After Transmigrating Into A Novel, My Advisor Became My Master - Chapter 1

Dawn broke, painting the clouds in brilliant colors.

Deep in the mountains, vast spiritual energy surged like a rising tide, spreading across the wilderness like mist, so dense it seemed ready to drip from the air.

A gentle breeze swept through, and the spiritual mist filling the sky gradually merged into a luminous ribbon resembling moonlight, winding toward a cave at the mountaintop.

“Crack.”
Deep inside the cave, an egg trembled incessantly.

It stood roughly half a foot tall and gleamed like flawless white jade. Its exquisite outline resembled a lotus bud.

Fine threads of silver radiance intertwined and roamed across the eggshell, tracing the pattern of a lotus on the verge of blooming.

As the silver light intensified, the egg shook more violently.

“Crack—”
In an instant, dazzling light burst forth, and the lotus bloomed.

A translucent dragon horn was the first thing to break through the shell.

Still soft from birth, the horn bent for a moment beneath the pressure of the shell’s edge before rising again in proud, imposing splendor.

“Crack, crack…”

The eggshell shattered completely, scattering across the ground.

A pair of eyes slowly opened, their deep-ocean blue shifting with a regal yet cold beauty.

The soft membrane fell away, revealing newborn snow-white scales as luminous as moonlight, delicate and damp. The tiny creature slowly slithered across the cave floor inch by inch, leaving faint trails of moisture behind.

After moving for a short while, it climbed onto a patch of warm, smooth skin.
Its tail cautiously probed, finding the sensation reasonably satisfactory.

It therefore condescended to press its entire body against her.

It opened its mouth, revealing two tiny, pearly-white fangs.

“Hiss—”

A sharp pain pierced the side of her neck, jolting Shen Yun awake.

Still dazed, she propped herself up, vaguely feeling that her mattress was far too cold and hard. A sinister chill surrounded her, making it somewhat difficult to breathe.

As her consciousness returned, her first thought was: Today is Friday.

“Another group meeting…”

Shen Yun heaved a long sigh and raised a hand to massage her temple.

The moment she thought of the group meeting, she could not help thinking of the woman who conducted it.

Which, in turn, reminded her of what had happened the previous night.

After the dinner gathering ended, she had escorted Lian Yi, who could not hold her liquor, back to the faculty apartments. Unexpectedly, several hours later, Professor Lian had braved the freezing winter night to knock on Shen Yun’s dormitory door.

Shen Yun opened the door and stared outside in surprise. “Professor?”

The woman’s figure was solitary and aloof, her expression indifferent.
The dim corridor light faintly illuminated the delicate flush of intoxication on her cheeks, lending her a touch of vulnerability.

“Shen Yun, I can’t sleep…”

Shen Yun instinctively held her breath.

She stared at the woman without blinking. The brief pause felt extraordinarily long, and for no apparent reason, her heart began pounding wildly.

Lian Yi blinked slowly, then belatedly finished her sentence: “…after reading the first draft of the paper you submitted.”

With that, she held out a thick stack of papers.

“What?” Shen Yun’s heart abruptly stopped.

After voicing her accusation, Professor Lian’s eyes became veiled in a damp mist.

Flustered and panicked, Shen Yun accepted the stack of pages and flipped through a few of them, only to find them densely covered in red corrections and rebuttals.

The corridor window had not been shut properly. An icy wind poured through, chilling her heart to the core.

…

Nameless feelings constricted her throat, and the sensation of suffocation grew increasingly severe. Shen Yun struggled to breathe and even began gasping.

W-Wait.
It did not seem to be her feelings constricting her throat.

Shen Yun’s eyes flew open.

Something was tightly coiled around her neck.
Without making a sound, it slowly contracted inch by inch, squeezing tighter and producing a suffocating pressure that was nearly impossible to escape—

A snake!

Shen Yun shuddered, and a chill shot through her like electricity, numbing her from head to toe.

Now fully awake, she discovered that she was actually inside a deep, shadowy cave. Jagged stone walls surrounded her, cold and mysterious, making her suspect that her advisor had exiled her here overnight.

The snake rubbed against the skin of her neck, then abruptly bit her again.

W-Why did it feel a little furry…?

Shen Yun’s mind went blank for an instant before an overwhelming desire to survive erupted within her.
She seized the snake, yanked it away, and flung it blindly against the wall before staggering to her feet.

“Smack.”

The jade-white snake was incomparably frail. It was sent flying and ended up plastered limply against the wall like a forlorn sliver of moonlight.

Shen Yun bent halfway over, panting heavily.

It was too dark for her to make out its exact shape. She could only vaguely see that the snake had a pair of mutated horns on its head, lustrous and translucent—and exceptionally beautiful.

When it had rubbed against her just now, its head had even felt slightly fuzzy. She had no idea what kind of moldy white-furred snake it was.

It had to be extremely venomous.
Shen Yun’s heart tightened.

Forcing herself to remain calm, she swiftly searched herself, but found neither her bag nor her phone.

“Is anyone there?!”

Unwilling to sit around waiting for death, Shen Yun charged toward the exit, shouting for help.
Yet her footsteps came to an abrupt halt at the mouth of the cave.

—Ahead of her was not the ordinary forest she had expected.

The cliff rose in lonely isolation. She was standing on a tiny patch of ground at the very summit, surrounded by nothing but vast, ethereal clouds and rosy mist.
The morning sun had just begun to rise, dyeing layer upon layer of clouds a resplendent gold. Magnificent and majestic as dragon scales, they spread into endless brilliance.

It was as dreamlike as a celestial realm.

Even more fantastical was—

Someone in the distance was soaring through the air, drifting gracefully toward her.

Shen Yun instinctively wanted to pinch herself, but the stinging pain from the snakebite on her neck flared up at precisely the right moment.

Her faith in science, built over more than twenty years, teetered on the verge of collapse. She stood frozen as the newcomer landed steadily at the edge of the cliff.

The woman wore a pale green robe, with a medicine gourd hanging from her waist. She possessed an air of serene elegance.
Her gaze settled upon Shen Yun, carrying a familiar smile.

“Yun’er, auspicious signs descended from the heavens today, and even the morning clouds shone with extraordinary colors. I presume your master has hatched?”

…Her master had hatched?

While her thoughts were still in complete disarray, a sudden crackle sounded deep within her mind, like a tiny cluster of lightning exploding inside her head.

Immediately afterward, an ethereal female voice rang out: “Please continue writing The Aloof Master’s Rebellious Disciple Tribulation and help your master successfully ascend within one hundred years.”

Shen Yun listened in stunned disbelief.

Wasn’t The Aloof Master’s Rebellious Disciple Tribulation the melodramatic cultivation novel she had written?

As a direct-entry doctoral student, Shen Yun’s life in scientific research could only be described as unbearably miserable.

As a childish form of revenge, she had buried herself in writing late into countless nights, pouring all her emotions into the novel.

The Aloof Master’s Rebellious Disciple Tribulation was updated sporadically on Green River, and its premise had been equally haphazard—

Her own advisor, Lian Yi, was cold and indifferent, so with a few strokes of Shen Yun’s keyboard, the master in her novel became so frosty she practically shed shards of ice.

Rather than becoming an academic powerhouse herself, Shen Yun looked forward to her advisor becoming an academician as soon as possible. She truly hoped her mentor would “become a dragon”—so the master in her novel was made a member of the dragon race, blessed with the uniquely gifted bloodline of an ancient silver dragon. The main storyline likewise followed her path to ascension.

As for the specific plot… Shen Yun had been tormented by her advisor countless times, so the rebellious female lead in her story defied her master and tormented her countless times in return.

After several hundred thousand words of this, the plot gradually became a runaway horse, galloping headlong into ever more sweeping and extravagant melodrama.

In the latest chapter she had published, the master died while helping the female lead survive her heavenly tribulation. The female lead’s spiritual roots were also completely destroyed, reducing her to a cripple. One was dead and the other maimed, creating a tragic and heartrending scene that sent countless readers into howling fits of grief.

Fortunately, cultivation stories never lacked miraculous turns of fortune when all hope seemed lost—

During her earlier travels, the master had once saved the Phoenix Clan from catastrophe and had been granted an opportunity for nirvana in return. Shen Yun had planned to bring this foreshadowing back in the next chapter by writing the scene in which the master underwent nirvana, was reborn, and hatched from her shell, thereby rescuing her readers from despair.

But because she had been too busy with research, she had procrastinated for more than half a year and had yet to write a single word.

So… she had transmigrated into her own novel?

So she did not have to attend the group meeting today, did not need to prepare the PowerPoint presentation, and could let that paper whose results she could not reproduce no matter what simply scatter with the wind… This was suspiciously like a doctoral student’s final fantasy before having her graduation delayed.

“Are you a system?”

Shen Yun tentatively asked in her mind, “Will completing the mission get me first authorship in a top journal?”

Another faint crackle sounded, and the system’s voice seemed somewhat fried around the edges and scrambled on the inside. “If the mission fails, the Three Realms will collapse, and all living beings will perish.”

Shen Yun considered this. “If I fail, will I go back and continue my doctorate?”

The system replied, “You will die suddenly on the spot, and your unpublished academic achievements will be inherited by your junior labmate.”

Shen Yun: “!”

She immediately snapped, enunciating each word, “I don’t have a junior labmate. I’m my advisor’s only student.”

The system said, “She can recruit another.”

“…”
Shen Yun drew a deep breath.

“Help Master ascend within a hundred years, right? She’ll ascend. She definitely will.”

The title Rebellious Disciple Tribulation made it clear that the greatest obstacle to the master’s ascension was the rebellious female lead.
But now that Shen Yun had transmigrated here, she would strictly observe the proper boundaries between master and disciple from this point forward. She would never again create any melodramatic plot about a disciple defying her master.

Completing the mission would be effortless.

“Shen Yun,” the woman before her called.

Shen Yun returned to her senses. “Hm?”

Although Shen Yun’s mind had wandered for quite some time, the woman showed no suspicion and merely asked patiently, “How is your master now?”

“I shall go inside and take a look.”

She turned toward the cave, the jade token hanging from her waist fluttering with her robes. The characters “Yan Li” were engraved upon it.

Shen Yun remembered that Yan Li was the Pavilion Master of Tengyun Pavilion, where the female lead resided, as well as her master’s friend.

In that case, the soft, fluffy “snake” inside the cave—the one Shen Yun had violently flung against the wall, where it remained embedded with its fate unknown—was obviously…

A chill instantly crawled across her back.

“Please wait, Pavilion Master!”

Yan Li stopped and turned around, a questioning look in her eyes.

“I… I’ll bring Master out.”

Not daring to delay, Shen Yun immediately hurried back into the cave.

That forlorn sliver of moonlight remained peacefully and delicately embedded in the same spot. Only its tail twitched faintly in defiance, displaying a fragile yet tenacious vitality.

Forget ascending—she had nearly died in infancy.

Shen Yun drew a deep breath and carefully pried her from the wall, cradling her entire body in her palm.

The little dragon master was only the size of her palm, her body feeling like warm, exquisitely smooth mutton-fat jade.

As Shen Yun fumbled with her in a panic, she was suddenly caught off guard by a pair of magnificent deep-blue eyes.
They possessed an almost bewitching beauty, yet held the innocent bewilderment of a newborn.

Her breath caught, and she stared dazedly into the eyes of this infant version of her master.

In the next instant, however, the innocent beast’s pupils narrowed into vertical slits, suddenly revealing a hint of profound coldness—

“Ah!”

Bitten yet again, Shen Yun cried out in pain.