Yanyan was so furious that he could hardly breathe, seeing that she actually poked his face with a stick and spoke to him in such a manner.
Fine, very fine! How many years had it been since anyone dared to treat him like this!
If he could move, he would strangle this damned dried bean sprout in a heartbeat.
No matter what, for treating him this way, he had memorized this face.
Perhaps his gaze was too furious and murderous, for Li Dai finally could not ignore it.
She simply tossed the stick aside, squatted down, and ruthlessly pinched his face again, saying viciously: "What are you glaring at? Look, you can't move now, and you can't do a thing to me! As the old saying goes, when under someone's eaves, one must bow their head. In your current state, killing you would be as easy as pie. Why don't you beg me? Maybe if I'm in a good mood, I'll let you go." Of course, she was just saying that; even though she knew the man looked as if he had only one breath left, his aura was not to be trifled with. She was certain that if she really harbored murderous intent, she would be the first one to die.
Still, even if she thought that way, she could not show it—she might lose, but she wouldn't lose face.
Yanyan endured her hands roaming all over his face like a lewd woman taking advantage of him, feeling an indescribable suffocation in his heart. Hearing her words, he let out a cold sneer. "Killing me as easy as pie? Heh... go ahead and try!"
Seeing his reaction, Li Dai grew even more certain of her guess. Since she could not kill him, she might as well torment him fiercely.
Having finished pinching his face, she flipped him over onto his stomach and let her eyes wander appreciatively over his sturdy physique, looking every bit like a ruffian.Seeing her act this way, Yan Yao’s face darkened even further, and he chanted inwardly over and over: *Endure, endure, endure.*
Noticing his expression and finding it rather amusing, Li Dai wickedly gave his chest a hard pinch.
*Gasp.* As luck would have it, she happened to pinch a certain sensitive spot on the man. Li Dai’s face flushed crimson with utter embarrassment.
Though she was currently inhabiting the shell of a seven-year-old, her soul belonged to a twenty-year-old young woman!
At that moment, Li Dai was profoundly grateful that Yan Yao knew nothing of the sort.
As for Yan Yao, his body stiffened as he stared in disbelief at this scrawny bean sprout. How could someone so young be so lewd?
"Uh… I didn't mean to," Li Dai offered a rather hollow explanation. It truly had been an accident—an accident so minor it could simply be overlooked.At a single glance, it was obvious that the man harbored a profound aversion to female living creatures. Even though she was tiny, her soul was not, and she had instantly perceived this truth—how could she possibly dare to provoke him for real? The pinching and tugging she had just inflicted were merely out of resentment, intended to disgust him a little, never imagining that she would accidentally go a bit too far.
The man's eyes were bloodshot, and if glares could kill as arrows, she would likely have been riddled like a sieve long ago.
"Get lost!" he roared, expending almost all of his strength.
If this dried bean sprout truly continued to harass him, he feared he wouldn't be able to restrain himself, and would kill her even if it meant suffering a thousand losses of his own for every thousand inflicted on the enemy.Li Dai's earlier guess was entirely correct: it would be exceptionally easy for the man to kill her. He only needed to activate a secret technique to instantly heal his injuries and restore his cultivation to its peak, at which point crushing an ant with no cultivation at all would be effortless. But he could not do that—at least, not while his life was not under threat.
Activating that secret technique would not only cost him the greater part of his cultivation, but would also plunge him into a deep slumber for a full century.
Time was the very thing he lacked most right now. He had too many things to do; a century might not be long for a cultivator, but far too many unpredictable changes could happen in that span, and he could not afford to gamble. This was also why he tolerated Li Dai to this extent.
However, this time, before Yanyan could say anything else, Li Dai yanked her hand back as if she had touched something scalding. Though being told to get lost left her deeply displeased, she refused to lose the momentum and roared back: "I don't know how to get lost! Why don't you demonstrate?"
Hearing this, Yanyan felt like coughing up blood. Could this dried bean sprout possibly be his nemesis sent to plague him?
If he wasn't afraid of suffering a backlash from using spiritual energy, he probably would have swatted her to death on the spot.
Although this was the Cultivation World, it was still akin to ancient times.
Most people still held to the notions of male superiority and having a houseful of wives and concubines, and cultivators were no exception. In poor families, it was quite normal for girls of eleven or twelve to marry.
Even though Li Dai was only seven years old, she was already reaching an age where she understood the proper boundaries between males and females. Her actions simply led Yanyan to suspect that this dried bean sprout must have taken a fancy to him, which was why she was behaving this way toward him.There was no helping it. Once upon a time, even smaller runts had told him they liked him simply because his looks were so striking. In truth, those little ones had no concept of what liking someone meant, nor what romance between a man and a woman looked like. At most, their fondness for him was the kind they felt for pretty things—just like a child coveting a toy, wanting it and wishing to possess it entirely.
Having encountered this so often—being so exceptionally attractive that he appealed to all ages—Yanyan found it endlessly vexing.
He figured Li Dai, that scrawny bean sprout, was no different; she must like him the way one likes a toy, which explained her behavior.
It was utterly infuriating.
Yanyan had faced such situations countless times, which was why he politely declined all female creatures, even the ones who were barely past infancy.
He was brilliant, possessed profound cultivation, and came from an illustrious background. Aside from the little runts who treated him like a toy to be possessed, he was practically a walking bundle of hormones to adult female cultivators, holding absolute appeal and fitting every female cultivator's criteria for a partner. Therefore, ever since reaching adulthood, he had lost count of how many times he had been drugged. Fortunately, his willpower was ironclad, and he had managed to resist every time. He had even thrown all those who tried to crawl into his bed straight into the Jiuyou Abyss, letting them experience firsthand the consequences of daring to make a move on him. Even so, more female cultivators continued to throw themselves at him, undeterred by death.
A complicated mix of emotions churned within Yanyan.
So many women had exhausted every trick in the book without managing to touch even half a finger of his, yet today, he had actually been taken advantage of by an undergrown, scrawny bean sprout.
What was even more fatal was that with just that little tug of hers, he had felt no sense of repulsion inside. He apparently did not detest this scrawny bean sprout at all.
Yanyan was horrified. What in the world was going on!