The Scheme of the Nine Heavens Holy Land

The vast, desolate bedchamber was cold and empty, moonlight spilling across the thick carpet like frost and snow.

Shen Qingshuang’s sobs gradually weakened until only tightly suppressed whimpers remained.

Like a dying white crane, she lay against Ye Xuan’s chest, feeling the heartbeat of the man who had taken her innocence and then mercilessly shattered the last of her illusions.

Ye Xuan’s fingers threaded through her hair, damp with sweat, his gaze deep and complicated.

He looked at this pitiful woman who had guarded a vague, unattainable phantom for eight thousand years. In the end, he had still laid the cruelest truth bare before her.

“Ye Jiuhuang was a woman from the very beginning.”

“Back then, she disguised herself as a man and traveled the world with her sword. That was why she married you—as a shield to conceal the truth. You spent eight thousand years trying to warm a block of ice that had existed for ten thousand years, never realizing that she could never have loved you from the start.”

Ye Xuan sighed, his voice carrying a trace of sorrow. “How could a woman ever truly fall in love with another woman?”

Shen Qingshuang’s entire body suddenly trembled.

She raised her head. Her once-empty, lifeless eyes were now filled with bloodshot veins and shock.

Her lips quivered violently. She wanted to say something, but not a single sound came from her throat.

So that was how it was… So that was how it was!

No wonder that over the past eight thousand years, no matter how gentle and considerate she had been, no matter how much she had endured and compromised, Ye Jiuhuang had always looked at her as though she were nothing more than a decorative object.

No wonder Ye Jiuhuang would rather spend all her time cultivating in seclusion than share even a single moment of intimacy with her.

It was not because she was lacking, nor because Ye Jiuhuang was indifferent to desire.

It was because their relationship had been an utterly ridiculous lie from the very beginning!

Shen Qingshuang suddenly began to laugh.

Her laughter shook her entire body, while tears poured down her cheeks like pearls from a broken string.

Her laughter was filled with mockery toward fate, hatred for Ye Jiuhuang, and overwhelming grief at having spent the past eight thousand years playing the part of a complete fool.

“Hahaha… What a fine excuse to conceal the truth… What a fine shield…”

Her laughter gradually faded. The sorrow and weakness on her face were replaced by a determination so cold it seemed to freeze the air.

She said nothing more and shed no further tears. She merely raised her snow-white arms and wrapped them tightly around Ye Xuan’s neck like vines, pressing her body, covered in red marks, completely against his embrace.

“From today onward, you are my husband.”

Shen Qingshuang stared directly into Ye Xuan’s eyes and spoke each word distinctly. Her voice was hoarse, yet filled with a twisted obsession and madness.

“My life, my body—from this day forth, they belong to you alone.”

Looking into her eyes, where the flames of revenge burned fiercely, Ye Xuan understood that she was doing this only to make Ye Jiuhuang suffer more deeply and painfully.

She intended to use herself as a weapon, to disgust the woman who had ruined her entire life.

Ye Xuan shook his head. A helplessness flickered through his deep eyes as he sighed, “Why must you do this?”

“To make her suffer! Even if it’s only for a single instant, I want to lodge myself in her eyes like a poisonous thorn and drive it in as deeply as I can!”

Gritting her teeth, Shen Qingshuang buried her face in the hollow of Ye Xuan’s neck, greedily breathing in his scent.

“Husband, take me… Take me again…”

That night, the candlelight in the bedchamber flickered until dawn.

Over the next few days, the atmosphere within the Sword God Palace became strange beyond words.

Shen Qingshuang, once the lofty Palace Mistress, completely took on the role of a bedchamber maid and favored concubine.

She cast aside the dignity of a Grand-Mahayana cultivator and clung to Ye Xuan’s side at every moment.

At dawn, when Ye Jiuhuang entered the main hall carrying a bowl of spirit porridge she had carefully prepared, her face full of ingratiating smiles, she saw Shen Qingshuang sitting on Ye Xuan’s lap with her clothes half undone.

Shen Qingshuang held a peeled spirit-crystal grape between her crimson lips and passed it mouth-to-mouth into Ye Xuan’s.

“Husband, is it sweet?” Shen Qingshuang asked in a seductively tender voice, the corner of her eye provocatively sweeping toward Ye Jiuhuang, who stood frozen in the doorway.

“Bitch!”

The tray in Ye Jiuhuang’s hands instantly cracked beneath her grip. The sword qi of a peak True Immortal nearly burst uncontrollably through the hall.

Her eyes dripped with jealousy as she stared fixedly at the hand Shen Qingshuang had placed against Ye Xuan’s chest. She wished she could draw her sword at once, chop that hand off, and feed it to the dogs!

Yet whenever she was about to lose control, Shen Qingshuang would let out a startled cry and burrow into Ye Xuan’s arms like a frightened fawn.

“Husband, Sister Jiuhuang looks so fierce. Is she going to kill me again?”

Ye Xuan merely lifted his eyelids and glanced at Ye Jiuhuang.

That single look was enough to freeze Ye Jiuhuang’s overwhelming fury in place, forcing her to swallow it back down.

“You… just you wait!”

Ye Jiuhuang trembled with rage, her nails digging deeply into her palms as blood dripped onto the jade floor with soft, rhythmic taps.

In the end, however, she still did not strike.

Because she did not dare anger Ye Xuan—and because there was something more important for her to do than kill Shen Qingshuang.

“I am the officially wedded wife! She is nothing but a lowly servant fit only to warm a bed in some dark corner!”

Ye Jiuhuang frantically consoled herself with these thoughts. She turned around abruptly, refusing to look at the indecent scene, and poured all her fury and jealousy into the preparations for the wedding.

“By this Emperor’s decree! Bring the Nine-Dragon Agarwood Carriage from the Eastern Sea! Go to the Northern Sea’s ice fields and hunt nine hundred and ninety-nine ice phoenixes. Use their tail feathers to weave the red carpet!”

Ye Jiuhuang shouted like a madwoman throughout the Sword God Palace.

She intended to use the most extravagant and spectacular ceremony in the entire cultivation world to announce her status as the principal wife to everyone. On the day of the wedding, she would make Shen Qingshuang, that lowly servant, kneel at her feet and personally wash them!

As she watched Ye Jiuhuang hurry away with an almost crazed figure, the smile in Shen Qingshuang’s eyes gradually faded, replaced by endless coldness and satisfaction.

“Ye Jiuhuang, this is only the beginning…”

At the same time.

In the Nine Heavens Sacred Land, millions of miles from the Sword God Palace—

This was one of the oldest and most unfathomably powerful supreme orthodoxies in the entire cultivation world. Amid its mist-shrouded mountains lay countless abodes and secret realms belonging to mighty cultivators.

At the summit of the highest solitary peak in the Nine Heavens Sacred Land, clouds roiled across the sky as lightning flashed and thunder boomed.

A young man in a moon-white robe, carrying himself with extraordinary grace, stood respectfully before a shadowy cave sealed beneath layer upon layer of ancient restrictions.

This man was none other than the Peerless Prodigy renowned throughout the world—Bai Yujing.

“Rumble…”

Accompanied by a deep, muffled boom, the stone door of the cave slowly opened. It was covered in moss and ancient runes.

A cold wind smelling of decay and antiquity howled out from within, carrying with it an aura of terrifying, destructive power.

Then, a shriveled old man as thin as a skeleton—one whom a strong breeze might have blown away—slowly emerged from the darkness, leaning on a withered staff as black as ink.

The old man’s eye sockets were sunken deep, and his eyes resembled two balls of ghostly green flame, flickering in the darkness with a terrifying, bone-chilling light.

He wore an ancient Daoist robe, and the aura radiating from him was countless times more terrifying than that of Ye Jiuhuang at the peak of the Mahayana realm!

This old man was none other than Lin Jiutian, the Supreme Elder of the Jiutian Sacred Land, who had long lived in seclusion.

“Master.”

Upon seeing the old man, Bai Yujing immediately fell to both knees and bowed deeply. “Everything is proceeding according to plan.”

Lin Jiutian slowly raised a pair of hands that looked like withered tree bark. His voice was hoarse, rasping like sandpaper being rubbed together.

“Where is Ye Xuan now?”

“Reporting to you, Master, he is currently in the Sword God Palace.”

Bai Yujing replied respectfully, “According to our informants, Ye Xuan has been running rampant within the Sword God Palace and has taken the First Sword Emperor, Ye Jiuhuang, as his personal concubine. The Sword God Palace has now completely become his private garden.”

At these words, an extremely sinister smile curled across Lin Jiutian’s lips. His laughter echoed across the desolate peak, like the cry of a night owl.

“The Sword God Palace? Heh heh heh… Does he really think hiding there will make him completely safe?”