And so the momentous day finally arrived. My wife's birthday and, accordingly, her wedding to, for the time being, Xiao Che. Canon had officially begun.
We prepared for this day as thoroughly as humanly possible. It was mind-boggling how much effort and how many resources we'd spent just to make everything work properly. To understand the scale of the operation, you need to know that more than forty senior disciples from the Palace had been secretly combing the mountains near Floating Cloud City in search of one little flower—or Star Concealing Grass, to be precise. Jasmine was supposed to fall right next to that thing, and we needed to mark the landing site so that later, after Yun Che carried off the psycho child, we could rush in at waltz tempo and collect the Absolute God-Slaying Poison, among other things.
What? A rare treasure doesn't just lie around on the road. Though in this case, it literally was going to lie around on the road, and we couldn't afford to miss the opportunity. But that was only a secondary objective. The main objectives were information gathering and disinformation.
On the wedding day, our observers confirmed Xiao Che's death and immediately got the hell away from there, because reincarnation artifacts were acting up in the area, and the Ancestral Goddess might notice something she wasn't supposed to. Naturally, there could be no wedding, so by the time Yun Che arrived in his carriage at the gates of the Xia clan, everyone there was in mourning.
The body of "Xia Qingyue" lay in her room, while her father and brother wept inconsolably. And all the credit for that went to me. Every little detail had been directed by yours truly. Xia Yuanba really was crying, and that was part of the plan so he'd awaken his OP constitution. Xia Hongyi, meanwhile, was also genuinely crying, despite knowing the body in front of him wasn't his daughter's.
Simple. An hour earlier, I'd had a serious talk with my father-in-law about the dowry I expected from him. How else do you make a merchant cry sincerely? His daughter hadn't died. His hard-earned fortune had. The man was grieving.
And, of course, the third participant in this farce was the corpse of a girl who resembled my wife. That part was much more complicated. A simply similar-looking corpse wouldn't do. We had to throw a huge amount of effort and resources into the search, but eventually we found a girl from some small clan who was dying from an illness. If I could have cured her, I would have. But I wasn't a genius doctor like Yun Che, though I planned to become one. At that moment, the girl had no chance. Simple negotiations, and in exchange for resources for her clan, she agreed to die on our terms.
That same day, we brought her to Frozen Cloud Palace, where, at the cost of a pile of resources—including my direct involvement—the girl reached the True Profound Realm. Her body had enough time to transform under the influence of the Frozen Cloud Art, making her resemble Qingyue even more. An injury to one eye, a veil—and even Hongyi couldn't believe this wasn't his daughter. Meanwhile, my wife had changed a great deal recently in the opposite direction. Yue was older than she should have been thanks to the Dragon God's trial grounds. Like me, she now had piercing azure eyes, and her hair had acquired a bluish sheen, while mine remained black. My body was simply less prone to changing under various inheritances thanks to the Great Way of the Buddha.
What actually happened there, I never found out. We were already gone, though we remained not far from the city. In theory, Yun Che shouldn't have been too devastated over a wedding that never happened. Besides, he already had someone to take revenge on at the moment. He was probably already planning the ultraviolence he'd unleash on the clan master's son. Or was it his grandson?
Just in case, though, Hongyi said that the attackers had called themselves gods from the Darkya Realm. Why had they attacked? Nobody knew. The guard from the sect who had accompanied Qingyue had died as well. Xia Qingyue of Floating Cloud City was officially dead. End of story.
The second part was making sure the reward found its hero. What if the damn Trash failed to find Jasmine? That would have been ideal. Not because I had no conscience or didn't feel sorry for the child. I'm not that much of a monster. But this child called herself Jasmine, she was soaked in blood, or however she put it. She had already killed billions, and she possessed enough power to destroy this planet. Could she be rehabilitated? Definitely. With our resources? I doubted it.
Still, I felt like shit. I was already worried about the fate of the poor girl who had impersonated Qingyue—or rather, whose corpse was doing the impersonating—and now there was a child too. I felt like a genuine villain. Could I have redone everything? Probably, yes. Freeze the child in ice, collect the poison and develop immunity to it—Rage God, your technique is awesome, thanks, man—start cleansing her body and soul, and in forty years or so I'd probably deal with everything. The only problem was that all our plans would go straight to hell. In that amount of time, so much shit would happen that we simply weren't ready for.
Yes, I didn't like handing a child over into the claws of the "perverted Trash," but right now there was no other way.
All that soul-searching didn't stop me from watching the area and spotting Jasmine's fall to the planet not far from the Star Concealing Grass. How was I watching her from such a great distance? You'd have to be a complete idiot to possess power over ice and not come up with a decent optical technique. Not something small and precise like binoculars. Just two meter-wide pieces of ice of the right shape floating in the air. The experiments took a lot of time, and the control required was almost perfect, but I managed it, though not easily. How many times did the disciples, the fairies, and even my own women look at me like I was an idiot while I first tried to make perfectly smooth, transparent ice and then bent it with my own hands while scribbling incomprehensible notes? If Yue hadn't supported me, I would definitely have given up halfway through. But she was beside me and educated enough to appreciate the idea.
"Release the good rabbit," I gave the order, since I'd been appointed commander of the operation.
The idea was ridiculously simple. A trained little beast that probably wasn't actually a rabbit ran toward the child lying on the ground. The rabbit carried a ring in its teeth, tied with a bright red bow. Inside? Painkiller pills, ice essence capable of freezing the body and partly even the soul to save her from the pain, a couple of cleansing pills that obviously couldn't cure such a horrific poison but could partially slow its spread, and several other everyday little things.
I couldn't just watch a little girl suffer from that kind of pain. Yes, I put all my plans at risk. Yes, I didn't particularly like this character and thought she really belonged in a psychiatric prison for especially dangerous criminals, but... talking about something was one thing. Seeing it in front of you and doing nothing was another.
The rabbit, let's call it that, ran to the girl and promptly died from the poison—remembered and mourned. At first, the girl didn't even notice the heroically fallen rabbit, and that genuinely made me nervous. But before long, during another spasm of pain, she turned her head in the right direction and then used the resources I'd sent her in such an unconventional way. I breathed out in relief. The poor girl must have been desperate if she swallowed pills from an unknown source. They were labeled, sure, but in reality they could just as easily have been an even worse poison.
Trash Che didn't reach the girl until four hours later. All that time, even with our help, the poor girl suffered. Then everything went according to canon. Jasmine bit Yun Che's fingers, her body turned into a poisonous puddle, and she herself moved into the pearl. Our Trash Che then went back to his clan, delighted that he'd found such a valuable treasure as the Star Concealing Grass.
The hardest part of the plan.
On the way home, Yun Che was attacked by a beast at the Elementary Profound Realm. He lost quite a lot of blood there, which was exactly what we needed so we could collect it afterward, but the beast had been trained to bite only his legs, so Trash wasn't seriously harmed. This stage of the plan consumed more time than anything else. And even then, if not for my emergency preparations, nothing would have worked. The trash decided to wander around a little longer to clear his head, so he went back down to the clan by a completely different route. The beast we'd delivered to the area with second-by-second timing was too weak to sense Trash and attack him. And the operation had been conducted with surgical precision. The moment Yun Che ended up near Jasmine, several weaklings at the Elementary Profound Realm quickly brought the caged beast to the site and got the hell out. The cage itself was made of ice, so it broke apart very quickly.
Why all the complexity? So that the Ancestral Goddess wouldn't sense strong practitioners near her beloved nephew-lover and rush over to save him. Or maybe she had been watching him the whole time. We had to work as snipers from a huge distance. More precisely, Fairy Jun Lianqie, who was stationed nearby, fired tiny ice needles across that enormous distance, letting us steer the beast in the right direction. That hadn't been part of the plan, so we had to improvise on the fly, but the solution worked, and once again we breathed out in relief.
The beast itself was a whole separate story. All my medical skills—which, naturally, I wouldn't dream of comparing with Trash Che's—hadn't gone to waste. Do you know how hard chimerology is? I had to attach vials to the beast's fangs, turning it into a half-assed vampire so we'd obtain clean blood afterward. How else were we supposed to collect the blood from the ground? The spirits of nature would have cursed me if they'd known how many beasts I'd killed. Even my beloved Yue looked at me sideways. And I wasn't exactly thrilled with the solution myself, since digging around in meat wasn't my favorite activity either. How many times did I want to drop the whole thing and come up with something easier?
After that, everything was simpler. I personally went down to our UFO's landing site, cautiously collected almost all the poison in the area from a huge distance using long tools, buried the rest, and we got the hell out of there.
The entire plan had been worked out to a ridiculous degree, so everything went like clockwork, though there were still misfires. If Jasmine had simply lost consciousness after landing like a good girl, for example, we wouldn't have had to risk so much or expose ourselves. But what's done is done, and I don't regret it. In the end, you can't spend forever criticizing Trash and his patrons and then act exactly like them yourself.
Why did I need that trash's blood specifically after his reincarnation? Because I believed that was when he received some kind of inheritance, possibly hidden inside the Mirror of Samsara, or perhaps the Ancestral Goddess granted him that power at that moment. What a shame that by the time I died, only around eighteen hundred chapters had been released, or something like that. I'm sure there was some dramatic twist hidden in there. Something cheap. The plan was to use his blood to steal the inheritance that let Trash possess an endless number of inheritances. All those tricks with light and darkness at the same time, when even the Evil God couldn't play around like that—something like that would definitely come in handy.
Very soon, I was back in the Palace, which already felt like home, reporting to the Great Mistress.
"Are you finished?" Feng Qianhui asked when we were finally back at the Palace.
We were sitting in her room.
"Yes. Everything went according to plan."
"The next stage is the Blue Wind Tournament?"
"Exactly. There's an Emperor Awakening Heart Lotus there. With it, Yue can jump straight to the Emperor Profound Realm. That's useful for the Palace."
"Why not use it yourself?"
"Because of my channels. On the other hand, the stronger Yue gets, the faster I become stronger myself."
"Ah, yes. How could I forget?"
"Want me to make sure you never forget about my technique again?"
"You yourself said it wasn't time yet."
"You just needed to stabilize your realm and advance toward the second level. And you've already done that."
"The second level is still far away. Advancement in the Tyrant Profound Realm is no joke."
"And we have the perfect way to speed that up, don't we?"
"That is true, but not now."
"May I hear the rational reason for your refusal?"
"Not now."
The smart milf got embarrassed. Very embarrassed. It was funny and cute. Such a virtuous, responsible leader through and through, and now she was blushing like a girl.
"Let me guess. You have personal doubts. You don't want to be 'just another one.' You do know that isn't how I see you at all, right?"
"Isn't it? Isn't little Yue your one and only beloved wife?"
I did something I'd never done before: stepped closer to her and touched her cheek with my fingers.
"Qianhui, you know that isn't true. You know I've liked you for a long time, and you'll never be 'just another one' to me. What kind of nonsense are you filling your head with? What proof of my serious intentions do you need?"
"Well, if my daughter could accept you..." And here came the quests. Damn it.
Maybe I should retreat? To hell with this kind of trouble, but... this woman was worth the effort.
"And how am I supposed to become friends with your daughter?"
"Just keep doing what you're doing now. Help the children, strengthen the Palace, bring rare resources. You're already on the right path. She doesn't hate you nearly as much anymore."
"Maybe there's something specific?"
"Most likely, if you truly give Yue the Emperor Lotus instead of keeping such a valuable resource for yourself, her opinion of you will change a great deal."
"I'm supposed to wait patiently for two years?"
"You have plenty of work, and the fairies won't let you get bored. And I'm not talking only about the Chu sisters."
"Isn't that a little too much? Then your daughter will hate me completely."
"No. She, the fairies, and I have already discussed it. In such a short time, Yueli has already reached the eighth level of the Sky Profound Realm and will soon become an Emperor. That's an enormous leap in growth. And under the influence of your yang energy, her profound entrances are opening."
"So why don't you try progressing just as quickly yourself? Want me to work on your entrances too?"
I still couldn't resist making one last attempt, doomed from the start.
"Only after you fulfill my condition. And yes, you guessed correctly: I will not be 'another one.' Is that clear?"
"Of course, darling."
"For now," she stepped closer and initiated a kiss herself. It didn't last nearly as long as I'd hoped. "Here's your advance. Behave yourself, work hard, and the reward will be generous."
"You do realize you're driving me insane, right?" I didn't let her out of my arms.
"That's all right. Patience is a virtue. For now, start studying the Divine Art of Absolute Ice. Tell the fairies, and they'll take you and your wife to the wall."