I CULTIVATED BY TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE DEMON LORD

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CHAPTER 22: The Hidden Realm

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Chu Li couldn't help letting out a burst of laughter. "You want to pick a muli flower?"

Little Lian looked momentarily taken aback. "Don't you want to see one, Sister?"

Chu Li sighed. "It's not that I don't want to see one, it's that this flower's nearly impossible to find. In this world, muli flowers only grow on the most treacherous cliffs, and no one even knows when they're likely to bloom. So don't go setting your heart on it."

As she spoke, she rolled over, facing away from him, muttering under her breath, "Why am I even bringing up muli flowers with you right now..."

Another candle burned down to nothing, plunging the room into near-total darkness. Chu Li felt her eyelids growing unbearably heavy, and after one last yawn, let her consciousness slip slowly into the dark.

But she hadn't been asleep long before pain jolted her awake.

It felt as though a thousand blades had plunged into her heart all at once, sweat and bone-deep agony overwhelming her in an instant.

In her hazy, half-conscious state, she thought she'd grabbed hold of the boy's hand, could feel her own nails digging uncontrollably into his palm, could hear her own breath coming in short, ragged bursts as though her chest might burst open, but she never heard a single word from him in return.

By the time the crushing wave of pain finally subsided, leaving her gasping, the darkness closed back in over her consciousness once more, swallowing her whole, piece by piece.

Somewhere deep down, she felt a genuine wave of relief.

It was finally over.

Inside the room, only the last stub of a single candle still struggled to hold its flame, casting the shadows of the crane and the boy in impossibly long, stretched shapes against the wall.

Dandan bent his long, slender neck, hesitating, nudging Chu Li's shoulder gently with his beak.

Chu Li lay peacefully on the bed, her dark hair, once damp with sweat, now flowing smoothly across the pillow and down the side of her neck, clearly having been carefully tended to by someone's hands.

Her hands rested folded atop the blanket, still gripping the golden mother bell tightly.

Dandan called out to her with a soft "honk honk," and receiving no response, tilted his head slightly in confusion, calling out once more.

"Let her sleep peacefully for a while." The boy's voice came out unnervingly calm, entirely devoid of emotion, barely recognizable compared to how he'd sounded only moments before.

Dandan straightened his neck, then lowered his head, as if in understanding.

The boy seemed to reach some kind of decision, prying open Chu Li's fingers and taking the mother bell from her grip.

Before leaving, he turned back to look at the figure on the bed, and after a moment, his gaze shifted to the crane beside her. "While I'm gone, you're responsible for watching over her. Don't let anyone disturb her, not even your own owner. Do you understand?"

Dandan spread his wings slightly, slowly lifting one clawed foot, as though sealing some kind of agreement with him, bowing his head obediently and letting out a single soft call.

The Bliss Sect lay in complete silence, the moonlight that should have graced the sect blocked entirely by thick clouds overhead, nothing but a light breeze stirring past.

The boy stood before an enormous water mirror, though it cast no reflection of him at all.

That was because the water mirror wasn't truly a mirror, but the sole entrance to the Bliss Sect's hidden realm.

Within that hidden realm lay treasures collected by generations of sect masters since the sect's founding, protected by a thousand-year barrier, left unguarded year-round.

Every disciple of the Bliss Sect, partners included, was sternly warned upon joining the sect never to touch the water mirror.

Anyone who did, whether the lowliest outer-sect disciple or the sect master herself, would be instantly dragged into the ever-shifting hidden realm within, and the slightest carelessness there could mean never coming back out at all.

A chilling story had circulated within the sect for generations, about a disciple centuries ago, the sect master's own senior disciple at the time, already at the peak of the Spirit Transformation stage, who'd rashly challenged the hidden realm over some careless wager.

By the time the sect master had rallied everyone's combined strength to pull her back out, she'd spent barely the time of two cups of tea inside. Yet once rescued, she'd been left with barely the third level of Qi refining cultivation remaining, utterly humiliated, her path of cultivation cut short forever.

Ever since then, no one in the sect had dared trespass into the Bliss Sect's hidden realm again.

At this very moment, the long-dormant hidden realm finally sensed a new challenger, an enormous purple datura pattern flickering faintly into view within the water mirror.

The boy bit down on the ribbon at the top of the mother bell, holding it between his teeth, and pulled a silk handkerchief from the front of his robe, the same one still stained with the blood he'd wiped from her lips.

He studied the bloodstain on the handkerchief carefully, as though examining some finely detailed painting, before twisting it into a cord and using it to bind his dark hair up high at the back of his head.

He then fastened the mother bell tightly to his belt and touched a single fingertip to the water mirror's surface.

Ripples spread outward, and almost instantly, a burst of purple radiance bloomed toward him like an enormous datura flower unfurling.

When he opened his eyes again, he found himself already inside the hidden realm.

Before him stretched an endless field of snow.

The main body of the Bliss Sect's hidden realm was constructed entirely from illusion, the scenery it presented shaped by the intruder's own inner state of mind.

He knew perfectly well this snowy field was nothing but illusion, yet the cold felt utterly real. If he lingered here too long, he risked freezing to death in the storm.

Only by moving quickly enough could he force his way out through sheer will alone, before his body froze solid entirely.

Snowflakes drifted silently into the front of his robe, melting into faint, fleeting traces of water, while fierce, cutting gales howled down from above, again and again, billowing his gray-blue robe out like a flag caught in the wind.

Winds this violent would normally suppress a cultivator's own power severely, weighing down their legs as though filled with lead, making each step agonizingly slow. But with hardly any cultivation left to his name, the boy found himself, ironically, spared much of that burden, the wind's grip on him weaker than it might otherwise have been.

Still, a seventeen-year-old body simply wasn't resilient enough. As he pressed forward through the snow, blade-sharp gusts laced with spiritual energy kept slicing fresh, vivid wounds across his skin.

At the same time, the mother bell fastened at his waist continued to ring out in faint, persistent bursts, a warning signal urging him to stay alert to danger.

He wasn't afraid of getting hurt. He didn't particularly mind it either.

He simply disliked the sight of his own body marked with fine, crisscrossing lines of blood.

After several dozen breaths, the bell's ringing suddenly turned frantic.

Within the hidden realm, spiritual energy condensed into invisible arrows, slicing against the wind itself, each one aimed directly at a vital point on his body.

The boy didn't even blink, turning lightly on his heel, his gray-blue robe billowing through the snow in time with the ringing bell at his waist.

The arrows' force swept past his sides, briefly taking shape against the snow before dissolving into black mist and scattering away.

Determined to stop him from advancing any further into its depths, the hidden realm continued conjuring wave after wave of these lethal, condensed arrows, seemingly without end.

And yet, the boy's movements carried the ease of someone who'd rehearsed this exact sequence a thousand times before, as though it had been etched into his very soul, effortlessly dodging every single strike that came for him.

Rather than dodging danger, it looked more like he was performing a solitary dance, one with no audience to watch it.

He had no deep well of cultivation to draw upon here, no sturdy body capable of absorbing mistakes.

All he had was the accumulated experience of his entire existence, built up since the moment he was born.

And that alone, it turned out, surpassed every cultivation method the world had ever known.

The wind and snow couldn't stop him. The hidden arrows couldn't stop him.

However many dangers this hidden realm threw at him, none of it could stop him.

He had no way of knowing how long he'd walked before the wind and snow around him gradually began to weaken, a clear sign that he'd drawn close to the heart of the hidden realm.

The boy pressed on without pause, until at last, amid the snow, he caught sight of an oddly out-of-place lotus pond.

A lotus flower carved from black jade rose from the water, pale purple runes surfacing faintly across each of its petals.

This was the seal cast by the Bliss Sect's own sect master, the final barrier standing between him and the Soul-Waking Jade.

Should he touch any single petal of the Soul-Waking Jade directly, the seal would bind him here permanently, until his body froze solid and his soul had nowhere left to flee.

The boy lowered his head and bit through his own fingertip, letting a single drop of blood fall onto the seal.

In that instant, the runes of the seal, which had been drifting slowly until then, suddenly surged into six blinding streams of light, coiling together as they rose into the air, forming a translucent purple figure.

"Who dares trespass so brazenly into the Bliss Sect's hidden realm, scheming to steal the Soul-Waking Jade?" The seal spirit hovered above him, formless and without a body of its own, yet its voice carried an authority that rivaled that of the gods themselves.

The seal spirit existed as the embodiment of the seal's own will, and it would use every means at its disposal to turn away any uninvited intruder foolish enough to reach for the treasure it guarded.

The boy paid the seal spirit's question no mind whatsoever, simply raising his fingertip and giving the wound a light, unhurried suck.

The seal spirit's light flared brighter across its entire form, its tone turning sharp with displeasure. "You may refuse to reveal your identity, but there's not a single trace of the Bliss Sect's cultivation method running through you. If you aren't some spy posing as a partner who's infiltrated this sect, then what exactly are you?"

The boy lowered his gaze, a faint trace of amusement flickering at the corner of his eye.

The seal spirit refused to be discouraged. "Don't think that just because you say nothing, I know nothing at all. Why else would you risk everything to venture this deep, if not to seize the Soul-Waking Jade's power for yourself, and rise to the heavens in a single leap?"

The boy continued idly rubbing his thumb over the wound. "Is that so?"

"Not for yourself, then?" The seal spirit caught the implication behind his silence. "Even if you meant to use it to save someone else, you have no way of actually taking it with you regardless. With cultivation as weak as yours currently is, the moment you so much as touch the Soul-Waking Jade, the spiritual energy that floods out would be more than enough to shatter every meridian in your body, leaving you a hollow, ruined husk of a person, nothing more."

The boy lifted his fingertip, studying it in the purple light rippling from the spectral figure before him, turning it slowly this way and that. After a long moment, he simply let out a small, noncommittal "Mm."

The seal spirit tried a gentler approach. "I can see your aptitude is remarkable. Your body may still be young, but with dedicated cultivation, you're sure to achieve great things in time. Why throw away your own foundation for someone else's sake? Leave now, and I'll open the path back for you myself, and spare your life."

The boy tilted his head back, considering this for a moment, then said, with faint contempt, "And if I'd rather not?"

The seal spirit swelled to more than three times its previous size, its voice booming across the snowy field. "Then you're courting death!"

The bell at his waist rang out violently, yet the boy's expression never so much as shifted. He simply reached one hand straight through the seal spirit's insubstantial form, pressing his palm against the small opening in the seal that his blood had already parted, the purple light reflected in his eyes casting his blood-streaked face in an eerie, striking glow.

"When did I ever say I was here to steal the Soul-Waking Jade?"

Whatever fury the wind and snow had shown on his way in, it paled entirely against what awaited him on the way back out.

It wasn't that the hidden realm had shown him any mercy this time. It was that the storm of spiritual energy raging within his own body now dwarfed even the treacherous, ever-shifting wind and snow of the realm itself.

The spiritual energy the Soul-Waking Jade had poured into his fingertip a moment ago had, in an instant, flooded his already near-depleted meridians, surging and raging wildly through his body without restraint.

If he hadn't already once contained a torrent of spiritual energy far more overwhelming than this, a thousand times over, he might well have ended up exactly as the seal spirit had warned before its dissolution, unable to withstand the impact, reduced to a ruined shell of a person.

He had no way of knowing how much time passed before the turbulent energy racing through his meridians finally began to settle, gradually flowing into his spirit root, leaving him with a sense of calm he hadn't felt in a very long time.

By then, he'd already reached the back side of the water mirror. A single touch of his fingertip would carry him back to where he'd started.

The boy brushed a thin layer of frost from the mother bell at his waist, and just as he was about to pass through the water mirror, a tiny golden glimmer, no larger than a firefly, flickered at the edge of his vision.

He turned abruptly, fixing his gaze on it.

At the edge of a bottomless cliff, amid a storm of wind and snow that never once let up, a small, unremarkable yellow flower swayed gently within his field of view.

【Author's Note】

【Bonus scene】

Ji Wuyan: I looked so impressively cool in the hidden realm, and Sister never even got to see it. What a waste.

Chu Li: Fried chicken, bubble tea, mochi balls, teppanyaki, duck blood vermicelli, butter hotpot... my dream had all of that, and I couldn't bring a single bite of it back with me. Now that's a real waste!

Ji Wuyan: ???

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