The moment Xiao Chen transmigrated into the novel, his entire body burned with an unbearable, scorching heat akin to fire. His consciousness was blurred and hazy, leaving him with only the primal instinct to draw closer to the person right beside him.
He could not clearly see the other person’s appearance, only knowing that the other person’s body felt wonderfully cool, and getting closer brought immense relief. He could distinctly sense that the other person wanted to push him away, yet the hands doing the pushing lacked any real strength.
“Xiao… Chen… Wake up… Mph…”
For a fleeting second, Xiao Chen felt slightly better, but right after, the fire raging inside his body burned even more fiercely. It wasn’t enough! He wanted more!
Before he could make another move, the other person suddenly exerted force and pinned him down beneath them. After a trace of sharp pain, it felt as though a fish that had been dried up for a long time had returned to the water, bringing an infinite, refreshing sense of gratification.
He had no idea how much time passed like this. When he finally woke up again, a man’s voice filled with regret and reluctance reached his ears.
“I will marry you.”
Marry him? Xiao Chen felt a splitting headache and couldn’t help rubbing the bridge of his nose, and then he noticed that he was lying in disarray on an embroidered bed, while beside the bed sat a man wearing only an outer robe who was supporting his head in regret.
The man’s ink-black hair cascaded down his waist like a waterfall, and his skin was fair and firm. Even though he was facing away, Xiao Chen could still guess that this man must be extremely handsome.
He remembered that at the time, he was conducting a chemical experiment, and there must have been an error in the reagent proportions because it blew up. A roaring sound filled his ears before he lost consciousness, and when he woke back up, he was met with this exact scene: a classical, antique room and a disheveled man dressed in traditional ancient attire.
Before Xiao Chen could think any further, the man spoke again: “I will take responsibility. Tomorrow, I will ask the sect master for your hand in marriage.”
Take responsibility for him? Ask the sect master for his hand in marriage? Xiao Chen wanted to ask more, but the man had already stood up, dressed neatly, and left.
Wait! Xiao Chen anxiously tried to get up to give chase, but the soreness radiating from his waist and the discomfort in his lower regions forced him to stop his movements.
In a scenario like this, coupled with that feeling, plus the man’s ambiguous words, Xiao Chen felt his mind go boom as if it had exploded. He, he had actually slept with another man!
Xiao Chen forced himself to calm down, and some faint, hazy, and unclear fragments of memories gradually surfaced. Not only had he slept with a man, but they had also been caught red-handed by a crowd of people. The crucial part was that he was the one who initiated it. Stunned as if struck by lightning, Xiao Chen collapsed flat on the bed, taking a long time to pull himself together before finally dressing properly and stepping out the door.
Outside the bedchamber, many spectators and guests had not yet dispersed, all gathered around the doorway. Xiao Chen swept his gaze over them with cold eyes, causing the crowd to step back and clear a path.
“Never would I have imagined that the proud son of heaven, Xiao Chen, actually likes men!”
“Indeed, what a pity.”
“What is a pity?”
“Pity that the one he likes is that Xie Yuanjia whose cultivation was crippled, rather than me. To be honest, I’ve long thought Xiao Chen looks drop-dead gorgeous, but Xiao Chen always looked unapproachable, so I didn’t dare make a move. If I had known earlier…”
“It’s a good thing you didn’t know earlier, otherwise, you would have definitely been obliterated by Xiao Chen.”
Xiao Chen really had no mood to pay attention to these remarks right now. He had to figure out why he had inexplicably ended up in this place and suffered such an unprovoked accident.
The next day, inside the study, Xiao Chen looked at the wedding token approved by the sect master resting on the desk, massaging his throbbing temples. Through a night of groping and figuring things out, he finally grasped his situation: he had transmigrated into a male-oriented web novel he had recently read.
The person he slept with was the male protagonist of the book, commonly known as the overpowered protagonist Xie Yuanjia, while the character he transmigrated into was the cannon fodder with the exact same name, Xiao Chen. In the original text, this character ended up having his bones scraped and soul scattered by Xie Yuanjia.
Thinking about it, it made sense; after all, whose protagonist in a web novel doesn’t lose his virginity to a young maiden, yet the author chose to arrange a dude for his precious son?
As for this incident, both of them were victims. Xiao Chen and Xie Yuanjia had been framed and plotted against by the current mistress of the Xiao family and Xiao Chen’s stepmother.
Xie Yuanjia was originally the direct disciple of the master of the number one immortal sect in the world, the Jiutian Sect, but because he committed a transgression, his cultivation was crippled and he was sent to the Xuantian Sect to temper his state of mind. Sooner or later, he was destined to return to the Jiutian Sect. In contrast, the current Taixuan Sect was like a cup of water compared to the ocean when placed beside the Jiutian Sect, and he himself was merely an even more negligible droplet within that cup. With such a gap in status, it was impossible for him to marry the other person. Furthermore, because Xie Yuanjia lacked a fixed status in the Taixuan Sect, and the Xiao family was one of the four great immortal clans that the Taixuan Sect relied upon, even this overpowered protagonist could only be married into his family as a matrilocal husband.
This meant that he would become a husband wed into the family, and from then on it would be impossible for him to take another wife or have descendants. Even though his natural talent was peerless, he completely lost any qualification to inherit the Xiao family.
And even though Xie Yuanjia was the direct disciple of the Jiutian Sect master, having a husband from such an unknown, minor sect destined him to be cut off from the position of sect master unless he divorced his spouse or was widowed.
The Taixuan Sect imposed far stricter regulations on husbands married into a family than on women. If divorced by his spouse, he would forever lose the right to share in spiritual medicines, and in severe cases, his spiritual meridians would be directly crippled, while the spittle of the surrounding cultivators alone would be enough to strip away a layer of his skin. Therefore, a Taixuan male spouse would rather die than ever leave his husband.
Thus, once the marriage went through, Xiao Chen would never allow Xie Yuanjia to divorce him, meaning his only ending would be to die at Xie Yuanjia’s hands that is, if he were still the original Xiao Chen from the book.
Now that the one who came was him, the situation was naturally different. After all, walk your own path and let others talk; a miserable survival is better than a noble death, anyway.
The marriage was easy to resolve, leaving only a single difficult problem: in the original book, Xiao Chen was, after all, a proud prodigy of his generation, and being betrothed as a male spouse naturally filled him with resentment. Consequently, he poured all his hatred into retaliating against Xie Yuanjia, which ultimately led to his torturous death in the later stages.
Setting that aside, he remembered almost every detail of the scene on the night after the incident. Although both of them had been drugged with Spring’s Intoxication, Xie Yuanjia still retained a shred of rationality it was him, who led to the final outcome.
His own reputation didn’t amount to much, but the novel’s overpowered protagonist Xie Yuanjia probably wouldn’t see it that way. His continued survival was a blemish to Xie Yuanjia, and even if he did nothing at all, Xie Yuanjia would likely still want to obliterate him.
Xiao Chen let out a silent sigh. If it had been a little earlier, he would have found a way to avoid this matter, or if it had been a little later failing that, he could have just come clean to Xie Yuanjia and explained that the person who slept with him that night was the original owner and had nothing to do with him, but it just had to be at that exact moment.
Thinking about it so much didn’t help much either. Right now, he could only try his best to treat Xie Yuanjia well and smooth over their relationship, perhaps allowing him to squeak by with his life.
[Host, you cannot do that.]
Xiao Chen frowned; he knew every book transmigrator was bound to come with a brain-dead system.
[Host must maintain Xiao Chen’s persona and complete the task. The first task: humiliate Xie Yuanjia. If the task is not completed, you will explode and die! Wishing the host a pleasant time.]
Humiliate Xie Yuanjia?! Isn’t this courting death on the spot! Xiao Chen massaged his brow.
In the original book, after Xiao Chen and Xie Yuanjia’s marriage was settled, Xie Yuanjia moved into the Xiao estate. Without a doubt, Xiao Chen initiated his self-destruction mode, coming up with a new method to torture Xie Yuanjia every single day, cycling through whippings, water tortures, and all sorts of punishments.
By the time the wedding arrived, the man was covered in bruises and injuries, barely managing to stagger through the main ceremony before passing out cold, and when he woke up, Xiao Chen had even carved the characters “Useless” onto his back. Alas! The original owner’s torturous death later on was truly not unjust at all.
He certainly couldn’t court death in such a manner. The system only mentioned humiliation without specifying that it had to be daily, nor did it state to what degree. As long as the final right of interpretation remained in his hands, everything could still turn around.
That evening, Xie Yuanjia entered the Xiao estate. In order to disgust Xiao Chen, Xiao Chen’s stepmother, Zhang Liusi, specially brought the person right before Xiao Chen: “Chen’er, this is your husband. Mother is afraid of making improper arrangements, so you can arrange it yourself.”
With that, without even giving Xiao Chen a chance to react, she turned and left. Strictly speaking, this should be considered the first time the two of them officially met.
It really was what he feared the most. At a time like this, Xie Yuanjia must be furious, and the two of them were best off seeing as little of each other as possible, but now avoiding him was simply out of the question.
Xiao Chen raised his eyes. The book had a description of Xie Yuanjia that left an extremely deep impression on him: In the void, Xie Yuanjia’s white robes had already been dyed a dark crimson by blood, his long hair by his temples was plastered to his face by bloodstains, and the hairpin on his head had long since fallen off somewhere as the cold wind swept past, causing his ink-black hair to flutter wildly.
His facial features were as cold as frost, a bone-chilling coldness condensed between his brows, and his long sword stood inverted at his side. As his cold gaze swept across the few scattered cultivators standing amidst the sea of corpses and mountains of blood, he spoke without a trace of emotion: “Today, all of you must die.”
Therefore, in Xiao Chen’s imagination, Xie Yuanjia should possess chiseled features, sword-like brows, star-like eyes, cold and domineering, differing very little from the standard modeling of an overpowered protagonist. However, in reality, the person before him was handsome indeed, but leaned more toward gentle beauty; his skin was as white as jade, his ink-black hair like silk, his long eyelashes like feathers, and those dark ink-black eyes were shockingly beautiful as cold as a wintry abyss, yet bewitching like a seductive spirit.
Feeling somewhat surprised, Xie Yuanjia frowned slightly, and Xiao Chen snapped back to his senses: “Um…”
[Ahem! Reminding the host to maintain the persona and humiliate Xie Yuanjia, otherwise you will explode and die!]
Startled by the system’s reminder, Xiao Chen hurriedly put on a cold, aloof expression and said in a chilly voice, “The Xiao estate only has the woodshed vacant. I’m afraid Young Master Xie will have to make do and stay there temporarily. Someone come, escort Young Master Xie over.”
A servant stepped forward: “Young Master Xie, please.”
[Task completed, points plus 10]
Early the next morning, Xiao Chen went to a teahouse to listen to storytelling. With that stepmother of his who constantly tried to find trouble by every means possible, coupled with the fact that he was truly reluctant to see Xie Yuanjia, he simply couldn’t stay in the Xiao estate anymore.
In the modern world, with smartphones, tablets, computers, TV dramas, movies, and anime, there were countless choices to pass the time; by comparison, listening to storytelling was rather dull. Xiao Chen idly and boredly fiddled with the teacup on the table when suddenly, a fight broke out just a few steps away from him.
A flash of delight crossed Xiao Chen’s eyes. This was far more interesting than listening to stories! Embracing the principle that melons must be eaten, and eating melons must be thoroughly understood, Xiao Chen expended a good deal of effort to finally squeeze into the front row, after which he immediately regretted it.
Because the one being beaten up was Xie Yuanjia, and he was being pummeled quite miserably by a group of people. Xiao Chen suddenly recalled a plot point from the book: the overpowered protagonist got into a dispute with some people in a teahouse over a trivial matter and was almost beaten to death.
Subconsciously raising his head to take a look Tea Tasting Pavilion, it really was this place, sigh! Xiao Chen let out a silent sigh. Since he had bumped into it, ignoring it would definitely incur hatred.