The more Sang Nian thought about it, the more exasperated she became.
“I hooked him up with such a luxurious, sprawling house, and he’s still not satisfied?”
Liuli chimed in, “Maybe he figures you’re up to no good? After all, unsolicited favors always hide a scam or a scheme.”
Sang Nian’s eye twitched.
“Fair point. Given that his favorability is already sitting at a cool minus one hundred and twenty thousand, he’s going to assume everything I do has an ulterior motive.”
She pressed her fingertips against her throbbing temples.
“I bet he rehearses ways to kill me in his head at least once a day.”
Liuli immediately disagreed with that assessment.
“You’re being way too conservative. How could it possibly be just once? At least four digits, starting from the thousands.”
Kicking off her shoes, Sang Nian scrambled onto the bed and tossed the bird toward the edge of the pillows, her mind suddenly latching onto another pressing matter:
“By the way, I don’t know how to use the original host’s whip. When that demon shows up in half a month, what if I accidentally hit it too hard or something—what happens if I die?”
According to the plot of the original book, a rogue demon slipped into Qingzhou City hoping to score a major haul. But the City Lord wasn’t one to sit back and do nothing; he sent cultivators to encircle and suppress the beast before it could harm any innocents, though unfortunately, it managed to slip away in the end.
Sustaining severe injuries and burning with hatred, the fleeing demon snatched away the City Lord’s younger sister. Luckily, a few passing disciples from the Xiaoyao Sect happened to step in and save the day.
That was the official inciting incident for the entire novel.
Liuli reassured her, “You won’t die. The original host has a whole inventory of defensive magical artifacts—all top-tier orange-rank gear. Even if a Deity Transformation expert showed up, they’d have to hammer away at her for half a day just to scratch the surface. When the time comes, you can literally just lie down and wait for the female lead to come rescue you.”
With her worries lifted, Sang Nian let out a long breath and sighed, “It is so good to be rich.”
Rubbing its round, stuffed belly, Liuli echoed with deep emotional resonance: “It is so good to be rich.”
The next morning, Sang Nian woke up extra early.
She had the kitchens prepare an extra portion of breakfast, intending to share a meal with Xie Chenzhou in a bid to build some positive rapport.
Yet, the moment she took a single step toward him, a rapid sequence of system chimes rang out right beside her ear:
【Ding~ Favorability -10】
【Ding~ Favorability -10】
【Ding~ Favorability -10】
?
Staring at the completely expressionless Xie Chenzhou ahead of her, Sang Nian refused to believe her bad luck and took another step forward.
【Ding~ Favorability -100, Xie Chenzhou’s current favorability: -123,200】
Sang Nian completely checked out.
She decided to throw in the towel entirely. She ate six meals a day, polished off three bowls of rice per sitting, and spent her free time doing calisthenics, treating Xie Chenzhou like parallel lines that would never intersect.
Half a month flew by in the blink of an eye.
On a moonless night shrouded in heavy shadows, a dark figure silently infiltrated the Hall of String Melodies.
“What a striking beauty,” the shadow cackled with an eerie, lewd chuckle, peering through the hazy, translucent silk canopy as it spoke in a frivolous tone. “Be a good girl and come play as big brother’s little bed-toy.”
Having waited for this exact moment, Sang Nian executed a textbook carp-leap straight out of bed, extending both hands with maximum cooperation. “Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s go, let’s go.”
The dark shadow spun around and immediately bolted out the door.
Sang Nian: “?”
Comrade, did you happen to forget something?
The next second, a commotion erupted from the adjacent room.
“What a striking beauty!”
Oh no, that direction is—
“Xie Chenzhou!”
Before she could overthink it, Sang Nian sprinted out at full speed.
Crash—!
She kicked the door wide open, sending billowing clouds of black mist spilling out into the room.
Xie Chenzhou was locked in combat with some shadowy entity. Their figures were a blur, leaving only a vague, shifting silhouette visible through the haze.
“Stop struggling,” the shadow laughed with an even more wretched leer. “Be a good little toy for big brother’s bed, hahahahaha—”
Sang Nian: “????”
“You grabbed the wrong person, you idiot!!!” she yelled in panic. “I’m the City Lord’s sister!”
The dark shadow visibly hesitated.
It glanced back and forth between Xie Chenzhou and Sang Nian, before finally announcing, “Raincheck for next time, then.”
With that, it scooped up Xie Chenzhou and lunged out the window.
Seeing them about to escape, Sang Nian panicked and abandoned all caution. Taking a running start, she leaped into the air, desperately lunging to yank Xie Chenzhou back down.
Instead, the moment her fingertips grazed his hem, the world spun wildly before her eyes, and she instantly plunged into unconsciousness.
“Sang Nian, why would you hand over such useless trash to me?”
“From the beginning to the end, all I can see is a completely blank mind.”
“Your thesis shows zero trace of any scientific training.”
Familiar voices echoed in Sang Nian’s ears as consciousness slowly returned.
Blinking hard against the light, she finally managed to focus on her surroundings.
It was the dead of a sweltering summer, and outside the glass windows, the leaves of the camphor trees reflected the blazing sunlight in a vibrant, glossy green.
The air conditioning hummed softly in the freezing office while her advisor’s mouth moved up and down, speaking with fierce agitation.
Had she… somehow traveled back?
Before Sang Nian could even feel a flicker of joy, her advisor slammed a freshly printed stack of thesis pages onto the desk, his tone colder than a cleaver that had been butchered a thousand fish:
“Deferred graduation.”
With a deafening roar, her entire world collapsed.
Sang Nian jolted upright, cold sweat soaking straight through her inner garments.
“It was just a dream,” she gasped, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end as she shook her head in lingering terror. “That was way too terrifying.”
Drip— drip—
Water droplets trickled ceaselessly from the rock cracks overhead. The patch of stone she had been lying on was soaked through, and her dress was damp all the way down to her thighs.
No wonder it had felt so freezing.
Scooping up a handful of moisture to splash across her face, Sang Nian finally shook off the last remnants of sleep. She stood up, wringing out the hem of her skirt while casting a sweeping gaze around her.
It was an immensely spacious underground cavern. The dim, gloomy light revealed rock walls completely blanketed in deep green moss, lending the place an eerie, bone-chilling aura.
“Xie Chenzhou?”
The demon had vanished without a trace. She called out tentatively, her voice bouncing back and forth against the stone walls to form rolling echoes.
There was no reply.
“Liuli,” she called out again.
A beam of white light flashed out from her sea of consciousness, and the little parrot hopped onto her shoulder. “Need something?”
“Where is Xie Chenzhou?” she asked.
“In the next cavern over,” it replied.
Clinging to the damp rock wall as she felt her way forward, Sang Nian muttered anxiously, “He isn’t dead, is he?”
“Not yet, still hanging on by a single breath,” Liuli said.
Quickening her pace, Sang Nian was consumed by a wave of deep regret:
“I knew I should have slapped a couple of defensive magical treasures on him. Look at us now—if he dies, my mission is completely screwed.”
“Still, why did that monster kidnap him and not me?” she muttered, completely baffled. “The original plot definitely didn’t go like this.”
Liuli scratched its head. “Maybe—”
“It’s just a sucker for a pretty face?”
Sang Nian: “.”
She shouldn’t have even bothered asking.
Rounding a sharp bend, a much larger cavern suddenly opened up before her.
The surrounding walls were embedded with countless glowing crystals that illuminated the entire space as bright as day. A massive stone bed stood in the center, layered with thick, plush animal pelts.
Draped entirely in black, Xie Chenzhou lay motionless across the bed.
Sang Nian hurried over in a jog. “Xie Chenzhou?!”
His complexion was deathly pale, and his eyes were tightly shut.
“Check on him and see what’s wrong,” she urged Liuli.
For once, Liuli’s tone turned genuinely solemn. “He didn’t have any magical treasures to shield him, so he took the full brunt of the demonic poison. His condition is looking very bad.”
Stripping every single protective artifact off her own body, Sang Nian piled them straight into his arms. “Is it still not too late to give these to him?”
“There’s only one way left to save him,” Liuli stated.
“What is it?” Sang Nian asked.
The moment the words left her mouth, a single feather dissolved into a stream of fluorescent light and drilled straight between her eyebrows. Darkness swallowed her vision, and she collapsed unconscious right beside Xie Chenzhou.
“It was my fault. I shouldn’t have given birth to you.”
The world was shrouded in gloom, battered by sheets of torrential rain.
As cold raindrops lashed mercilessly against her skin, Sang Nian snapped her eyes open.
Looking around in utter bewilderment, she couldn’t understand how she had suddenly ended up in this desolate wilderness.
Voices drifted from somewhere in the distance, muffled and blurred by the roar of the rain, making the words impossible to catch.
Wiping the rainwater from her face with her sleeve, she raised her head to look.
It was a strange… pair of mother and child.
A wind reeking of damp earth fluttered the woman’s plain white robes.
Looking down with lowered eyes at the young child kneeling in the mud at her feet, her face remained blurred and indistinct.
“Xie Chenzhou, I shouldn’t have brought you into this world,” she uttered, every single syllable falling like ice.
A sharp jolt went through Sang Nian’s chest.
Lowering her gaze, she stared at the frail, utterly wretched and muddy child kneeling on the ground.
That child was—
Xie Chenzhou?!