Chapter 1

The air conditioner hummed as it blew out cold air, but it did nothing to ease Pei Zhiyin’s frustration.

Her eyes, bloodshot from staying up late night after night, stared blankly at the trending hashtag #MostInfuriatingEndingOfTheYear and its comments for a long time. She still couldn’t think of a way to get herself off the trending list.

[Did a donkey kick the author in the head? How could she give such a wonderful female lead an ending like this?]

[I paid to watch a genius Immortal Venerable ascend and reach Soul Formation, not become a lovesick fool.]

[I suggest the author experience firsthand what it feels like to be stabbed to death by the Zhuwang Sword.]

…

This was her most successful novel.

After six months of serialization, with two chapters posted every day, she had finally made the female lead, Fan Qingyun, the cherished ideal of countless fans, earning herself tens of thousands of readers who faithfully followed every update.

As the author, Pei Zhiyin had pushed Fan Qingyun toward demonic corruption in the later part of the story in pursuit of the most heartrending romance possible.

But as the story involving humans and demons progressed, she found that her writing could no longer handle such a vast web of unauthorized copy causes, consequences, and opposing forces. She also worried that allowing a human and a demon to find lasting happiness together would blur the boundaries between good and evil and undermine the story’s message. In the end, she could only have Fan Qingyun perish, her cultivation extinguished with her, bringing the romance between the male and female leads to an abrupt close.

Pei Zhiyin raised a hand to rub her temple, trying to ease the faint, needlelike pain at the back of her head.

First things first: grovel. She quickly typed up an apology and an announcement that she would take down the entire novel and rewrite the ending, then hit send.

The pop-up confirming that her novel had been taken down made Pei Zhiyin’s eyes sting. She closed them and slumped against the back of her chair. She would get a little shut-eye first. Her reputation couldn’t possibly get any worse anyway.

The blazing sun hung high overhead. Shimmering summer heat blurred the rolling mountains, as though they lay beyond a flowing veil of golden gauze.

A party of several dozen riders galloped along a rugged mountain road. All the guards wore matching sky-blue fitted outfits, with long sabers at their waists. Their mounts were Cloud-Treading Steeds, capable of traveling a thousand li a day and difficult to acquire even for a fortune.

The carriage surrounded by them was extravagance itself. Its entire body was fashioned from golden-thread spirit agarwood, its walls carved with intricate cloud patterns. Spiritual energy circulated through the heat-repelling pearls set into its four corners, keeping the interior as pleasantly cool as spring even amid the rolling heat of a midsummer noon.

A sharp turn sent the carriage tilting abruptly.

“Hss…”

A jolt of pain shot through the back of Pei Zhiyin’s head. She instinctively opened her eyes, her whole body aching terribly. She blinked, and a woman’s worried face gradually came into focus.

“Forgive us, Young Mistress. The carriage jolted badly as we rounded Eagle’s Beak Bend. Did you hurt yourself against something?”

The woman looked to be in her early forties. Her features were composed and stern, and she wore a plain blue-gray Daoist robe. A closer look revealed fine, densely embroidered patterns along the collar. The white jade hairpin in her hair had a warm, gentle luster; one glance was enough to tell that it was worth a considerable sum.

Pei Zhiyin stared at the woman before her, her mind a muddle.

She tried to push herself upright, but her hands had barely moved an inch before a gentle force drew them back into place.

Looking down, she saw a thick rope shimmering with faint silver light, binding her tightly from her shoulders to her ankles.

Pei Zhiyin began to panic.

“Untie me!” she demanded, struggling and twisting while trying hard to stay calm.

Steward Shen reached out to smooth the disheveled strands of hair off her forehead, but Pei Zhiyin turned her head away.

Steward Shen sighed, a trace of helplessness passing through her eyes.

“Young Mistress, please don’t resent the clan head. No one loves you more than she does. But there are some things that love alone cannot shield you from.”

She looked toward the ancient trees flashing past the carriage window.

“Since time immemorial, those who pry into heaven’s secrets have met unhappy ends. For generations, the Pei clan has used the Eye of Heaven’s Secrets to read the stars and divine fortunes in service to emperors. Yet we have also borne a price unknown to others.”

“Without some fortuitous opportunity, most members of our clan do not live past fifty.”

“The clan head is forty-eight this year. Only two years remain before she reaches the limit heaven has allotted the Pei clan. If you continue squandering your time like this, Young Mistress, who will take charge of this vast clan after she passes away?”

Pei Zhiyin was still struggling to make sense of the woman’s mad ramblings when a man’s voice suddenly came from outside.

“Reporting to Steward Shen: we have entered Jinshan Ridge. If the journey goes smoothly, we should reach Xuanqing Town in another four hours.”

The Pei clan’s young mistress. Steward Shen. Jinshan Ridge. Xuanqing Town. Weren’t these from the novel she had written…? Something seemed to wrench open deep inside her mind, and countless unfamiliar memories came flooding in.

The color drained from Pei Zhiyin’s face. Cold sweat seeped out, trickling down her forehead into her hair.

At last, she understood—she had transmigrated into her novel, the very book readers had just lambasted onto the trending list.

Worse still, she had become the Pei clan’s young mistress, a cannon-fodder character who died at the very beginning and didn’t even qualify as a bottom-tier female supporting character.

And Jinshan Ridge was precisely where this cannon fodder met her end in the original novel.

According to the original plot, Wu Zheng, one of the Four Demon Kings, would soon arrive, drawn by the scent of the Moon-Soul Spirit Lingzhi. No one in the Pei clan’s party would survive.

Gu Changge, the male lead, happened to pass through on his way to the disciple recruitment assembly. Taking advantage of Wu Zheng’s grievous injuries, he killed it and claimed its early Golden Core-stage demon core, allowing him to break straight through to the middle stage of Foundation Establishment. He then picked up the Spatial Pouch and Immortal-Binding Rope beside Pei Zhiyin’s corpse. From that point on, one fortuitous opportunity followed another, his path to immortality smooth as he ascended ever higher.

And she was merely the most unremarkable stepping stone in the plot as far as the readers were concerned.

Chills swept over Pei Zhiyin’s back, but this was precisely the time when she could least afford to panic.

She forced herself to calm down. In the original novel, barely an incense stick’s worth of time passed between Wu Zheng’s sudden appearance and the slaughter of the entire convoy. Her only chance of survival now was to convince Steward Shen to turn the whole party around immediately.

But there was a problem—she glanced down at the Immortal-Binding Rope around her. This body’s original owner had a long history of misconduct in her attempts to avoid cultivation, with countless tricks ranging from feigning illness and going on hunger strikes to running away from home.

If Steward Shen were so easily persuaded by her words, she would never have tied her up like this to take her to find a master.

At that thought, Pei Zhiyin saw nothing but darkness ahead. This godforsaken opening on hell difficulty—was it punishment too…?

Steward Shen had been watching Pei Zhiyin closely. Seeing her grow paler and paler, cold sweat pouring off her, she hastily took out a handkerchief and bent down to wipe her face.

“Are you feeling unwell somewhere, Young Mistress?”

Somewhere? She felt awful everywhere. Pei Zhiyin looked steadily at her, and the calm, detached look in her eyes made Steward Shen pause.

“Steward Shen, if I told you that continuing on this road would mean the end of the Pei bloodline here at Jinshan Ridge, would you believe me?”

For no reason she could explain, Steward Shen’s heart gave a jolt. But a moment later, she suppressed that strange feeling. She had watched Pei Zhiyin grow up. The girl had been clever since childhood, but never put her intelligence to proper use. What she was saying now sounded exactly like a new excuse to avoid the disciple recruitment assembly.

Having served in the Pei household for decades, how could Steward Shen be taken in by a few words?

“Young Mistress, we’ll be at Xuanqing Town soon. Get some rest and stop troubling yourself.”

Just as she had expected, the woman didn’t believe her. Silently cursing the original owner’s unreliability, Pei Zhiyin closed her eyes in despair. Maybe she should just die. Perhaps dying would send her back. But the thought of Wu Zheng tearing her apart and eating her, as the plot dictated, made her shudder.

No. Absolutely not. She had been afraid of pain since she was little. Sharp claws ripping open her belly, fangs crushing her bones—just imagining it made her eyes sting.

She had to live! And not only live—she would change the ending here and restore her book to its former glory. She refused to believe she couldn’t do it.

Her gaze swept past the carriage roof, and her eyes lit up at the raised Eight Trigrams patterns carved into its four corners.

Of course! How could she have forgotten? The Pei clan had never put ​read the original at bailiantales.com​its faith in people. It put its faith in divination.

She drew a deep breath and spoke slowly.

“If you don’t believe me, Steward Shen, why not cast a life-and-death divination? You’ll know as soon as you see the result.”

Steward Shen lowered her brows in thought. She knew Pei Zhiyin all too well. The girl might lie and make trouble, but she would never make light of the divination arts handed down by their ancestors.

After a brief silence, she turned her wrist. Wisps of pale silver spiritual energy slowly rose from her palm, and a moment later, a white tortoise shell the size of a hand appeared in the glow.

The shell was as luminous and white as the moon, its surface covered in natural markings. On closer inspection, they resembled mountains and rivers, as though heaven and earth had been condensed into that tiny space.

She murmured an ancient incantation. Spiritual energy flowed around the shell like a stream, and its dormant markings gradually lit up, streaks of silvery-white light traveling along them.

The carriage was so quiet that a falling pin could have been heard. Steward Shen’s gaze remained fixed on the shell.

The first few markings to light up were normal enough. Then, without warning, a pitch-black crack appeared along the shell’s edge. It spread, extinguishing the other divinatory markings in its path. In the blink of an eye, a sharp crack rang out, and the white tortoise shell split.

Steward Shen’s pupils contracted. The Pei clan’s ancestral teachings said that one could seek answers through divination and glimpse heaven’s secrets, but one must never force a glimpse into a situation of certain death, or the divination instrument would be damaged.

The hand holding the tortoise shell trembled.

“How could this…?”

At the sight, the last flicker of hope that things might be different died in Pei Zhiyin’s heart.

“Steward Shen, tell the convoy to turn around. Quickly.”

Pei Zhiyin’s voice was tight with tension. But the words had barely left her mouth when the entire carriage jolted violently and came to an abrupt halt.

Outside, the spirit steeds neighed in terror, followed by the successive sounds of long sabers being drawn.

“On guard!”

The entire mountain forest suddenly fell eerily silent. The spirit steeds panted heavily, pawing at the ground and backing away in agitation, as though they sensed some terrifying presence.

What was coming had come after all. This was exactly how she had described it in the original novel—when Wu Zheng appeared, Jinshan Ridge would become as silent as a graveyard.

Pei Zhiyin went limp and lay flat, resigning herself to the agonizing pain to come. Instead, the bindings around her suddenly loosened.

“Young Mistress, leave as soon as you can. I will do everything in my power to buy you time.”

Steward Shen put the white tortoise shell away in her Spatial Pouch, then took out a golden talisman. Holding it between both hands, she murmured an incantation. The next instant, the talisman spontaneously burst into flame and dissolved into countless streams of golden light that poured into the meridians throughout Pei Zhiyin’s body.

“This is a Gale Talisman. It will double your speed for the time it takes an incense stick to burn.”

With that, she gripped her saber, lifted the curtain, and strode out of the carriage.

Pei Zhiyin rubbed her aching wrists and moved her new body a little. Her feet did feel light, as though the wind were buoying her entire body.

For now, she had to run. She lifted the carriage curtain, only to hear a beast’s roar like the clash of metal and stone tear through the sky. It made her eardrums ache, and several spirit steeds collapsed on the spot from sheer terror.

Deep in the forest, an enormous black shape some twenty feet tall slowly emerged, crushing ancient trees beneath its feet. Its whole body was black as ink, a fearsome single horn jutted from its forehead, and five long, chainlike tails swayed gently behind it. A pair of crimson demonic eyes looked down upon the party from above.

Faced with the Demon King she had written into existence herself, Pei Zhiyin almost slapped herself on the spot. Of all the things she could have written, why had she created a monster like this?

Steward Shen stepped forward, shielding her firmly behind her. Something close to grim resolve appeared in those normally steady eyes.

“Young Mistress, run. Don’t look back.”

She barked the words, her long saber ringing as she drew it. Spiritual energy erupted around her with all the power of a cultivator at the peak of Foundation Establishment. At the same time, shadows shifted among the surrounding trees, and several dozen hidden guards at the middle stage of Foundation Establishment emerged one after another. Every one of them stood in front of Pei Zhiyin, their eyes fixed on Wu Zheng.

Facing a Demon King whose cultivation far surpassed their own, they knew they would die, yet still they stood between it and her.

Pei Zhiyin’s eyes burned. In the original novel, she had devoted only a few brief lines to this scene, without even pausing to consider her wording. Only now, standing here, did she understand the cold-bloodedness of the words “all were wiped out.”

She quickly pieced the plot together in her mind. Wu Zheng hadn’t come to kill the Pei clan’s people. It had come for the “Moon-Soul Spirit Lingzhi.” As long as the “Moon-Soul Spirit Lingzhi” left this place, Wu Zheng was sure to chase after it.

Pei Zhiyin spun around and rushed back into the carriage, lunging toward its innermost recess. She opened a hidden compartment. The moon-white lingzhi lay quietly inside, silver radiance flowing over its cap as though it had been formed from condensed moonlight.

Her heart pounding, Pei Zhiyin took out the “Moon-Soul Spirit Lingzhi” and tucked it inside the front of her robe. Icy spiritual energy instantly wound around her entire body.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t afraid of what she was about to do. Even her legs were going weak. But when she thought of Steward Shen and the guards dying to protect her… No!

Pei Zhiyin gritted her teeth and vaulted out of the carriage. She took out the “Moon-Soul Spirit Lingzhi” and waved it at Wu Zheng, then summoned every last trace of spiritual energy in her body and sprinted toward the rear of the convoy without looking back.