Leng Zhuxin checked Leng Yueyao's breath and heartbeat once again. There was still not the slightest movement, yet no heavenly thunder descended from the gloomy sky, nor had her own karma returned.
After a moment of thought, she used a dagger to slice open Leng Yueyao's throat, making certain she was thoroughly and irreversibly dead before tossing her down to the base of the cliff.
A pack of mountain tigers lived at the bottom of the cliff, which would serve to dispose of the corpse completely.
Had it been possible, she would have liked to eradicate Leng Yueyao's soul as well, but for some reason, the moment she killed Leng Yueyao, her soul could no longer be sensed.
Frowning, Leng Zhuxin gazed down into the bottomless abyss, yet her heart found not a shred of peace; she felt an inexplicable sense that this was not the end.
Regardless, Leng Yueyao was truly and thoroughly dead beyond any doubt, and her slit throat completely severed any chance of reincarnation.
A bolt of startling thunder struck from the sky, rumbling as it brought down a torrential downpour. Leng Zhuxin let the rain wash away the bloodstains on her body, merely casting a sideways glance at the heavenly thunder that crashed closer and closer, and released her full reservoir of virtue.
The heavenly thunder, which had been on the verge of striking the top of Leng Zhuxin's head, retreated with evident reluctance. Leng Zhuxin stared coldly at the pitch-black sky; having taken a life, she emanated not a trace of malevolent aura.
"The Heavenly Dao is merciless, treating all things as straw dogs; those who walk the path are merciful, destroying the Heavenly Dao for the sake of all things. Slaying your lackey is only the beginning. The days ahead are long—you had best ensure my cultivation makes not an inch of progress, or else I shall surely annihilate you."
As a soul from another world burdened with immense virtue, she wanted to see precisely how the Heavenly Dao of this realm could destroy her.
Dark clouds rolled downward, and heavenly thunder exploded beside her ears as though the firmament itself had flown into a rage. Without a shred of fear, Leng Zhuxin turned and walked step by step back along the path she had come.
...
Leng Zhuxin's goal was to return to the Leng Family to retrieve what belonged to the original owner. By the time she returned to the city, the pitch-black clouds over the entire city had completely dissipated, leaving only the relentless rain beating down upon people's faces.
This city was a small, remote border town in the Mortal Realm called Beast-Taming City, which had been a battlefield between humans and demons tens of millions of years ago.
It was precisely because that great battle had damaged the underground spiritual veins that the spiritual energy here had leaked away, turning the place into the Mortal Realm. Yet because it bordered the seal of the demon race, various sects still maintained a presence of cultivators here.
Their strength, however, was not high; they were merely miscellaneous-root cultivators without backing who remained stuck at the Foundation Establishment Stage.
As Leng Zhuxin walked into the city, cultivators were rushing outward, muttering that this thunder felt like divine retribution and hoping against hope that the seal had not loosened and allowed demons to escape. Others guessed that evil cultivators had appeared.
Yet regardless of the guesses, it ultimately pointed to the appearance of something contrary to the Heavenly Dao, which had provoked divine wrath and summoned heavenly punishment.
Leng Zhuxin brushed past them, and after taking barely two steps, she caught sight of members of the Leng Family.
The person who had come was the head of the Leng Family, who was also the nominal father of Leng Yueyao and Leng Zhuxin: Leng Changdao.
Leng Changdao was followed by several servants. The moment he spotted Leng Zhuxin, he hurried over, asking, "Xin'er, where is your elder sister?"
"I don't know."
Leng Zhuxin spoke coldly, and without caring whether Leng Changdao might harbor suspicions, she continued along her memories toward the Leng Family residence.
She had no desire to exchange pleasantries with Leng Changdao; had it not been for the need to reclaim the items left behind by the original owner's mother, she would not have returned to the Leng Family at all.
Leng Changdao had never seen Leng Zhuxin display such cold indifference, and feeling somewhat uneasy, he reached out to pull on her sleeve. Under the shelter of a servant's umbrella, Leng Changdao—whose very hairs remained entirely dry—seemed only just to notice that Leng Zhuxin had been drenched by the heavy rain into a drowned rat.
With a tone tinged with concern, he said, "Xin'er, why are you soaked like this? Go back with Old Chen and drink a bowl of ginger soup; I'll go look for your sister. Did you really not run into her?"
"No."
Leng Zhuxin lied through her teeth without the slightest flicker of a guilty conscience, whereas Leng Changdao's expression as he spoke was thoroughly hypocritical.
Assuming that Leng Zhuxin was still her obedient former self, Leng Changdao harbored no suspicions and was consumed entirely by anxiety over Leng Yueyao's safety.
Someone in the city had seen Leng Yueyao leave the city gates, and heavenly punishment had descended outside. Leng Changdao could no longer maintain the facade of a benevolent father and filial daughter, and taking his servants with him, he hurried off toward the outskirts once more.
The moment Leng Changdao left, the steward Old Chen stepped up beside Leng Zhuxin and raised his umbrella. "Second Young Miss, let us return to the estate and wait."
...
The Leng Family residence stood at the very center of Beast-Taming City, and was also the largest aristocratic family within the city.
The original owner had grown up from childhood inside this most luxurious mansion in Beast-Taming City, harboring the naive belief that her parents were loving and her sisters affectionate.
She never knew that she and Leng Yueyao were not born of the same mother, and perhaps did not even share the same father. Leng Yueyao's mother had been Leng Changdao's childhood sweetheart and beloved, passing away immediately after giving birth to Leng Yueyao.
Meanwhile, the original owner's mother, Ning Mi, was Leng Changdao's nominal wife and Leng Yueyao's nominal mother.
In the original plot, Leng Yueyao had once told Immortal Lord Changheng that Leng Zhuxin's mother had married Leng Changdao while heavily pregnant, usurping her own mother's position as legitimate wife and causing her mother to die in difficult labor.
Leng Yueyao said nothing further, but Immortal Lord Changheng understood, and anyone in the cultivation world would have understood upon hearing it—including Leng Zhuxin, who had received the original owner's memories.
The power of bloodlines was formidable. The offspring born from the union of two mortals without spiritual roots were destined to lack spiritual roots; if a husband and wife consisted of one cultivator and one mortal, the resulting offspring had only a fifty percent chance of inheriting spiritual roots.
Every hundred years, the major sects recruited disciples in the Mortal Realm merely in search of those one-in-a-million gems lost in the sea.
The reason why Leng Zhuxin was a gem lost in the sea while Leng Yueyao was not lay right here. It was pitiful that the original owner had mistakenly believed Leng Yueyao inherited their father's constitution, obeying her elder sister's every command and even handing over all the possessions left by her deceased mother.
Yes, deceased.
Ning Mi had died six years prior. Ever since her death, the only masters remaining in the Leng Family household were Leng Changdao, Leng Yueyao, and the original owner.
The storage bags carried by both the original owner and Leng Yueyao—which mortals could use by binding them with a drop of blood—had been given to them by Ning Mi, though they could not store living creatures and possessed a storage space of only five square meters.
Aside from those two Storage Bags, there was a third Storage Bag held by Leng Changdao, and a longevity lock crafted from millennial Cold Jade kept inside the original owner's bedchamber.
The longevity lock had been secretly given to the original owner by Ning Mi before her death, with strict instructions not to mention it to Leng Changdao or Leng Yueyao. Ning Mi had also mentioned that she had left other items for the two of them separately, which was why the original owner had managed to keep the longevity lock hidden until now.
Yet it remained hidden merely until then; once she traveled to the Qingxuan Sect carrying the longevity lock, she had handed it over to Leng Yueyao all the same.
The original owner did not know what wondrous properties the lock possessed, but Leng Zhuxin remembered that in the original plot, Leng Yueyao possessed an inexhaustible supply of spiritual water from the Cold Abyss. Leng Yueyao had told Kangkong Hao that the spiritual water came from a lock; when Kangkong Hao first arrived on the Xuanling Continent, Leng Yueyao had used that Cold Abyss spiritual water to save him. Later on, the two of them had even attempted to force their way into the lock to investigate where the spiritual water originated, but had never succeeded in entering.
Her intuition told Leng Zhuxin that the lock in Leng Yueyao's possession was precisely the Cold Jade Lock that Ning Mi had entrusted to the original owner.