Xia Lengyue Doesn't Believe

"The husband who has been by my side all this time... was just a lotus root? I don't believe it! I refuse to believe it!"

Xia Lengyue thrashed across the ground like a worm, her tears, snot, and blood smearing all over her face.

From her throat escaped a despairing howl like a dying beast. She pounded the hard black ice floor with all her might, not even noticing when her fingers broke, leaving them dripping with fresh blood.

Her pride, her self-respect, had been trampled into the dust by Ye Xuan in the cruelest way imaginable.

She had always thought she was the sinner who had wronged Ye Xuan.

But the harsh truth was that Ye Xuan had never seen her as anything more than a buffoon from start to finish.

The very first day he spotted the first hint of her betrayal, he had pulled away in disgust, leaving behind nothing but a lotus root avatar to play out this centuries-long farce with her.

She had always prided herself on playing with people's hearts, on her unmatched charm that made countless prodigies fall at her feet.

Yet in the end, she could not even tell a real person apart from a lotus root!

"Hahaha..." Ye Xuan let out a cruel, delighted sneer as he watched Xia Lengyue rolling on the ground, completely broken.

He stepped forward slowly, squatted down in front of her, and reached out to grab a handful of her hair without mercy, forcing her to lift her disfigured face.

"This is such an interesting truth I only discovered after crossing into this world, you know."

Ye Xuan slapped her blood-stained cheeks freely, the crisp "papa" sound echoing sharply.

"You should have realized it long ago, you stupid woman."

Ye Xuan's eyes held an overbearing, disdainful arrogance that looked down upon all eternity. "I, Ye Xuan, am the Eternal Supreme. I have cycled through the river of time for ten thousand lifetimes! What peerless goddess or frosty sword immortal have I not seen? You, a lowly root spirit from the lower realm, where did you get the confidence to think I would ever die for a fickle woman like you?"

These words were the final sledgehammer that shattered every last sliver of illusion Xia Lengyue held.

"That perfect husband you saw, that good-for-nothing who took a sword strike for you, who died for you—none of it was ever real to begin with."

Ye Xuan released his grip, letting Xia Lengyue's head thud heavily against the ground. "In reality, I never died for you at all."

Xia Lengyue collapsed onto the ground, her eyes empty, her pupils completely dilated and unseeing.

Her lips moved unconsciously, and her whole body looked as if her soul had been siphoned out, leaving nothing but a convulsing, empty shell.

After a long while, she lifted her head abruptly, as if in a final burst of lucidity before death, and fixed her bloodshot eyes straight on Ye Xuan.

"Your... your next target... who is it?"

Her voice was hoarse, every word dripping with blood. "And that... that masked girl... who is she?"

She was unwilling to accept this. She needed to know the full truth before she died!

She had to know what "next target" Ye Xuan would abandon her without a second thought to seek out.

What kind of woman could make Ye Xuan discard her like trash?

Ye Xuan stood up slowly, looking down at her with a mocking smirk tugging at his lips.

"That girl..." Ye Xuan said lightly, "her name is Ling'er. She is the Moonwatch Swordmaster."

"And as for the next target..."

A playful glint appeared in Ye Xuan's eyes.

"Naturally, it's Xiao Honglian."

Ye Xuan sighed, as if recalling some boring old memory. "That woman was just as rotten and self-absorbed as you are. I died trying to save her, at the hands of her own husband."

"In other words, that lifetime I didn't die saving you. I died saving Xiao Honglian."

Ye Xuan shrugged. "I have to say, you so-called Daughters of Destiny all have shockingly identical tastes. You all love that little drama of a man swearing to protect you with his life."

The last thread in Xia Lengyue's mind snapped completely.

She, Xia Lengyue, was not Ye Xuan's one and only.

She was not even the only one who had been tricked by this same exact lie.

"No... no... no!"

Xia Lengyue shook her head wildly, her once stunning features now twisted into the visage of a malicious ghost.

She jerked her torso up, opened her blood-filled mouth, and let out the last sound she would ever make in this world.

"I won't believe it! I refuse to believe it!"

That scream, so sharp and full of agony, pierced through layers of restrictive formations and echoed madly through the deep underground abyss of the Sword God Palace.

Ye Xuan stood by and watched coldly, no joy or sorrow in his eyes.

Xia Lengyue, like a drowning man clutching at a wisp of straw, struggled to pull herself halfway up from the ground. Her blood-soaked hands dug into the black ice floor so hard her fingernails flipped open and oozed blood.

Her once peerless beauty now looked like a withered ghost, her face plastered all over with unwillingness and madness.

She jerked her head up again, her eyes so bloodshot they looked ready to drip red, and locked them onto Ye Xuan.

"Husband... why are you doing this? You're lying, aren't you?"

She panted heavily, her chest heaving wildly, clinging to that last wisp of hope like a drowning person. "If you truly never cared for me at all, why would you go through all the trouble of leaving that lotus root avatar behind? You left it there to take that fatal strike for me, to protect me!"

Xia Lengyue wept and laughed hysterically at the same time, tears and blood streaming into her mouth without her even noticing.

She mumbled to herself deliriously. "Husband, admit it... you did all this because you still care about me... you love me! You're just mad that I betrayed you, so you made up all these lies on purpose to torture me. But deep down, you're still that husband who loved me more than his own life!"

Ye Xuan looked down at her, listening to her delusional, self-deceiving cries. Instead of getting angry, a strange, creepy tenderness slowly surfaced in his deep, cold eyes.

He bent down slightly, his voice so soft it seemed to drip with sweetness. "Yue'er, did you truly think that avatar I left behind was there to protect you?"

Xia Lengyue froze. She stared blankly at the rare soft look on Ye Xuan's face, as if she had gone back hundreds of years to the time when her husband doted on her every whim. A flicker of hope surged in her chest.

But the next words out of Ye Xuan's mouth plunged her straight into an icy abyss.

"The one I wanted to protect was never you."

Ye Xuan's smile widened, and the softness in his eyes instantly turned into endless greed and fanaticism. "It's the True Phoenix Heart... that's inside your body."