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Chapter 1: Surviving In a Death Trap — Chen Moqing

"Chen Moqing! You colluded with the demon clan and slaughtered over five hundred members of the Haoran Sect. Heaven and earth will not tolerate this! No number of deaths could atone for your sins!"

"Master has already proclaimed to the world that you are expelled from the sect! There is no place for you in the Nine Thousand Prefectures. Submit to your execution!"

A cliff of towering height, biting cold winds, pines and cypresses snapped and broken.

Chen Moqing stood at the edge of the abyss, frost-cold sword in hand, ink-black hair flowing like clouds, crimson robes whipping in the wind, her expression unchanged.

Someone spoke from high above the clouds, filled with righteous indignation: "To think that little junior brother dragged his ailing body to plead for you, and you repaid him by severing his spiritual veins with a single sword strike! Master spent heart's blood and countless heavenly treasures just to barely save him, and he has yet to wake even now!"

"Oh?" Chen Moqing raised an elegant brow, "He isn't dead yet?"

"You show not the slightest remorse!"

"Even if junior brother received Master's favor after joining the sect and his talent was no less than yours, you should not have struck him down out of jealousy!"

"And the five hundred paragons of the righteous path in the Haoran Sect! What did they ever do to you, to deserve such a massacre!"

"How could the senior brother who was once like an orchid in a secluded valley become so deranged and devoid of all humanity!"

A thousand fingers pointed, and the voices of the crowd drowned out all else. Chen Moqing stood alone with his sword, his figure unbroken—like a blood-stained green bamboo splitting through rock at the edge of a cliff.

Someone stepped forward from the crowd—sword crown, white robes, hands clasped behind his back—looking down at him from above, taking in every detail of Chen Moqing's pallid and striking face beneath his ink-black hair, and the gaunt line of his waist within the crimson robes.

His words were earnest: "Senior Brother, everyone here belongs to the sect. There are no outsiders."

"You may offer your neck to be cut, or you may choose another path."

Chen Moqing drove his sword into the ground to support himself, lifted his eyes slightly, and looked toward his second junior brother: "I would like to hear more."

Gongsun Bushi said gently: "We cripple your spiritual veins, sever your limbs, and spare your life—to serve as our cultivation vessel."

The foremost sword cultivator of the younger generation across the Nine Thousand Prefectures, renowned and unrivaled—reduced to a cultivation vessel beneath them, kept from light of day...

"Out of our shared sect bond, we will naturally see to your protection."

A forbidden morsel that all in the sect may taste would of course be kept hidden deep within the forbidden grounds, unknown to outsiders.

Chen Moqing laughed.

That smile of his was like ice and snow melting away, like light pouring over ten thousand rivers, moving several of those present.

Everyone heard him laugh and say: "Very well."

That voice, made slightly hoarse from months of being hunted, remained cool and still like clear bamboo after rain—just as it had been when they first entered the sect, when they first saw this senior brother descend from the clouds before them and guide their way.

Gongsun Bushi's throat bobbed slightly.

Wind swept past sharply, and the sound of swords rose.

Tens of millions of sword qi interlaced with fierce intensity, sweeping and howling across the sky. The dazzling sword light was like the great sun rising at dawn, its brilliance stretching ten thousand zhang*, splitting through layers of cloud, blotting out the heavens.

*t/n; a traditional Chinese unit of length. 1 zhang ≈ 3.33 meters (about 10 feet), so "ten thousand zhang" would be about 33,300 meters.

"Not good! It's the Myriad Phenomena of All Heavens Formation!!"

Gongsun Bushi swiftly retreated behind the crowd, the smile on his face shattering completely.

The Myriad Phenomena of All Heavens Formation cast all things into a net. Those who fell into the net became dust and mud.

The sword formation created by Chen Moqing, first disciple of the Tianshu Sect's sect master—with this formation he had sealed a demon god, suppressed the demon abyss, and made his name known across the Nine Thousand Prefectures in a single battle.

And with this same formation, he had slaughtered the Haoran Sect, staining green mountains and long rivers red with blood, the killing aura unable to be cleansed from the surrounding hundreds of li for thirty days.

Howling wind and sword cries accompanied screams erupting in all directions. Everyone was seized with terror—they had never imagined that one day senior brother would turn the Myriad Phenomena of All Heavens Formation against them, nor had they expected that senior brother, already gravely wounded and cornered, still possessed the strength to turn the tide from the brink of ruin.

Chen Moqing stood alone at the cliff's edge, both hands folded over the hilt of the sword planted in the ground. The fierce wind swept his blood-red robes, outlining an upright figure like a blade pointing straight at the heavens. Beneath his wildly flying hair, his eyes were gently closed, fresh blood rolling from the corners of his eyes, sliding down his cold and pallid face.

The light of ten thousand swords reflected upon his form, sculpting the image of a killing god, peerless and untouched.

Beneath the formation tearing heaven and earth apart, all living things were like ants. The positions of hunter and hunted reversed in an instant. These proud prodigies, their courage shattered, had no will to fight at all, and without prior agreement each summoned every innate divine ability and life-saving technique they possessed, desperately trying to escape this place of certain death.

From beyond the high heavens, a sword qi descended—vast and magnificent as a frozen waterfall.

The Myriad Phenomena of All Heavens Formation, once unmatched at the height of its power, was now driven by a man already at the end of his strength. Beneath this full-force strike of sword qi, the formation held for only three breaths.

The sword formation shattered. Countless beams of sword light broke apart, like a violent rainstorm pouring down upon the cliff's edge.

Chen Moqing bled from all seven orifices. He slowly raised his head, those eyes cold as iron soaked in night rain piercing through the sky above, utterly without fear—only contempt.

"What a pity."

His scoff was swallowed by the descending torrent of icy sword light.

The second sword qi struck, shattering the spiritual veins throughout his body and grinding his sword cultivation foundation to nothing.

The third sword qi cleaved him across the waist, severing all four limbs.

The cliff collapsed, the earth split, the mountain crumbled. He could no longer hold his sword. The blade that had accompanied him for years slipped from his grasp into the dust, and his barely intact body plummeted straight into the deep valley below.

The final sword qi, before the eyes of all, drove straight through his chest, churned his heart to ruin, and obliterated his divine soul—from this moment, not a trace of life remained.

The mangled remains of the foremost figure of the younger generation across the Nine Thousand Prefectures rained down in a shower of blood. Before his body could even fall into the bottomless chasm, it was scattered by the howling winds.

Soul and spirit both destroyed. No reincarnation remained.

The clouds that had wrapped around the high cliff dispersed, revealing the boundless deep valley below. Countless crimson sealing formations drifted through the air, submerging the entire valley in a haze of bloody light, dim and unclear.

A figure with a sword on his back stood suspended in the air above the valley.

"Master!"

"Sect Master!"

An invisible pressure swept outward. Everyone bowed their heads—no one dared to look up.

Clad in white robes, a white-haired immortal lord resembling the snow-covered realm of a heavenly mountain gazed down into the valley. Frost and sword qi swirled around him as he uttered two indifferent words: "What a pity."

Gongsun Bushi bowed respectfully, the knuckles beneath his robes quietly tightening.

What a pity...

With senior brother's innate talent and natural gifts, had he been willing to become a cultivation vessel, he would surely have helped him ascend to the heights.

What a pity...

Knowing his intentions, knowing that for these past months he had repeatedly risked discovery by the sect to send letters—and yet never once responded.

Had he been willing to turn back, how could things have come to this.

Word spread by flying crane, and soon all of the cultivation world came to know—

Months prior, the criminal Chen Moqing—who had colluded with the demon clan, harmed his fellow disciples, and slaughtered over five hundred members of the Haoran Sect—had been executed by his own master, Tianshu Sect Master Yu Bai, at the northern border of the Zhou Kingdom. Not even his bones remained.

The foremost prodigy across the Nine Thousand Prefectures had fallen, yet few mourned him. The Tianshu Sect carried on as if nothing had changed.

After all, they still had another prodigy—a sword cultivation genius said to be in no way inferior in talent to Chen Moqing, Yu Bai's last and most cherished disciple, the very junior brother whom even Chen Moqing had allegedly resented out of jealousy.

The sect's future remained as brilliant as ever.

Only occasionally did someone raise the question of whether Chen Moqing might yet be revived—only to be quickly laughed off and dismissed.

Chen Moqing was indeed the foremost figure of the younger generation in the cultivation world—the first to achieve the great completion of the Deity Transformation stage before the age of one hundred. During the battle at the Demon Abyss, he had further broken through to the early Void Refinement stage, becoming the youngest cultivator at that level just as he had once been the youngest at Deity Transformation. His talent was so extraordinary as to be almost maddening.

Yet his master Yu Bai was the undisputed foremost sword cultivator in name and truth, standing at the peak of the Mahayana stage.

Yu Bai's sword was named "Yanluo," Where Yanluo struck, there was death and no life. A single strike was enough to sever the divine soul and cut off reincarnation—and Chen Moqing had received a full four strikes from his own master, a testament to the depth of their bond between teacher and disciple.

Furthermore, the valley where he had fallen was in the northern border where the Demon Emperor had perished five thousand years ago. The vicious and baleful energy there had not dispersed in a thousand years, and even cultivators of the Body Integration stage dared not venture deep within, fearing they would never return.

Without a doubt, Chen Moqing was certainly dead.

—Seven days later, at the bottom of the deep valley, Chen Moqing awoke.

He lay on a patch of barren grass. His severed limbs were connected by red wooden branches, slowly piecing themselves back together. The missing parts were filled in by newly grown shoots. Across his deathly pale and bloodless skin, red branch-like markings spread like veins—like a withered red lotus.

His tattered crimson robes had been soaked through with blood so many times over that the red had darkened almost to black, the original pattern of cranes against a pale blue-green ground long since indistinguishable.

His entire body wracked with agonizing pain—pain that even the slow cut of a blunt blade could not match by even a ten-thousandth—yet Chen Moqing shed no tears. His ashen eyes gazed up at the blood-red sky. After a moment, he smiled slowly and without a sound.

His return from death was of course not due to extraordinary fortune or heaven's mercy, but a contingency he had long prepared in advance.

—The Withered Wood Spring Revival Decree.

Lost for tens of thousands of years, said to be a talisman created by the first immortal to ascend to the heavens in the cultivation world, possessing the power to reverse life and death and overturn fate.

Three years prior, he had replicated it.

Before the slaughter of the Haoran Sect, before the sword thrust through his junior brother's chest, he had already carved this talisman into his own body.

Only at the threshold of death does spring appear.

A cold rain fell across the northern border. In a place where thousands of years of baleful energy had condensed, every strand of rain transformed into a blade scraping across his skin, drawing long, bleeding gashes.

Unable to move, Chen Moqing quietly closed his eyes and let the countless strands of rain descend as blades upon him, cutting layer upon layer of wounds across his body, slowly tearing away strip after strip of flesh, until bone wrapped in red branches lay bare.

Newly seeping blood once again soaked through white bone and ink-black hair, drifting through the rain, spreading into a dissolved landscape painting of ink and water.

Vast as heaven and earth were, he alone remained, listening to wind and rain.

He murmured softly: "Mother... I want to eat osmanthus cake..."

The osmanthus tree before the family gate, consumed by fire.

Several thousand households across the entire city, wiped out in a single night.

It was as if a tide of blood surged before his eyes, the stench of it flooding his nose. Chen Moqing vomited great mouthfuls of crimson, mixed with fragments of mangled flesh, nearly heaving out his very organs.

Only when every last drop of blood in his body had drained away did new red branches carve themselves into the pale skin of his chest, climbing from his well-defined abdomen upward to his chest like a red lotus blooming from flesh and blood, finally coming to rest inches from his heart.

His four limbs had by now been restored. Chen Moqing forcibly swallowed the blood rising in his throat, suppressed the agonizing dizziness threatening to overwhelm him, turned himself upright, sat cross-legged on the ground, and steadied his breathing.

The spiritual sea that had once been full of spiritual energy was now a barren wasteland. His once clearly defined sword cultivation foundation had been torn out from the root.

Those who possess cultivation aptitude are born with a natural foundation, and the nature of that foundation determines the path of their cultivation. A foundation of fewer than three spiritual roots signifies lower-grade talent; four to five, mid-grade; six to seven, upper-grade; eight to nine, supreme-grade. A ten spiritual roots foundation is a once-in-a-millennium perfect natural gift, marking an unparalleled prodigy destined to reach the pinnacle of their path.

Yet there had once been one born with twelve sword spiritual roots—a talent the cultivation world had not seen in tens of thousands of years. His name was Chen Moqing.

His cultivation was entirely crippled, but cultivation could be rebuilt. What could not was his sword foundation—Yu Bai's four full-force sword strikes had thoroughly shattered it. Once a foundation was destroyed it could not be remolded. The cultivation world's foremost sword talent would never again set foot upon the path of the sword.

Chen Moqing's mind was still as a mirror, without a single ripple.

Of the countless ten thousand paths in the world, there was no reason only one could be walked.

From just a moment ago he had already noticed that the immense baleful energy filling this place contained vast spiritual power. For cultivators, this baleful energy would directly damage their foundation—like an irresolvable poison, it would corrode the spiritual sea and ultimately destroy cultivation entirely, ending in death.

As it happened, his foundation was now fully destroyed and his spiritual sea already ruined—so it could not kill him.

The Withered Wood Spring Revival Decree's price for reversing life and death was the permanent end of reincarnation. After death, his soul would fall forever into the underworld, to be tormented by raging fire for ten thousand years. Those red branches piercing through his heart would be the mark of his death.

But until that moment, so long as spring had not departed—he would neither die nor be destroyed.

Chen Moqing sat cross-legged in the mud and used this great rain washing heaven and earth to grind down his shattered bones and broken sinews and reconstruct his spiritual foundation.

The rain gathered into shallow pools. Mirrors of all sizes reflected the upside-down image of ink-black hair and red robes beneath the dim sky. Within layer upon layer of ripples, a pair of crimson eyes opened.

In an instant, countless translucent raindrops froze in place and turned deep red, as though dragging the mortal world into a blood-colored underworld.

A pair of cold crimson eyes pierced through the curtain of rain, casting their gaze across the mortal world, and came to rest upon Chen Moqing's face.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

The downpour ceased abruptly. A gentle wind came, parting the dark clouds.

Cang Shun awoke from a long slumber. The first sight of the mortal world his eyes fell upon was that person.

Face of breathtaking beauty. Bearing like a sword.

Wounds covering every inch. Foundation entirely destroyed.

...How could anyone be so grievously hurt?

Had someone bullied him?

Those cold crimson eyes narrowed slightly.

【Benzun*—】

*t/n; a self-referential honorific title. Ben (本, Běn) means "this/one's own", and Zun (尊, Zūn) means "venerable one", so Benzun can mean "This Venerable One".

"Meow."

A soft little cub's cry.

Cang Shun: "?"

【Ben—】

"Meow."

"???"

The former Demon Emperor looked down at himself in disbelief.

White.

Tiny.

A little beast no bigger than two or three palm-lengths, somewhere between a cat and a leopard—round little beast ears, perfectly round red eyes, a long slender tail, and snow-white fur puffed up in a fluffy little ball.

The tiny white beast stared back with an expression of complete and utter disbelief, then chased its own tail around in a fluffy little circle.

"Meow!"

Even the cry came out baby-soft.

"......"

The former Demon Emperor decided to keep his mouth shut.

He sat on the ground in a huff, his fur puffing up even more into one big fluffy ball.

Got soaked all over with rainwater.

Even more annoyed. He scrambled back up and shook his fur out at top speed, flinging water everywhere.

Bustling about in a frenzy, with no clear idea of what exactly he was doing.

Chen Moqing lifted his eyelids slightly, his still and cold dark eyes reflecting the tiny demon beast spinning round and round.

Sensing his gaze, Cang Shun turned his head, tilted his chin up with an air of overbearing arrogance—which, in practice, looked like a fluffy little white beast staring wide-eyed with its small head held high.

Chen Moqing said nothing and closed his eyes again.

Cang Shun strolled leisurely over to his side and began circling around him, as if he had discovered a beautiful iceberg, occasionally drawing closer and attempting to poke and prod with his little paws.

"Meow?"

How do you not even have a foundation anymore?

Who bullied you?

Whether Chen Moqing understood or not, his raven-dark lashes remained quietly lowered.

The circling Demon Emperor noticed that his fluffy white fur had picked up specks of mud, and without a second thought wiped it off on the corner of Chen Moqing's robes.

A faint fragrance drifted into his nose.

So pleasant.

Those crimson eyes stilled slightly, reflecting Chen Moqing's pale and strikingly beautiful profile, wet strands of dark hair clinging to his face in the rain.

Cang Shun silently drew a little closer and caught again the soft wafting scent from this young human cultivator—a fragrance that not even rain and mud could mask.

...Quite nice, actually.

The tiny white beast instinctively bit down on Chen Moqing's finger, leaving behind a neat little ring of tooth marks.

Chen Moqing: "......"

He gathered his strength for a moment, then opened his calm and unfathomable dark eyes and, without a word, picked up this scheming little demon beast by the scruff.

Finding itself lifted up with such ease, the tiny white beast's fur bristled all over. It began flailing its paws wildly, twisting and thrashing about, letting out a loud "Meow!"

Like a cotton ball that had exploded.

Chen Moqing bit back.

Cang Shun: "???"

"Meow!!!"

Author's Note:

———————————

Cang Shun: My wife kissed me on our very first meeting!

Cang Shun: My wife kissed a little hard though.

Chen Moqing: ...

Cultivation Stage: Qi Refinement, Foundation Building, Golden Core, Nascent Soul, Deity Transformation, Void Refinement, Body Integration, Mahayana, Tribulation Crossing, Ascension

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