“I don’t want to!”
The refusal flew out of her mouth before she could stop it, startling even Ye Ruyue herself.
What was she doing? Where was she?
Why did everyone around her look so tall? And why were they dressed so strangely?
Then she looked down at herself. No way. This tiny body with its stubby arms and legs couldn’t really be hers, could it?
How had she shrunk?
Had she transmigrated?
And into a baby, no less?
She raised her head and looked around blankly. The crowd was staring at her as if they’d seen a ghost.
A moment later, a flood of memories that weren’t hers poured into Ye Ruyue’s mind.
She had transmigrated into a book, into the cultivation novel she’d been complaining about just a few nights ago, into the body of a girl who shared her name: Ye Ruyue.
In the original story, Ye Ruyue was pure cannon fodder, so insignificant that the book barely spent any ink explaining why the sect’s Grand Elder would insist on taking a five-year-old baby as his direct disciple.
And a trash Five Spiritual Roots at that.
The novel spent its whole length describing how beautiful the female lead, Hua Sijin, was and how great her charisma was. In the sect, her senior brothers doted on her and piled every kind of treasure on her; they would die for her. The sect elders all tacitly protected her. Outside, anyone with any promise at all orbited around her, and even the Demon Race and the Demon Realm were no exception.
She was a total heartthrob. Everyone who had seen her, and everyone who hadn’t, seemed to have been hexed by her.
It was a brainless wish-fulfillment novel to begin with. Ye Ruyue hadn’t thought much of it when she first started reading, until later, when she saw that because of the female lead’s love-hate entanglements with the Demon Realm and the Demon Race, the Demon Venerable led his people to besiege Xuanyun Sect.
Xuanyun Sect had already lost many disciples earlier on, protecting the female lead while she seized treasures. On top of that, the sect’s ancient divine artifact, its treasure, had been secretly stolen by the brainless bootlicker second senior brother and given to the female lead. So the sect lost its strongest shield, and the entire sect was massacred.
A sect so vast, nearly eighty percent dead or wounded, and the remaining ten or twenty percent were basically crippled or ruined.
This great sect, once ranked among the named powers of the cultivation world, was utterly annihilated in an instant.
The laughable thing was that such a tragedy was merely a touchstone on the female lead’s road of love.
The female lead said she wanted revenge on the Demon Venerable, but after he fobbed her off, the two soon fell back into their back-and-forth…
It was here that Ye Ruyue truly lost the heart to keep reading. The laughable thing was that the novel had gone and botched its ending…
Now Ye Ruyue finally understood why she had blurted out a refusal just now.
It had been completely subconscious.
It was only because this sect was truly too unlucky. Never mind that it was still listed as one of the five great sects of the cultivation world; with the female lead around, it would be destroyed in less than a hundred years.
Whoever joined would share its bad luck!
So, with everyone watching, when the sect’s Grand Elder Liao Huang wanted to take her as a direct disciple and give her an extremely lavish apprenticeship gift, Ye Ruyue refused before her soul had even fully settled into her body.
“I don’t want it!” Once again, Ye Ruyue refused firmly.
She could not accept this apprenticeship gift.
A Sumeru Ring, five magical artifacts, one hundred spirit fruits, one thousand talisman papers, and ten thousand spirit stones: any one of which would make the other disciples of the sect green with envy.
But compared with her life, Ye Ruyue still felt life was more important.
As long as she did not enter this sect and stayed far from the female lead, she would surely survive to the end, happy and free.
Thinking of this, Ye Ruyue also felt a bit resentful about the timing. If she had transmigrated even a day or half a day earlier, she absolutely would not have entered the gates of Xuanyun Sect, let alone taken a master in front of so many people.
And now that she was refusing to take a master, Ye Ruyue was prepared to be ridiculed and mocked.
Anyway, in this kind of sect, masters and disciples all valued justice and uprightness; they would not kill mortals for no reason, and she was still a child, so Ye Ruyue was not afraid they would kill her.
At most they would curse her a few times for not knowing what was good for her.
“I’m still so young, and a trash Five Spiritual Roots at that. I really don’t deserve the title of Xuanyun Sect’s direct disciple. Let’s forget the apprenticeship. A little beggar like me should go back wherever I came from, and not disgrace the sect…”
Ye Ruyue was speaking with gusto; she did not want to take a master, she just wanted to leave Xuanyun Sect immediately, right now.
But suddenly a startled shout came to her ear.
“See? I told you, this apprenticeship gift is nothing to look at. Look, even my disciple despises it, right!”
“It’s all your fault…”
Ye Ruyue raised her head in astonishment and saw the Grand Elder in front of her, his face full of disdain, spitting curses at the middle-aged man beside him in a purple robe with dark patterns: the sect master, Lin Shiduan.
Lin Shiduan’s brows furrowed slightly, his expression somewhat disbelieving. Was such an apprenticeship gift still not lavish enough?
You should know, whether it was him as sect master or the other two elders, when they had taken direct disciples before, none of their apprenticeship gifts had been this much.
Never.
So when Lin Shiduan saw the Grand Elder about to give so many things to Ye Ruyue, this little baby, he was shocked!
Subconsciously, he secretly reminded the Grand Elder: no need to give so much, no need to give so much!
But he never expected that this still was not enough?!
How could it not be enough?
If the little child did not understand, fine, but you, Grand Elder, have lived over two thousand years. Do you not understand?
“It’s all your fault. I shouldn’t have listened to you!”
The Grand Elder, whose temper was like a mischievous child’s, scolded Lin Shiduan in a low voice, then turned, lowered his head, and again began pulling things out of his spatial ring.
While pulling, he muttered, “How are five magical artifacts enough? It has to be at least a hundred!”
Then Ye Ruyue heard a young man behind her cough lightly and softly remind his master, “Master, you don’t have a hundred magical artifacts! The whole sect doesn’t have a hundred!”
Magical artifacts were not some cheap thing you could find on any street. When Hua Sijin took a master before, she only got one magical artifact, and at the time it made many disciples envious beyond measure.
Now the Grand Elder wanted to give a hundred???
Sure enough, after searching through the spatial rings on both hands and pulling out about five more magical artifacts, the Grand Elder’s hands paused, as if he could not pull out any more.
Then the Grand Elder raised a hand and scratched his graying forehead, muttering to himself, “Gone? Could they have been left at Luoshuang Peak?”
“It’s fine, magical artifacts are nothing. Your master here still has a spiritual artifact. I’ll give it to our disciple!”
“Actually, spiritual artifacts are nothing either. Later I’ll get our disciple a divine artifact. Yes, that’s right, only a divine artifact is worthy of my little disciple.”
In the entire cultivation world, spiritual artifacts were already extremely rare, and divine artifacts were hardly so easy to get. Such extremely scarce things could be counted on one hand.
From what Ye Ruyue had learned in the book, each of the five great sects only had one or two.
For example, Xuanyun Sect only had two. One divine artifact was the sect’s treasure, the very one that was later stolen by the bootlicker second senior brother and given to the female lead.
The other could only be called a half divine artifact, and it was in the hands of sect master Lin Shiduan. In the end, when the Demon Venerable massacred the sect, Lin Shiduan survived by relying on this half divine artifact…
The Grand Elder truly doted on this new disciple he had picked up. He kept saying he was going to get her a whole divine artifact?
That was way too much nonsense!
But the Grand Elder did not care at all about others’ opinions. After muttering to himself, he continued pulling things out. “How are one hundred spirit fruits enough? It has to be at least one thousand spirit fruits for my disciple to snack on.”
The crowd was even more stunned. What did one thousand spirit fruits even mean?
Even other direct disciples only got five or ten at their apprenticeship, and even the previously much-noticed junior sister Hua Sijin only got twenty.
Now, the Grand Elder actually wanted to give his little disciple one thousand?
Luckily, at this moment the voice behind the Grand Elder sounded again, reserved yet tinged with a trace of helplessness: “Master, you don’t have that many spirit fruits.”
Sure enough, the Grand Elder rummaged for a long while, and in the end only pulled out around five hundred.
But the Grand Elder still patted his chest and promised Ye Ruyue that from then on, as long as there were spirit fruits, they would all go to her.
That was not the end of it. After the spirit fruits, he pulled out talisman papers. “One thousand talisman papers really isn’t enough. It has to be at least ten thousand.”
Unfortunately, after rummaging for a long while, he only pulled out around one thousand in total, and said he would make up the rest later.
Finally, only the spirit stones were pulled out in full. “Ten thousand spirit stones really isn’t enough. It has to be at least one hundred thousand!”
Even more than one hundred thousand. The Grand Elder emptied out everything he had on him, actually pulling out more than two hundred forty thousand spirit stones!
He did not even round the amount down; not a single one was held back, all of it given to Ye Ruyue.
Looking at this pile of apprenticeship gifts before her, everyone was stunned, utterly thunderstruck…
Yet the Grand Elder still felt unsatisfied, and turned to instruct his eldest disciple behind him: “Later, go through my residence. Whatever can be of use, give it all to your little junior sister, understand?”
“…”
Ye Ruyue’s mouth twitched wildly. Clearly, she too could not believe everything she was seeing!
An illusion!
This had to be an illusion!
If she remembered correctly, the book said that after the female lead Hua Sijin entered the sect, a month later she took sect master Lin Shiduan as her master and was taken as a direct disciple. At that time the apprenticeship gift she got was no more than a spatial ring, one magical artifact, twenty spirit fruits, thirty talisman papers, and one thousand spirit stones.
Just that much made the other disciples envious beyond measure.
And now, what about her?
What she had gotten now was ten times, even dozens of times more than Hua Sijin!
How could such an unbelievable thing happen to her?
Not to mention anything else, he had even given her a spiritual artifact!
Magical artifacts were already very precious things in the cultivation world to begin with. A normal defense-type magical artifact could withstand an attack from the Golden Core stage, and Hua Sijin had only gotten one. But a defense-type spiritual artifact could block a full-power strike from the late Nascent Soul stage.
You should know, in this lower cultivation world, many sect elders’ cultivation was only at the Nascent Soul stage, so Ye Ruyue getting this spiritual artifact was practically a life-saving divine artifact!
One spiritual artifact absolutely surpassed one hundred magical artifacts!
The Grand Elder actually had such a good thing, and was even willing to give it to her???
Truly inconceivable!
Or was there some secret hidden in this that she did not know?
For instance, Ye Ruyue was actually the Grand Elder’s illegitimate daughter???
Because it could not be spoken of, he took her as a direct disciple!
Otherwise, how could all of this be explained?
But she was only five years old now.
And the Grand Elder was said to be over two thousand years old?
Could this be a case of an old tree blooming late…