The Hundred Thousand Mountains.
Poke—
Poke—
Xu Fan, dressed in a clean robe tailored for a Golden Core Realm cultivator, blinked and used a small wooden stick to prod Ji Hanyue, who had collapsed under the tree.
No response.
Ji Hanyue’s face was as pale as death, her breath so faint it was nearly gone. Her lips, dark purple bordering on black, left no doubt—she had been poisoned with something fatal. She looked like she was taking in her last breath.
Xu Fan scratched his head, troubled, and asked the system, “System, can’t you spawn some gear to save my master? I can owe it to you or something.”
It wasn’t that Xu Fan didn’t want to save Ji Hanyue.
The real problem was: if it was a poison that could take down a Divine Transformation Realm expert, let alone Xu Fan—there wasn’t a single person in the entire Supreme Void Immortal Sect who could deal with it.
So he had no choice but to turn to the system.
The system responded helplessly, [Host, this system doesn’t have that kind of function.]
Xu Fan went silent for a few seconds, then shook his head and sighed as he rolled up his sleeves, “Forget it. I’ll just treat this life as a waste. I’ll try harder in the next one.”
The system immediately panicked, realizing Xu Fan’s suicidal intent. [Host, don’t do anything drastic! The system’s reincarnation function is extremely unstable. You might be a human this life, but next time you could be born a cow or a donkey!]
Xu Fan gently cut open a spot on Ji Hanyue’s wrist that had turned black and necrotic. He smiled lightly, “A cow or donkey it is then.”
“No matter what, Ji Hanyue raised me for thirty years. If I just stand by and watch her die without doing anything, wouldn’t I be worse than a beast?”
He knew very well—
With his personality and the kind of cultivation aptitude he had this life, if he hadn’t met Ji Hanyue, he probably would’ve died in some forgotten corner before he even had a chance to grow.
Even if, by some miracle, he had managed to survive, there was no way he could’ve lived like this—doing nothing and receiving endless cultivation resources the moment he opened his eyes every day.
Xu Fan might be someone who had lived through several lifetimes, but he wasn’t heartless. Ji Hanyue’s kindness—he had kept it all in his heart.
Thoughts surged like a tidal wave, tangled and endless, filling Xu Fan with restlessness.
Fine. Let this life end here. Whatever comes next… will come next life.
With that in mind, Xu Fan lowered his head and decided to use the dumbest, most primitive method to suck out the poison from Ji Hanyue’s body—the same poison that could kill a Divine Transformation Realm cultivator.
He had no idea if it would work, but it was all he could do.
With one motion, a mouthful of foul-smelling black blood—like rot from a corpse—was spit to the side.
The moment that blood hit the ground, the surrounding grass and trees withered at a speed visible to the naked eye. Even the color drained from the area instantly.
Clearly, the poison in Ji Hanyue’s body was terrifying beyond belief!
The system couldn’t bear to watch and sighed, [Host… why are you doing this? If you want, this system can assign you another target this life.]
But Xu Fan didn’t respond. He couldn’t.
The moment his tongue touched the poison—his mortal Golden Core Realm body trying to withstand something of Divine Transformation-level—his tongue began rotting rapidly. In the blink of an eye, more than half of it had disintegrated.
Inside his mouth, the flesh boiled like hot water. Black smoke curled out with a sizzling sound, and his oral tissues melted, collapsing bit by bit into sludge.
The scalding pain made Xu Fan give a helpless smile, then lower his head to continue.
Second mouthful.
Half of Xu Fan’s face was gone. Everything below his eyes had rotted off. Even the bones beneath were beginning to melt.
The system shivered inside his mind, heart aching unbearably.
But Xu Fan didn’t react. He silently took out a life-saving pill Ji Hanyue had given him.
The Ninefold Fate Severing Pill.
This was an ancient forbidden pill, priceless and rare. As long as one’s soul wasn’t instantly annihilated, it could forcibly preserve life for the duration of one incense stick. Ji Hanyue had risked her life to snatch it from a rogue cultivator’s cave and gifted it to him.
With exposed white jawbones, Xu Fan chewed the pill and swallowed it through what remained of his ruined throat, mumbling vaguely, “Tastes alright… kinda like coarse mantou.” Follow the newest chapters on NovelPing.
Of course, in this situation, the pill was much more effective than mantou. A mysterious power from within kept him alive just enough to keep going.
Having lost his tongue, Xu Fan now had to use spiritual energy to generate airflow, continuing to draw out the poison from Ji Hanyue’s increasingly bloodstained wrist.
Third mouthful—
The moment the poison entered, it spread throughout his body.
His Golden Core immediately started melting like ice under sunlight, silently collapsing. What had melted turned into a stinking black sludge, dripping down into his dantian.
His insides churned violently. His organs were displaced. His body’s internal equilibrium was thoroughly destroyed.
In his daze, Xu Fan thought he saw Ji Hanyue’s fingers twitch slightly… and his long-departed great-grandmother waving at him.
Fourth mouthful.
Fifth.
Sixth…
With each mouthful, his body deteriorated irreversibly. Muscles sloughed off visibly, spiritual energy corrupted and polluted at insane speeds. Only the Ninefold Fate Severing Pill’s lingering aura clung to his bones, stubbornly keeping his life from extinguishing.
Not one more, not one less—Xu Fan extracted exactly nine mouthfuls of poison.
He believed it worked. In the final flicker of consciousness, he thought he saw Ji Hanyue’s eyelids tremble again.
Looks like… Master made it through after all.
It’s just a shame that in all the mountains and rivers to come… her disciple would no longer be by her side.
In agony so deep it felt like being carved alive, Xu Fan painfully died on the spot.
…
Half an incense later.
Ji Hanyue’s body beneath the phoenix tree suddenly spasmed. Her throat convulsed.
Suddenly—!
A torrent of dark, viscous blood reeking of death gushed from her orifices like a crawling ghost. As it hit the air, a faint shrieking echo of grudges and hatred echoed, chilling to the bone.
Thankfully, the wails didn’t last long. They soon vanished.
In their place—Ji Hanyue slowly awakened.
“I… I’m still alive?”
Her face was tinged with a strange grey-purple hue, but the poison had weakened significantly—just enough for her to suppress with spiritual energy.
This realization left Ji Hanyue first confused, then overwhelmed. Joy at surviving and bafflement about how mixed across her face.
She frowned and tried to recall what had happened. “What… I was supposed to die…”
She remembered going out for a mission, being ambushed and poisoned by sect masters from nearby sects.
Even after fleeing thousands of kilometers to the Hundred Thousand Mountains, she hadn’t escaped death.
In her last moments, she remembered summoning her disciple, Xu Fan, to receive her final inheritance.
But… didn’t she lose consciousness before he arrived?
“Wait… I sense a lingering spell in the air?”
Although some poison remained, it no longer impeded her perception. She could sense several traces of residual spell auras around her. Among them… was the unmistakable aura of the Ninefold Fate Severing Pill.
Wait—why would that be here?
That was the pill she gave Xu Fan for emergencies!
The moment she realized that, unease flooded her chest. She struggled to rise and search for Xu Fan’s presence.
But before her divine sense could cover the entire Hundred Thousand Mountains, she felt it—the presence of a lifeless skeleton.
The upper half of the body was completely gone, only some tattered muscle hanging from the waist down. The robe was soaked in blood and filth—no one would want to look twice.
But Ji Hanyue froze as if struck by lightning.
That was the robe of Supreme Void Immortal Sect. And the faint aura on the bones… matched the poison that had been in her body.
Ji Hanyue instantly pieced it all together.
“No! No way!”
Her heart pounded like a war drum. Her expression twisted in panic. She didn’t care about her image as she rushed over in disarray, frantically injecting her essence into the corpse. Tears streamed from her long-cold eyes.
“This can’t be Fan’er!”
“Fan’er wouldn’t be this foolish! He’s clever! He’d never be this stupid!”
But the aura clinging to the bones told her cruelly: this was her beloved disciple Xu Fan—her Fan’er.
Cradling the still-warm remains in her arms, Ji Hanyue’s mind replayed every moment she had spent with him through the years. The memories only drove her further into madness.
“No! No way!”
She remembered the scrawny boy who carried her through the Snowbound Mountains. She remembered the vow he made before his parents’ graves.
“He said he liked me… He said he’d protect me for life… How could he leave me like this?”
Only now did Ji Hanyue realize she had been wrong.
That little brat hadn’t been forgotten by her—he had silently burrowed into the deepest corner of her heart, doing mischief without a sound.
That stupid disciple!
She recalled all his obedient, charming antics and felt that long-dormant ache return—this time, it tore her apart.
“No… You are not allowed to die!”
Ji Hanyue’s aura suddenly twisted—unstable and dark. Her crimson eyes glimmered with obsession and madness.
“I raised you for thirty years. Your body, your life, your everything belongs to me! If I say you can’t die—then you can’t!”
As Xu Fan’s life force continued to fade, Ji Hanyue looked almost demonic—her beautiful features distorted with grief and fury.
Without hesitation, her slender, pale hand pierced her own heart.
She drew out a drop of heart’s blood—her most precious life essence—and infused it into Xu Fan’s body.
The heart’s blood contained the core of a cultivator’s life force. It was the foundation of all cultivation.
For someone like Ji Hanyue, giving it up meant her cultivation would be severely impacted.
But in return—it could preserve life against the heavens, even if just for a moment.
With the heart’s blood and all the techniques she knew, Ji Hanyue miraculously held on to the last flicker of Xu Fan’s consciousness.
Maybe it was the Ninefold Fate Severing Pill.
Maybe it was Ji Hanyue’s desperate sacrifice.
Maybe Xu Fan’s fate simply wasn’t finished.
Whatever the reason—Xu Fan didn’t die.
But he didn’t live either.
He was stuck in a strange, precarious state… between life and death.
…