In the palace, at the shift change, Li Shanxiang yawned and gave a few instructions to the young eunuch taking over for him. Then he went back to his room, changed clothes, and prepared to leave the palace. Although he was a eunuch, his position wasn't low. Maybe if Wu Shizu also met with an accident, he could even compete for the top spot.
Whenever he thought of Wu Shizu, Li Shanxiang was filled with resentment. He had once been Liu Xian's trusted man. Who would have guessed Liu Xian died suddenly? And then this Wu Shizu rose to power and now targeted him at every turn. Life was not easy.
Damn those Ningxi partisans! If not for them, Liu Xian wouldn't have died.
Cursing under his breath, he left the palace gates. The imperial guards on duty only nodded at him, which made Li Shanxiang feel good. Now, us eunuchs could truly be said to stand just one step below the emperor and above everyone else.
Thinking about seeing his newly wedded wife soon, the gloom in Li Shanxiang's heart lifted a little.
"Heh heh, my little beauty, your man is back!" Gently pushing open the door before him, Li Shanxiang's grin stretched from ear to ear. But the next moment, his smile froze.
There was no little beauty in the room. Instead, there were two grim-faced men with dangerous looks.
"Who are you!" Li Shanxiang immediately grew uneasy.
"Eunuch Li, don't get so worked up. Let's sit down and have a nice chat." The voice behind him made Li Shanxiang jump. He turned and saw a stooped man standing behind him, smiling without a trace of warmth.
"Guards—"
Before he could finish the call, the man kicked him into the room.
"Save your breath, Eunuch Li. Were you calling for them?" Zhu Hong kept that eerie smile on his face. As he spoke, the two men sitting by the bed reached out and pulled open the bed curtains. There on the bed lay the two young eunuchs Zhu Hong had left here. When they saw Li Shanxiang, they looked on the verge of tears.
"How dare you! Do you know who I am—"
Zhu Hong cut him off bluntly: "Of course we do. Why would we go to all this trouble if we didn't?"
"You... you're from the Ningxi faction..." Li Shanxiang suddenly realized. "Have you thought about the consequences?"
Zhu Hong curled his lip. "Say something meaningful. We've got nothing to fear from consequences. People like us—we're dead men already."
Li Shanxiang froze.
Zhu Hong suddenly pulled out a letter. "Didn't expect such a bonus. A former confidant of Liu Xian's, and here he is in contact with the Ningxi faction. Tsk."
Li Shanxiang stared at the letter in his hand, and his mind went blank.
That was the letter he had prepared a few days ago, thinking that if Wu Shizu kept targeting him, he would just switch sides and surrender to the Ningxi faction. After all, serving anyone was the same in the end.
"That letter... that letter isn't—" He clearly remembered burning the letter after reading it. Could it be?!
Zhu Hong kept smiling. "Blame yourself for being too stingy. You could afford to take a wife, but you couldn't spare pocket money for your underlings. No worries—you don't have money, but we do."
Li Shanxiang's heart plunged into an icy abyss. He glared wide-eyed at the two young eunuchs on the bed.
"Eunuch, I had no choice. They... they threatened my parents!" one of the young eunuchs wailed.
Zhu Hong rolled his eyes. "Bullshit. Didn't we give your parents money?"
Li Shanxiang's heart sank like a stone.
He had clearly fallen into these people's trap. But who were they?
In earlier years, the Imperial Surveillance Bureau had been mightily formidable; nothing in the world escaped their eyes. But in recent decades, the Bureau itself had been riddled with corruption. Whatever power remained was all used against the Ningxi faction, and their intelligence network had mostly fallen apart.
Li Shanxiang squinted, carefully studying the three men in the room, but he couldn't place any of them.
"Stop staring, Eunuch Li," Zhu Hong said again. "You shouldn't know me."
"What do you want? Money or your life?" At this point, Li Shanxiang was ready to gamble.
But Zhu Hong shook his head. "We're just common folk. We don't want your money or your life. On the contrary..." He waved a hand, and one of the men took out a bundle of banknotes and set them before Li Shanxiang. "We're here to give Eunuch Li some silver."
Li Shanxiang stared at the banknotes on the table, his mind racing. But no matter how he turned it over, he still had no clue.
"Eunuch Li." Zhu Hong suddenly stood up. "From what we know, things haven't been going well for you lately, have they?"
He walked over to Li Shanxiang, reached out, and lightly patted his shoulder. "But we do have a way to put great power in your hands..."
Shock rippled through Li Shanxiang's heart. Being a eunuch, especially one who had seen the heyday of the eunuch faction, he knew full well the taste of wielding authority.
"What... what nonsense are you spouting! Did Wang Changlin send you fools to win me over?"
Zhu Hong smiled. "Understood, understood." He turned and made a gesture to one of the men. The man moved in an instant, his short blade ending the life of one young eunuch with a single strike. The other eunuch who had betrayed Li Shanxiang trembled in terror.
"He shouldn't be a problem anymore. Now Eunuch Li can speak freely."
Seeing that these people killed without batting an eye, Li Shanxiang couldn't help swallowing hard.
"Who exactly are you people?"
Hearing the softening in his tone, Zhu Hong smiled and extended a contract. Li Shanxiang looked at it in confusion. When he saw the signature and the thumbprint on the document, he drew in a sharp breath. The name written there was none other than his elder brother's, who lived far away in the south!
Zhu Hong seemed to read his thoughts. He then pulled something else from his pocket—a small rattle-drum.
When Li Shanxiang saw that child's toy, the blood in his veins ran cold.
That was a gift he had chosen himself when his brother wrote to tell him a child had been born into the family. He had even written a large "blessing" character in gold lacquer on it!
"What have you done to my brother!" Li Shanxiang couldn't stay seated. But the moment he rose, one of the men pushed him back down into the chair.
"Calm down, Eunuch Li. We haven't done anything. Just like it says on that contract, we gave your elder brother some shares. From now on, dividends will be delivered to him every year. As for this..." Zhu Hong shook the rattle in his hand, and the little trinket let out a soft thump-thump. "The subordinate I sent to handle things thought it was interesting and brought it back on a whim. Don't worry—I've already punished that man severely."
With that, he shoved the rattle into Li Shanxiang's hand.
"Eunuch!" The young eunuch who had kept silent tried his best to stay away from his dead companion and said fearfully, "Just agree to them! Besides you, many of us have already..."
Zhu Hong glanced slowly at the young eunuch, who immediately lowered his head.
But those unfinished words shattered the last shred of hope in Li Shanxiang's heart.
s the Eldest Princess, renowned for her cold and aloof detachment, became the most docile of lambs, obeying his every command without question. But when the final move was played on the chessboard, as Gu Chenghan seized everything and ascended on the verge of apotheosis, that very Princess suddenly embraced him from behind, her tone carrying a dependence never heard before: "Wait... you haven't yet... commanded me to love you forever." Gu Chenghan froze abruptly. She... hadn't been hypnotized?! ... [The Eldest Princess's Diary] [When my soul was extracted, becoming the sole spectator outside my own shell] [At first, there was overwhelming fury, until I saw] [How he used my sword to effortlessly shatter my inescapable doom] [How he wielded my authority to eradicate fatal conspiracies I had never even detected] [Like a deity, he rescued me from the deep mire I was trapped in] [If not for those annoying vixens, he and I would be a match made in heaven] [I think I am ill, gravely ill] [My deity should belong to me alone] ... "Hypnosis? Oh, it succeeded, my dear Master." "Only this time, it's my turn to hypnotize you."
world slacker. But a genius female disciple just had to get clingy, insisting that he take her as a disciple. Not only that, she was always making advances on him, thoroughly disrupting his peaceful slacker life...
e, Immortal Body, Transmigration, System, Progression Fantasy, Academy Setting, Third-Person Perspective. Alternate Title: Transmigrating into a High Martial World and Reading Live Comments. Bad news: I transmigrated. This is a terrifying high-martial world, and my original, pathetically weak body fell into a coma and never woke up. Good news: I got a Popularity Points system upon arrival. I can see live comments and even create an unkillable alternate identity. Starting out, the alternate identity has all stats at 1. The system tells me that to grow stronger, I must participate in the plot, gain popularity points to allocate stats and grow stronger, and ultimately awaken my original body. And so, carrying my original body on my back, I officially entered Huaqing Academy, where the story's protagonist resides. From that moment on, Chen Guan kicked the original plot to pieces. Live Comments: [Doesn't anyone find this mysterious coffin guy creepy? He can summon indescribable grey misty hands.] [Is this guy a hero or a villain? What kind of onion became a spirit?] [By the way, does anyone know who's in the coffin? Shouldn't the debt for saving his life be repaid by now?] [According to unofficial histories, the person in the coffin was Chen Guan's first love. Their love was once passionate and earth-shattering, but they were separated by life and death due to worldly circumstances. What a star-crossed pair.] ... Years later, the world knew of a demon god born from a coffin, shrouded in grey mist, impossible to gaze upon directly. His foremost divine emissary often wielded a scythe, reaping lives like the god of death. As war approached, facing former friends and a boundless sea of enemies, Chen Guan merely raised his scythe. "Would you like to dance as well?"
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
