She gritted her teeth, one hand clamped tight over her chest, and muttered to herself in the lowest voice she could manage.
"I almost couldn't patch that one over."
That whole speech about returning to the origin and comprehending the Great Dao had been empty talk, improvised on the spot in a moment of panic.
She was no genius who had seen through to the origin of the sword dao. She had stood motionless in front of that entry stele for so long for exactly one reason: the carving was public, and she had been using every minute of it to cram the formulas of 《Ethereal Sword Art, Opening Chapter》 into her head by brute memorization.
In her last life she had been an ordinary male university student on a modern campus, fighting just to keep from failing her exams.
Then, overnight, she had crossed over into this cultivation world bristling with danger, and taken over the body of Chu Qingxue, Saintess of the Ethereal Sword Sect.
The body's original owner was acknowledged the world over as a daughter favored by heaven itself. At twenty she had cultivated to late-stage Golden Core; she possessed a top-grade mutated water spirit root and the Flawless Sword Body, one of the highest holy physiques; and her talent crowned the whole of the Eastern Wilds continent. She was someone the multitudes looked up to.
At first she had thought this was a heaven-dealt opening hand. But the only thing living inside this extraordinarily gifted body was a complete and utter outsider to cultivation.
Her cave dwelling was piled high with cultivation texts and sword manuals, and she could not make the slightest sense of the abstruse archaic script, the runes, the method formulas. Not one word of it.
She had wanted to ask her fellow disciples or the elders for guidance. But as the revered Saintess of the Sword Sect, the very top of the top tier in the Eastern Wilds' cultivation world, she had eyes on her from the other sects, from her junior brothers and junior sisters, from the sect elders. She had tried it once, questioning a few juniors under the pretext of an assessment — and by the next day everyone from the Elders' Hall down to the menial disciples knew of it. An elder called her in for questioning on the spot. After that she went back to studying quietly on her own and behaved herself.
What drove her further toward despair was that this body was nowhere near so simple.
Countless times she had tried to rouse the sword intent deep in its spirit meridians, hoping to practice a form, or half a form, in secret late at night where nobody would notice. But the Flawless Sword Body — the one the Eastern Wilds was said to see once in ten thousand years — had been a bolted door of black iron from the moment she took this body over. However she probed at it, however she pleaded with it, it had never given back so much as a flicker of response.
Three months, and she still could not make this body truly acknowledge her as its master.
With nowhere left to turn, all she could do was slip out at dawn or late at night, when few people were about, and study the entry section on the stele, hoping to copy it move for move and pick up at least a little.
But her own comprehension was poor. Sword forms and methods that others understood at a glance, she could read hundreds of times, thousands of times, and still never find her way into them.
What frightened her day and night above everything else was this: in an orthodox sect, body-snatching was a crime of the highest order.
The scene of a punishment she had witnessed not long ago flashed through her mind again — that body-snatching cultivator's soul sealed inside the Soul-Refining Lamp, true fire blazing high around it, shriek after shriek tearing out from within.
The image was still vivid before her eyes, and a cold that cut to the bone spread out from her marrow through her whole body.
In three months here she had walked on thin ice every single day, holding up the illusion of a peerless Saintess by copying the original owner's expressions, her movements, her every word and gesture.
Chu Qingxue wiped away the cold sweat that kept beading on her forehead, and the mess inside her settled a little.
Then the Second Elder's words — the Sect Master has called for you — surfaced in her mind again.
The heartbeat that had only just slowed began hammering wildly all over again.
What exactly did the Sect Master want with her?
Could it be...!
Had she let something slip these past months?
Chu Qingxue smoothed her disordered robes, drew a deep breath, and forced every trace of panic back down.
Within moments she had gathered up every emotion that showed and put the mask back on — aloof, otherworldly, of extraordinary bearing.
She tapped the ground with her toe, and a soft sword light lifted her body and carried her on the wind toward the sect's main hall.
As she flew, a few strands of pure water-attribute spiritual energy slipped from her fingertips by accident and condensed into fine beads of water in the air.
Her heart clenched. She focused at once and drew the energy back in, adjusting the rhythm of its circulation over and over.
The original owner's talent had been blessed by heaven beyond anyone else's, her control over spiritual energy and sword intent superb. Chu Qingxue still made small slips like this constantly.
The mountain wind sent her hem flying. On the surface she looked perfectly composed, yet the heart hanging in her chest would not come to rest.
She had been lucky on Dao-Seeking Peak, fooling the Second Elder with a string of lies, and had thought it might buy her a stretch of quiet. She had never expected the Sect Master to summon her out of nowhere.
She guessed at his intentions in secret the whole way there, unease spreading quietly through her, matching every movement she made to the way the original owner used to move, not daring to slacken for even an instant.