After Infusing Love Poison to the Cold Sword Sovereign - Chapter 28.1

The murmurs of Jiang Qingbei and Yue Qinglan filled the air. The former rambled on about everything under the sun, while Wu Ruo responded half-heartedly, her mind fixated on just one sentence from the conversation.

“What is that thing?”

A shiver ran through her soul. Deep down, she had an intuition, the object entrusted by Sect Leader Jiang to Luo Qingyi was somehow connected to her.

The day passed quickly, and dusk soon gave way to night. Yue Qinglan and Jiang Qingbei returned to their own quarters. Before leaving, the latter even invited Wu Ruo to visit her luxurious residence, but Wu Ruo declined.

After seeing them off, Wu Ruo returned to the empty house and, for a moment, felt strangely disoriented.

This was the first night since she woke up that she would spend apart from Luo Qingyi.

For some reason, evening came unusually early. The light vanished swiftly from the mountaintop, and the sky darkened ominously, transforming into an endless, silent night.

She gazed at the nightscape of Luoxue Peak, almost as if Luo Qingyi were still by her side. Yet there was no trace of that faint, soothing fragrance, nor the ever-watchful gaze that always lingered on her.

A shooting star streaked across the sky, and snow began to fall once more.

Wu Ruo pushed the door open and stepped inside, casting one last glance at the path Luo Qingyi had taken down the mountain. Softly, she murmured, “Don’t lie to me.”

The path lay empty, with no reply.

The moment she entered, a pale paper crane hanging on the window frame suddenly stirred as if infused with life. In the blink of an eye, it slipped free of its tether and fluttered toward Wu Ruo.

“Eh? Luo Qingyi?” Wu Ruo called out, but the crane gave no response. It merely flapped its paper wings, hovering three inches above her shoulder, following her every move.

“How did you get here?”

Still, the crane remained silent, its wings beating at a steady, unchanging pace like a soulless puppet, mimicking her actions without thought.

Over the past few days, Wu Ruo had seen many paper cranes on Luoxue Peak. They were Luo Qingyi’s tools for sending messages, similar to messenger talismans but far more intricate. A stack of paper lay on her desk, and with deft fingers, she could fold them into fluttering cranes in an instant.

But this one was different from the rest.

Wu Ruo snatched it into her palm and realized its color wasn’t the plain white of ordinary paper but a faint, aged yellow.

Like paper that had been stored in a cellar for years, steeped in the passage of time, its edges tinged with the subtle hue of long-forgotten days.

As if, this paper crane had existed for nearly a decade.

She ran her fingers over its wings thick and solid, likely stuffed with extra scraps of paper, making it as plump as a pigeon. Unlike the others, this crane had been given eyes two dark ink dots that lent it a lively, lifelike appearance.

Dismissing it, she placed the crane on the table in the sitting room, weighing it down with a paperweight, then turned toward the inner chamber,

Snap.

A loud noise reverberated in her ears, the sound of something heavy hitting the ground. She turned to look again and saw, lying starkly on the floor, the paperweight that had been holding down the paper crane moments ago. Now it was broken in two, its dark, jagged edges uneven, with a few scattered fragments marring the otherwise spotless floor.

Meanwhile, the paper crane had flown right in front of her, its wings fluttering rapidly, brimming with urgency.

“Luo Qingyi.”

Wu Ruo didn’t pause to think or show surprise. She merely lifted her eyelids slightly and enunciated each word deliberately, “You used this paper crane to spy on me, didn’t you?”

“……”

The crane made no sound, but Wu Ruo could distinctly sense the other’s panic or rather, she could almost see Luo Qingyi’s expression, struggling to salvage something yet rendered speechless.

“Can you see through it? You’ve synced your senses with this crane, haven’t you? Is this paper crane in front of me you?”

“……”

Hollow silence echoed in the room. Their living quarters weren’t particularly large, but at this moment, her words seemed to dissipate in the empty space, carrying an inexplicable tension.

The crane remained silent, yet Wu Ruo thought she heard a familiar voice whisper, “Yes.”

“Luo Qingyi tell me, what’s inside?”

Wu Ruo braced one hand against the inner door, her lips pressed tightly together as she fixed her burning gaze on the yellowed paper crane. The ink-dotted eyes now seemed like real pupils, dark and motionless, like the depths of Luo Qingyi’s obsidian pools.

“You don’t want me to see, do you?”

The crane’s wings stopped moving, hovering in mid-air before her, neither advancing nor falling, as though suspended by nature itself.

“Luo Qingyi.”

Wu Ruo cupped the crane in her palm, pinching one wing lightly between her fingers as she spoke slowly, “What exactly did Sect Leader Jiang give you? Answer me.”

Perhaps her expression was too icy, or her grip too forceful. The crane trembled faintly in her hand before a voice finally emerged from it.

The other party offered no explanation, speaking as calmly as ever, “Don’t look.”

“Don’t look?”

Her fingers tightened slightly, flattening the crane’s arched wings. The rough texture of the rice paper scraped against her skin as she rubbed it absently.

“Why won’t you let me see? You said I’m your Dao companion. Shouldn’t there be no secrets between us?”

Her hand rested on the inner door just an ordinary door, yet her palm burned as though guided by some soul-deep instinct, an obstinacy rooted in her very bones and blood.

Luo Qingyi replied, “Yes. But this isn’t something you should know yet. Wait until I return, and I’ll explain everything. Alright?”

Wait for her to return. Wait for her explanation. Wait, wait, keep waiting. But the answers never came.

Suddenly, Wu Ruo felt the strength drain from her questioning.

She remembered the other’s strange reaction when she first woke up. She recalled the bewildered expression and the flimsy excuses when she bluntly admitted her amnesia.

Her homeland. The place of her birth, the land she once called home, why was there no record of it? Why did everyone avoid speaking of it?

And then there was…

She lacked spiritual roots and Dao bones, but that didn’t matter. Luo Qingyi had reforged her immortal bones, taught her swordsmanship, and for that, she was grateful.

But why had she lost her ability to sense and control all serpents and venomous creatures, rendering her incapable of continuing her practice of gu sorcery? The frigid temperatures atop Falling Snow Peak forced snakes into hibernation, so she could overlook that. But during the Sword Debate Tournament, at the mountain’s base and slopes, she had tried to sense the nearby creatures with her mind only to find nothing.

Her blood could no longer nourish the little snake that had once accompanied her in her personal pocket dimension.

Everything, absolutely everything, contradicted Luo Qingyi’s initial claims.

She wasn’t a petty or obsessive person. Since she was here, she might as well make the best of it. Every day before this, she had tried to ignore these anomalies because Luo Qingyi was kind, because Yue Qinglan was earnest, because Jiang Qingbei was amusing.

But the doubt in her heart wasn’t something she could simply force away. Instead, it had only deepened with time.

She released the paper crane and clenched her fists.

“Why did you hide so much from me? Why did you lie to keep me here? Why didn’t you want me to see?”

What nonsense about philosophical debates, exchange students, or a cultivation partner to tend to her daily needs. The truth was, she had inexplicably appeared here alone, inexplicably lived eighteen years, and inexplicably begun a life that wasn’t hers at all. She was the only one who didn’t belong in Zhiyuan Manor!

She wasn’t staying. She was going home.

She should have gone home long ago, what was the point of staying in this wretched place? She needed to see if the Witch Envoy had grown any white hairs, if Ah Xiang had made new friends!

She didn’t want to keep entangling herself with Luo Qingyi anymore.

“If you truly had a clear conscience, if you truly saw me as your cultivation partner, why did you insist I must absolutely must, stay by your side? Why did you strictly control who I interacted with? Why did you hide everything from me so thoroughly?”

“I didn’t!” The voice from the paper crane finally carried a hint of panic. The other party must have seen her furious glare, her suspicious and resentful gaze, seen her completely shatter the already fragile trust between them.

Who would have thought that the esteemed Immortal Luo, the heroine who had turned the tide in the cultivation world, the master of Falling Snow Peak, would be such a coward?

“Ah Ruo, wait for me to return, I’ll explain everything to you. Believe me, I’ll—”

Believe.

Just days ago, the other had promised her there would be no more deception. And now, they had brazenly broken that vow.

Or perhaps, they had been a liar all along.

Wu Ruo cut off the voice, gripping the paper crane with both hands one at its head, the other at its tail.

“I wanted to believe you.”

Rip.

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