Chapter 1: Just as you wished, I’m dying.
Yan Jingyu felt as if he had been struck.
He hadn’t seen who did it. All he remembered was an excruciating pain in his sternum and a flash of darkness before he knew nothing more.
When he groggily regained consciousness, his first thought was: I’m not dead?
Given his understanding of his own ruined body, it was a blessing that his soul hadn’t scattered after taking such a heavy blow. That he had managed to cling to life was nothing short of a miracle.
As he drifted in a daze, a young girl’s voice reached his ears. “Who in the world is this man? To think the Lord would be willing to use a Cuiwei Pill on him.”
Yan Jingyu’s eyelashes trembled.
The Lord… He remembered being struck in Hutian. Hutian was a sacred ground of the immortal sects, and in this day and age, there was only one person in Hutian who could be addressed as “the Lord.” Although the Cuiwei Pill was a legendary ancient remedy with ingredients that were nearly impossible to find, it wouldn’t be out of reach for that person…
But his own face was now completely unrecognizable. How had the man identified him?
“He’s probably a nobody, just some unlucky sod,” a young boy’s voice chimed in this time. “The Lord mistook him for someone else. He felt bad after injuring him by mistake, so he brought him back.”
Yan Jingyu: “?”
The fog in his mind began to clear.
So, the “Lord” they were speaking of wasn’t Qin Zhongyou? On second thought, that made sense. After all, that man’s title in the outside world was the Tianyi Sword Master; the people of Hutian would surely have addressed him as Sword Master.
Although being mistaken for someone else and getting beaten for it was certainly unlucky, the silver lining was that his assailant hadn’t simply left him for dead. Since the man was willing to use a Cuiwei Pill to save him, he must be a person who abided by the codes of the martial world.
He could just chalk it up to one of those encounters where foes become friends.
Yan Jingyu quickly adjusted his mindset. He let out a soft cough and cracked his eyes open a slit. The girl’s voice sounded again, “He’s awake! I’ll go inform the Lord right away!”
A figure dashed out of the room. Yan Jingyu squinted against the slightly dazzling light, realizing that these two youths possessed a rather profound level of cultivation.
“How are you?” The boy was a kind-hearted soul. He took two steps forward. “Does it still hurt? Do you want some water? Are you trying to sit up? Here, let me help you!”
As the boy helped him lean against the headboard, a sharp pain shot through his sternum, causing him to frown. He pressed a hand to the injury. His breastbone, once reasonably solid, now seemed to have a slight depression. It had undoubtedly been caved in.
Yan Jingyu adjusted his breathing weakly, his face pale and beaded with cold sweat.
The boy scratched his head. “Um, I’ll go get you a cup of water.”
Before Yan Jingyu could even nod, the boy vanished in a flash, his movements again unnaturally swift. While nursing his chest with one hand and coughing softly, Yan Jingyu surveyed the room, trying to deduce the identity of this “Lord” from the decor.
He soon discovered that this was less a room and more a hall within a palace. The ceilings were high, with pillars of black gold visible. The carvings on the roof and the furnishings were all exquisitely crafted. The air was scented with burning thousand-year-old white sandalwood, and even the incense burner was forged from ebon gold.
…Just who was this person? Although he had withdrawn from the world a century ago and rarely set foot in the cultivation realm since, this man’s style was so extravagant and his generosity so immense—handing out ancient miracle pills as if they were nothing, burning thousand-year-old sandalwood day and night, and casually using ebon gold, a material most cultivators coveted for forging top-tier divine weapons, to make a simple incense burner. The two young cultivators at his side were at least at the Cloud-Soaring Realm. With such resources and flair, it was impossible that Yan Jingyu had never heard of him.
Yet, as he wracked his brain, he couldn’t find a single cultivator who fit the description. Unless…
“Water.” A translucent porcelain bowl was offered to him. Yan Jingyu took it and moistened his dry throat. He heard the boy continue, “This was truly our fault. We originally went to Hutian to seek revenge on your Immortal Lord Dufang. We never expected to run into you on the way, and for some reason, our Lord mistook you for him.”
Yan Jingyu’s hands struggled to hold the bowl steady. The kind boy helped support it. A fog of confusion clouded Yan Jingyu’s mind. The title the boy mentioned sounded vaguely familiar, but for the life of him, he couldn’t place it…
The boy’s eyes darted around, and he asked curiously, “Are you, by any chance, related to Yan Jingyu?”
Yan Jingyu’s hand jerked. The boy swiftly took the bowl back, saving him from a drenching, a look of confusion on his face.
Yan Jingyu coughed violently twice to cover his lapse in composure. In that split second, it all came back to him. Immortal Lord Dufang was the title he had earned in his youth. The memory was so distant that even he himself had nearly forgotten it.
“Cough… Does your Lord have some sort of, ahem, grudge against Yan… Jingyu?” Yan Jingyu feigned surprise. The boy was young and immediately took the bait. “A grudge? It’s more than a grudge! That Yan Jingyu is treacherous and cunning to the extreme! He ruined so many of our Lord’s plans back in the day! He even led a group to ambush him and personally knocked our Lord off a cliff. Our Lord nearly died at his hands several times! And then, during the battle over the Endless Sea, he destroyed our Lord’s Spiritual Abode, which almost got our Lord devoured! The moment our Lord emerged from seclusion, he declared that between him and Yan Jingyu, this would be a battle to the death!”
“Cough, cough, cough—” Spots of black swam before Yan Jingyu’s eyes. From the boy’s words, he was gradually piecing together just who had attacked him that day. There were quite a few people in this world who had vowed to fight him to the death, but there was only one he had personally led an ambush against, knocked off a cliff, and fought in a great battle over the Endless Sea.
The man hadn’t mistaken him at all. He had struck him, Yan Jingyu. And saving him with a Cuiwei Pill wasn’t out of some sense of martial honor…
He wanted to torture him. He wanted to make his life a living hell!
Blood trickled from his lips, and Yan Jingyu’s brow furrowed in pain. The boy beside him, who had been hesitating, saw the blood and hastily produced another pill, stuffing it into his mouth with a pained look. “This is a Blood-Restoring Pill. One of these costs a thousand high-grade spirit stones. You have to hold on, or the Cuiwei Pill will have been wasted on you…”
The pill slid down his throat, momentarily easing the throbbing in his chest. The boy pulled a pillow over to prop him up more comfortably, clearly trying to prevent him from wasting any more medicine.
Yan Jingyu took a moment to recover, then weakly lifted his eyes. “But… isn’t Yan Jingyu supposed to have been dead for a century?”
The boy seemed surprised that he still had the energy for gossip in his condition. He tried to hold it in but failed. “I heard that too. A hundred years ago, Yan Tingxuan failed his heavenly ascension, the Yan Clan was wiped out, and Yan Jingyu’s body was never found. They say Qin Zhongyou searched the entire world but found no trace of him. Logically speaking, he should be well and truly dead…”
Yan Jingyu nodded slowly and repeatedly, his movements sluggish from his injuries.
“But our Lord doesn’t believe Yan Jingyu could have died.”
“On what… cough…” Yan Jingyu cleared his throat, his voice faint. “On what grounds?”
“I don’t know either,” the boy said. “Before the Lord came out of seclusion, he summoned the Guardians to the Spirit Grotto and ordered them to find Yan Jingyu’s whereabouts. We tried to cross-reference every cultivator on the Immortal Registry, but not a single one matched Yan Jingyu.”
Of course they couldn’t find him using the standards of a hundred years ago. He was now weaker than a common mortal, let alone worthy of being on the Immortal Registry.
“So the Guardians also believe Yan Jingyu is really dead. The Lord learned of all this after his seclusion, but he just insists that Yan Jingyu isn’t dead and was determined to go to Hutian to find him personally.”
Yan Jingyu: “…”
A hundred years apart, and that man was still as stubborn and obsessive as ever. Sometimes he wondered if the man had demon blood in his veins.
He covered his mouth and coughed again. “He’s so certain. Does he have any proof?”
“Yan Jingyu has always been sinister and cunning, with an endless bag of tricks. Plus, he was born with the Heavenly Mandate Eyes and can glimpse fate in advance. The Lord believes a person like him would have surely left himself a way out.”
…This time, there really was no way out. For a moment, Yan Jingyu didn’t know whether to say the man thought too highly of him or too little of fate.
“But the trip to Hutian still didn’t turn up Yan Jingyu. Instead…” The boy’s gaze shifted to him. Yan Jingyu tensed, but then the boy slowly shook his head. “To be honest, when the Lord suddenly attacked, I really thought Yan Jingyu wasn’t dead. But rumor has it that he had the grace of a snow-dusted pine and the beauty of a celestial being. You don’t look the part, do you? And besides… you’re a waste…”
“…” Yan Jingyu sighed.
Suddenly, there was a commotion outside. Accompanied by the light footsteps of the girl, a pair of black boots stepped into the hall.
Yan Jingyu turned his head and met a pair of deep, dark eyes. They were as dark as an abyss, inspiring a natural sense of awe and fear.
Under the absolute suppression of the man’s cultivation, the boy quickly moved away from the bed and stood respectfully to one side.
Yan Jingyu’s heart was a tangle of complex emotions.
He knew, with absolute certainty, that the man had recognized him. Even though he couldn’t understand how he was still recognizable in this state, the moment their eyes met, he knew. There was no deceiving this man. He was already convinced that he was Yan Jingyu.
As the one under another’s roof, he took the initiative and offered a smile. The man had already reached his side. His eyes silently swept over him from head to toe. “You don’t recognize me?”
The two youths watched them from behind, confused. Yan Jingyu felt a moment of awkwardness before offering a vague reply. “My benefactor.”
The man came to the bedside, looming over him. He clearly had no intention of letting Yan Jingyu get away with it. His voice held a hint of warning. “My name.”
Up close, he could see the faint glint of crimson-gold within the man’s dark pupils. Yan Jingyu’s heart felt as if it had been struck by something heavy, a dull, throbbing ache.
His lips moved, and he slowly said, “Liao Chen.”
The moment the name was spoken, Yan Jingyu’s heart twisted into a painful knot.
He stared at the crimson-gold flecks in the man’s dark eyes, watching as his expression gradually softened. A surge of blood and vital energy silently rose in his chest.
The metallic taste reached his throat, and he forced it down. The next instant, an even stronger wave surged up. Yan Jingyu swallowed it down again. As the man’s expression grew grave once more, he finally lost the battle. With a wretched gasp, he spat out a mouthful of fresh blood. Accompanied by a fit of frantic coughing, his face and chest were splattered with crimson.
Liao Chen…
The man with whom he had been like fire and water, sworn to a battle unto death—
Damnation.
His body folded forward wretchedly as he coughed like a madman. It felt as if a giant boulder was rampaging inside him, and his vision was once again swallowed by darkness.
Not until another pill was placed in his mouth and a hand pressed against his chest, sending a vast amount of spiritual energy into his body, did he feel a flicker of relief. Yan Jingyu’s body, which had long been unable to absorb any spiritual energy, was momentarily nourished. His eyelashes fluttered. He looked up at Liao Chen, his face pale, his eyes filled with a complex mix of grief and indignation.
Liao Chen’s expression was just as complex. “Why have you become such a waste?”
The question sent another wave of anger through Yan Jingyu, and he coughed a few more times before rolling his eyes. “Just as you wished,” he said, his voice raspy. “I’m dying.”
