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CHAPTER 1: The Youth
"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?
In the novel, Bai Lingyu had always been the sort to act on impulse. Even the female protagonist couldn't talk sense into him.
It was precisely that stubbornness that had brought him to the Linxian Inn alone, against her wishes, where the original Chu Li had laid her trap and taken what she came for. The loss cost him at the Grand Immortal Assembly, where he suffered his first great defeat. And because he was, at his core, a golden-boy male lead too proud to admit what had actually happened, he'd sooner choked on his own dignity than told the truth. He'd even snapped at the female protagonist when she tried to comfort him, sending her into a spiral of heartache that dragged on for over a hundred thousand words.
Beyond the personality flaws, Bai Lingyu wasn't even particularly good-looking. Nothing about him sparked the slightest interest.
No matter how much narrative protagonist aura the original novel had draped over him, what Chu Li remembered now was a flushed, sputtering, thoroughly undignified mess of a man.
What a waste of a trip.
She rapped the paper umbrella lightly against her forehead and shooed the image away.
Focus.
She was twenty years old in this body. Without a cultivation partner, the original had scraped her way to the fifth level of Qi Refinement, and that was apparently the ceiling. To extend her lifespan, Chu Li needed to push past that, to reach Foundation Establishment, and she needed a cultivation partner to do it.
But the original had been accepted into the Hehuan Sect for a reason. The aptitude was there. Given enough time and a proper approach, reaching Foundation Establishment within three years was entirely achievable.
The real question was where she was going to find a suitable partner.
A cold gust swept past, and Chu Li sneezed.
Several drops of icy rain landed on her face. She looked up. The sky had turned without warning, the way it always did in early spring, and grey clouds had rolled in from nowhere. Fine rain was already beginning to fall.
She gathered her thin gauze wrap closer around her shoulders, opened the paper umbrella, and quickened her pace.
The landscape around her grew hazier, the air heavier. She'd lost her bearings somewhere along the way and was just about to use a directional technique when her foot caught on something and she lurched forward.
She looked down, annoyed.
That was not a stone.
That was a desiccated human skull.
When she looked up at the path stretching ahead, she saw more: bodies in various states of ruin, blood diluted to pale streaks by the rain, an atmosphere of suffocating dread hanging over everything like a second sky.
She had wandered into a rogue cultivator's hunting ground.
Rogue cultivators, the kind who had abandoned orthodox practice and turned to consuming the spiritual energy of others, laid illusion formations to lure lone cultivators in. They would savage their prey first, draining them to the edge of death before drawing out the last of their spiritual energy, leaving nothing but an empty husk.
She hadn't witnessed the act, but the condition of the bodies left little room for other explanations.
Chu Li pressed a hand over her mouth and fought down the wave of nausea rising in her throat. Slowly, carefully, she began to back away with the umbrella still raised, doing everything she could not to make a sound.
Once she'd put several dozen feet between herself and the carnage without anything stirring, she snapped the umbrella shut, gathered her qi, and ran.
She had no idea how long she ran for. Eventually the landscape softened back into something ordinary, and the air lost its sour, suffocating weight.
She must have crossed out of that cursed stretch of land. Chu Li planted the umbrella tip on the ground to steady herself and pressed her other hand flat against her chest, waiting for her heartbeat to settle.
She'd been masking her footprints with a concealment technique throughout. As long as she'd covered her qi trail well enough that nothing had followed her by scent, she was safe.
Her robes were soaked through. The rain showed no sign of letting up, and her water-repelling technique was only good for short bursts before she was drenched again. She gave up trying to stay dry and ducked under the nearest tree instead, opening her umbrella and letting herself breathe.
She'd barely had a moment to shake the chill off her sleeves when something cold crept up her spine from behind.
Chu Li felt it for the first time with perfect, unmistakable clarity: the thing novels called killing intent.
It wasn't like the cold rain. It was something that went deeper, something that raised every hair on her body before her mind had fully registered the threat.
Her cultivator's instincts moved faster than her thoughts. Her hand snapped around the umbrella handle and she swept it in a wide arc behind her.
The pale umbrella spun on its axis. The red oleander painted across its surface blurred into streaks of red and green as the last of the rain flew from its edges in a bright scattered spray.
She stood there, breath unsteady, fingers white around the handle.
Through the semi-translucent oilpaper, she could just make out a figure crouched low against the ground.
She was certain the tip of her umbrella was pointed directly at the figure's face. And yet the figure hadn't moved at all. Perfectly still. Patient, somehow, like something quietly calculating its next move.
Chu Li tightened her grip. "Who are you? Why are you following me?"
Silence. Only the rain kept answering.
She was about to strike when a voice came from behind the umbrella.
"...Sister?"
It was a young man's voice, carrying that particular quality of adolescence: a faint roughness at the edges, but soft underneath, like bamboo leaves in the rain. The wariness drained out of her before she'd made any decision to let it go.
She lowered the umbrella slowly.
The barrier between them came down, and she found herself looking at a boy in a tattered blue robe, hugging his knees on the ground.
His head was bowed. The wet crown of his hair faced her, rainwater tracing the dark strands at his temples, running down the bridge of his nose. His shoulder had a tear in the fabric, baring skin that had gone red with cold. His trousers were missing from the knee down, leaving bare shins and narrow ankles exposed to the weather. His shoes were gone entirely. His pale feet were pressed tightly together and trembling.
He looked exactly like a small dog someone had left out in the rain.
Something in Chu Li softened.
Something this pitiful could not possibly mean her harm. She must have been so on edge from before that she'd imagined the threat entirely.
She bent slightly and extended the umbrella over his head. "How did your clothes end up in this state?"
The boy bit down on his lip. When he finally spoke, it came out slowly, like something he'd had to drag out of himself. "Someone... wanted to hurt me. The others... they didn't make it."
He gestured behind her with one hand, toward exactly the direction she'd come from.
She hadn't expected that. He was a survivor.
When he drew his hand back, she noticed the blood on it. "You're hurt?"
He rubbed at the stains against his side, again and again, his voice barely above a murmur. "That's not... my blood. It got on me when they... when they died."
Chu Li's stomach turned. So the bodies she'd stumbled past had been his companions. And whatever he'd witnessed had rattled him badly enough that speaking in full sentences was a struggle.
"We can't stay here." She glanced around, then looked back at him. "Where do you live? I'll take you home."
"Home?" He shook his head, his expression lost. "I don't have one."
The words landed with a quiet weight. Chu Li's sympathy deepened further. She reached down to help him up. "Then I'll get you away from here."
But the boy didn't move.
After a long pause, he said three words, voice carefully restrained: "I'm in pain."
He had furrowed his brow slightly. He tucked his feet under the hem of his tattered robe, as though admitting that much had cost him more than he'd wanted to give.
She couldn't tell at a glance where he was injured. "Where does it hurt?"
"Everywhere. But my face... especially my face." He kept his gaze down. Those long, dense lashes cast a shadow across his eyes, hiding whatever was in them.
"How am I supposed to help if you won't look up?" Chu Li reached out with one finger and, as gently as she could, tilted his chin toward her.
And promptly forgot to breathe.
Did people like this actually exist?
Every feature was placed exactly where her eye wanted it to be. High brow bones, a straight nose, the clean lines of his face balanced by the soft curve of his lips, which took a little of the sharpness out of his bone structure. And those eyes: doe-shaped, with a subtle double fold, looking up at her as though carrying a thousand things he hadn't decided whether to say.
Chu Li's heart leapt.
Cultivators, it was said, wore their spiritual aptitude in their faces. If that was true, this boy had won before he'd even begun.
His clothes could rival a beggar's. And yet Chu Li was willing to stake anything that with that face alone, he could outshine ninety-nine percent of everyone in the novel.
She had a feeling even the great villain himself, Ji Wuyan, who had lived a thousand years, whose hair had gone entirely white, and who was said to possess unparalleled spiritual roots, probably couldn't match this face.
In the boy's clear, water-still eyes, she caught the reflection of her own smile curling up at the corners without her permission.
She had searched everywhere without finding what she needed.
And here it had come to her on its own, without any effort at all.
A boy with exceptional looks, a gentle disposition, no family ties, and nowhere to be.
From any angle, by any measure, he was...
A perfect cultivation partner.
[Author's Note]
Ji Wuyan: Thank you, same to you :)
Read only on https://royaltywrites.com.ng/
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