The White Moonlight of the Empress

In the deepest part of the imperial palace, there stood an isolated hall.

This place was the forbidden ground of the entire Great Xia Imperial Palace.

For eight hundred years, apart from Wu Lingxiao herself, any living creature that dared to take half a step into this place—be it human, demon, or a wandering bird—had been reduced to a corpse.

Because this was the residence where Ye Xuan lived before his death.

Wu Lingxiao waved away all the guards who attempted to follow her, standing alone before the two tightly shut ebony doors.

The coldness and brutality she displayed while killing just moments ago receded like the tide the instant she stood here.

Replacing it was a heartbreaking cautiousness, along with an uncontrollable, morbid excitement.

"Consort Xuan... I have returned."

She whispered softly to the closed doors, as if someone inside were waiting for her to come home.

Trembling, she reached out and gently pushed the doors open.

Creak!

As the heavy wooden doors slowly opened, a faint scent—a mixture of cold plum blossoms and old scrolls—wafted over her.

The furnishings inside the hall were exactly the same as they were eight hundred years ago.

Even the half-open ancient tome on the desk and the long-dried ink stains beside it remained exactly as they were the moment Ye Xuan left.

Over the past eight hundred years, Wu Lingxiao had used the highest-tier space-time arrays to freeze everything here in place.

She did not allow a single speck of dust to fall here.

She did not allow anything here to be moved even a fraction of an inch.

Wu Lingxiao closed the doors behind her and expertly laid down eighteen isolating restrictions.

Only after doing all this did she take off the heavy mask known as the Female Emperor, completely releasing the imprisoned beast within her heart.

She took off the twelve-tasseled imperial crown that symbolized supreme power and casually threw it on the ground.

Next was the heavy imperial robe embroidered with the sun, moon, mountains, and rivers, which she roughly tore off and discarded to the side.

At this moment, she wore only a thin, snow-white inner garment. Barefoot, she stepped on the cold jade floor.

Like a sleepwalking ghost, she walked step by step toward the cloud bed situated deep within the hall.

Neatly folded on the bed were a few pieces of clothing.

They were clothes Ye Xuan had worn when he was alive.

A cyan long robe, a white inner lining, and even a belt embroidered with a crooked duck: that was something Wu Lingxiao had personally embroidered for him when she first learned needlework.

Wu Lingxiao walked to the edge of the bed, her knees gave way, and she knelt directly on the footstool.

The moment her eyes touched those clothes, they became glazed, fanatical, and obsessed.

"Consort Xuan..."

Trembling, she reached out, grabbed the cyan robe as if holding a peerless treasure, and suddenly buried her face into it.

Inhale!

She took a deep breath.

There was no longer any scent of Ye Xuan on it, only the smell of the dust of time and the cold aura of the arrays.

But in Wu Lingxiao's mind, the unique scent of Ye Xuan, as crisp as pine needles after a snow, frantically revived at this moment, filling her nasal cavity and numbing her nerves.

"Ah..."

A suppressed groan, tinged with a sob, emerged from the clothes.

Wu Lingxiao hugged the clothes tightly, curling up by the bed, her entire body trembling violently.

"It's you... It's really you..."

"I miss you... I miss you so much..."

"Do you know? Just now, I wanted to kill everyone... They are all so noisy, they are all such eyesores... Only you, only you are quiet..."

As she muttered to herself, she frantically rubbed her cheeks against the rough fabric until her fair skin was rubbed red, even seeping traces of blood.

Her eyes were unfocused and hollow, as if through this piece of clothing, she saw the man she loved to the point of madness and hated to the marrow of her bones.

"Why did you run away?"

Her voice suddenly turned sinister, carrying a chilling resentment.

"Running away on the day of our grand wedding... Did you want to humiliate me in front of the whole world? No, you didn't care... You just wanted to leave me..."

"How dare you leave me?!"

Rip!

She exerted sudden force, her fingernails digging deep into the fabric, but the next second, her heart ached, and she quickly let go, frantically smoothing out the wrinkles on it.

"I'm sorry... I'm sorry, Consort Xuan, did I hurt you? I didn't mean to... I just love you too much..."

This schizophrenic self-talk echoed in the empty hall, appearing exceptionally eerie and terrifying.

Kneeling on the footstool, her cheek buried deep in Ye Xuan's long-faded cyan robe, she greedily sniffed the faint, musty scent.

As her consciousness sank, the darkness before her eyes gradually receded, and a colorful yet fatally tempting scene slowly unfolded in her mind.

That was a thousand years ago.

That year, she had just ascended the throne, in her prime, viewing all the men in the world as nothing more than grass.

To display her imperial majesty, she toured the world.

With nine dragons pulling her carriage and an honor guard stretching for a hundred miles, tens of thousands of people knelt in submission wherever she passed. What an awe-inspiring sight it was.

Just as she arrived beneath a tavern in the misty, rainy lands of Jiangnan, she glanced out casually through the carriage's gauze curtains fluttering in the wind.

Just this one glance was a descent into eternal damnation.

At that time, it was a spring day.

The street below was crowded with commoners watching the spectacle, all with lowered eyes, subservient and meek.

Only one person was as vibrant as a ray of sunlight piercing through the gloom.

It was a young man riding a white horse.

He wore a washed-out cyan robe, a gourd filled with some unknown cheap wine hung from his waist, and he held an ordinary iron sword in his hand.

He did not kneel.

He was looking up at the terrifyingly majestic nine-dragon imperial carriage in the sky. In those eyes, as clear as a mountain spring, there was not the slightest bit of awe or fear, but rather the excitement and curiosity of a fledgling, as well as infinite longing for this vast cultivation world.

He was like a young eagle that had just flown out of its nest, fully believing that this world was free and this martial world was carefree.

He was smiling.

His smile was so clean it made one's heart tremble, with a bit of sugar residue from a candied haw he had just sneaked a bite of still clinging to the corner of his mouth. It was so radiant that it made the overwhelming imperial majesty pale in comparison.

At this moment, Wu Lingxiao, sitting high on the dragon throne, heard the sound of her own heart beating violently.

"Halt."

Wu Lingxiao spoke lightly.

The massive touring procession instantly came to a standstill.

She extended a slender jade finger, pointing from afar through the gauze curtain at the young man who was looking around curiously in the crowd.

In her eyes, there was not a single trace of love, only the greed and domineering nature of seeing a peerless treasure that she must claim for her own.

"Whose son is that?"

The maid beside her quickly lowered her head: "Answering Your Majesty, judging by his attire, he is just a rogue cultivator who recently entered the martial world, with no background."

"A rogue cultivator... Good, very good."

The corners of Wu Lingxiao's mouth curled up into a cold smile of inevitable conquest, her eyes instantly turning dark and dangerous:

"Such heavenly beauty, wandering in this filthy martial world, is simply a reckless waste of God's gifts."

"This man belongs to no one but me."

She waved her hand casually, as if she were just randomly buying a little trinket she liked at the market:

"Capture him, wash him clean, and deliver him to my dragon bed tonight."

No questions asked, no warning given.

That was the beginning of Ye Xuan's nightmare.

The youth in her memory hadn't even had the chance to wield his sword and roam the martial world of his dreams before he was pinned into the mud by golden-armored guards descending from the sky.

The light in his eyes shifted from excitement to astonishment, from astonishment to terror, and finally, to anger.

He was forcibly brought back to that abyssal imperial palace and locked inside this resplendent golden cage.

Wu Lingxiao originally thought this would just be an ordinary bestowment of favor.

Which man in this world didn't want to cling to the dragon and phoenix? Who didn't want to share the bed of the Female Emperor?

But she was wrong.

She never expected that this seemingly weak and easily bullied youth, whose smile was so harmless, would have bones harder than ten-thousand-year profound iron.

No matter how many heavenly treasures she bestowed upon him, no matter how high a status she promised him, or even how she used her absolute power to humiliate him.

He never smiled at her even once.

In that golden cage, he fled time and time again, was dragged back time and time again, had his legs broken time and time again, and crawled back up to resist time and time again.

Until... that rainy night.

The memories receded like the tide, and the coldness of reality once again enveloped Wu Lingxiao.

"Hehe... hehehehe..."

Wu Lingxiao raised her head from that azure shirt, letting out a low, neurotic laugh.

She slowly stood up, her eyes turning dark and profound, and walked step by step toward a massive bronze mirror in the hall.

Looking at the woman in the mirror with disheveled hair, red-rimmed eyes, and a crazed expression, she muttered to herself:

"Ye Xuan, I originally just wanted to keep you by my side as an obedient canary..."

"But I never imagined that you were an untamable eagle."

"The more you resisted, the more excited I became... The more you wanted to escape, the more I wanted to crush you into pieces in my embrace..."

Saying this, the madness in her eyes grew even more intense.

She raised her hand, her slender fingers resting on the collar of her inner robe, and gave it a vicious tear.

Riiiip.

The garments slipped off, pooling at her feet.

The perfect, jade-like body of the Great Xia's Female Emperor—a body capable of driving countless men in the world mad—was laid bare to the air without any concealment.

Her skin was fairer than snow, her curves exquisite, as if carved from mutton-fat white jade.

However, on this flawless physique, right over her heart, lay a shocking blemish.

It was a hideous sword scar glowing with a purplish-black light, piercing through her pale skin.

The flesh around the wound was curled back, faintly revealing the ghastly white bone beneath. Even more terrifying was that an extremely fierce sword intent still lingered within the wound, continuously tearing at her flesh and blood, preventing it from healing.

This sword intent carried a sense of absolute resolve, a fierce determination to be shattered jade rather than intact clay.

This was exactly the final strike thrust by that youth she had driven to a dead end eight hundred years ago, burning the last of his soul's power right before his death.

Its name was—Dragon Severing!

With Wu Lingxiao's current terrifying cultivation at the mid-Mahayana stage and as a Half-step True Immortal, erasing this scar would take but a single thought.

But for the past eight hundred years, she had always used her origin spiritual energy to carefully nourish this wound, even deliberately suppressing her own healing abilities to prevent it from closing even the slightest bit.

"Hiss..."

Wu Lingxiao extended her sharp fingernail, gently probing into the curled flesh of the wound.

The moment her fingertip touched the lingering sword intent, a piercing agony instantly washed over her entire body.

Her body snapped taut, cold sweat immediately beading on her forehead as her face turned as pale as paper.

Yet, there wasn't a trace of pain on her face.

On the contrary.

The corners of her mouth curled up madly, revealing a smile of extreme pleasure and extreme perversion.

"Ugh... ah... ha..."

Rapid, heavy pants echoed through the hall.

She pressed forcefully into the wound, letting the fresh blood trail down her pristine body and dye the jade stones beneath her feet red, like crimson plums blooming on snow.

"It hurts... it hurts so much..."

"Ye Xuan... is this the feeling you left for me?"

"Within this sword intent is your unwillingness... your anger... and the look in your eyes when you glanced at me for the very last time..."

Wu Lingxiao stared obsessively at her blood-soaked reflection in the mirror, her eyes unfocused as if plunging into the deepest of hallucinations.

At the peak of her agony, she returned to that rainy night.

That youth, covered in blood, gripping a longsword, its tip piercing into her chest.

"This is the price of your refusal to submit to me..."

"And it is also the proof of my love for you..."

"Only this pain... can make me feel that you are still alive... Only this pain... can remind me that you, an ungrateful little wildcat, truly once struggled in my embrace..."

Tears welled up in Wu Lingxiao's eyes once more, mixed with a bloody madness.

She lunged at the bronze mirror, her bloodstained palms pressing firmly against the glass, leaving behind blood-red handprints that dyed the peerlessly beautiful Female Emperor in the reflection to look like a malicious ghost.

"Eight hundred years... this wound has accompanied me for eight hundred years! Every long night, I have relied on this agony just to barely fall asleep..."

"You gave me this sword strike and made me hurt for eight hundred years."

"How am I going to settle this debt with you?"

Wu Lingxiao glared at the mirror, her gaze gradually shifting from obsession to a chilling tyranny:

"Do you think that in this rebirth, you can still ride a white horse and roam the martial world like the youth you were back then?"

"Keep dreaming!"

"This time, I will not give you the chance to hold a sword again."

"I will break your arms and legs, pierce your collarbones with chains of ten-thousand-year profound iron, and lock you to this bed!"

"I will make you cry and beg me... make you, day and night, only able to seek pleasure beneath me, only able to look at me alone!"

"Since you don't want to be my consort, then this time, you will be my dog."

"You are mine!"

"Boom!"

Accompanied by a hysterical roar, an unparalleled, terrifying shockwave erupted instantly with Wu Lingxiao at its center.

The massive bronze mirror shattered into fine powder in an instant.

The tables, chairs, and folding screens in the hall all turned to flying ash.

Only that bed, the bed where Ye Xuan's clothes rested, remained completely unscathed under her deliberate protection.

Wu Lingxiao stood amidst the ruins, stark naked and bathed in blood.

She slowly lowered her head, picked up a shard of the broken mirror from the floor, and looked at her fragmented self within it. The corners of her mouth curled into a smile that was extremely gentle, yet also extremely terrifying:

"Consort Xuan, do not be afraid."

"My grand army is already on the way."

"This time, I will forge that golden cage to be even stronger... I will absolutely never let you see a single glimpse of the sky outside ever again..."

Outside the window, thunder roared.

A bloody storm that had been brewing for eight hundred years was finally about to descend.