I CULTIVATED BY TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE DEMON LORD - CHAPTER 2

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 :)

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