Wang Qianyue still had no money, but he no longer worried about food or drink, and they had even replaced his Taoist robe with a new one.
This made Wang Qianyue a bit uncomfortable, but he was only allowed to move around in a small, separate courtyard. Ever since that day the protector had questioned him, no one had bothered him again.
Even when he tried to talk to the young acolytes at the gate, they kept their distance.
“What the hell is going on? What do they want? If they’re going to kill me or cut me up, just say so!” Wang Qianyue scratched his head in frustration.
Luckily, Little Mouse—no, Fang Zhiyi—had come in as his acolyte, or else he would have gone mad from boredom.
“Um, Ancestral Master, what do you make of this?” Ever since confirming Fang Zhiyi’s identity, Wang Qianyue had unhesitatingly swallowed his pride, even though Fang Zhiyi looked nearly twenty years younger than him.
Compared to Wang Qianyue, who paced back and forth every day, Fang Zhiyi seemed far more composed, simply sitting cross-legged in meditation each day.
“Make of what?”
“We killed quite a few people, didn’t we? But instead of questioning us about the cases or using torture, they give us food and clothes. Does that seem right?” Wang Qianyue wasn’t a fool.
“Interrogating cases is the business of the Justice Department,” Fang Zhiyi replied flatly.
Wang Qianyue squatted in front of him: “I’m telling you, Ancestral Master, why won’t you let me reveal your name? It would scare the living daylights out of them!”
From his rambling, Fang Zhiyi also learned what rumors had spread after he’d left—everyone said he had ascended to immortality, and even Jiang Mubai had half-believed it, thinking his uncle had achieved transcendence.
Fang Zhiyi felt a bit exasperated. Were these fools so lost in their cultivation that they’d gone deluded? Ascension? Ha.
“If we don’t reveal our names, you might live a few more days. If you reveal mine, we’ll both be dead in an instant.”
Wang Qianyue was stunned: “Wait, why? Are they committing heresy against their own master?”
“What heresy? These people aren’t from my sect.”
“But—but that Imperial Preceptor! Everyone in the realm knows he reveres you most of all!” Wang Qianyue shouted.
Fang Zhiyi shot him a glare, and Wang Qianyue shut his mouth.
“Wait. It’ll happen soon.” With that, Fang Zhiyi closed his eyes again.
Wang Qianyue had no choice but to go back to counting the gray bricks on the ground.
Three days later, at dawn, a procession arrived. Two protectors led the way, followed by a dozen Taoists in full ceremonial robes.
A bleary-eyed Wang Qianyue hadn’t even figured out what was going on when someone pulled a crimson robe over him. It puzzled him, but the newcomers didn’t bother explaining; they dressed him haphazardly, then dragged him along.
He tried to look back and call for Fang Zhiyi, but saw him standing in the shadows, watching silently. At that moment, Wang Qianyue chose to keep his mouth shut.
The Ancestral Master must have his reasons, he thought, and with that, the knot of anxiety in his chest loosened somewhat.
He was shoved and surrounded as they led him through the main hall, then past the back hall door, over the threshold, and into another vast chamber. But unlike the front hall, the atmosphere here was grim and chill, making Wang Qianyue involuntarily shiver.
As they went deeper, he realized they were descending. Natural light no longer reached this place.
Finally, they stopped at a pair of massive doors carved with strange beasts.
As two indistinct figures pushed the doors open, Wang Qianyue’s heart began to pound violently. An overwhelming sense of dread surged over him, as if some terrifying fiend lurked beyond those doors.
But what he saw next was oddly anticlimactic: the empty stone chamber held nothing but bronze lamps along the walls and a single stone coffin in the center. No evil spirits. No grim executioners. No monsters.
The two protectors knelt respectfully outside the doorway: “Imperial Preceptor, the person who can extend your life has been found.”
“Extend life?” Wang Qianyue was dumbfounded. Extend what life? And how was he supposed to do that?
But his question went unanswered. Suddenly, hands clamped down on his shoulders from both sides, gripping hard.
“What are you doing! Trying to fight me?” Wang Qianyue yelled, but before he could finish, something was shoved into his mouth, and to his horror, he found he couldn’t speak.
Then his arms and legs were seized, and he was carried inside.
“The Imperial Preceptor is over a hundred years old. Fellow Taoist, I trust you understand how vital his life is. You’ve shown such pure thunder magic, which proves you have a true foundation in the Dao. For the sake of the realm, for the sake of the Emperor, we must ask you to make a sacrifice.”
Wang Qianyue’s eyes darted wildly. A terrible thought struck him.
Word outside was that all the most powerful cultivators in the realm were gathered under the Imperial Preceptor’s banner. But he’d been here for so long, and he had hardly seen any Taoists with real depth of cultivation. Could it be…
At that moment, memories from his childhood flooded back—his vanished master, his vanished senior brothers. If that were the case, then everything made sense.
These people were capturing cultivators to extend the Imperial Preceptor’s life!
He suddenly thought of the villagers in Black Mountain Village.
Turns out, no matter their status, these people were all the same inside.
He was placed before the stone coffin, and in the instant he was set down, he saw the white-haired old man lying inside it. The old man's face had wasted away to skin and bone, his eyes bulging wide open, staring dead at him.
Wang Qianyue panicked. He could accept being beheaded, even shout a line like "Eighteen years from now, I'll be a hero again!" But being used as a sacrifice? That was absolutely out of the question!
Yet now he had no say in the matter. The moment he was set on the ground, someone pulled iron chains from the corner of the room and firmly shackled his arms and legs.
"Imperial Preceptor, those who cultivate the Dao are hard to come by these days. This man is quite resourceful, and his master once studied under your tutelage. I had my men verify it—there's no issue."
As he spoke, a strange glimmer flickered in the protector's eyes.
Then, they all retreated to the doorway, watching the stone coffin with reverent expressions.
Wang Qianyue's eyes went wide as he struggled desperately, but everything was futile. With a bizarre creaking sound, he craned his neck to look back at the stone coffin behind his head—the Imperial Preceptor had actually sat up!
He was even more terrifying upright than lying down. He wore only a robe whose original color was impossible to tell, his chest bare, his body already close to that of a dried corpse! Grayish-white skin clung tightly to his ribs—nothing about him looked normal!
And in his belly, something seemed to be squirming, pulsing in and out.
The next moment, from his navel, a thing like a long worm emerged, creeping out along the stone coffin, slowly extending its head, as if searching for Wang Qianyue's position.
Wang Qianyue stared at that thing, and his heart nearly stopped.
ing gift was a patch of barren land, and disciples were all picked up along the way. He spent fifty years diligently building three "ramshackle little sects," thinking he could finally live a carefree life relying on his disciples. But right at the fifty-year mark, he was suddenly swept away by a spatial rift and exiled to the Chaos Desolation, the Disorderly Ruins. There was no spiritual energy there, only slaughter. Relying on the cultivation feedback from his disciples, Gu Changyuan hacked his way through a sea of blood for eleven hundred years. When the system finally fished him back out, he discovered the ramshackle little sects he'd built back then had developed a rather... unusual style. Hold on... I vanished for a thousand years, so how did my ramshackle little sects become holy lands?!
lan, the Luo family, tracked him down - along with the babies in their arms. Mo Xuan stared pensively at the paternity test results from over a dozen top institutions, both domestic and international, showing a 99.99% match between himself and the two baby girls. At 23, Mo Xuan, a doctoral student, had become the father of two three-year-old children. The kicker? The mothers weren't even the same person! He gradually realized he was being lured step by step into an elaborate trap designed by these two yandere sisters. "Be good, little Xuan. Sister's life belongs to you entirely." "Brother, if you try to run away, I'll have no choice but to tie you up." Mo Xuan: "Do whatever you want, ladies. I give up."
ive and Ruthless] Before his transmigration, Ye Xuan was playing a game called "Severing Emotions to Attain the Dao." The game's core wasn't about leveling up by fighting monsters, but about conquering various "bad women" with wicked personalities and cold, fickle natures. There was only one method to conquer them: stay unwaveringly by their side, then die at a critical moment, driving them to madness after losing the protagonist. The higher their level of regret, the higher the player's score. To dominate the server, Ye Xuan conquered all the bad women. In the early stages, he showered them with boundless tenderness, only to choose to sacrifice himself for them later, making them weep bitterly and drown in regret. Among them were: Xia Lengyue, the unfaithful immortal wife who chased after powerful men and discarded her husband like trash. Ye Qingcheng, the Demonic Venerable of the Joyous Union Sect, who appeared pure and innocent but was, in reality, promiscuous. Wu Lingxiao, the Empress of the Great Xia Dynasty, who lusted after men and loved maintaining a harem. Bai Qiangu of the Endless Demonic Sect: a bloodthirsty mass murderer. However, when the protagonist transmigrated into the game world, he made a horrifying discovery. Eight hundred years had already passed. The bad women he had conquered had now each become deities and revered ancestors. Faced with the endless stream of toxic women coming for him, Ye Xuan could only rely on his god-tier acting skills to carve a path of survival through this world of treacherous women.
ut it can buy an entire year of absolutely perfect training results! Su Yu stared at his empty wallet and decisively opened up various online loan platforms. “Borrow a thousand bucks! Recharge my vitality!” Boom! His vitality broke a hundred points, shattering the limits of the human body! “Borrow ten thousand bucks! Recharge my combat skills!” Boom! A basic punching technique so common it was everywhere instantly maxed out, revealing the ultimate assassination technique of Five Elements Unity—Inner Force! When a rich kid hired assassins for a midnight ambush, aiming to break both of his legs, they instead ran headfirst into a monster—a human-shaped tyrannosaur, brimming with dragon-like vitality. With just two fingers, Su Yu snapped a steel staff reinforced with alloy. Staring at the killer’s stash of stolen cash—a staggering quarter-million dollars—he showed a corporate-sincere smile: “Thanks for the pre-exam gift pack, Mr. Zhao! I’m gonna go re-invest this!” Three days later, at the National Martial Arts College Entrance Exam, while everyone else struggled just to reach the passing line, Su Yu threw a single punch—and more than a thousand vitality points literally detonated the entire arena!
