Chapter 2
Carrying a lantern, Shi Cimo followed the narrow path and soon returned to her small courtyard on Qingji Peak.
She raised her hand to push open the courtyard gate, only to feel something resisting it. Her brows furrowed slightly.
When she finally pushed it all the way open, sure enough, she found a mass of unidentified yellow creatures swarming around the entrance, making an incredible racket. They flapped their wings and crowded toward her, chirping noisily as they attempted to tug at the hem of her skirt.
Shi Cimo stopped just outside the threshold.
Her first reaction was to scan the courtyard floor. Thankfully, unlike the last time she’d returned home, opening the gate hadn’t greeted her with an overwhelming assault of duck droppings everywhere.
Shi Cimo let out an almost imperceptible sigh of relief. She pulled her skirt free from the noisy ducklings’ beaks and headed straight toward her room.
The ducklings chased after her relentlessly, but they couldn’t keep up with her pace. They quickly fell behind, occasionally stumbling and falling over.
By the time they waddled their way to the house, the wooden door had already slammed shut with a merciless bang.
The little yellow creatures gathered noisily outside the door. Before long, however, it opened again.
Shi Cimo had changed out of her disciple uniform into a plain dress. She walked toward the feeding trough beside the pond, took some crushed spirit grain from her storage pouch, and scattered it evenly inside.
The ducklings immediately swarmed forward.
Shi Cimo watched them eat, her face expressionless and her gaze unfocused.
The silvery moonlight fell across her already bloodless face, making her appear even paler.
“Coo.”
Shi Cimo snapped out of her thoughts and turned toward the sound.
A plump mother duck with sleek, glossy feathers was crouching not far away. For some inexplicable reason, its tiny, beady eyes held an air of haughty superiority. When it noticed Shi Cimo looking over, it proudly raised its neck and even gave its wings a couple of shakes.
The next instant, a pale, slender hand shot out like lightning, seized the mother duck by the neck, and lifted the proud, aloof creature completely off the ground.
“QUAAACK—!”
A shrill duck cry pierced the night.
“Before I left this morning, I specifically told you not to forget to feed your children. Yet here I am, coming home to find them so hungry they’re chasing after me. Is this how you raise your ducklings?”
Shi Cimo looked at the mother duck struggling in her grip, its wings flapping wildly and downy feathers flying everywhere. She weighed it in her hand, her expression blank. “You’ve gotten heavier again. Where have you been begging for food this time?”
The mother duck’s beady eyes were filled with terror. Realizing it couldn’t escape, it flapped twice, tilted its neck to one side, and actually began playing dead.
“Heh.” Shi Cimo let out a barely audible sneer. Looking at its shamelessly lazy, couldn’t-care-less attitude, another face suddenly flashed through her mind—a perpetually grinning face that always looked perfectly justified even after causing trouble. Her fingers unconsciously tightened. “You’re exactly like your former owner.”
The mother duck let out a miserable “QUACK!” as her grip tightened, immediately abandoning its act of playing dead. The cry brought Shi Cimo back to her senses. She lowered her eyes to the fat duck in her hand and gave it a shake. “Your former owner deliberately chose tonight, when I was assigned to patrol the back mountain, to climb over the sect wall.”
After a pause, a trace of coldness entered her voice. “And I caught her again. Just look at how incapable she is of behaving herself. She insists on causing trouble whenever I’m on duty.”
“Right now,” she said, staring into the mother duck’s eyes, which had already begun rolling back. She enunciated each word with deliberate clarity. “I’m furious beyond belief.”
Shi Cimo suddenly released her grip. The mother duck, still flapping its wings, had no time to react and fell to the ground with a plop, thoroughly dazed and disoriented.
She unhurriedly gestured with the tip of her foot toward the group of ducklings beside her, who were still engrossed in their meal, utterly oblivious to the danger around them. “What do you think? Should I stew you, or perhaps one of your little ones, to help nourish my body?”
Before she had even finished speaking, the mother duck on the ground sprang upright as though struck by an invisible whip. Scrambling and stumbling, it transformed into a brown blur and vanished into the shadows of the courtyard’s artificial rockery, quacking in terror. Its speed was no slower than Song Che’s earlier dash toward the bamboo grove.
Shi Cimo watched it disappear and made no move to torment it further. The faintest upward curve that had somehow appeared at the corner of her lips gradually faded, her expression once again settling into its usual frostiness.
Stepping past the ducklings, who were so absorbed in eating that they had lost all awareness of the world around them, she turned and returned indoors to deal with official business.
＊
Qingji Peak was cold to begin with, and the chill inside the room was even more pronounced.
After using a warming talisman, Shi Cimo sat down at her cold writing desk and channeled a thread of spiritual energy through her fingertips.
A palm-sized green jade disc on the desk silently lit up. Ripples spread across its surface like water, and dense rows of golden characters appeared, some long and some short, forming the names of Tianyan Sect disciples.
As a personal disciple of the Law Enforcement Elder, Shi Cimo was responsible for most matters concerning the maintenance of order within the sect, even with a senior sister above her to share the burden. Moreover, her master, Leng Qianqiu, had recently entered seclusion, while Senior Sister Mu Yangyu was on sick leave, leaving Shi Cimo and the other disciples with an even heavier workload.
This jade disc contained one of the reports that had to be submitted to the Law Enforcement Hall at the end of the month—a record of disciplinary violations among the disciples.
Beneath each name were tally marks representing the number of violations committed.
The names appeared in different colors, ranging from gold to crimson. The darker the color, the more serious and numerous the offenses.
At the very top was one name, blazing a fiery crimson so intense it almost seemed ready to drip blood, painfully dazzling to the eye—
Song Che.
Shi Cimo’s gaze rested on those two characters for less than a breath.
Not a ripple of emotion stirred.
She picked up her brush, dipped it in ink, and, guided by spiritual energy, added another stroke beneath Song Che’s name.
A small line of text silently appeared: “Third quarter of the hour of the Rat: Violated curfew and attempted to leave the sect without authorization.”
The golden characters floating above the jade disc flickered.
The crimson glow surrounding Song Che’s name suddenly intensified, leaping like flames. It then firmly secured its position at the very top of the rankings, making every name beneath it seem dull by comparison.
Shi Cimo’s gaze passed over the name at the top without the slightest pause. She continued writing, adding another mark beneath the names Xiao Yushu, Su Yiyao, and Lin Suijue, along with the annotation: “Accomplices in the same offense.”
She set down her brush.
The jade disc’s glow gradually faded, returning it to the appearance of an ordinary piece of smooth, lustrous green jade.
She put it away without a trace of expression.
Including this month, Song Che had now topped the rankings for three consecutive months, earning herself a place on the Law Enforcement Hall’s list of “disciples requiring special attention.” From this point onward, all disciplinary punishments imposed on Song Che would, according to the regulations governing those on the list, be carried out to the maximum permitted severity.
This wasn’t a bad outcome.
Even knowing that the sect would soon be flooded with yet another round of rumors and gossip directed at her, Shi Cimo was still in a rather good mood.
In truth, tonight’s events hadn’t been the result of her possessing some uncanny ability to predict the future. She had deliberately created an opportunity for them to sneak out of the sect, specifically spreading word that she would be patrolling the back mountain that night.
It had all been an elaborate trap to catch them in the act.
As for why she had gone to such lengths, that was a long story.
She wasn’t originally from this world. In her previous life, she had merely been an ordinary student in the twenty-first century, overwhelmed by the struggle to finish her thesis while making ends meet.
Then, one day, she opened her eyes to discover that she had become a swaddled infant in this world.
Back then, her name hadn’t been Shi Cimo, either. She was called “Chimo,” meaning “Obsessed Demon,” and had been born into an impoverished mortal family with barely a roof over their heads. A natural disaster reduced her loved ones to bones, leaving her to wander from place to place for more than a decade, enduring every hardship imaginable. It wasn’t until the Tianyan Sect held its once-in-a-decade talent selection in the mortal realm that she discovered she had transmigrated into a novel.
The novel was titled Path of Destiny. She had skimmed through it in her previous life. Put simply, it was a cultivation novel featuring an irresistible, universally adored heroine and a tragic master-disciple romance. “Chimo” was the vicious antagonist who appeared throughout the early storyline, serving as a plot device to advance the romance between the male and female leads before ultimately being ground to dust and sacrificed for the sake of the plot. In other words, she was a cannon-fodder female supporting character.
Although Path of Destiny appeared to explore profound themes such as wars between immortals and demons, the balance of the Heavenly Dao, and the darker side of the righteous path, at its core, it was nothing more than a Mary Sue romance novel. The male and female leads’ supposedly perfect partnership, their devotion to each other alone, and their unwavering love until death all needed the ugliness and hypocrisy of other characters to make them stand out by comparison. Chimo was precisely that sort of vicious cannon fodder.
And the female lead of this novel was none other than the Tianyan Sect Master’s final disciple—Song Che.
Rumor had it that Song Che possessed a mysterious background. At the same time, her cultivation talent was unparalleled, and her comprehension was extraordinary. While ordinary children only had their spiritual roots tested at the age of ten, she had already drawn spiritual energy into her body at eight and reached the peak of Qi Refining at ten. Now, at just twenty years old, she had already reached the middle stage of Golden Core. Her astonishing talent and brilliance were such that countless prodigies throughout the cultivation world could only be considered reasonably talented when compared to her.
Chimo, meanwhile, was Song Che’s complete opposite. The two were practically a pair of contrasting characters deliberately arranged by fate itself. In the novel, Chimo was jealous of Song Che’s talent and hopelessly infatuated with the male lead, Mu Yizhi, who would eventually become Song Che’s disciple. She resorted to every despicable means imaginable to frame Song Che, ultimately causing her to be expelled from her master’s sect, her Dao heart shattered, and herself driven onto the demonic path.
But Chimo didn’t fare any better. The male and female leads joined forces to overcome their predicament, and she was subjected to revenge until her death. Abandoned by everyone, utterly disgraced, she was stabbed by Song Che’s bonded sword and thrown into the Old Abyss, where her soul was completely annihilated.
In her previous life, Shi Cimo had only finished the first half of Path of Destiny. She hadn’t gotten around to reading the second half. However, the greatest mystery left hanging at the end of the first half was the prologue to the revelation of the female lead’s origins, brought about by the death of Chimo, the antagonist.
As it turned out, the female lead’s identity as the “Child of Destiny” was quite literal. Her birth involved secrets concerning powerful figures in the cultivation world and was closely tied to the laws of the Heavenly Dao. The destiny bestowed upon her through the Heavenly Dao’s favor came at a price, but that price wasn’t hers to pay. Instead, it was transferred to another vessel, one abandoned by the Heavenly Dao.
Chimo was that vessel.
Yin and yang existed as opposing poles, their total always remaining in balance. When one side flourished, the other declined. Song Che’s extraordinary prosperity represented Chimo’s equally extraordinary misfortune. The better Song Che’s life became, the more miserable Chimo’s would be.
When Shi Cimo discovered at the age of ten that she had not only transmigrated into a novel but had also become cannon fodder, she made up her mind that she would never meet the same tragic end as her counterpart in the book. Song Che was destined to rise to the very top under the protection of the Heavenly Dao, but Shi Cimo absolutely refused to obediently serve as a stepping stone on her path to greatness. How could she possibly resign herself to that?
She had no intention of staying away from the Tianyan Sect and escaping the plot in hopes of living a peaceful life. That would merely be burying her head in the sand. This was the cultivation world, where the mysteries of the Dao were profound and destiny was difficult to unravel. This damned place didn’t follow the laws of science at all, so Shi Cimo naturally didn’t dare dismiss the notion that one person’s extraordinary fortune required another person’s extraordinary misfortune as mere nonsense.
Even if she fled far away and avoided all contact with the female lead, what if, many years later, Song Che truly reached the pinnacle of the immortal path? Who could say whether Shi Cimo might suddenly explode on the spot, quite literally, under the influence of their intertwined destinies? After all, in the original novel, she had ultimately died at Song Che’s hands.
Her only chance of survival was to approach the eye of the storm and search for a way out. And so, Shi Cimo altered her appearance, changed her voice, and carefully erased every connection to Chimo, from her facial features and voice to even certain traces of her original aura. Assuming the identity of an orphan girl with no roots, no connections, and a mysterious background, she arrived at the Tianyan Sect under a new name.
She hadn’t entered through the conventional route, so naturally, she couldn’t become a disciple of the sect master. Instead, she settled for joining the tutelage of Leng Qianqiu, the master of Qingji Peak, which fell directly under the main Taiwei Peak, and an elder of the Law Enforcement Hall. Her goal was to gain legitimate access to the sect’s most closely guarded records and archives, searching for any clues that might lead her to a way of exchanging or altering their destined fates.
But ten years had already passed since she entered the Tianyan Sect. After a decade of treading carefully as though walking on thin ice, she had finally worked her way up to become the third-in-command of the Law Enforcement Hall. Yet despite gaining access to its vast collection of records, she hadn’t managed to uncover a single piece of relevant information. The only thing connected to the matter was Song Che herself, who was alive and well and spent every day bouncing around right in front of her.
Shi Cimo pressed a hand to her forehead. Ten years of meticulous planning, and it felt as though she’d spent the entire time punching at empty air, struggling against something that wasn’t even there. She suspected her rank still wasn’t high enough.
Was she supposed to kill Leng Qianqiu and take his position?
She tried to find some humor in her predicament, but couldn’t help feeling somewhat oppressed by it all.
What a joke. Leng Qianqiu’s cultivation was unfathomable, and his thoughts were as deep and inscrutable as the ocean. Kill him? That would be no different from an ant trying to shake a mighty tree.
What she was actually planning for now was the upcoming “Convergence of Ten Thousand Arts.”
Shi Cimo’s fingertips unconsciously traced the cold surface of the desk before finally coming to rest on a jade pendant lying quietly in one corner.
Smooth and pleasantly cool to the touch, the pendant was made of flawless, milky-white jade, as pure and translucent as frozen snow. It was a piece of the finest cold jade.
An orchid on the verge of blooming had been exquisitely carved into its surface. The jade itself was of exceptional quality, but there was something indescribably cold and desolate about the orchid’s appearance.
Shi Cimo picked it up, feeling its substantial weight and chill against her fingertips.
As her gaze settled on the pendant, her eyes darkened slightly.
Only a hundred days remained until the Convergence of Ten Thousand Arts.
This was a grand event held once every century in the cultivation world, jointly organized by several of its most powerful factions. When the time came, the outstanding young talents from across the world would gather to enter a secret realm. Those who ranked among the top hundred would be granted access to the Secret Archives Pavilion, where they could study higher-level cultivation techniques and secret manuals. But the thing she sought could probably only be found in the Tianshu Secret Vault, and she would need to break into the top ten to have even the slightest hope of gaining entry.
Yet she was currently only at the late stage of Foundation Establishment. Among cultivators her age, that might be considered excellent, but the cultivation world was overflowing with extraordinary talents, and geniuses were the one thing it never lacked.
There was no need to look at other sects. Within the Tianyan Sect alone, which of its direct inner disciples hadn’t at least reached Foundation Establishment? Some, such as Lin Suijue and Song Che, had even attained Golden Core cultivation. Looking farther across the cultivation world, there were renowned prodigies in Kunlun Ruins, Guiyuan Sect, the Frostflower Palace of the Northern Region, and Aoki Valley. And that wasn’t even counting the reclusive demon-suppressing cultivation families, the exceptionally gifted independent cultivators whose movements were shrouded in mystery, or the hidden geniuses carefully nurtured by smaller and mid-sized sects while they quietly bided their time…
Precisely because outstanding talents emerged in such abundance, the standards for what constituted a genius had been raised to almost unimaginable heights. At the Convergence of Ten Thousand Arts, where the most extraordinary prodigies from across the world would gather, late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivation was barely enough to meet the threshold for participation.
If she wanted to distinguish herself amid such terrifying competition and secure a place among the best, she would probably have to break through to Golden Core.
Break through to Golden Core within a hundred days?
Shi Cimo rubbed her fingertips along the cold edge of the jade pendant. Every breakthrough to a major cultivation realm was like crossing an immense, seemingly impassable chasm. How could it possibly be easy?
If she still couldn’t succeed this time… what other choice would she have?
She stared at the solitary orchid carved into the pendant, her gaze gradually growing distant.
The night wind swept past the eaves of Qingji Peak, stirring the hanging bronze wind chimes and producing several clear, ethereal notes that sounded strangely lonely.
She returned to her senses and clenched the jade pendant in her palm. Its icy touch sent a chill through her heart, finally allowing her to suppress the complicated emotions surging within her.
She had placed Song Che at the very top of the disciplinary punishment list. According to sect regulations, Song Che would now be subject to the Five Great Punishments, the sect’s most severe disciplinary measures. Leng Qianqiu would never sit idly by and allow that to happen.
Once he emerged from seclusion, half her plan would already be accomplished. The problem was that the man was notoriously vindictive and would never let matters rest. She still needed to think carefully about how to deal with whatever difficulties that old bastard would throw her way next…
Shi Cimo let out a long sigh. Then, as though remembering something else, she shook her head repeatedly in disgust before turning back to her desk.
The lamplight flickered, casting her slender figure in a long shadow against the wall. She once again spread out the mountain of accumulated documents and picked up her brush.
What goes on behind closed doors is not for others to speak of.
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