Guide to the Rebirth of the Evil Woman in the Immortal Realm - Chapter 4

Centered around the swirling pair of yin-yang fish, all the students on the sword platform turned and bowed in the direction of the two figures.

Shen Fuxin withdrew her gaze, straightened her posture, and lowered her eyes as she addressed the two immortals before her. “This student pays respects to the Sword Venerable.”

Sword Venerable Jie Xia glanced at Shen Fuxin’s stiff limbs and let out a bitter laugh. After reporting the incident yesterday, she had hurried off to visit an old friend and was unaware of the absurd events that had followed.

Her original intention had been that Shen Fuxin, who always heeded Zhao Lanying’s words, would behave obediently for a few days after being reprimanded by her master. Little did she expect to return and learn that Zhao Lanying had actually subjected her to a whipping. Now, she couldn’t help but feel a pang of pity and silently resent Zhao Lanying for being overly harsh.

Thus, she allowed Shen Fuxin’s failure to bow, sighing, “You could have sent someone to ask for leave and not come. I wouldn’t have devoured you.”

Shen Fuxin blinked at her, a smile playing on her lips but offering no reply. Instead, she turned to the person standing behind the Sword Venerable and said, “Greetings, Master.”

At the words “Master,” Zhao Lanying, who had been standing with downcast eyes in silence, abruptly lifted her gaze.

The moment her eyes rose, the countless yin-yang fish began to swirl rapidly again, stretching their bodies like elongated koi banners before vanishing into a lotus-shaped ring on Zhao Lanying’s ring finger, transforming into a single glistening dewdrop.

…Truly worthy of the description “ethereal and jade-like, aloof and solemn.”

Shen Fuxin’s face wore a smile, but her eyes held no trace of warmth. Zhao Lanying’s gaze, sharp as a blade, met Shen Fuxin’s directly without evasion. Before Shen Fuxin could react, an immense, icy force pressed down on her spine, forcing her to her knees.

Zhao Lanying had struck with heavy force. Shen Fuxin’s vision instantly blurred into darkness.

Excruciating pain, like maggots burrowing into bone, seared through her body. Faintly, she heard Sword Venerable Jie Xia’s urgent attempt to intervene, and the overwhelming pressure was immediately dispelled by another, purer sword intent. Yet, despite this, the whip wounds that had just begun to heal split open completely.

This back-and-forth made the pain several times worse than when she had first endured the punishment.

Biting her lip until it bled, drenched in cold sweat, she couldn’t tell whether it was blood or perspiration trickling down her forearm, drop by drop, staining the smooth ground.

Even a clay figure has its pride. Shen Fuxin’s grip on her sword tightened abruptly, but in the next moment, her palm felt as if struck by lightning as Zhao Lanying’s next blow sent the sword flying more than ten meters away. Empty-handed and kneeling, old and new injuries flared up simultaneously, forcing her to cough up blood once more.

Zhao Lanying’s glass-like eyes lowered, resting on Shen Fuxin’s blood-stained lips.

She said coldly, “The incompetent are unworthy of holding a sword.”

Shen Fuxin suddenly looked up, meeting Zhao Lanying’s frost-filled gaze.

Those pale eyes, that icy stare she had seen them thousands of times. Zhao Lanying delighted in playing the role of the noble and strict master in her mind, treating her the same even after their bond was sealed.

In those years, Shen Fuxin had been confined to a courtyard within her immortal abode, forbidden to step beyond her room. Whether she pleaded, cursed, or swore bloody oaths wishing Zhao Lanying a wretched death, Zhao Lanying never allowed her to see the sun outside the immortal manor again.

And here, under the boundless sky, a golden sun hung brightly in the cerulean heavens.

She stood on the sword platform, a place she had never set foot on in her past life, wearing a blue robe she had never worn before. Holding her breath, she listened as the black birds circled overhead, their cries echoing one after another in a symphony of unrestrained freedom.

Shen Fuxin’s gaze fell upon the long sword stained with her blood.

From the moment she could remember, every object she had touched or studied had been tainted with her blood. She had knelt in punishment countless times, whether under the scorching sun or in the snow. Today was merely another punishment, another public humiliation on the sword platform. It should have been as routine to her as breathing, something she should have swallowed along with her blood, something she should have grown accustomed to…

But was what she had grown accustomed to truly normal? Was it something she deserved to endure?

Suddenly, Shen Fuxin spoke, “I will no longer learn the sword.”

Her words plunged the sword platform into silence.

Zhao Lanying stood frozen in place, while the surrounding junior immortals stared wide-eyed in disbelief. Yu Zhanxu’s eyes were fixed on the sword on the ground. He had intended to mock Shen Fuxin’s resolve, but the words died in his throat.

Amid the crowd, only Jiexia, the Sword Venerable, let out a soft sigh, as if genuinely lamenting Shen Fuxin’s plight.

Shen Fuxin was not without talent. She grasped most cultivation techniques with ease, except for the sword. It seemed she and the sword were simply incompatible.

Rumors said she had tried every path of cultivation except swordsmanship, yet all ended in failure. The reason she kept returning to the sword was an extraordinary event three hundred years ago, when she first stepped into the renowned Sword Selection Hall of Qingdi Ling Mountain.

Thousands of treasured swords hung silently from the hall’s ceiling, yet only the leader among them, the Spring God Sword had responded to her presence for the very first time. Jiexia Sword Venerable had been both astonished and delighted, believing he had finally found a successor. But despite Shen Fuxin’s relentless efforts over the years, the sword refused to be drawn from its sheath.

In the three centuries they had spent together, Jiexia Sword Venerable had come to recognize one exceptional talent in Shen Fuxin.

The ability to refine spiritual fire.

The spiritual fire she conjured from her palms was extraordinarily pure. Though weak in intensity, its purity surpassed that of every disciple present, even Zhao Lanying, the Rainbow Capital Fairy who resided at the peak of Qingdi Ling Mountain.

If she could one day draw the sword and combine it with her spiritual fire, she would undoubtedly carve out a brilliant path of her own in the immortal realm.

Zhao Lanying remained stunned for a long moment. Seeing Shen Fuxin rise to leave, her expression finally darkened.

With a flick of her wrist, a gleaming silver longsword materialized in her hand.

In the crowd, Yu Zhanxu tightened his grip on his own sword hilt, his gaze fixed on Shen Fuxin, who had not once glanced in his direction. Her blue robe was completely soaked in blood, as if she had been dragged from a pool of it, yet she stood miraculously upright, as if ready to confront Zhao Lanying’s sword intent with her own body.

In that instant, countless chaotic thoughts surged within Yu Zhanxu. And in the very moment Zhao Lanying’s sword intent surged forward, he stepped forward, facing his master and unleashing a near-perfect sword strike!

For a brief moment, two opposing sword intents clashed. Zhao Lanying shifted slightly to evade the crimson sword aura coming her way, causing the sword wind aimed at Shen Fuxin to veer off course. She did not spare Yu Zhanxu so much as a glance, not even a contemptuous one.

To her, that crimson sword aura was nothing more than dust not even worth the effort to brush away.

She lowered her gaze to Shen Fuxin, who had collapsed once again. Shen Fuxin lay prone on the ground, her blood flowing all the way to Zhao Lanying’s feet. Unflinching, Zhao Lanying asked softly, “Have you realized your mistake?”

She did not receive an answer from Shen Fuxin. Instead, what she encountered was a blaze of fire that suddenly erupted from the pool of blood.

The spiritual flames surged from Shen Fuxin’s clenched palm, sweeping across the sword platform. The initially pitiful flicker of fire began to roar under Zhao Lanying’s astonished gaze, growing so intense that Shen Fuxin could no longer hold it back. In an instant, the blaze engulfed the entire platform!

The raging tongues of fire licked their way to the feet of the two alchemy cauldrons at the entrance of the platform. Unnoticed by anyone, a wisp of blue smoke rose from the cauldrons, which had not been ignited for tens of thousands of years.

Shen Fuxin took a deep breath, struggling to push herself up from the ground before Zhao Lanying’s feet.

Covered in blood and pale-faced, her eyes shone with an extraordinary intensity. She picked up the sword she had discarded in the flames and met Zhao Lanying’s slightly altered gaze. Word by word, she declared, “I said, I will no longer learn the sword.”

With that, Shen Fuxin gripped the Spring God Sword with both hands and bent it fiercely, attempting to snap it in two.

Zhao Lanying watched her calmly. “You spent three hundred years drawing this sword. How could you break it in a single day?”

Before her words faded, the sky-blue scabbard began to melt drop by drop, like glaciers thawing at the arrival of spring, dissolving entirely into a pool of green water within moments.

In the blink of an eye, a fluffy white sword spirit emerged from the green liquid. Envious gasps filled the air, but Shen Fuxin didn’t even blink. She reached out to seize and crush it. The sword spirit squirmed desperately in her grasp, crying out, “You’d kill your benefactor? You’re not human!”

Shen Fuxin tightened her grip around its plump neck. “You wasted three hundred years of my life, and you still can’t tell what I am?”

The sword spirit struggled fiercely, pointing at the two cauldrons emitting tendrils of blue smoke. “Who knew you possessed the talent for spiritual flames? No wonder none of the other artifacts chose you! I must have been half-asleep that day to follow you! Once a sword is drawn, the spiritual pact is sealed. With your unique gift, staying with you would mean being extinguished by your flames sooner or later. Think carefully aside from these cauldrons, hasn’t every sentient artifact spirit fled at the sight of you?”

At the same time, an ordinarily inconspicuous junior disciple in blue robes stared dumbfounded at the two massive cauldrons behind them and exclaimed, “It’s Senior Sister Shen’s spiritual flames! Senior Sister Shen’s flames have ignited the cauldrons!”

How was this possible?

Sword Sovereign Jiexia whirled around and saw raging flames leaping from the cauldrons, threatening to devour the very sky. Having cultivated for a thousand years in the mortal realm and another thousand in the immortal realm, she understood the fundamental difference between mortal alchemists and immortal cauldrons.

Mortal alchemists required only cultivation, not innate talent.

But refining elixirs in the immortal realm was infinitely more demanding. Without the destined fortune, no amount of effort could ignite these cauldrons. Even in the divine realm, few could wield them, let alone in the immortal realm. To possess such talent meant that godhood was merely a matter of time.

Legend had it that pills refined in such cauldrons could not only revive the dead and heal fatal wounds but could even encapsulate an entire trichiliocosm earth as the pill’s clay, clouds as its filling. Consuming such a pill could shatter multiple layers of constraints, allowing one to glimpse the legendary “Tome of Divine Whispers.”

Sword Sovereign Jiexia shook her head with a bitter smile. No wonder none of the myriad arts had responded to Shen Fuxin. With talent like hers, any path other than that of a pill immortal would have been a waste.

Flames flickered from cracks in the aged cauldrons. Now, upon closer inspection, the patterns were not signs of decay but a connected map of the Big Dipper’s celestial blessings.

Zhao Lanying wasn’t looking at the alchemy cauldron her gaze remained fixed on Shen Fuxin. It might have been her imagination, but she felt that this lotus rooted in mud, once so easily plucked, had grown distant, had become…

No longer something she could casually break.

“The celestial realm hasn’t seen anyone ignite the alchemy cauldron in thirty thousand years. How could she… why…”

Shen Fuxin paid no attention to the surrounding uproar. None of it compared to the exhilaration of setting the Sword Platform ablaze. In this moment of solitary love and hatred, she stood still, allowing the flames to reflect in her pupils.

The blazing crimson engulfed her plain blue robes, burning through them. For a fleeting moment, she was transported back to the covenant banquet on Qingdi Mountain all those years ago.

With rosy clouds as her cloak and a blue phoenix-drawn carriage, her vision then had also been filled with endless shades of red bewildering and chaotic, obscuring the path to her impending doom.

But now, Shen Fuxin saw clearly.

How precious, how laughable it was to ignite this cauldron it had cost her an entire lifetime, ending in resentment as she offered her own body as the vessel to kindle its flames.

If Shen Fuxin were truly a furnace cauldron, then she would be the one that burned the fiercest, consuming the unjust heavens and earth within her flames, incinerating the arrogance of those who stood above until they turned to dust, their bones ground to ashes!

The sword spirit, noticing her strange expression, timidly asked, “What… what are you going to do?”

Shen Fuxin smiled faintly. “All things are bound by fate. It seems we, too, are connected by destiny… Guess what I intend to do?”

With that, she sheathed her sword, sealing the sword spirit inside.

Amid the gasps of the gathered immortals, she hesitated no longer. Leaping onto the abandoned Seven-Star Cauldron left by her predecessors, she waved her hand, and the sword, along with its spirit, vanished into the roaring flames of the alchemy cauldron.

One breath, two breaths, three breaths.

The bluish-white Spring God Sword melted instantly within the blazing cauldron, transforming in the eyes of the onlooking immortals into a silvery-white pill. It rose lightly, then in a flash, shot straight into Shen Fuxin’s lips!

Zhao Lanying’s expression shifted in alarm as she tried to force the pill out of Shen Fuxin’s body, but with a single swallow, Shen Fuxin had already consumed it.

At this critical moment, under the watchful eyes of all, Shen Fuxin suddenly formed a hand seal, lowered her gaze, and let out a long, deep exhale.

The moment she opened her eyes, distant mountains roared, and her gaze now held the essence of ten thousand sword intents.

–

At the same time, in a certain hall of the divine realm.

A white-haired immortal sat upright on a white jade chair not far from an alchemy furnace, her head nodding slightly as she dozed off. The attendants seated around the furnace paid no mind, calmly focusing on the small, jade-colored pill coalescing within the cauldron.

Just as they concentrated their efforts to condense the flames and form the pill, the immortal who had been resting in the chair suddenly snapped her eyes open and stood up with a start. The commotion was enough to make the attendants exchange puzzled glances, unsure of what had happened.

The immortal responsible for tending the furnace spun around a few times, calculating with her fingers before finally understanding. “No wonder, no wonder. So, it’s the alchemy cauldron I left in the celestial realm someone has ignited it.

“What a coincidence! Now there’s a candidate for the Divine Court Flower Banquet.”