Jiang Qingyu sat cross-legged at the highest point of City H, beneath a heavy canopy of dark tribulation clouds, a deep undercurrent of excitement and eagerness hidden in her eyes.
Goodness knows how difficult it was to cultivate in a continent so starved of Spiritual Qi.
A full seven hundred years she had spent, outliving generation after generation of acquaintances until even a sacred turtle would have to look at her and shout, "All hail, Patriarch!"
From Qi Condensation all the way to Tribulation Transcendence, Jiang Qingyu not only had to fight against a harsh cultivation environment, but she also had to use bone-shrinking and face-altering arts every hundred years to assume a new identity and keep living.
She could be her own mother, her own daughter, her own granddaughter, and so on.
Seven hundred years, transitioning from the iron-shod horses and gleaming spears of chaotic times to the peace and prosperity of the modern era.
In Jiang Qingyu's eyes, it all felt like only yesterday.
To keep pace with the changing times, she had no choice but to immerse herself in endless studies.
Her former teachers and old codgers all said she was a genius, but only she knew the truth in her heart: she merely had the advantage of living long, seeing much, and learning much—nothing more.
Jiang Qingyu looked down over the entirety of City H. The once bustling and neon-lit metropolis had now plunged into utter darkness.
In this world, immortals were never meant to exist; she was defying the Heavenly Dao itself.
Flashes of lightning drifted faintly within the tribulation clouds. The Spiritual Qi within a radius of a thousand miles was drawn in, forming a miniature vortex of Spiritual Qi that surged and churned restlessly in the air. The wind howled by her ears like whispers. The hem of her plain, unadorned Daoist robe fluttered in midair, her cuffs filled to the brim with biting gales.
A dull roll of thunder echoed. The moment had come.
The Spiritual Qi stored within her body was pushed to its absolute limit at this instant. Jiang Qingyu stood up, summoning her trusty treasure sword Jinglan—which had accompanied her for many years—from her sword realm, and pointed it straight at the heavens!
At that moment, all sounds of the world died away.
A bolt of tribulation thunder as thick as a thumb broke through the air with the force of shattered bamboo, striking toward Jiang Qingyu like a slivered silver serpent. Her expression remained unchanged; she flicked her wrist to spin the sword into a bloom of light, soared forward, and swung her blade directly at the flash of lightning!
"Jinglan! Break it for me!"
Thunder rolled endlessly, carrying the mighty majesty of the heavens.
Her clear, ringing female voice was swallowed by the roar of the thunder as she charged forward against the odds. Wherever the sword light and lightning reached, everything turned to pure white. Nine streams of sword Qi, nine waves of heavenly tribulation.
Jiang Qingyu's Daoist robe was charred black, reduced to mere fluttering strips of rags that barely covered her vital parts. Her nostrils were filled with the stench of scorched flesh, the top of her head felt chillingly bare—her raven-black hair had been ruthlessly stripped away by the tribulation lightning, leaving not even her eyebrows behind.
The residual electricity lingering inside her body made her meridians tingle numbly, and the hand gripping the Jinglan sword was still trembling slightly.
Jiang Qingyu closed her eyes, feeling the surging, roaring spiritual power within her body. In her Dantian, a misty white infant was radiating warmth that flowed out to all her limbs and bones.
It was a marvelous, entirely new realm.
Had she achieved Ascension?
It was true that her cultivation had advanced to the next level, but why did this realm still look so...
Huh? Why did it look so familiar?
What the hell, after all this fuss, wasn't she still in City H?!
While Jiang Qingyu was still in a daze, the Jinglan in her hand suddenly began to hum and vibrate.
High above in the sky, the tribulation clouds that should have dissipated began to gather once more, looking even more ferocious and formidable than before.
At that very moment, taking advantage of Jiang Qingyu's momentary distraction, Jinglan suddenly burst forth with a surge of sword Qi, excitedly carrying her straight toward a bolt of tribulation thunder as thick as a wrist!
The joy on Jiang Qingyu's face gradually turned to horror.
"What the actual f—?!"
Amidst the flashing lightning and roaring thunder, she thought she caught a glimpse of the old codger who had already departed for the immortal realms, while the Jinglan in her hand charged toward the tribulation thunder without looking back!
The sword hilt felt as though it had been glued to her hand.
She couldn't shake it off; she simply couldn't get rid of it.
The biting wind whipped coldly against her face.
Jiang Qingyu had already shifted from panic to calm, completely disheveled by the wind, as something traced the corner of her eye.
Ah, so it was just my own worthless tears.
I am like my sword, and my sword is like a dog!
***
Cold... So cold...
Half-conscious, Jiang Qingyu figured she must have arrived at the netherworld of the Underworld; otherwise, why would she be unable to circulate her spiritual power to ward off the severe chill?
She hoped the Ghost Envoy coming to guide her would look reasonably pleasant, just to soften the disappointment of being blasted to death by heavenly lightning.
Gathering her wits slowly as the ringing in her head subsided, Jiang Qingyu forced her eyes open and took in her surroundings.
Whoa!
You have to hand it to the Underworld, they really went all out on the interior design—they even factored in winter snowfall. This snowy landscape setup looked startlingly authentic!
She tried to stand up to see if people really turned into ghosts after death, capable of walking through walls and tunneling through the earth.
In truth, some cultivators versed in esoteric arts of earth-escaping could perform such little tricks, though few bothered to study them. Jiang Qingyu certainly couldn't.
The moment she propped up her upper body, a searing wave of agony struck her. Oh, what a thoroughly exquisite, bone-deep thrill!
Jiang Qingyu felt the frantic beating of the heart in her chest. The snow beneath her was stained a vast patch of crimson, and from her knees down, her lower legs sent waves of sharp, piercing pain.
A wound hastily mended with herbal pulp, tearing all the way from her ankle to her calf, revealed faint glimpses of bare, gleaming white bone that continued to ooze blood drop by drop. Her body was rapidly losing heat; it looked like she would either bleed to death or die from the agony of her shattered bones.
She was alive, but not entirely alive.
Though, well... these tiny arms and legs...
"I transmigrated?!"
Having read so many transmigration and rebirth novels, Jiang Qingyu was still somewhat bewildered that such a cliché had actually fallen upon her one day!
She strongly suspected that the authors who wrote those transmigration stories were very likely transmigrators themselves. What speculative fiction—it was clearly historical realism!
Thinking this, Jiang Qingyu's eyes were nevertheless actively scanning her surroundings.
As far as the eye could see, everything was a pristine white.
Yet upon closer inspection, beneath the blanket of snow lay numerous spiritual plants—and they were varieties completely absent from the modern era recorded in the old codger's notes.
The only one she recognized was the rare Lingbing flower from the Arctic glaciers, which bloomed once a century; yet here, there were several clumps of them, practically growing in patches, and judging by their age, none of them were less than a hundred years old.
After all, in Jiang Qingyu's understanding, there was also a notoriously money-burning and rare profession: the Alchemist.
Jiang Qingyu had once studied medicine. While she couldn't refine pills, she knew how to roll herbal pellets—hemostatic pills, qi-tonifying pills, heart-clearing pills, and so on.
Those were concoctions she had slowly figured out by exploring the medicinal properties of spiritual plants herself, inspired by an ancient emperor in chaotic times who had sought to brew an elixir of immortality.
During her travels, Jiang Qingyu once passed through the imperial palace and happened to see a Daoist priest pounding a bunch of herbs into juice, mixing them together, extracting, refining, baking them into a powder, and finally rolling them into pills the size of ox eyes to present to the sickly emperor. While it couldn't grant eternal life, the emperor's physique truly grew stronger day by day.
The greenish pulp plastered over her calf was unrecognizable as to what herbs it contained; it was likely meant for stopping bleeding, but its medicinal efficacy was mediocre and it did nothing for the pain.
With sharp eyes, Jiang Qingyu foraged through the snow and dug up a stem of two-sided needle—also known as double-thorn—which could numb the area and relieve pain. It was the only one within her immediate reach. It wasn't a spiritual plant, and it carried a trace of toxicity.
Compared to dying of pain, that slight bit of toxicity was practically negligible.
Using a nearby stone, she crushed the plant and applied it to her wound. The injury was too large, and the medicine fell a bit short.
That leg of hers was eight-tenths likely crippled; her kneecap was smashed to pieces beyond any hope of being pieced back together.
Jiang Qingyu closed her eyes and collapsed weakly into the mixture of blood and snow. Her face was deathly pale, and her breaths in were fewer than her breaths out, save for the faintest rise and fall of her chest.
The good news: Heavenly Dao Father had blasted her straight into the Cultivation World. The bad news: she was about to kick the bucket all over again.
She still had so many delicacies she hadn't tasted, so many sceneries she hadn't seen, and most importantly, she hadn't cultivated into an immortal yet. She hadn't even had the chance to explore this new world.
She didn't want to die.
Forcing her eyelids open with sheer willpower, she found that the effect of the two-sided needle was far better than she had imagined. While it couldn't instantly kill the pain, it at least allowed her to barely crawl along the ground.
Yet fate loved playing tricks; before the old problem was even resolved, a new crisis came tumbling and scrambling right toward her.
So, as for the one not far from her—Brother Wolf, where did you crawl out from?
Presently, there were two pieces of news, one good and one bad.
The good news was that wolves were pack animals, yet she had only encountered a single one, and this particular specimen looked rather selfish, wanting to hog the entire meal for itself.
The bad news was that she was currently a cripple.
Oh, she was really in for a miserable time.
A snow wolf of the Cultivation World was truly incomparable to those mongrels of the modern era.
This one clearly lived a lavish life in this territory: its coat was sleek, its fur well-groomed, and its white hair blended almost seamlessly with the surrounding snowscape, save for those dark, ink-jade-like pupils that contrasted sharply against everything else.
The weaker one was, the easier it was to overlook lurking dangers. Now that she possessed only a mortal, flesh-and-blood vessel, it was a good thing Jiang Qingyu loved eating shredded stir-fried lotus root and always kept her wits about her.
That "Brother Wolf" likely possessed spiritual intelligence, resembling nothing so much as a destructive husky from next door, its eyes brimming with pure, unadulterated foolishness.
Seeing that its "flawless" camouflage had been seen through by a little mortal girl, its eyes carried a modest amount of sheepish anger, its every move no different from that of an impulsive child.
It bared its cavernous maw at Jiang Qingyu, threads of drool hanging from its jaw, its two fangs gleaming with a murderous intent, dying to tear her apart and devour her flesh and bones on the spot!
Surely her life was about to end right here!
To kick the bucket the moment she transmigrated, and to die inside a wolf's belly at that—such a disgraceful feat was simply not something Jiang Qingyu would allow herself to do!
Even if she had to die, she would put up a struggle first, and then die with grace!
Glancing back over her shoulder, how wonderful—aside from a couple of trees, there was nothing but a sheer cliff drop.
Ah, heroes at their wits' end have resorted to jumping off cliffs since ancient times; Heavenly Dao Father had even thought of this detail!
Gritting her teeth, she dragged her right leg and crawled a couple of paces, moving beneath the two trees. She patted herself down in search of anywhere she might have hidden something, but came away completely empty-handed—the Jinglan sword was stored within her sword realm, and without spiritual power, she couldn't draw it out at all.
Jiang Qingyu suddenly made peace with her fate, or perhaps she was simply going out of her mind. She shouted at the white wolf at the top of her lungs!
"Brother Wolf! Actually, there isn't two taels of meat on me. Why don't you take me back and fatten me up first?"
"Awoooo...?" The white wolf halted in its tracks, tilting its head in apparent contemplation of Jiang Qingyu's words.
Yet judging from that wise look in its eyes, it was glaringly obvious that its brain was moments away from short-circuiting.
Jiang Qingyu was overcome with a profound sense of listlessness as she gazed at the white wolf, which possessed nothing of value besides its looks and acted entirely like a total dunderhead.
It once again charged resolutely toward her, firmly selecting her as its delicate, crispy little appetizer. Jiang Qingyu wore a calm and serene smile.
Well, fuck—this is dog shit...
Jiang Qingyu gazed in the direction of the white wolf and slowly closed her eyes. In a daze, she seemed to catch sight of a flash of sword light, before completely losing consciousness and plunging into darkness.
She really liked huskies; their eyes always radiated a sort of pristine foolishness, exactly like her best friend.