His voice was strange, somewhere between a chant and a song. After finishing the verse, he struck the instrument three more times, then turned to look at Su Xun.
“Filial sons and daughters, weep no more. The departed has already set foot upon the road to paradise...”
Seeing that Su Xun was still lost in thought, the Taoist priest reminded him, “Burn the paper.”
Su Xun came back to himself and began adding more paper offerings to the brazier.
The Taoist priest chanted another passage, then seemed to grow tired. He stopped, and silence once again settled over the room.
“Um, I need to go rest for a while. You two keep watch. Burn more paper every half hour.”
Su Xun nodded.
The priest rose and looked around. Su Xun pointed toward a door. “That room is mine. You can rest there.”
“Alright, alright.” The priest headed over.
Wang Lei snorted and muttered, “Isn’t this Taoist a little too unprofessional? He chants one verse and then needs to sleep?”
Whether the priest had heard him or not, he turned around, irritation flashing in his eyes. Wang Lei wasn’t afraid in the slightest—he had always been bold. “What?”
The priest looked him up and down. Then, suddenly, he smiled. “Nothing. I just thought of something. Do you know your birth characters?”
“Birth characters? What do you need that stuff for?” Wang Lei replied bluntly.
“There are rules to keeping vigil as well. People whose birth characters clash shouldn’t stand vigil together,” the priest explained.
Wang Lei rolled his eyes. “No idea. Who even believes in that nonsense?”
Only Su Xun honestly gave his date and time of birth. After hearing it, the priest made a few calculating motions with one hand, then nodded with a smile. “No problem. You two keep watch. I’ll be back after I rest for a while.”
“He can tell fortunes too? It’s an act, right? Taoists these days have it easy making money. Hey, what do you think? Why don’t we become Taoists ourselves? You can play the Taoist priest, and I’ll bring in the customers.” Wang Lei’s imagination ran wild.
By now, Su Xun had recovered somewhat from his grief. He could not help but laugh. “You think this job takes no skill?”
Wang Lei glanced disdainfully at the door the priest had closed behind him. “Look at him. Does that take skill?”
Keeping vigil through the night was hard. It was only two in the morning when Wang Lei lowered his head and began snoring. Su Xun woke him and suggested that he go sleep in the room, but Wang Lei shook his head.
“I said I’d keep you company. Good brothers stick together.”
Yet only seconds later, he started nodding off again. Su Xun had no choice but to lower his head and continue burning the paper offerings by himself.
Su Xun had rushed back from afar, and Wang Lei’s snoring was making him drowsy as well. Still, he forced himself to stay awake and keep feeding paper into the fire.
He did not know whether these yellow paper offerings were of any use, but this was the only thing he could do for his grandfather.
But as he burned the paper, Su Xun suddenly heard several tapping sounds.
He froze, thinking he might have imagined them. Then, moments later, the tapping came again.
Su Xun heard it clearly. Slowly, he raised his head and searched for the source. Before long, he pinpointed it: the sound was coming from his grandfather’s coffin.
Could Grandpa still be alive?
Su Xun stood up, intending to walk around and check. But in the next instant, his entire body went rigid.
A black shadow stood at the far end of the coffin, a pair of eyes fixed directly on him.
“Grandpa?” Su Xun was both excited and afraid. Could it be that Grandpa…
But the shadow did not answer. In the instant Su Xun blinked, it was suddenly right in front of him.
Gooseflesh rose all over Su Xun’s body. The deathly pale figure before him was not his grandfather, but… Old Madam Ma from the eastern end of the village. He remembered her—she had a fierce temper, and no one in the village dared cross her. But why was she here?
What was more, Old Madam Ma was dressed in bright red. It looked like… a burial shroud. Her face was deathly pale, and a strange smile twisted across her wrinkled features. Then she opened her mouth, revealing a pitch-black cavity.
The next moment, Su Xun felt a pair of icy hands clamp around his neck.
He was terrified. He wanted to call out to Wang Lei, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not make a sound. As he struggled, Wang Lei’s voice suddenly rang in his ear.
“Su Xun? Su Xun?”
Su Xun’s eyes flew open. He found himself still kneeling in front of the brazier, a stack of joss paper in his hands. Wang Lei was watching him with concern.
“What’s wrong? You look awful.”
Su Xun looked around. Had that just been a dream? Yes, it had to be a dream. He remembered now—his grandfather had mentioned over the phone that Old Madam Ma had died several months ago.
“I’m fine. I just…” Afraid of frightening Wang Lei, Su Xun shook his head. “I had a nightmare.”
“What kind of nightmare?” Wang Lei pressed.
“Ah, well, it was…” Su Xun turned his head, but what he saw made his heart leap again.
Wang Lei’s body was facing straight ahead, yet his head had twisted at an unnatural ninety-degree angle. His eyes drooped oddly downward, and the corners of his mouth were raised. No matter how he looked at it, the sight was bizarre.
“Wang Lei?” Su Xun reached out and patted him, but the sensation that came back was… hard. Rigid.
Wang Lei’s mouth remained fixed in a smile, yet his words were perfectly clear.
“What kind of nightmare?”
Su Xun froze. Wang Lei suddenly leaned close.
“What. Kind. Of. Night. Mare?”
Fine cracks appeared across his face. His entire head looked as though it might shatter at any moment.
A burst of excruciating pain struck Su Xun. The Wang Lei before his eyes vanished, and he jolted awake once again.
Wang Lei shook his hand and muttered, “It’s not like I wanted to hit you. The Taoist priest told me to…”
Su Xun immediately took a step back and watched Wang Lei warily.
Wang Lei gave him an awkward smile. “Uh… you’re awake?”
Only then did Su Xun notice the scruffy Taoist priest standing nearby. He fiercely pinched himself, trying to determine whether he was still dreaming.
Fortunately, the pain told him that he was well and truly awake.
“Did you… see something?” the priest suddenly asked.
Su Xun glanced at Wang Lei before answering, “I saw… Old Madam Ma, and… Wang Lei.” He pointed to Wang Lei standing off to the side.
The priest muttered, “What old madam…” But he quickly straightened up and put on a solemn air.
“You’ve encountered something unclean.”
“Huh?”
“What?”
Su Xun and Wang Lei voiced their confusion almost in unison. Su Xun was astonished, while Wang Lei’s reaction was pure disdain.
The Taoist priest glanced at Wang Lei. “Believe it or not, your birth chart is yin in nature. You must have picked something up on your way back.”
Su Xun frowned and thought for a long while. “Um... nothing strange happened.”
The Taoist snorted. “Of course you wouldn’t notice it. But let me tell you—if you don’t deal with it soon, it’ll cling to you day after day from now on.”
Wang Lei said, “Damn, I know this routine. Next you’ll say we need to pay up to ward off disaster, right?”
Su Xun said nothing, while the Taoist replied, “Rest assured, those who cultivate the Dao do not talk about money. Since I happened to encounter you, it means we’re fated. It wouldn’t be impossible for me to help you resolve this.”
Su Xun was skeptical, but when he thought of the dream within a dream, Old Madam Ma’s terrifying appearance, and Wang Lei’s eerie smile, a chill ran down his spine.
“Then... then what should we do?”
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.
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."
transmigrates into the world as the sect master of the Heavenly Yan Sect, which is on the verge of being wiped out. He binds a system that grants him cultivation power based on the number of disciples he has: for each disciple, he automatically gains a year's worth of cultivation every single day! Take one disciple: every day he gains 1 year of cultivation power. While others struggle through a year of bitter training, he gets the same just by sleeping through a single night. Take ten disciples: every day he gains 10 years of cultivation power. Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, Nascent Soul—he breezes through all bottlenecks without lifting a finger. Take one hundred disciples: every day he gains 100 years of cultivation power. Even a Soul Transformation Venerable before him can’t survive a single blow. Take ten thousand disciples: every day he gains 10,000 years of cultivation power! With a wave of his hand, he topples empires. With a single step, he crushes the sacred grounds of the universe. ... While others fight tooth and nail for secret techniques, Lin Yan casually hands out Nascent Soul-level cultivation manuals as beginner textbooks. While others strain to find talented recruits, Lin Yan opens his doors to anyone—so long as they’re human. In just three short years, the Heavenly Yan Sect went from a backwater sect made up of three crumbling huts to a sacred land that every cultivator under heaven would kill to enter. ... One day, otherworldly demon gods invade, with a million demon soldiers pressing down upon the realm. Lin Yan, yawning, rises from his lounge chair and glances at the system panel: [Current Disciples: 1.28 million] [Daily Cultivation Increase: 1.28 million years] He waves his hand casually, and the countless demon soldiers are reduced to ashes in an instant. “So noisy… interrupting my fishing.”
ng to die together with you." Lin Xuan is dead, his body thrown into the river by his scumbag lover and her accomplice. She, the president of the Su Group, is decisive, ruthless, and ice-cold. For three days and three nights, she had his body fished out of the river, and without hesitation, she kissed the bloated corpse of Lin Xuan. She laid down beside him in a cold coffin, their fingers intertwined, a smile lingering on her lips as she closed her eyes. The noble and cold-hearted woman, only bending for one man—Lin Xuan. Lin Xuan, with his golden finger, is reborn and returns to the day of his wedding to the treacherous woman. Su Qiang comes to steal the bride. Lin Xuan's eyes light up, eager to pledge his loyalty on the spot, but instead, her kiss transfers a glass of drugged wine into his mouth, causing him to pass out... 【Male Protagonist with Single Female Lead】【Yandere Tycoon】【Action-Packed】【True vs. Fake Heir】
