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.
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."
e bizarre and supernatural had descended. The previous emperor was a thoroughgoing tyrant; no longer satisfied with human women, he had set his sights on a stunningly beautiful supernatural entity. He met his end in his bedchamber, drained of all his vital essence. As the legitimate eldest son and crown prince, Wang Hao was thus hastily enthroned, becoming the young emperor of the Great Zhou Dynasty. No sooner had he awakened the "Imperial Sign-In Intelligence System" than he was assassinated by a Son of Destiny—a classic villain's opening. The Great Zhou, ravaged by the former emperor's excesses, was in national decline. The great families within its borders harbored their own treacherous schemes, martial sects began to defy the imperial court's decrees, and border armies, their pay and provisions in arrears, grumbled incessantly against the central government. Fortunately, the central capital was still held secure by the half-million Imperial Guards and fifty thousand Imperial Forest Army who obeyed the court's orders, along with the royal family's hidden reserves of power, barely managing to suppress the realm. As the Great Zhou's finances worsened and supernatural activities grew ever more frequent, the court sat atop a volcano. Ambitious plotters everywhere dreamed of overthrowing the dynasty, and even some reclusive ancient powers emerged, attempting to sway the tides of the world. At the first grand court assembly, the civil and military officials nearly came to blows, fighting tooth and nail over the allocation of fifty million taels of silver from the summer tax revenues. The spectacle opened Wang Hao's eyes—the Great Zhou's bureaucracy was not only corrupt but also martially proficient, a cabinet of all-rounders. Some officials even had the audacity to suggest the emperor release funds from the imperial privy purse to address the emergency. Wang Hao suddenly felt weary. Let it all burn.
d intelligence to keep the plot moving, and sometimes even the protagonists are forced into absurdly dumb decisions. Why does the A-list celebrity heroine in urban romance novels ditch the top-tier movie star and become a lovestruck fool for a pockmarked male lead? Why do the leads in historical tragedy novels keep dancing between love and death, only for the blind healer to end up suffering the most? And Gu Wei never expected that after finally landing a villain role to stir up trouble, she’d pick the wrong gender! No choice now—she’ll just have to crush the protagonists as a girl!
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.
