lit city gate.
She saw Xiao Changge watching and grinned, tilting her head in a friendly nod.
Demon? flashed through his mind, but he felt no ripple of spiritual power at all. Human, then? But what human could survive amidst a ruin like this, swarming with monsters?
That thought had barely formed when a familiar red cord snapped through the air, binding the tiny old woman tight. A flash of blinding steel followed, slicing her clean in two, swift, ruthless, final.
Blood soaked the dirt as two halves of a body slumped to the ground. Only now did the rest of the group leap up in shock,
"What the hell? Demon? But I didn't sense any aura from her at all!"
"She looked so weak, what kind of demon even is that?"
"Was that a bit too much?"
"Wait, she actually used it?"
What really caught everyone off guard, Mu Xue almost never used her famous Binding Immortal Cord. If she brought it out, you knew things were deadly serious.
Meanwhile, Cen Qianshan almost never made a move, he usually just hung back at the rear, silently watching as the others fought.
But now, this frail-looking old lady with barely any spiritual power was somehow enough of a threat for both Mu Xue and Cen Qianshan to strike at the same time, on pure instinct.
“Any idea what this thing is?” Mu Xue, back-to-back with Cen Qianshan, whispered quietly.
“No clue. But it’s dangerous,” Cen Qianshan replied, his survival instincts, sharpened by countless battles, screaming that this enemy was absolutely not to be underestimated.
He’d been on high alert this whole time, spiritual sense spread wide. Anything with even a hint of spiritual energy within miles should be instantly detectable. Yet this plain, ordinary “old woman” had just strolled in, silent as a shadow, and wasn’t noticed until she was almost on top of them.
Even the weakest normal human still radiates a trace of life force. But this old woman? Under his spiritual probing, there wasn’t the slightest ripple. It was as if she simply didn’t exist.
Moments later, the two blood-drenched corpses on the ground began bubbling, and two more old women, indistinguishable from the ones before, climbed out of the gore.
They seemed to have forgotten they’d just been killed. Basket on one arm, cane in the other, they tottered onwards, muttering and gossiping as they walked,
“Snow again… Would be lovely to have a hot cup of yellow wine in this weather.”
“Heard the Qinhuai Pavilion has a new musician. Should go and listen someday.”
“The altar’s sacrifice hasn’t been changed yet, best not to forget.”
Yet when one of these tottering grannies was blocked on the road by Cheng Yan, she suddenly gaped her toothless mouth and let out the most shrill, grating screech imaginable.
The sound crashed like a foul, rancid current into everyone’s minds, corrupting their senses and throwing spiritual energy into chaos. Cheng Yan’s golden shield couldn’t block the mental attack; he screamed in pain, clutching his head as blood leaked from his ears.
Ding Lanlan’s puppet dropped from the sky, stomping the nearest monster flat.
But almost immediately, more identical old women crawled out from the monster’s corpse.
Soon, everyone was sucked into the fight. But the problem: Every time a monster died, even more identical ones took its place.
Before long, the entire block in front of the city wall was swarming with hunched, white-haired old women, shuffling back and forth.
“Let’s go have a chat with Granny Wang.”
“The God-Whip is in the hands of that little girl? Isn’t that a White Wuchang’s tool?”
“Heard Second Dog’s wife from West Street ran off with another man.”
“More snow… Did you bring those incense sticks in from the courtyard?”
“Now that’s a nice sacrifice this year.”
The flock of elderly women wandered and muttered endlessly. They seemed entirely harmless. But whenever one paused at a spot, she’d open her mouth and unleash a piercing shriek, instantly incapacitating anyone nearby.
This can’t go on, Mu Xue thought from her position above, brow furrowed.
They were well and truly stuck: the more monsters they killed, the more appeared. If they stopped, the horde would begin shrieking in concert, no one could withstand that.
These things couldn’t be the true form of the demon, they needed to find the real source and destroy it completely.
Mu Xue sat cross-legged atop her Reflecting Sky Cloud, steadying her breath. Her spiritual sense fanned out in all directions, probing deep beneath the earth. She might only be at Foundation Establishment in terms of cultivation, but her spiritual sense was easily on par with a Golden Core cultivator.
That sense turned to a silver thread, weaving downwards. First she encountered the city’s bedrock, then layers of shadowy earth below.
Deeper... Hm? There seemed to be a grand temple buried far beneath countless tons of stone. And deep within the temple, a hazy light floated in darkness.
Mu Xue stretched her spiritual sense to the very edge of its limit, trying to get a clearer look at that indistinct radiance.
It was like an ancient chunk of amber, and sealed within sat a primordial spirit, eyes tightly shut.
As Mu Xue’s sense edged closer, a sharp, glacial presence spilled from the amber, dragging her in.
The figure inside suddenly opened their eyes and stared directly at Mu Xue.
They were eyes of impossible allure, springtime longing and autumn melancholy intertwined, bewitching and radiant.
Mu Xue first heard a faint, languid sigh.
“Oh? What a fascinating child. Such powerful spiritual sense, yet your cultivation’s barely begun. Impeccable foundation, but you haven’t even reached the stage of refining elixirs…” The voice laughed, languorous and sweet, echoing through a void where nobody else existed. “Most intriguing of all, you walk the Path of Affection. Looks like, after all these years, my patience has finally paid off.”
Above ground, the sturdy city wall, solid for centuries, began to tremble. Massive chunks of earth tumbled down as the structure threatened to collapse.
The horde of old women all surged toward one spot. Jostling and clawing, they clambered over one another, piling up and molding themselves into the shape of a gigantic, beautiful young woman.
Graceful and enchanting, she moved like flowing silk, her silhouette mesmerizing. She wore just a sheer veil, her bare arms and feet adorned with golden bangles that chimed musically with every motion.
Her every breath dripped with seduction, yet she was never vulgar. Even the women among them felt their hearts race just looking at her.
“What in the world kind of demon is this? I’ve read plenty of books, but I’ve never seen anything like her!” pressed Cheng Yan, unable to bring himself to use transformation spells against such a figure, resigning himself to shouting questions from a safe distance instead.
Lin Yin raised a trembling finger, pointing ahead. “Look, doesn’t she look exactly like… like those things over there?”
Many of the ruined buildings lining the streets still housed statues of the God of Pleasure, faces hidden among the carved stone.
Now, following Lin Yin’s finger, everyone realized, the goddess in those statues looked almost identical to the alluring woman standing before them. In clothes, in features, everything.
The demon goddess lifted her pale foot, slowly rising to stand. With lotus-light steps, she glided toward Mu Xue.
“Master,” a childlike voice echoed in her mind, it was the Wangchuan Sword, and for once, there was a quiver of fear in it. “I... feel like I’ve seen her before. But I can’t remember where.”
“No matter who she is, as long as I have you in my hand, we can slay gods and demons alike.”
Within the sword’s misty consciousness, a voice suddenly surfaced, someone had once said those words to it too.
“Wangchuan, as long as I wield you, there’s no god or demon I can’t destroy.”
The memory was ancient, so distant that Wangchuan could no longer recall who it was. Perhaps it had been its last master, long ago.
Mu Xue ran her hand along the blade, drawing blood to ignite its killing aura. With a slash of winter frost, she struck toward the demon goddess closing in on her.
“Oh? The Wangchuan Sword?” That sultry, magnetic voice she’d heard underground sounded again. “Wangchuan Sword... the Immortal-Binding Rope... How did things from Dongyue end up in your grasp?”
The Ancient God Dongyue was a legendary being, whether immortal, demon, or ghost, all spoke the name with reverence and awe. Yet this woman uttered it as if Dongyue was just an old friend she once drank with.
Even as she finished her first sentence, she was still far from Mu Xue, but with a single ring from the golden band at her ankle, an almost imperceptible sound, her bewitching eyes were already inches from Mu Xue’s face.
Mu Xue’s heart lurched. With a flicker of thought, she sent her Reflecting Sky Cloud flying backward and whipped out a tiny puppet with a twist of her hand.
The little puppet, no larger than a palm, had lifelike rosy skin and clutched a gleaming emerald lotus leaf. With a wave of its dainty hand, visions of shattered lotuses unfurled in the air, conjuring a cascade of overlapping green, so many phantom lotuses that it completely obscured Mu Xue’s presence and the Reflecting Sky Cloud too.
This puppet was made from that rare meteorite Mu Xue had selected from her sect’s treasure vault; she'd only had time to imbue it with the simplest functions and had never taken it out before in battle, this was its first true test.
But she felt perfectly in sync with it, as if it moved with her own will, utterly coordinated, as if it were an extension of herself.
When the puppet saw its master escape, it flashed a jubilant, almost human-like smile. But then, from amid those green leaves, a colossal, delicate hand, pure white and soft, burst forth and closed around the puppet, hoisting it high in the air.
Scarlet runes ignited across the puppet’s face. Suddenly, its little body liquefied and slipped through the God of Pleasure’s fingers, escaping her grasp entirely.
Hovering midway in the air, the demon goddess looked down at her empty hand and arched her crimson lips in amusement. “Fascinating. Dongyue’s been gone for tens of thousands of years, but you’ve somehow grasped a hint of their divine techniques.”
Mu Xue caught sight of the Reflecting Sky Cloud in the distance, reached out to scoop up the liquified puppet as it rolled desperately toward her, and tucked the little thing away. She eyed the distant, sultry demon goddess across the void, alert, wary, knowing every graceful gesture could be lethal.
The Goddess of Pleasure lifted her arm ringed in gold, pressed her hands together, smiling, her gaze gentle and dangerous all at once. “After all these years, I’d almost given up hope. And yet, here you are, finally found.”
“Now, come with me to the Hall of Bliss.”
Her flawless face shattered like a cracked gemstone, the sky heaved, and the earth split open with a deafening rumble, a gaping chasm yawned below, its depths black and endless. Along the walls of the abyss, palatial towers and pavilions seemed to spiral downward, hinting at a temple descending into the dark.
From the depths, an irresistible force began to pull.
Mu Xue suddenly felt the world spinning. She lost control of the Reflecting Sky Cloud. Sand, stone, and herself, everything was wrenched downward into the bottomless darkness.
The last thin sliver of sky vanished behind falling sand and rock; relentless divine power pressed at her back. Mu Xue’s body spiraled out of control, plummeting, pelted painfully by boulders and debris, her vision swimming.
In the confusion, out of nowhere, a hand reached through the chaos, a strong arm seized her and yanked her straight into a hard, burning embrace, holding her tight, shielding her completely.