“Linh Nhi, you’ve been away from the mountain for so long this time. Do you know how worried your master was?” In the magnificent immortal palace, an immortal with an air of transcendent virtue stroked his beard and frowned at me. He looked every bit like a concerned elder. If only he didn’t keep urging me to take medicine…
“You must have run out of the medicine I gave you before. Your constitution is weak; you can’t go a single day without a Life-Nourishing Pill. Your master just finished refining this new batch.”
“Linh Nhi, you haven’t taken your medicine today, have you? Take one now.”
I glanced at the purple smoke curling around the box of Life-Nourishing Pills on the table and raised an eyebrow. I hadn’t expected my old abilities to follow me here, too.
The world I was born in could just barely be considered a cultivation world. But cultivation there was incredibly difficult, and most cultivation families had turned to business instead. Spiritual veins were scarce; if even one person in a family reached the Foundation Establishment stage, it was an earth-shattering event.
I was born into the Shen family, and, as it happened, my name was Ngân Linh, too. The Shen family specialized in medicinal pills, but when it came to cultivation, we were the worst of the worst.
To support the family, my father started a pharmaceutical company. Fortunately, he caught the wave of the times, and the company grew rapidly. My father became a celebrated CEO, and I was lucky enough to live the pampered life of a wealthy heiress.
At first, I planned to spend my life in comfort and luxury. But on my eighteenth birthday, I suddenly awakened abilities only our ancestors had possessed. One was the power to see the properties of medicinal pills; the other was the ability to control furnace flames. That was even more astonishing than the fact that I could reach Foundation Establishment. My father was overjoyed and took me to our ancestral home to pay respects that very night. That was when the accident happened.
The car overturned, and I transmigrated into a cultivation novel my close friend Lâm Vu had given me. Fortunately, I’d managed to read a few lines in the car, so I knew a little about the plot. Unfortunately, I’d transmigrated as a villainous bit character, even lower in the pecking order than the wicked supporting female character, and I was killed right at the beginning.
“Linh Nhi, hurry and take your medicine.” The master’s voice rang through the magnificent immortal palace again. It was as gentle as I remembered. But if you listened closely, you could hear a trace of impatient insistence.
I lowered my eyes and stroked the wooden medicine box. It was packed with pills. The purple smoke, visible only to me, shrouded them so thickly it nearly obscured their shapes. Dark purple—poison.
A Life-Nourishing Pill? It would be more accurate to call it a Life-Ending Pill! It seemed that even if I, a lowly bit character, didn’t die at the villain’s hands, sooner or later this pill would finish me off.
“Click.” I closed the wooden box and smiled sweetly at the man seated above me. “Master, I’ll take it in a little while.”
Mộc Phong paused, apparently not expecting me to refuse his kind offer. “Linh Nhi…”
He frowned, then seemed to think of something and nodded at me. “All right. Just remember to take it.”
“Yes.” At that point, I still had a faint glimmer of hope. I planned to throw the pill away—or bury it—once I got back.
But that night, when pain like a tearing heart spread through my meridians, I finally understood why my good master had agreed so readily. Trembling, I opened the box of Life-Ending Pills. I was too weak to care whether they were poisonous or not, and shoved one straight into my mouth.
The pain, like termites gnawing at my bones, gradually faded. In its place came a foggy feeling in my head, and flickering hallucinations appeared before my eyes. A sudden, uncontrollable rage surged up inside me. I pulled the whip from my waist…
When I came to, the room had been reduced to rubble. Debris was scattered everywhere; the floor was cracked, and the tables and chairs were smashed. Only the box of Life-Ending Pills remained intact. At last, I understood how an ordinary person could change their temperament so drastically. These pills also contained something that scrambled the mind.
Take a Life-Ending Pill and you die; don’t take one and you die anyway—just sooner. What could be more hopeless than that? I could identify the poison in the pills, but I didn’t know the proportions of the ingredients, much less how to neutralize it completely.
Fortunately, after yesterday’s violent episode, I was able to use my body’s reactions to refine a few Antidote Pills, which neutralized some of the poison. Then I made some pills to clear my mind and calm my spirit, to keep my agitation in check.
I had to admit, whoever wrote this novel was a master of pharmacology. Most of the medicinal ingredients and pill recipes here were similar to what I knew, but a few herbs had long since vanished by the time I lived in. There were even some I’d never heard of.
For several days, I kept to myself in the sect’s Library Pavilion, studying medical texts day and night. Mộc Phong had never paid much attention to me. Besides, the people the original owner had made enemies of were coming to demand justice, keeping my master busy enough as it was.
Still, there was someone who just wouldn’t take a hint and kept hanging around me. For example, the original owner’s senior fellow disciple, Trình Trú.
“The master intends to punish junior sister by sending her to the Dark Prison.”
“???” I looked up from the stack of books at the man who had just leaped down from a window in the ceiling and melted into the shadows. His inner-disciple uniform of the Phi Tinh Sect was black as ink, with just one star embroidered on the collar in fluorescent thread. It was hard to see up close; only in the faint light did it give off a dim, hazy glow.
“What are you doing here?” I frowned and stared at that faint glimmer.
Trình Trú moved in front of me as fast as a shooting star. In the blink of an eye, he was standing right before me. He pressed his lips together, his eyes betraying a hint of unease.
“Ngân Linh, junior sister was in the wrong, so it’s only right that she be punished. But sending her to the Dark Prison—isn’t that too harsh?”
I tilted my head and rummaged through the jumble of memories for a long while before I remembered. Junior sister Vân Hoa had loudly accused me of disgracing the Phi Tinh Sect at yesterday’s gathering.
Things like this were perfectly ordinary. Mộc Phong usually turned a blind eye. Countless people had insulted me, and Vân Hoa was only one more. But this time, he flew into a rage and even wanted to send Vân Hoa to the Dark Prison to face the wall and endure the Five Elements punishment.
The Dark Prison held the sect’s most serious offenders, and the Heavenly Dipper Five Elements Formation had been laid within it. There, day and night blurred together; only the Five Elements circulated, and every cycle was pure torment. Vân Hoa had merely misspoken—why should she have to endure such torture? The disciples of the sect had begged to no avail, so Trình Trú finally came to me.
They wanted me to plead for Vân Hoa. Plead? If I actually did, she might be the one who lost her life. My unusual behavior when I first returned had made Mộc Phong suspicious. He was testing me!
So I could only maintain my former persona and reply coolly to Trình Trú, “She brought this on herself. If senior brother feels sorry for her, I can speak to master and have you go down there with junior sister.”
“You!” Trình Trú was so furious his face changed color. He hacked through the bookshelf in front of me, grinding his teeth as he snarled, “If anything happens to junior sister, I’ll never forgive you!”
Trình Trú left. I narrowed my eyes at the square patch of sky overhead and sighed softly. Outside, powerful enemies were everywhere; within the sect, everyone was an enemy. And then there was my master, outwardly compassionate and benevolent, but unfathomable within, secretly poisoning me day after day.
Every road led to certain death. What was I supposed to do? If I died here, where would my soul go? Could I return, or would I vanish forever? Who could say?
I rolled up the first page of the medical text, my thoughts in turmoil, when the blue talisman at my hip began trembling incessantly. I froze.
Giang Úc? He was using the Transmission-Exchange Talisman already?