I CULTIVATED BY TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE DEMON LORD - CHAPTER 1

"You wicked woman; how dare you drug me!"

That furious voice was what dragged Chu Li back to consciousness.

Wicked woman?

Drug?

What on earth is this man going on about.

Pressing a hand to her swimming head, Chu Li blinked through the gradually sharpening curtain of bed hangings and found herself staring at a stranger's face.

An unnatural flush burned across the man's features, damp strands of hair plastered to his forehead and cheeks. He lay flat on the bed in nothing but a white inner robe, the thin fabric soaked through with sweat. His voice, for all its fury, carried an unmistakable thickness. "If you dare sully my honour… I will not let this go."

The false accusations were giving her a headache. Chu Li pressed two fingers to her temple and leaned against the bedpost.

"Who said anything about sullying your honour?"

She remembered perfectly well what she'd been doing: sitting in the courtyard, enjoying a quiet drink, when a bolt of lightning came screaming down out of nowhere and...

How had she ended up in this absolute nightmare of a scene?

The man on the bed looked ready to bite through iron, glaring at her like she'd personally wronged his ancestors. "Stop playing innocent with me! You put Boundless Yin-Yang Hehuan Powder in the side dish. Don't even think about denying it!"

Boundless… Yin-Yang Hehuan Powder.

That ridiculous name. Wasn't that the aphrodisiac that only existed in...

The thought cracked something open in her memory.

Right before her drink that evening, she'd idly cracked open a xianxia novel called Peerless White Soul, a male-audience cultivation story. In it, there was a female side character from the Hehuan Sect who shared Chu Li's exact name. Desperate to secure a powerhouse cultivator's primordial yang energy and break through her bottleneck in one shot, the original Chu Li had set her sights on the male lead, Bai Lingyu, only to find him thoroughly devoted to the female protagonist and impossible to pry away. Left with no other options, she'd resorted to slipping him that very powder.

The irony was that even after getting what she came for, the original Chu Li had pushed too hard and gone qi-mad in the process. She lost everything: her cultivation, her place in the sect. She'd tried to take refuge elsewhere, but every sect had heard what she'd done to the male lead, and every door had been slammed in her face.

In the end, she'd drifted alone into the wilderness, where a group of rogue cultivators had found her. Used her. Left nothing behind.

The memory hit Chu Li like cold water.

She snapped back to herself and looked down.

Lotus-pink gauze draped her shoulders; beneath it, a deep plum ruqun, its sheer hehuan-embroidered fabric letting the curve of her waist and the pale skin of her calves catch the light. Scandalous by ordinary standards, perfectly standard for a Hehuan Sect cultivator of the Qi Refinement stage.

Her unease sharpened. She turned toward the bronze mirror on the wall.

The woman looking back at her had a small, fine-boned face and skin like poured cream. Tilted amber eyes, slightly upturned at the outer corners. A soft upper lip with just enough curve to read as knowing.

It wasn't her face. It was the face of someone born to be trouble, the original female side character's face.

Chu Li was speechless.

Of all the characters to transmigrate into, it had to be the one with the worst ending in the whole novel.

As for the furious man on the bed...

She picked up a pair of bamboo chopsticks from the side table and pushed back the damp hair falling across his brow. There it was: a small cinnabar mark between his eyebrows. The signature mark of the male lead, Bai Lingyu.

And despite all that rage in his voice, he hadn't moved once. He just lay there, bloodshot eyes fixed on her, his throat working in a barely suppressed swallow every few seconds.

Consistent with the novel's scene: male lead dosed with Yin-Yang Hehuan Powder, female side character's paralysis technique keeping him pinned.

Chu Li felt a little numb.

Of all the moments to drop into, she'd landed in the middle of the original's most depraved scene, the one the author had slapped an eighteen-plus warning on.

The one saving grace: her robes were still on. All of them, intact.

Which meant the original hadn't succeeded yet.

Chu Li exhaled slowly and upended her storage bracelet, shaking everything inside it onto the floor. A scatter of spirit stones, some rouge and face powder, a handful of common herbs.

No antidote.

She frowned and started pulling open cabinet drawers, checking every bottle and jar in the guest room.

"Shameless creature." Bai Lingyu's voice ground out from behind the bed curtain. "What are you plotting now?"

"You were drugged, not blinded. Can't you see I'm looking for the antidote?"

Yin-Yang Hehuan Powder was one of the Hehuan Sect's closely guarded formulas, potent enough to be genuinely dangerous, which was precisely why the sect kept a corresponding antidote on hand, in case a disciple accidentally dosed themselves and couldn't find a cultivation partner in time.

But she turned the room inside out and found nothing.

Bai Lingyu let out a cold laugh. "You said yourself you were going to have my primordial yang no matter what. You never brought the antidote. Stop performing."

"…You are so loud." Chu Li pressed a hand over one ear.

What she wanted was to simply walk out the door.

What she couldn't do was leave him like this. Without an antidote to neutralise it, the powder's toxins would eat through his meridians and leave him half-crippled. The moment that happened, his sect, the Heavenly Sword Sect, would come looking for answers, and the Hehuan Sect wouldn't be able to protect her.

The original had gone all-in without even packing the antidote. What exactly was the plan here? Fix this with sheer willpower?

Unless...

Something clicked.

Chu Li crouched down and rummaged through the pile she'd emptied from her bracelet, pulling out a small jar of zaojia powder. She tipped the whole thing into the teapot, filled it with water, swirled it once, and carried it over to Bai Lingyu.

"You want the poison out of your system, don't you? Then drink."

Every muscle in his face went rigid. He pressed his lips together with what little control he had left. "You think I would ever..."

She shoved the spout between his teeth and poured.

He spluttered, choked, and managed a furious, "What did you just make me drink?!"

"Premium soapberry solution." Chu Li lifted the lid and inspected the very empty pot. She set it down with a satisfied click. "No substitutions."

When no antidote was available, the next best option was to get the toxin out fast. Soapberry had strong emetic and purgative properties. If she could accelerate his body's rejection of the powder before it fully absorbed, the effect would be similar to treating food poisoning with induced vomiting.

Straightforward medical logic.

The only small issue was that she'd used the entire jar to make sure it worked.

He was going to be miserable for a very, very long time.

The mental image was so vivid that Chu Li shuddered.

Not my problem. She'd done what she could.

According to the novel's timeline, the female protagonist would arrive on the scene within two cups of tea. Chu Li needed to be gone before that happened, or things would get complicated in ways she had no patience for.

She gathered everything off the floor, grabbed the paper umbrella propped against the bed, dissolved the paralysis technique on Bai Lingyu with a quick hand seal, and left without looking back.

•

After slipping out of the Linxian Inn, Chu Li chose the most deserted route she could find.

Taverns and teahouses. Rouge shops. Anywhere a righteous-path cultivator might be lurking. She avoided them all.

The back path was quiet and sparsely travelled, good for thinking.

Specifically, for thinking about her future.

The original Chu Li had been born with a weak constitution. A medical cultivator had told her in childhood that she wouldn't live past twenty-three. It was that death sentence that had driven her to the Hehuan Sect, which had strict standards for its disciples' looks, and which she'd met easily enough. While her fellow disciples spent their days steadily cultivating and breaking through bottleneck after bottleneck, the original had been chasing a shortcut, betting everything on squeezing what she needed out of the male lead. It had cost her everything.

Chu Li genuinely could not understand what the appeal was supposed to be.

What was so great about some overpowered golden-boy male lead, anyway?

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