Taiyan Sect.
The immortal palace of Venerable Lingyue was situated atop Dragon Ridge Peak. The palace was named "Wuji," constructed from ten-thousand-year mystic ice. Few ever set foot there; even the sect's immortal cranes flew around it, for neither great cultivators nor spiritual birds could withstand the all-pervading, bone-piercing cold.
Yet today, for the first time in anyone's memory, the five peak lords braved the bitter chill and came to Dragon Ridge Peak.
The five senior disciples—brothers and sisters in the same lineage—were all direct disciples of the old sect master, Daoist Xuji. They had come of their own accord to stand guard for their junior brother while his soul was transferred.
Three months prior, the seal on the Primal Chaos Domain had loosened. Venerable Lingyue had made a trip to the Northern Abyss and drawn out three of his own ribs to reinforce the formation. Upon his return, he needed to recuperate in the cold pool at the peak's summit until his bones grew back whole.
To that end, the old sect master of the Yanshi Sect, who had long since retired, came out of seclusion personally to craft a puppet shell for him—a temporary vessel for his soul during his convalescence.
The five great cultivators—all ranked within the top twenty of the Three Realms—stood at the palace gates, rubbing their hands, stamping their feet, and shivering, utterly devoid of their usual immortal bearing.
"Junior brother's palace is just too cold…"
"Cold is one thing, but can't the lights inside be changed? The moment you walk in, everything turns ashen gray, and there are no shadows. Every time I go in, I get the creeps. Won't living there too long breed a heart demon?"
"You need a heart first before a heart demon can breed…"
"Junior brother simply doesn't like colors clamoring for his eyes, so he had these colorless, shadowless lamps custom-made. The lampshades were dug out from the depths of the Western Ming Sea—mist crystals…"
"Whoa! How many spirit stones must that have cost!"
Though they were still several dozen zhang from the Wuji Hall, they still cautiously used secret sound transmission—their junior brother's cultivation had reached a height they could no longer estimate. If he overheard them gossiping, that would be bad.
Their junior brother was gentle and courteous to them, but somehow they always felt a vague sense of trepidation around him.
Probably because his cultivation was so high that he naturally emanated an aura of pressure.
…
Fu Tingyun lay expressionless on the priceless mystic ice bed, listening to his senior brothers and sisters prattle on.
They were using secret sound transmission, keeping their voices extremely low, thinking themselves discreet—little did they know he was forced to hear every word clearly.
In his eyes, people fell into two categories: those who could be killed, and those who should not be killed. The second category had a total of six names on its list. Everyone outside the second category belonged to the first.
These five all belonged to the second category.
Very noisy, but not to be killed.
The five of them entered the Wuji Hall while whispering via secret transmission.
The second senior brother had always been the most sentimental of them all. He stepped forward and carefully took his junior brother's hand, stroking it, tears in his eyes: "Junior brother, why didn't you tell your senior brothers and sisters when you got hurt? Just thinking of you lying alone in this cold, icy Wuji Hall…"
Before he could finish, a cold, indifferent voice drifted over from beside him, chilling to the bone. Everyone present involuntarily shuddered.
"That's the puppet."
"Ha, ha," Second Senior Brother laughed awkwardly twice, let go of the puppet's hand, and patted the back of it. "Your senior brother is getting old. His eyesight is getting worse and worse."
He turned and sent a secret transmission to his companions: "I knew it. I was just thinking, why does today's junior brother look a bit more lively?"
The others all agreed.
"You're not wrong, you're really not wrong."
"No wonder Second Senior Brother mistook it. If you asked me to guess, I'd also pick that one as the real person…"
"Oh dear! We almost forgot the main task," said the eldest senior sister. "Hey, hey, hey, everyone take your positions, don't get mixed up… No wait, Old Five, how have you mixed up Azure Dragon and White Tiger again? You should be standing over there…"
After saying this, he turned his head and smiled at his youngest junior brother. "Don't worry, little junior brother. With your senior sister and senior brothers here, nothing will go wrong!"
Fu Tingyun had entered the sect at three and a half years old and had been raised personally by his master, Daoist Lord Xuji. He knew very well how to deal with people who were emotionally effusive but not particularly gifted.
His tone was calm, without the slightest ripple. "It's only a small spell. There's no need to trouble my senior brothers and sisters."
"How can that be!" Second Senior Brother's voice trembled, and hot tears spilled from his eyes. "You child, you keep everything from us. If the Yanshi Sect hadn't come to deliver the puppet, we'd still be in the dark! Before Master passed, he specifically instructed us to look after you… We've truly failed Master's spirit in heaven."
Daoist Lord Xuji had perished when his primordial spirit was destroyed, his soul scattering between heaven and earth. There was no spirit in heaven.
Fu Tingyun wisely did not say this aloud.
The group fussed about for quite a while longer before finally taking their positions and setting up the formation.
"Little junior brother, the soul-shifting technique is no small matter. Don't rush, take it slow…"
Before Second Senior Brother could finish speaking, the spirit pattern between Fu Tingyun's brows flickered, and his primordial spirit had already left his body.
The soul-shifting technique was indeed very dangerous. Every few years, news would spread of a great cultivator meeting with an accident during soul-shifting. But that did not include Fu Tingyun.
To him, this technique was as simple as drinking a glass of water.
It was just unfortunate that the Yanshi Sect had sent an ordinary-looking young disciple to deliver goods, who had been spotted by Third Senior Sister. As a result, they discovered his injury. After the senior and junior brothers and sisters put their heads together, they made a big fuss about coming to protect him during the process.
If not for that, he would have finished shifting his soul long ago.
Cries of alarm from his senior sisters and brothers reached his ears, but Fu Tingyun's heart was utterly calm.
If he could make a mistake even in shifting his soul, then he might as well stop cultivating immortality and hurry up and perish.
In an instant, he felt the familiar pull of the formation and landed steadily in the puppet's spirit mansion.
Very simple.
So simple that… something had gone wrong.
Fu Tingyun did not need to wait for his five senses to recover to know something had gone wrong.
The puppet body he had prepared was forged with his own flesh and blood and could accommodate his soul.
But the one before him now had a spirit mansion that was far too small. Forcing himself inside was like having his entire body bound tightly in flood-dragon hide and then cinched with a dark-iron hoop—except what was bound was not his body but his primordial spirit.
Aside from the spirit mansion, the meridians were also narrow and thin. Too much spiritual energy had been poured in, and they were nearly bursting.
Tight, suffocating, oppressive—very uncomfortable.
His soul-shifting technique could not possibly go wrong, and this could not be an ordinary puppet either—it had to have a spirit-gathering formation that he himself had personally laid, and it had to be able to contain thirty percent of his spiritual power.
It took Fu Tingyun only a single breath to understand: this was the old puppet body he had used three years ago.
At the time, there had been no time to remake one with his own flesh and blood, so he had chosen one from the ten sent by the Puppet Sect Master that was barely pleasing to the eye, merged a drop of his blood into it, used it for only a month, and then discarded it.
It had been transported to the Melting Abyss then. It should have been destroyed long ago. Something must have gone wrong during the destruction process—the Melting Abyss was guarded in rotation by those five people, so it was hardly surprising.
The spirit-gathering formation in the old puppet was still there and had activated before the new formation. That was why he had ended up here.
Because the size was unsuitable, he would need to merge with this puppet until he could use half his cultivation base—at minimum seven days, at most ten.
It would take those people at least three days to realize something was wrong, then at least ten more days to go to the Puppet Sect and ask someone to investigate the cause, find out his whereabouts, and send people to look for him…
Fu Tingyun calculated: two ten-day periods at the fastest.
But a puppet body couldn't transmit sound across thousands of miles.
At this moment, he had only two paths: the first was to damage his own primordial spirit, break the formation, and destroy this puppet—his soul would naturally return to the new puppet, but the damage to himself would be immense, requiring at least a year to recover.
The second path was to wait quietly for three months.
Even a three-year-old child knew which to choose.
He didn't hesitate to merge his soul with the formation, but just then, he discovered something in the spirit-gathering array that shouldn't exist.
Among the countless golden threads, there was an extra red thread as thin as a spider's silk.
It was the blood of another person—a mortal whose cultivation was practically nonexistent.
The moment it was discovered, the frail, slender red thread drifted over, trembling, tentatively brushing against him, then immediately darted away. After a moment, seeming to see no reaction from him, it grew bolder and wrapped itself around his pinky finger.
For the first time in his life, Fu Tingyun felt a sense of absurdity.
A wisp of his aura remained in the puppet bodies he had used, equivalent to a restriction no one could undo. Not to mention forming a blood contract—even attempting to probe his meridians would invite backlash, resulting in death or madness.
That person's cultivation was low, their aptitude practically nil—they must have used some extraordinary means.
He looked at the fragile red thread wound around his soul form. Such a spell could bind an ordinary puppet, but trying to bind his soul was nothing short of a dream. A single flick would snap the thread, and along with it, that person would be scattered to the winds.
Breaking the contract would also backlash against him, but compared to being bound by something unknown, that backlash was nothing.
Yet for some reason, he didn't act immediately.
Perhaps it was a hint of curiosity—how had that low-cultivation mortal managed to place a blood contract on his puppet?
Curiosity was also unfamiliar to him.
His soul began to merge with the formation, and his senses gradually returned.
The first to recover was his sense of smell.
Amid the thick, pungent scent of incense, there was a trace that didn't belong to any fragrant flower or herb—faint, delicate, very much like that red thread, belonging to the same person.
Next came his sense of touch.
Damp heat, suffocating closeness—utterly different from his Wuji Palace, but he couldn't yet tell where this place was.
In the dense moisture, someone was moving—a woman.
Though he still couldn't see, the currents of air traced her silhouette clearly in his mind—like some flower that didn't exist, with a slender stem and thin, fragile petals that would snap at a bend and bruise at a touch. Her spiritual power was even weaker than some spiritual flowers.
She held her breath, raised her hand, and extended a single finger.
Fu Tingyun didn't know what such a thin finger could possibly do.
For the first time, he discovered there were things in this world he couldn't fathom.
Then that finger poked at his waist and abdomen.
Very lightly, like a butterfly alighting for a single instant.
His vision happened to return at that very moment.
He lowered his eyes slightly, gazing in bewilderment at this utterly inexplicable mortal girl.
Now she wasn't just a silhouette—she had color, many colors, especially shades of pink and white in varying depths.
Each color could be further divided into countless subtle gradations, all blurred by the moisture into a haze of peach-blossom mist.
Fu Tingyun had never liked things with too many colors.
That was why his Wuji Hall used specially crafted lamps that filtered out all extraneous hues.
At this moment, he hadn't yet fully merged with the puppet and couldn't speak, so he simply gave her a cold look.
The girl instantly tensed, snatched her hand back, and raised her eyes to look at him uneasily—her eyes, clear and bright, seemed to hold a pool of spring water.
Then he saw her part her lips, moist and glistening, like flower petals dampened by a light rain.
The last sense to return was hearing.
A soft, gentle voice sounded by his ear: "S-sorry… I might need to take off your pants…"
Fu Tingyun understood the meaning of these words, yet he did not understand.
Was she speaking human language? Or did she mean something else?
Before he could figure it out, the young girl had already reached toward his waist. Her slender fingers hooked onto the drawstring of his undergarments and began untying the dead knot.
Her head was bowed very low, revealing a section of her snow-white neck, which gradually took on a pink hue as fine beads of sweat seeped out, dampening the soft down at her hairline.
As her hands worked, she muttered under her breath: "Sorry, I mean, I might need to take a slight look at your… that sword… its dimensions, length, hardness and such… otherwise, it might be inconvenient to proceed…"
It took Fu Tingyun several breaths before he understood what she was doing and saying, yet he still did not understand.
Was she truly speaking human language?
The moment the knot came undone, it triggered the restrictive formation, and the mortal girl was sent flying by a gust of spiritual wind.
…
Su Xiaoyuan was completely dazed.
The puppet's waistband had been tied in a dead knot. She had spent ages trying to untie it, growing more and more embarrassed. The more embarrassed she became, the more she rambled nonsense trying to ease the awkwardness, which only made it worse.
She'd worked up a sweat from anxiety, and finally managed to untie it, only for a blinding white light to flash before her eyes. Her fingertips tingled as if struck by electricity, and her whole body was sent flying into the air.
Some pants look like just an ordinary pair of pants, but are actually a hundred-thousand-volt Pikachu chastity pants!
With a splash, Su Xiaoyuan fell into the hot spring pool.
As luck would have it, she landed right in the deepest part of the center, where the water rose above her head.
She had learned spells, but after that electric shock just now, the pitifully scant spiritual energy in her meridians seemed to have been instantly drained. Her whole body was numb, and she simply couldn't regulate her breathing or channel her qi.
And she couldn't swim!
Instinctive fear seized Su Xiaoyuan. The more panicked she became, the more mistakes she made. She thrashed wildly in the water, gulping down mouthful after mouthful of water with a "glug glug."
Tears from choking and the hot spring water blurred her vision.
"Help… help!" she cried out to the puppet.
But the puppet merely stood quietly at the water's edge, chin slightly raised, watching her struggle in the water with cold eyes.