Since before she could even speak, Sang Ying had been diagnosed as congenitally frail, her meridians blocked, with no talent for cultivation at all. At most, in this lifetime, she could only ever hope to reach Foundation Establishment.
They said her mother had the same constitution. Not long after giving birth to her, her mother had passed away.
Living only to Foundation Establishment, how long could that even last? Sang Ying had calculated it once: roughly a hundred and thirty years.
When she’d first learned this, her senior brothers and her father had all feared she’d be devastated and never spoke of it. But Sang Ying had actually been delighted. Ordinary people lived to be a hundred at most, she’d get to live thirty years longer than that.
Sang Ying had no interest in swordplay or martial arts, nor the energy for it. While her two senior brothers practiced their swords, she’d always be off flipping through a talisman codex instead.
It was something her mother had left behind, which she’d found buried deep in her father’s study. Called the Wisdom-Seeking Scroll, its later pages had been torn out, but the earlier ones held plenty of interesting talismans.
The first thing Sang Ying ever learned was the disguise talisman.
The first time she’d used it, she’d transformed into their instructor uncle to tease Second Brother, punishing him with ten laps around the mountain, he hadn’t caught on at all. It was only when he came back to report completion that Sang Ying, unable to hold back her laughter, gave herself away.
Neither of her senior brothers could ever see through her disguise talisman. Even her father was fooled by it sometimes. Only Xie Lingyu, no matter what she transformed into, he always recognized her at once. She could never fool him.
Sang Ying was not one to accept defeat easily. The more she failed, the harder she tried. Unable to trick him with the disguise talisman, she turned to another divination technique from her mother’s scroll instead. She staked out beneath his window one night, planning to conjure a few balls of ghostly blue will-o’-the-wisp fire to scare him.
As it turned out, the fire accidentally caught her own hair. While she panicked trying to pat it out, the window opened, and the young man sighed, scooped up a ladle of water, and poured it over her.
The fire went out. Sang Ying looked up, he’d clearly been in the middle of bathing, his long hair dripping wet, steam still rising off him, wearing only a loosely draped outer robe, his pale collarbones and chest exposed.
In an instant, her ears burned red, and she fled back to her room in a panic.
Afterward, the young man never said a word about it, as if nothing had happened at all.
Sang Ying never expected he’d remember the incident for years, only to bring it up again later and accuse her of sneaking a peek at his bath.
…She most certainly had not been trying to peek!
Back when she was young, listening to her father tell stories, she’d once swung her legs and asked, chin propped on her hand: why does the protagonist always awaken some world-shattering martial art right before death, only to turn the tables at the last moment?
Her father had said it was a very mysterious thing, one even he couldn’t fully explain. Perhaps, at the very edge between life and death, a person could glimpse the secrets of heaven. Perhaps some endless hidden potential burst forth, letting them suddenly understand the realm they’d been stuck at, or perhaps they recalled something from long ago and finally saw their own fate clearly.
Sang Ying thought she was probably the latter kind.
Wrapped in demonic qi, her spiritual power exhausted, her consciousness sinking, she had a dream. In it, this world was actually a book.
She used to listen to Sang Jingming read her storybooks. Every book, alongside its righteous protagonist, was full of thoroughly wicked supporting characters.
As luck would have it, she was one of them.
The book’s protagonist was Xie Lingyu. In his youth, hunted by enemies, he’d been unconscious when the story’s malicious female second lead happened to pick him up. After that, he was taken in by the malicious female lead’s father and kept on Minghua Mountain.
The malicious female lead never treated Xie Lingyu as a senior brother, only as her personal errand boy, ordering him around like livestock, and the young Xie Lingyu endured this oppression the whole time.
Of course, the malicious female lead’s father wasn’t a good man either. On the surface he’d saved Xie Lingyu and taken him on as a disciple, but in truth it was for his bloodline, azure dragon blood could extend life and cure illness, nourishing the meridians. Sang Jingming used Xie Lingyu’s blood as a medicinal base to nurse the malicious female lead’s body back to health, not caring that it would waste away his cultivation, and had him drink it for six whole years.
To pave the way for his daughter’s future, seeing that Xie Lingyu was bound to become someone great, Sang Jingming leveraged the debt of gratitude owed to him and demanded that Xie Lingyu marry his daughter someday.
Sang Ying’s lashes trembled. She opened her eyes and saw a quiet lake before her, the moon reflected on its surface, ripples stirring in the wind.
The night was still. Beside her, the demon cultivator youth chattered on, indignant. “No wait, I got stabbed with a sword and didn’t even pass out, and you get touched by a little demonic qi and nearly sleep yourself to death on me.”
No wonder.
She’d been frail and sickly since childhood, her constitution weak, even catching a common cold could turn into a major crisis for her.
Sang Jingming had brought in countless physicians over the years, tried countless medicines, none of which had worked, until, starting at age twelve, she’d suddenly had medicine that treated her illness.
From then on, as long as she drank it daily, her condition gradually stabilized, to the point she could even train alongside her senior brothers.
“Tch… you really don’t hold back. Hey, why are you spacing out? Did the fall knock you stupid? Actually stupid now?”
No wonder. No wonder Second Brother had been so evasive when he saw her, unwilling to say the real reason.
No wonder he’d been so eager to convince her to divorce, even introducing her to other promising young men. So that was it.
That was it, after all.
Sang Ying lowered her eyes.
Second Brother must have already known that Xie Lingyu had fallen for his white moonlight, wanted to tell her, but couldn’t bring himself to say it outright.
In the book, Xie Lingyu had already had someone he loved since he was young, but had been forced to marry the malicious female lead out of obligation to repay a debt.
He didn’t love her, and so, for three years after their marriage, he’d never once grown close to the malicious female lead, addressing her only as junior sister.
Her chin was lifted, caught between two fingers, as the gloomy youth studied her face. “The book never mentioned anyone turning stupid just from a touch of demonic qi. You’re the first case I’ve seen. Let me think about how to treat that dumb brain of yours.”
Sang Ying raised a hand and swatted him away, her tone flat. “Is this really how you treat someone who saved your life?”
The youth blinked, then laughed. “So you finally remembered? The way you were staring off, I thought you’d forgotten everything clean.”
Sang Ying hadn’t actually remembered on her own, it was simply that the book had mentioned this character.
Wei Li, the demon prince, once saved by the malicious female lead. Much of the plot around him was hazy in her memory, but she vaguely recalled that he’d done plenty of terrible things to help the female lead.
Putting it together now, she realized, half a year ago she’d saved an unconscious young man. That must have been him.
Sang Ying looked around. Several mirrors stood beside the lake, their surfaces unreadable. A few female cultivators lay collapsed by the lake’s edge, still unconscious.
“What are you planning to do with them?” she asked.
“Repaying a debt, obviously.” Wei Li glanced at her sideways, as if somewhat disappointed in her intelligence. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Three years ago, these girls’ fathers tried to seize your pathetic little sect and forced you into marriage. Hmph. Let that whole bunch of hypocrites taste what it’s like to lose a daughter too.”
Sang Ying: “…”
She lowered her head and sighed, rubbing her temple. “You said it yourself, they’re a bunch of hypocrites. What sincerity could there possibly be behind that pressure? All that urgency was probably just for show.”
The youth visibly stiffened, rubbing the back of his head in frustration.
“Besides, if the people themselves did wrong, then it’s the people themselves who should answer for it. These girls have nothing to do with it.”
Sang Ying leaned against the tree, her small face deathly pale, her voice very faint. “Let them go.”
“Fine… these ones can go.” Wei Li thought it over. “But this one—” he gestured, “Xu… Xu something, wasn’t it? He’s after your little sect too, one way or another. Can’t be wrong about him. I saw him once in his study, holding your portrait. He’s definitely plotting something to hurt you.”
Sang Ying sighed. “Rivalries over succession are always like that. Nothing worth dwelling on. What about the others?”
Wei Li leaned against the tree, kicking a foot up, listing them off one by one. “That second senior brother of yours ran the moment you fell into trouble, vanished for three years without a trace. Classic case of biting the hand that fed him [1]turning one’s back on kindness, forgetting righteousness (bei en wang yi, 背恩忘義) (Idiom), to repay someone’s past kindness with betrayal or ingratitude jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_3389882_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_3389882_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });.”
“That one’s not even the worst of it, though. Your husband’s the real villain here.”
As he spoke, the youth sat up, looking rather righteously indignant. “Those bastards tormented you back then, and there’s no way he didn’t know about it, yet he still agreed to help the Immortal Alliance rescue their daughters. Clear as day he never cared about the humiliation you suffered.”
Sang Ying sighed softly. “I already told you, they’re innocent.”
The gloomy youth glanced at her. “Fine. Then what about him falling for someone else?”
Sang Ying suddenly froze.
“I did some digging, you know. He’s fallen for some other girl, yeah, that so-called saint maiden from Jade Pool. I grabbed her too. What do you call this, a mistress, right? Once we’re done here I’ll give her and that bastard husband of yours both a proper beating.”
“That’s enough.”
“What devoted white moonlight for years, honestly, already married and still doing something like this, utterly shameless and rotten to the—”
“It was me who came between them.”
Wei Li paused mid-sentence, startled, and looked at the girl. “What did you just say?”
Sang Ying leaned against the tree, gazing at the moon reflected in the deep blue lake, her eyes calm and still. “I said, he never fell for anyone else. I’m the one who stood in their way.”
The wind stirred gently over the water’s ripples, and Sang Ying’s voice was just as gentle. “He only married me to repay the debt of once being saved. There was never any real affection between us to begin with. So how could there be any ‘falling for someone else’?”
Wei Li was momentarily speechless, never expecting things to be this way. The insults on the tip of his tongue died there. He scratched at his hair. “Whatever. He married you regardless, which makes you his. Already married and still liking someone else, that’s just a man with no sense of decency.”
Wei Li released the family girls, leaving only the one who remained, the successor to the Jade Pool saint maiden title, still unconscious, sleeping peacefully.
Sang Ying looked at her face. Just as the book had described, her bearing was gentle and pure.
There were plenty of rumors in the cultivation world about her—Shen Ying of Jade Pool, heaven’s favored daughter, astonishing in talent.
Actually, Sang Ying had met her once before.
That had been two years ago, when Xie Lingyu, out on a mission to slay demon beasts, had run into unexpected trouble and ended up trapped in an ancient secret realm alongside a group from Jade Pool.
The moment she’d heard the news, she’d wanted to go to him. At the time, barely a year had passed since the sect incident, with too many eyes watching from outside, and Lengmian had held her back, refusing to let her go.
By the time she’d finally arrived, they had already broken free of the secret realm. It was Xie Lingyu who, at great cost, had rescued several of the Jade Pool cultivators from that perilous place alongside him.
Xie Lingyu had been gravely wounded. He’d walked toward her, hadn’t even managed a single word, and collapsed heavily to the ground.
She’d panicked, at a complete loss, it was Shen Ying who’d stayed calm, gently reassuring her not to worry, using Jade Pool’s innate healing gift to treat Xie Lingyu’s injuries.
Rumors had started even then, that the two of them made a fitting match.
Two years ago, Sang Ying had furiously torn up the cultivation world’s gossip rag, unable to eat a bite that whole day, staring blankly at the moon all night instead.
Two years later, Sang Ying gazed quietly at the moon reflected in the lake, and thought.
They really were a fitting match.
Alright, little azure dragon, your wife’s about to be gone.
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