Xi Mengfei watched patiently as Zhang Cuiying finished her painting. The drawing was of a mountain filled with spirituality. Mengfei's eyes could easily see the slight growth of the plants on the painted mountain. Rather than a painting, it was more like a window to another world where the mountain existed.
"Elder Xi, thank you for waiting."
Zhang Cuiying's voice was neither loud nor soft with her words. It was as if she was going through the motions.
"It was a pleasure seeing Elder Zhang forging a minor realm. There is no need for Elder Zhang to be so courteous after all you have done for me."
Mengfei said as she pushed a box forward towards Zhang Cuiying.
Zhang Cuiying looks at the box before shaking her head. "I cannot take this. I agreed to protect your son as payment, but I didn't fulfill my end of the bargain, and he was drifting outside for months without my aid. If not for Elder Meng, I would not have been able to deter Monarch Soulfish."
"No matter what, you still fought back Monarch Soulfish from reaping Tianyi's soul, this is a fact I cannot ignore. If not for you, Elder Meng would not have been able to stop Monarch Soulfish without your appearance."
Zhang Cuiying saw the resolute will within Mengfei's eyes and accepted the box in the bell. She opened it to see several lotus seeds. Taking half, she returned the box to Mengfei.
"I only half fulfilled the bargain, so this will be enough."
Mengfei did not attempt to continue to persuade Zhang Cuiying and stored away the rest of the lotus seeds within the box. The two began to discuss various things while drinking fragrant tea.
Zhang Cuiying looked at Mengfei holding the teacup with her left hand and then looked at her right sleeve. There was no hand poking out of it.
"How are your injuries?"
Zhang Cuiying said, again, there was no fluctuation within her voice to reveal her inner thoughts.
Mengfei placed the teacup down and pulled her right sleeve back to reveal a fleshly stump. The stump was raw red with pulsating muscles and shattered bone fragments.
"It won't decay anymore, but this injury is the result of a dead divinity. I need about ten years at least to heal from it." Mengfei said, her voice was calm as if she had not lost her dominant hand.
"Was it worth it?" Zhang Cuiying asked.
"Yes," Mengfei said as she looked at the spatial ring on her left hand. Behind her was a levitating sword casket about two meters long and half a meter wide.
The white sword casket had been floating behind Xi Mengfei ever since she had returned to the Buzhou Immortal Sect. Though it was sealed tight with nothing leaking from the seams, Zhang Cuiying could detect the heaven-slaughtering aura within. Even she, who attained the Extremity Immortal Realm, felt fear of the sword within.
"I am not talking about physical gains. When you explored the shattered primordial world, if the devils captured you, your fate would be worse than death. All this for a problem that solved itself?" Zhang Cuiying said as she stared at her half-empty teacup.
"It is good that Tianyi was able to solve the issue himself. In the future, perhaps he would become even more powerful than me." There was a tinge of pride that Mengfei could not detect in her voice.
"Are you that sure of it?" Zhang Cuiying asked, not looking up from her cup. "Had you had the same resources and guidance at your age, your cultivation would have likely surpassed his."
Mengfei shook her head in refusal of Zhang Cuiying's words. "I disagree, Tianyi has shown a great affinity towards the Ten Heavenly Scriptures, even managing to create a new martial cultivation method using the Spatial and Timeless Heavenly Scriptures. My son has even successfully cultivated the Lotus Ascension Soul Art that you reconstructed from the Soulheart Heavenly Scripture."
There was a slight twitch of the lips from Mengfei's words. Zhang Cuiying took another sip from the tea. "Speaking of the Lotus Ascension Soul Art, I heard from Sect Master Xia that your son learned it at the seventh level of Immortal Scripture Repository. That technique should have been sealed at the ninth level, yet it was left with a disposable jade slip on the seventh level. Sect Master Xia had already investigated; no one touched the copy left on the ninth level."
"Elder Zhang, you found the fragmented Soulheart Scripture, do you have any suspects?" Mengfei asked.
"What, aren't you going to suspect me? The Lotus Ascension Art is a forbidden technique I created to allow a fragmented soul to reconstitute itself and be reborn. Alas, it was a failure in the end, not even fit to be cultivated." Zhang Cuiying said, with a hint of self-mockery at the end.
"I know Elder Zhang's personality very well; such an underhand trick is above you," Mengfei said, not even suspecting Zhang Cuiying of having any harmful actions towards Tianyi. She had the perfect chance to allow Tianyi to perish. Rescuing him and then using her methods to get rid of Tianyi was beyond foolish.
What Mengfei didn't mention was that using a method Zhang Cuiying created to revive him to murder someone else was below her bottom line.
"You shouldn't be so decisive of your assessment of others. People change, even immortals like us." Zhang Cuiying looked at Mengfei's features.
Compared to the twenty years ago, the sudden maturity of Mengfei's features may seem negligible. Still, it was a sudden development if you realized that ever since Mengfei started cultivating, her appearance stayed the same, never exceeding twenty. As for when Mengfei began to mature, the answer was obvious.
Idly, Zhang Cuiying wondered if she too would age had she had a child with him.
"The scariest part is that people don't even realize they've changed." Saying those words, Zhang Cuiying looked at Mengfei, who seemed not to understand.
After a few more words, Mengfei left. But she did not directly return to Jade Peak and instead went to find the Sect Master. She had just returned, but she didn't expect to hear the news of someone deliberately leaving the Lotus Ascension Soul Art for Tianyi. Mengfei had thought Tianyi had chosen it himself knowing the flaws but successfully cultivated anyways. Her conversation with Zhang Cuiying revealed otherwise.
When Mengfei showed up with her inquiries, there was a sense of helplessness from Sect Master Xia. Although he had investigated as much as he could, there were no clues of anyone copying the Lotus Ascension Soul Art onto a jade slip and leaving it in the seventh level of the Immortal Scripture Repository.
If the manual hadn't copied from the Immortal Scripture Repository's top level, then the suspicion would fall on Grand Elder Zhang Cuiying and the members of Forlorn Void Peak, who had access to the manual before. Even if it hadn't been copied from Forlorn Void Peak, there was still the matter of how someone was able to slip into the Immortal Scripture Repository without a word. The biggest suspect was naturally Grand Elder Zhang, but Sect Master Xia was clear about Grand Elder Zhang's personality.
On the surface, this was just a matter of a promising disciple and child of a Grand Elder learning the wrong technique that could have led to his death. But if the culprit was capable of leaving a technique soundlessly on the seventh level, what prevented the culprit from doing the same on the lower levels and harming the disciples' future? The culprit could have easily stolen all the techniques within. It would be even worse if the technique really were copied from the ninth level.
Mengfei left after the Sect Master promised to keep her updated on the situation.
When she did return to Jade Peak Palace, her nephew Xi Ri was nowhere to be found, Daoyi was cultivating on the Jade Lotus Clear Pond, and Tianyi was waiting near the front."
"Yi'er," Mengfei said, more to test the words on her lips than to call out to Tianyi.
Looking at this child of hers, perhaps Tianyi himself didn't realize it, but his features were slowly changing as he grew up. There were some of hers, but there was also that man's mixed within. At the very least, the Dragon Emperor's features were no longer as prominent.
Mengfei's eyes flashed with a hint of coldness too quick for anyone to notice. As she looked at Tianyi, another image began to overlap with Tianyi's.
Both of them wore the clothing, although one was far more ostentatious. Unlike Tianyi, the second figure didn't inherit her eyes, and his personality was a tyrant. During her cultivation of extremity, she had seen another version of herself also not aborting the accidental child in her womb. But that child wasn't a child.
She had seen that child bully the other people in the Buzhou Immortal Sect and even build himself a harem of beautiful servant girls and disciples. A despot who did as he liked. Many times the thought of just kicking him out and exterminating him crossed her mind, but she never went through with it and instead cleaned up the mess he created.
It wasn't until he was undergoing his Immortal Ascension Heavenly Tribulation that she made up her mind and killed that child.
No, not child.
Xi Longyi, the Dragon Emperor.
"Mother, did you say something?" Mengfei broke out of her musings as she looked at this familiar face. She had also seen this face after slaying the Dragon Emperor looking in shock when she discovered him.
"Nothing," Mengfei said.
Reaching her realm, during cultivation, she would often enter a dream and experience the lives of her alternate versions of herself. Perhaps she had not entered the Buzhou Immortal Sect and lived the remainder of her life as a princess of the Xi Dynasty, or maybe she had discovered her talent and rose to fame as a loose cultivator.
The only significant difference in that one dream was the sudden appearance of Tianyi. It was that one instant that made her hesitate and give birth to the current Tianyi.
After checking over Tianyi's progress, Mengfei took out the box and handed it to Tianyi. "Yi'er, this is a Primordial Chaos Fruit I found in the Vast Void. If you ingest it, your understanding of the Dao of Chaos will increase."
Tianyi received the box, not noticing that Mengfei's right hand had been constructed out of qi.
"Thank you mother, did you go to the Vast Void just for this?" Tianyi asked as he connected the dots on why Mengfei had left.
Mengfei shook her head and looked towards the sword casket behind her. "I had gotten clues of a divine artifact from the Primordial Era; the Primordial Chaos Fruit was something that I picked along the way."
That was a lie. Mengfei had entered the shattered primordial world to search for the Primordial Chaos Fruit. The divine artifact within the sword casket was a fortuitous encounter as a by-product of her adventure.
Tianyi looked at the sword casket with great interest. "What kind of divine artifact is it?"
"The divine artifact used to be four divine artifacts. Right now, only their shards remain. I am nurturing it and reforging it into an artifact." Xi Mengfei said without too much importance. "Yi'er go absorb the Primordial Chaos Fruit, the sooner you do so, the better."
The Primordial Chaos Fruit was one of the top ten treasures to understand the Dao, but if it were to forge a treasure or concoct a pill, it would have been a better use. If an immortal used it to reforge their body, an average immortal would attain the power of a Seamless Immortal, an Immortal Monarch. It was even useful for Mengfei. If she used it for herself, not only would her hand recover, but her physical strength would increase by a level. For her constitution to increase at her current realm was beyond hard, it would take hundreds of years normally. And that was even considered fast!
Tianyi, who was unaware of all this, retreated to his room under Mengfei's urging to ingest the fruit. Mengfei's eyes lingered on the wax gold pendant on Tianyi's waist for a moment, causing it to shiver under her gaze, but she averted it soon after. It didn't seem to harm Tianyi, so she would not interfere for now.
Afterward, Mengfei traveled to the Jade Lotus Clear Pond. Her only disciple, Jiang Daoyi, was quietly cultivating there. Tianyi was her son, and she was worried about having him under anyone else as his master, so she taught him personally.
Mengfei had thought Jiang Daoyi would have been an ordinary disciple who would not shine against all the other geniuses within the Buzhou Immortal Sect. But against her expectations, Daoyi had proven herself to be a diamond in the rough, causing Mengfei to put more effort into raising her. As she watched Daoyi cultivate, she had found that Tianyi and Daoyi were slightly similar in a way she couldn't adequately describe, as if they had some unknown connection.
Xi Mengfei watched patiently as Zhang Cuiying finished her painting. The drawing was of a mountain filled with spirituality. Mengfei's eyes could easily see the slight growth of the plants on the painted mountain. Rather than a painting, it was more like a window to another world where the mountain existed.
"Elder Xi, thank you for waiting."
Zhang Cuiying's voice was neither loud nor soft with her words. It was as if she was going through the motions.
"It was a pleasure seeing Elder Zhang forging a minor realm. There is no need for Elder Zhang to be so courteous after all you have done for me."
Mengfei said as she pushed a box forward towards Zhang Cuiying.
Zhang Cuiying looks at the box before shaking her head. "I cannot take this. I agreed to protect your son as payment, but I didn't fulfill my end of the bargain, and he was drifting outside for months without my aid. If not for Elder Meng, I would not have been able to deter Monarch Soulfish."
"No matter what, you still fought back Monarch Soulfish from reaping Tianyi's soul, this is a fact I cannot ignore. If not for you, Elder Meng would not have been able to stop Monarch Soulfish without your appearance."
Zhang Cuiying saw the resolute will within Mengfei's eyes and accepted the box in the bell. She opened it to see several lotus seeds. Taking half, she returned the box to Mengfei.
"I only half fulfilled the bargain, so this will be enough."
Mengfei did not attempt to continue to persuade Zhang Cuiying and stored away the rest of the lotus seeds within the box. The two began to discuss various things while drinking fragrant tea.
Zhang Cuiying looked at Mengfei holding the teacup with her left hand and then looked at her right sleeve. There was no hand poking out of it.
"How are your injuries?"
Zhang Cuiying said, again, there was no fluctuation within her voice to reveal her inner thoughts.
Mengfei placed the teacup down and pulled her right sleeve back to reveal a fleshly stump. The stump was raw red with pulsating muscles and shattered bone fragments.
"It won't decay anymore, but this injury is the result of a dead divinity. I need about ten years at least to heal from it." Mengfei said, her voice was calm as if she had not lost her dominant hand.
"Was it worth it?" Zhang Cuiying asked.
"Yes," Mengfei said as she looked at the spatial ring on her left hand. Behind her was a levitating sword casket about two meters long and half a meter wide.
The white sword casket had been floating behind Xi Mengfei ever since she had returned to the Buzhou Immortal Sect. Though it was sealed tight with nothing leaking from the seams, Zhang Cuiying could detect the heaven-slaughtering aura within. Even she, who attained the Extremity Immortal Realm, felt fear of the sword within.
"I am not talking about physical gains. When you explored the shattered primordial world, if the devils captured you, your fate would be worse than death. All this for a problem that solved itself?" Zhang Cuiying said as she stared at her half-empty teacup.
"It is good that Tianyi was able to solve the issue himself. In the future, perhaps he would become even more powerful than me." There was a tinge of pride that Mengfei could not detect in her voice.
"Are you that sure of it?" Zhang Cuiying asked, not looking up from her cup. "Had you had the same resources and guidance at your age, your cultivation would have likely surpassed his."
Mengfei shook her head in refusal of Zhang Cuiying's words. "I disagree, Tianyi has shown a great affinity towards the Ten Heavenly Scriptures, even managing to create a new martial cultivation method using the Spatial and Timeless Heavenly Scriptures. My son has even successfully cultivated the Lotus Ascension Soul Art that you reconstructed from the Soulheart Heavenly Scripture."
There was a slight twitch of the lips from Mengfei's words. Zhang Cuiying took another sip from the tea. "Speaking of the Lotus Ascension Soul Art, I heard from Sect Master Xia that your son learned it at the seventh level of Immortal Scripture Repository. That technique should have been sealed at the ninth level, yet it was left with a disposable jade slip on the seventh level. Sect Master Xia had already investigated; no one touched the copy left on the ninth level."
"Elder Zhang, you found the fragmented Soulheart Scripture, do you have any suspects?" Mengfei asked.
"What, aren't you going to suspect me? The Lotus Ascension Art is a forbidden technique I created to allow a fragmented soul to reconstitute itself and be reborn. Alas, it was a failure in the end, not even fit to be cultivated." Zhang Cuiying said, with a hint of self-mockery at the end.
"I know Elder Zhang's personality very well; such an underhand trick is above you," Mengfei said, not even suspecting Zhang Cuiying of having any harmful actions towards Tianyi. She had the perfect chance to allow Tianyi to perish. Rescuing him and then using her methods to get rid of Tianyi was beyond foolish.
What Mengfei didn't mention was that using a method Zhang Cuiying created to revive him to murder someone else was below her bottom line.
"You shouldn't be so decisive of your assessment of others. People change, even immortals like us." Zhang Cuiying looked at Mengfei's features.
Compared to the twenty years ago, the sudden maturity of Mengfei's features may seem negligible. Still, it was a sudden development if you realized that ever since Mengfei started cultivating, her appearance stayed the same, never exceeding twenty. As for when Mengfei began to mature, the answer was obvious.
Idly, Zhang Cuiying wondered if she too would age had she had a child with him.
"The scariest part is that people don't even realize they've changed." Saying those words, Zhang Cuiying looked at Mengfei, who seemed not to understand.
After a few more words, Mengfei left. But she did not directly return to Jade Peak and instead went to find the Sect Master. She had just returned, but she didn't expect to hear the news of someone deliberately leaving the Lotus Ascension Soul Art for Tianyi. Mengfei had thought Tianyi had chosen it himself knowing the flaws but successfully cultivated anyways. Her conversation with Zhang Cuiying revealed otherwise.
When Mengfei showed up with her inquiries, there was a sense of helplessness from Sect Master Xia. Although he had investigated as much as he could, there were no clues of anyone copying the Lotus Ascension Soul Art onto a jade slip and leaving it in the seventh level of the Immortal Scripture Repository.
If the manual hadn't copied from the Immortal Scripture Repository's top level, then the suspicion would fall on Grand Elder Zhang Cuiying and the members of Forlorn Void Peak, who had access to the manual before. Even if it hadn't been copied from Forlorn Void Peak, there was still the matter of how someone was able to slip into the Immortal Scripture Repository without a word. The biggest suspect was naturally Grand Elder Zhang, but Sect Master Xia was clear about Grand Elder Zhang's personality.
On the surface, this was just a matter of a promising disciple and child of a Grand Elder learning the wrong technique that could have led to his death. But if the culprit was capable of leaving a technique soundlessly on the seventh level, what prevented the culprit from doing the same on the lower levels and harming the disciples' future? The culprit could have easily stolen all the techniques within. It would be even worse if the technique really were copied from the ninth level.
Mengfei left after the Sect Master promised to keep her updated on the situation.
When she did return to Jade Peak Palace, her nephew Xi Ri was nowhere to be found, Daoyi was cultivating on the Jade Lotus Clear Pond, and Tianyi was waiting near the front."
"Yi'er," Mengfei said, more to test the words on her lips than to call out to Tianyi.
Looking at this child of hers, perhaps Tianyi himself didn't realize it, but his features were slowly changing as he grew up. There were some of hers, but there was also that man's mixed within. At the very least, the Dragon Emperor's features were no longer as prominent.
Mengfei's eyes flashed with a hint of coldness too quick for anyone to notice. As she looked at Tianyi, another image began to overlap with Tianyi's.
Both of them wore the clothing, although one was far more ostentatious. Unlike Tianyi, the second figure didn't inherit her eyes, and his personality was a tyrant. During her cultivation of extremity, she had seen another version of herself also not aborting the accidental child in her womb. But that child wasn't a child.
She had seen that child bully the other people in the Buzhou Immortal Sect and even build himself a harem of beautiful servant girls and disciples. A despot who did as he liked. Many times the thought of just kicking him out and exterminating him crossed her mind, but she never went through with it and instead cleaned up the mess he created.
It wasn't until he was undergoing his Immortal Ascension Heavenly Tribulation that she made up her mind and killed that child.
No, not child.
Xi Longyi, the Dragon Emperor.
"Mother, did you say something?" Mengfei broke out of her musings as she looked at this familiar face. She had also seen this face after slaying the Dragon Emperor looking in shock when she discovered him.
"Nothing," Mengfei said.
Reaching her realm, during cultivation, she would often enter a dream and experience the lives of her alternate versions of herself. Perhaps she had not entered the Buzhou Immortal Sect and lived the remainder of her life as a princess of the Xi Dynasty, or maybe she had discovered her talent and rose to fame as a loose cultivator.
The only significant difference in that one dream was the sudden appearance of Tianyi. It was that one instant that made her hesitate and give birth to the current Tianyi.
After checking over Tianyi's progress, Mengfei took out the box and handed it to Tianyi. "Yi'er, this is a Primordial Chaos Fruit I found in the Vast Void. If you ingest it, your understanding of the Dao of Chaos will increase."
Tianyi received the box, not noticing that Mengfei's right hand had been constructed out of qi.
"Thank you mother, did you go to the Vast Void just for this?" Tianyi asked as he connected the dots on why Mengfei had left.
Mengfei shook her head and looked towards the sword casket behind her. "I had gotten clues of a divine artifact from the Primordial Era; the Primordial Chaos Fruit was something that I picked along the way."
That was a lie. Mengfei had entered the shattered primordial world to search for the Primordial Chaos Fruit. The divine artifact within the sword casket was a fortuitous encounter as a by-product of her adventure.
Tianyi looked at the sword casket with great interest. "What kind of divine artifact is it?"
"The divine artifact used to be four divine artifacts. Right now, only their shards remain. I am nurturing it and reforging it into an artifact." Xi Mengfei said without too much importance. "Yi'er go absorb the Primordial Chaos Fruit, the sooner you do so, the better."
The Primordial Chaos Fruit was one of the top ten treasures to understand the Dao, but if it were to forge a treasure or concoct a pill, it would have been a better use. If an immortal used it to reforge their body, an average immortal would attain the power of a Seamless Immortal, an Immortal Monarch. It was even useful for Mengfei. If she used it for herself, not only would her hand recover, but her physical strength would increase by a level. For her constitution to increase at her current realm was beyond hard, it would take hundreds of years normally. And that was even considered fast!
Tianyi, who was unaware of all this, retreated to his room under Mengfei's urging to ingest the fruit. Mengfei's eyes lingered on the wax gold pendant on Tianyi's waist for a moment, causing it to shiver under her gaze, but she averted it soon after. It didn't seem to harm Tianyi, so she would not interfere for now.
Afterward, Mengfei traveled to the Jade Lotus Clear Pond. Her only disciple, Jiang Daoyi, was quietly cultivating there. Tianyi was her son, and she was worried about having him under anyone else as his master, so she taught him personally.
Mengfei had thought Jiang Daoyi would have been an ordinary disciple who would not shine against all the other geniuses within the Buzhou Immortal Sect. But against her expectations, Daoyi had proven herself to be a diamond in the rough, causing Mengfei to put more effort into raising her. As she watched Daoyi cultivate, she had found that Tianyi and Daoyi were slightly similar in a way she couldn't adequately describe, as if they had some unknown connection.
