The last image Chi Ning saw was a blood-red moon, with a dim star nearby on the verge of vanishing into the darkness, while another star quietly emerged, its light gradually growing brilliant and dazzling.
There were records that when a red moon hung in the sky, someone was secretly altering the course of fate.
“Chi Ning, do you know that you should not exist? The one who should ascend to immortality is me.”
That was the last voice she heard before her death.
…
Chi Ning had never imagined she could come back to life one day. A wave of heat surged in her chest, as if something heavy pressed upon her heart. As a warm current flowed through her, her body gradually grew warm. She felt her pulse beating rapidly and forcefully, and her stiff limbs slowly regained their softness.
Vaguely, she heard the sound of dense rain outside. Soon after, a single drop of bitter, earthy rainwater landed on her lips.
The faint spiritual energy contained in the rain was like a switch.
The coldness receded from her body. In the narrow, dark coffin, she opened her eyes. Her chest rose and fell with deep, ragged breaths, and the sound of her heartbeat echoed dully within the coffin.
In the darkness, she slowly reached out and felt around her surroundings, eventually confirming that this was a coffin.
She clearly remembered dying. It was only natural that after death, she would be placed in a coffin.
She and her senior martial brother, Lu Nanke, had grown up together since childhood and later became betrothed. Just the day before, he had been tender and affectionate toward her, yet on the day of their wedding, he had brought about her death.
Her parents had treated him like their own son, raised him, taught him cultivation techniques, and never once mistreated him.
She only regretted not seeing through Lu Nanke’s wolfish ambitions and killing him early.
She did not know how much time had passed outside, but as long as Lu Nanke still lived, she would personally kill him.
Chi Ning felt a faint trace of spiritual energy beneath her palm, and after a moment, she understood how to open this coffin.
The more expensive coffins had formations carved on the outside, one purpose was to protect the corpse within, and the other was that they could be opened by channeling spiritual energy into them.
After feeling around for a while, Chi Ning determined how to open it. But as she began to circulate her spiritual energy, her movements suddenly froze.
Her cultivation had completely dispersed, and her spiritual meridians were even damaged.
After death, one’s cultivation naturally scattered, and since she had truly died once, her cultivation was gone.
It must have been Lu Nanke’s sword strike that damaged her spiritual meridians. Each of her meridians had varying degrees of damage. Fortunately, as long as the meridians were not severed, she could repair them with the right pills.
At this thought, hatred flared in Chi Ning’s eyes. She pressed her palm against the coffin lid above her, slowly gathering the spiritual energy from her surroundings. Her body could not store spiritual energy, so she could only borrow the ambient spiritual energy of heaven and earth to move the coffin.
She waited nearly a quarter of an hour before gathering a single drop of spiritual energy.
Clearly, the spiritual energy in the area was extremely thin. Fortunately, activating the formation did not require much.
The formation patterns lit up at one corner, slowly spreading until they covered the entire coffin.
…
The sky was gloomy, and torrential rain lashed a desolate hillside. Amid the thunder and roaring rain, a black figure in a straw rain cloak swung a hoe desperately in the downpour.
With each swing, the large pit he had dug was nearly flooded by the accumulating rainwater.
“I’m done digging, dig and it floods. I’ll wait until the rain stops! This place is unfit for human habitation!”
Ever since arriving here three days ago, his only task had been to find a grave.
All because that damned system had teleported him to this godforsaken place without a single hint.
He had finally found it, only for the heavens to unleash a downpour.
He simply threw down the hoe and turned, charging into a small makeshift grass shed not far away.
In the place he could not see, as the rain washed down, the water at the bottom of the pit seemed to be continuously absorbed by something, gradually revealing a vermilion coffin buried deep underground.
The rain landing on the coffin was quickly absorbed clean. The patterns on the coffin slowly lit up, and mysterious formation lines drove the coffin to emerge from the earth, until the entire coffin was exposed beneath the sky.
…
The rain outside gradually lessened. The gray sky churned with rolling clouds, and a suffocating pressure hung over the entire land.
The gap beneath the shifting coffin lid widened steadily. A slender, pale hand reached out from within, bracing against the coffin’s edge to push the body up.
Chi Ning let the rain soak her clothes as she slowly climbed out of the coffin.
Her body, unused to movement for so long, had not fully recovered. The moment she exited the coffin, before she could adjust, she suddenly tumbled into the mud.
The icy rain sent her barely warmed body temperature plummeting. The cold made her instinctively shrink back, but the next moment, she felt a lightness above her, an umbrella blocked the rain overhead, and a man appeared before her.
A leisurely voice, carrying a lazy, crisp quality, sounded through the rain.
“Miss Chi Ning, the autumn rain is cold. Why not come to my home and sit for a while?”
To Chi Ning’s ears, it sounded like nothing but a scheme full of ill intent.
She raised her pale face, her long hair falling loose and obscuring her once-bright and beautiful features. At this moment, she looked like a vengeful ghost risen from hell.
Her voice was slightly hoarse, each word deliberate: “You know who I am?”
He pointed at the stone tablet on the ground and smiled brightly. “Of course I do. Isn’t it written on the tombstone? Chi Ning.”
At this moment, he had shed his heavy straw rain cloak and wore a set of brocade robes in deep blue. In the rain, he stood like a tall, straight green bamboo, his eyes bright and spirited, his handsome features carrying a faint, gentle smile.
Chi Ning rose to her feet, trembling, and looked at the man before her. Every inch of him practically screamed that he had ulterior motives.
“Your place?”
He seemed embarrassed as he said, “That’s just my temporary dwelling, it only looks a bit run-down.”
Chi Ning followed the direction he pointed and saw a thatched shack swaying precariously in the rain, leaking water through its roof.
This was “a bit run-down”?
It wasn’t even fit for a dog.
When she had crawled out, she’d noticed the grave had been dug up, and the area around it was desolate and uninhabited, it could only have been his doing.
Though she didn’t know where she had been buried, the fact that he’d come specifically to dig up her grave after her death, just how deep was his grudge against her?
Still, she was certain she had never seen this man before.
She asked calmly, without changing her expression, “Who are you?”
Seeing that Chi Ning had gotten to the point, the young man quickly straightened his clothes and said with mock solemnity, “Ahem, allow me to introduce myself. You may call me the Fate-Bearer. Miss Chi Ning, I am here to guide you to immortality. All you need to do is, ”
“You’re an immortal?”
Before he could finish, Chi Ning cut him off with a cold voice.
The man hesitated for a moment, deciding that getting Chi Ning to believe him was the key to achieving his goal, and paid no attention to the increasingly icy look in her eyes.
He nodded in confirmation.
A cold smile curled at the corner of Chi Ning’s lips, murderous intent flashing in her gaze as she whispered, “Qingxue.”
From the opened coffin, a sword’s hum suddenly rang out, trembling through the air. A pale cyan longsword shrieked as it tore through the curtain of rain. Chi Ning’s fingertip twitched, and the cold gleam of the blade’s tip pierced straight through the man’s body.
She gave him no chance to continue speaking.
His body toppled stiffly to the ground, his eyes filled with shock, clearly never expecting Chi Ning to kill him with a single strike.
His blood mingled with the rain and dissolved into the mud, and soon, the man stopped breathing.
Chi Ning gripped her sword and walked off in another direction without looking back.
“Next time you try to deceive someone, at least make it more convincing.”
The man had no spiritual power at all, and he was digging up graves, clearly no good person. Killing him outright was the simplest solution.
Not long after Chi Ning left, a faint blue light appeared at the wound on the young man’s body, and the gaping hole quickly healed.
Then, a mechanical, electronic voice echoed in his mind.
[Detected host’s life force at minimum. Triggered: Female Lead’s First Blood… As the first person killed by the female lead, you are utterly pathetic.]
[Host’s cultivation aptitude has been unlocked.]
[Additional reminder: Being killed by the female lead grants unlimited respawns. Being killed by other cultivators means no respawn. Devote yourself to cultivation, don’t be a lazy fish.]
[Previous world integrity: 0%]
[Current world integrity: 0.01%]
[Previous female lead darkening value: 379]
[Current female lead darkening value: 401]
Jiang Luoshen let out a rough gasp, finally alive again.
Lying in the mud, he slowly raised a middle finger.
Damn system. Ten years.
Finally, it was of some use.
Ten years ago, he had transmigrated into the book. Under normal circumstances, he’d received a system.
But this system had sent him too early, there were still ten years before the female lead would awaken. So the damn thing had dumped him in an unfamiliar world and gone into hiding, feigning death.
Fortunately, he’d already familiarized himself with the story’s background.
In the original book, the female lead and male lead were childhood sweethearts who later married. The female lead was astonishingly talented, ascending to immortality early on, while the male lead struggled to cultivate in the mortal world, unable to ascend despite his efforts. Instead, he was mocked and ridiculed, with some even sneering that he’d been abandoned by the female lead.
Originally, none of this concerned him. But then the system told him the world was collapsing, the original male lead had awakened with a rebirth and killed the female lead.
And his job was to repair the world’s integrity.
Until three days ago, the system had dumped him in this godforsaken place, telling him to dig the female lead out. He hadn’t even finished digging when she crawled out and killed him with one strike.
At least that counted as completing the task, adding a bit to the world’s integrity.
“System, me getting killed by the female lead, does that count as a work injury?”
System: [No.]
“Trash system!”
System: [Detected host insulting the system. Slowing wound recovery speed…]
“…”