Guide to the Rebirth of the Evil Woman in the Immortal Realm - Chapter 46

Qingwu Sect was not large, occupying only a single mountain peak.

It was currently the peak of golden autumn, and many fruit trees on the mountain were ripe. Shen Fuxin watched as she walked, her mind stirred by the sight of a particularly flourishing persimmon tree. Her days in the mortal realm had already stretched into several years, yet in the heavens, only a few days had passed.

Shen Fuxin had long pushed Zhao Lanying and Yu Zhanxu to the back of her mind. However, in the celestial realm, the story of her breaking off the engagement and fleeing was likely still a popular topic of gossip among the immortals. What expressions would those two have now? Were they filled with hatred or annoyance? Did they wish to skin her alive, or were they still stubbornly refusing to change, hoping she would have a change of heart?

She passed the persimmon tree without looking back, but a slightly clumsy name drifted through her mind. Li Jiantai was the young boy in the blue cloth shirt with a sword on his back. Shen Fuxin still remembered his expression when she held the persimmons back then. He did not look happy. Instead, he looked aggrieved. She had clearly seen a flash of tears in his eyes, but when she looked down again, Li Jiantai said nothing and simply laughed lightheartedly while holding the fruit.

Jiang Daileng walked at the very front. She remained wary of these three strangers intruding, but since she could not defeat them, she had no choice but to lead the way. Seeing the green clad sword cultivator behind her slow down, Jiang Daileng also decelerated. She asked with feigned indifference, “Your sword is quite good, fellow cultivator. Where did you study? Was it the Heaven Sword Sect or the Lu Immortal Sect?”

Shen Fuxin replied, “I am an alchemy cultivator.”

Jiang Daileng’s expression instantly became peculiar. Alchemy cultivators were supposed to stay within their sects trading pills, as they were the type of cultivators with the least self defense capability in the cultivation world. If she was an alchemy cultivator, Jiang Daileng wondered what she herself was.

Jiang Daileng shut her mouth and stopped asking Shen Fuxin questions, losing herself in the shock of having almost been killed by an alchemy cultivator’s sword Qi. She walked the short path up the mountain with her Dao heart shattered. Shen Fuxin, following behind with her head down, felt as if her soles were stepping on something crushed all over the ground, making a crunching sound with every step.

As they reached the summit, they saw several simple houses. The summit was the source of a plunging waterfall, and someone was currently practicing their swordplay there. It was a sword cultivator in white, her dark hair bound in a crown and her moves as graceful as a swimming dragon.

Jiang Daileng broke away from the three followers and ran forward. “Master!”

The white clad sword cultivator holding the sword turned around. She did not have a single white hair, yet her face showed signs of aging, like ebony wood on the verge of dying. Exhaustion seeped from her slightly drooping eyes. Neither her smooth skin nor her youthful features could hide this aged state. It was as if an old woman at the end of her life inhabited the body of a person in their prime.

Seeing her master standing dazed without a reaction, Jiang Daileng gently shook her sleeve. “Master, we have guests in the sect.”

Ye Xiao lowered her sword as if waking from a dream and took a few steps toward Shen Fuxin and the others. “Is your eldest senior sister back?”

Jiang Daileng pursed her lips and smiled. She gently took the sword from her master’s hand and set it aside, saying helplessly, “Master, you forgot again. I am the only disciple in Qingwu Sect. I am the eldest senior sister. Master, you cannot continue practicing day and night without rest. Sometimes I truly fear you will forget even me.”

Ye Xiao listened blankly until the sentence ended, and the confusion in her eyes finally dissipated. She rubbed her brow, clearly frustrated by her poor memory, and whispered, “Right, fortunately Daileng is here.”

She seemed to finally notice the three strangers standing there. She invited Shen Fuxin and the others to sit at a small wooden table by the waterfall and instructed Jiang Daileng to bring tea from the house. Ye Xiao calmly observed them for a moment before speaking. “This place is remote and hard to find. No outsiders have visited for several years. From where do you fellow cultivators hail?”

Shen Fuxin had no talent for pleasantries, so she lightly kicked Ji Ting’s shin under the table. Ji Ting understood and said politely, “I am Ji Ting. Over the years, I have traveled everywhere with my two junior sisters, making the world our home. Today, we accidentally intruded upon Qingwu Sect. It was my lack of etiquette, and I apologize to the Sect Leader.”

Ye Xiao understood and asked another question, “Under which sect did you study, and who was your master?”

Ji Ting lied effortlessly, “We belong to no sect. We are rogue cultivators. The master who led us onto the path has long since passed away.”

Ye Xiao nodded. She did not seem to mind their intrusion much. She raised her hand to place the tea Jiang Daileng brought in front of the three of them and said warmly, “A guest is a guest. Our Qingwu Sect is small and remote. We rarely see strangers. Since you are here, please stay for a few days before leaving.”

Shen Fuxin silently watched Sect Leader Ye as she discussed sword Dao with Ji Ting. The gentleness on her face did not seem fake, yet she had an entirely different demeanor when swinging her sword earlier. She wondered if this mortal had practiced the sword to the point of obsession and mental derangement.

Even in the celestial realm, Shen Fuxin had heard of many such cases, and most of the protagonists were sword cultivators. She wondered what kind of obsession sword cultivators held during their practice that caused them to fall into heart demons and undergo sudden personality changes. She now seriously suspected that Zhao Lanying also suffered from mental derangement. Otherwise, why would she always maintain a cold, self possessed expression while cutting her with a sword for no reason?

“Master,” Jiang Daileng said, standing aside without leaving. “But their identities are unclear”

She stopped mid sentence because the green clad alchemy cultivator sitting at the table was looking at her. Though she did not look old, her eyes were as cold and clear as ice and snow. Jiang Daileng felt a chill down her spine from Shen Fuxin’s gaze. She wanted to say more to dissuade her master, but the jade clad beauty sitting at the table stood up.

Ji Ting lowered her eyes, her expression looking quite pitiful. “It is the fault of my junior sisters and me for abruptly disturbing the cultivation of you two fellow cultivators. Junior Sister Shen, Junior Sister Shen Sha, we will leave now.”

Jiang Daileng had never seen such a performance and stood frozen on the spot. She saw the alchemy cultivator who had just been staring coldly at her raise her sleeve to wipe her cheek as if wiping away tears, her smile bitter. “Indeed, since our master died, we have had no home.”

She watched with an open mouth as the last woman, a large one who looked like a physical cultivator, also stood up. Shen Sha was not yet skilled in this business, but to cooperate, she had to cover her face with both hands and say dryly, “What should we do, Senior Sister? We are so pitiful.”

Shen Sha’s sobbing was the final straw for Jiang Daileng. Her scalp tingled as if struck by lightning. For a moment, she did not know whether to call them adaptable or shameless. Thousands of words turned into a hand clutching her heart as she stammered, “You, you all”

“Enough, Daileng.”

Ye Xiao lowered her brow, her face darkening. She coughed a few times and gently pushed away Jiang Daileng’s hand which had come to support her, instructing, “Clean up the other empty room and let the guests stay.”

Jiang Daileng was stunned. She opened her lips to say something, but her head slumped down, and she slowly walked toward the uninhabited empty room.

Taking advantage of the moment when Ji Ting sat back down to chat with Sect Leader Ye about local customs, Shen Fuxin sensed the spiritual energy and walked toward another room that looked like a woodshed. Shen Sha looked at Ji Ting, who was smiling and nodding frequently, and then at Shen Fuxin, who was walking away in silence. She chose to follow the latter.

They walked into the woodshed one after the other. Aside from a pile of firewood, it also contained a stove and utensils. It seemed they had not yet reached the stage of inedia. Some leftover cabbage was placed by the pot, attracting a sleek, large winged cockroach to feed. Shen Fuxin stood silently watching the cockroach. Shen Sha was silent for a moment but could not help asking, “Is that your father?”

Shen Fuxin looked at the spiritual energy thread attached to the cockroach and hummed in affirmation. Unlike previous times, he did not seem to notice Shen Fuxin’s arrival, making a rustling sound as he chewed the vegetable leaf. Not until Shen Fuxin moved her feet behind him did the large cockroach slowly turn around, staring at her with the two black eyes embedded in its head.

“Excessive cycles of reincarnation will wash away the memories carried in the soul,” Shen Fuxin laughed softly. “See? He is not afraid of me now because he has forgotten the tragic ways he died before, and he has forgotten his identity in the celestial realm. When a person completely forgets everything related to themselves and no longer struggles against fate, that is when they are truly dead.”

Shen Sha suddenly said, “Thank you.”

Shen Fuxin frowned. “I am not implying anything about you. You are fundamentally different from him. You are human, and in the future, you will be an immortal or a god, returning to the position you held in previous years. He is a cockroach, and cockroaches deserve to die.”

With that, Shen Fuxin stepped forward, prepared to crush her father to death. But at the moment she was about to step down, Shen Fuxin seemed to think of something, and her furrowed brow suddenly relaxed. Shen Sha, seeing the smile that suddenly bloomed on Shen Fuxin’s face, felt a bit of horror in her heart. “Do you want him to die in a different way?”

Shen Fuxin said, “Smart. I just thought of something. His current body is that of a cockroach, but his soul is still that of an immortal. Crushing him to death would just send him straight back to reincarnation. Shen Sha, do you not think that is a bit of a waste?”

“It is a little,” Shen Sha crouched down curiously with Shen Fuxin, watching the memoryless Immortal Guteng spin around pathetically within the spiritual energy. “But I still do not understand what you mean. What do you want to do to him? Extract his soul and torture it?”

“Actually, throwing him into the animal realm and personally torturing and killing him over and over is just a means of revenge for me,” Shen Fuxin smiled brightly, looking to be in an excellent mood. “But these things do not give me any substantive benefits. However, I just realized something. I have a cauldron. It is a very good cauldron left behind by the Great Deity Yandan.”

Shen Sha felt her vision go dark. She faintly understood what Shen Fuxin meant. Come to think of it, she wondered if she was truly not practicing some kind of evil cultivation.

Shen Fuxin said decisively, “I am going to put him in my cauldron to refine him. While his physical body disintegrates, some of his soul might leak out. This cauldron is truly excellent. It was not for nothing that Yu Zhanxu stole it for me from the Sword Altar.”

Stealing the cauldron was another past event Shen Sha did not know about. She was completely speechless. Shen Fuxin was always a woman of action. She immediately summoned the cauldron and lit the spiritual fire with practiced ease.

Outside the woodshed, Ji Ting noticed the movement of the fire inside and could not help but cast several glances toward it. Fuxin and Shen Sha went in together just now, Ji Ting thought. She felt that nothing good would happen when those two were together.

Sect Leader Ye Xiao misunderstood her look, her face showing some embarrassment. “Are the two junior sisters of Fellow Cultivator Ji going to prepare a meal? It is our sect’s poor hospitality. We usually eat later.”

As she spoke, she stood up and walked toward the woodshed. Ji Ting followed behind Ye Xiao, the ominous feeling in her heart burning brighter, until the two pushed open the woodshed door and the daylight illuminated the actions of Shen Fuxin and Shen Sha.

“There are fish in the lake. I will have Daileng catch two for you fellow young friends to eat fish”

Ji Ting closed her eyes in despair.

Shen Fuxin crouched by the shrunken cauldron holding a cockroach leg, making a move to throw it in. She looked calmly at the two standing at the door. Shen Sha was attempting to use her spiritual energy to stabilize Shen Fuxin’s fire, acting as her fire tending immortal boy.

“Thank you,” Shen Fuxin said, seeing the Sect Leader staring at the cockroach in her hand with complete confusion. She kindly reminded her, “This is purely a personal preference. I will not be sharing it with the Sect Leader.”