“Be quiet,” barked one of the elders. Once he had forced the crowd to calm down, he turned to look grimly at Li Xingjian.

They had heard the entire story from Li Xingjian, after all. None of them knew anything about this mysterious Origin Core cultivator. They needed Li Xingjian, the head of the family, to give them guidance in this matter.

“No way! I will not agree to let Rou’er serve that demon!” Li Yu was agitated as he glared at the young man in the Dao Origin Sect robe. He gritted his teeth and hissed, “What a vicious move, Second Brother..”

“No, the one who pushed Rou’er into a desperate situation was you. If you hadn’t done the improper thing, Rou’er wouldn’t have disregarded the altars of all our late ancestors in this hall and pleaded for you.” The young man suddenly spun around and glared hatefully at Li Yu. His expression was as twisted as a demon’s.

His heart hurt as much as Li Yu’s, after all.

Fang Rou was a girl he cared for too. They grew up together and saw each other every single day. And now, this same girl was willing to sacrifice herself in order to protect the family and protect a piece of trash. Of course, he wasn’t going just to let that happen.

“If the family doesn’t pay a price of some sort, how are we going to appease that senior cultivator? How are we..going to make him feel bad?” Li Yu’s second brother stared venomously at Li Yu with bloodshot eyes. That look in his eyes was enough to make anybody around him feel terrified.

If this scene were part of a brainless soap opera on Earth, it would definitely fit into the typical cringey love triangle of the long-running Eastern fantasy/ancient mythology/transmigration romance drama genre, one filled with enough feuds and disputes to make viewers weep. Nonstop family drama action that would make your summer holidays pass by in the blink of an eye.

To put it simply, Li Yu’s second brother liked Fang Rou, but Fang Rou liked Li Yu. At the same time, Li Yu was an ordinary man who couldn’t cultivate, so it was impossible between them in the first place.

Which was more important to Li Yu’s second brother? His family or his crush?

He didn’t know either. But he understood one thing. Without the resources from his family, he would never have come so far in his cultivation journey, never mind getting into the Dao Origin Sect. With that in mind, there was no way he was going to allow his family to be driven into a corner by a piece of trash like Li Yu. Even if..he had to sacrifice everything.

Nobody knew that the nondescript ring on Fang Rou’s finger contained Gu Suihan’s spiritual sense, and it was able to watch everything from that ring.

“In that case..I guess I should bring Rou’er to Mr. Gu and see what he thinks?” After pondering it for a while, Li Xingjian decided to give it a shot. The young man being punished was his own flesh and blood, after all, and no father and son were truly at odds for life. Cultivators were mostly unsentimental creatures, but having to watch his son die before him wasn’t something he could handle either.

The Li family was clearly at a point where they were really desperate. In order to become allies with Gu Suihan, they were willing to put in as much thought and effort as needed. They were even capable of coming up with a honeypot trap.

“No..” Li Yu instinctively held onto Fang Rou’s fair and supple little hand. His eyes bulged and he looked horrified.

Unfortunately, no matter how hard he tried to hold onto her hand, it was to no avail. She was smaller in size and looked weaker, but she was still a Foundation Establishment cultivator in the end. There was no way he could fight her in strength.

In his frustration, tears mingled with the blood that flowed down his cheeks as he let out one last roar in pain and despair, clutching the ring he had pulled off Fang Rou’s finger that still had a little of her warmth left. He sprayed a mouthful of blood, then fell to the floor and lost consciousness.

Fang Rou touched her fingers with a saddened look on her face. She pursed her lips and looked back to look at the unconscious Li Yu one last time, then turned around with tears in her eyes and walked away.

“That ring..you can think of me when you see it,” she murmured. It was hard to say if she was talking about Li Yu or herself.

....

“Aw man, I seem to have turned into a super evil villain helping the MC go from weak to strong for the sake of revenge,” murmured Gu Suihan’s spiritual sense inside the ring as though all of this had nothing to do with him.

Oh, is that so?“ Gu Suihan was smiling as he watched Taohua and Lihua busy themselves around the courtyard behind the shop that the Li family had given him when he suddenly received a message from the bit of spiritual sense he had left in the ring. He looked a little puzzled for a moment before breaking into a smile. “Well, since he dares to give her to me, why wouldn’t I dare to accept her? As for your plans..that’s none of my business.”

A cultivator’s lifespan is incredibly long.

Absorbing qi, awakening it, and transformation of one’s meridians were enough to add 200 years of life. If you hit Foundation Establishment, you could add another 200 more years.

If you could gather your hun together into your core and turn your po into nascence, you could easily live past a thousand.

Of course, that was all assuming you didn’t get murdered along the way or do something really suicidal like cultivate in some forbidden technique or other dangerous cultivation technique. Or dig up some grave or go on some adventure in hope of discovering something that could help you in your cultivation journey, then end up getting trapped somewhere and die tragically for no good reason.

But it was also true that most cultivators did not end up dying naturally. After all, you always needed more resources and greater understanding in order to arrive at the next stage.

And where would these resources come from? You could rob someone of them, or join a powerful faction and possibly end up risking your life for them. Otherwise, you had to go on a journey to seek out more opportunities and hope to get lucky, like find something left behind by a formidable cultivator. Either way, all these methods had one thing in common – they were all highly dangerous activities.

Of course, if you had a great father, a good family or a good sect, none of this would apply to you. After all, the most important thing in cultivation was your level of giftedness and that could be improved with certain techniques even if you weren’t born with enough talent. Otherwise, other resources like spiritual stones were helpful to have.

The least important were the usual bullshit in novels like resilience and experience etc.

Those who succeed solely by relying on their empty ambitions and willpower wouldn’t live for long..

Unless, you were a lucky fellow, or what was called a Child of Fortune. And what was a Child of Fortune? Simply put, you had the good fortunes of the world in your body, like an OP MC.

But of course, becoming a Child of Fortune also depended on what you looked like. What were fortunes anyway? Simply put, this was something that most living creatures in a particular world subconsciously wanted to become or wanted to strive for.

The most obvious example was one particular anime about ninjas that was shown on Earth. In times of war, the only thing that everyone wanted was for the war to end and for life to be peaceful. All the noisy people with negative intelligence scores appeared. Why was their intelligence poor? Because the rules of that world were extremely simplistic and could barely count as a domain of a cultivator. It was already not bad for a living creature to continue living in it, so one shouldn’t ask too much of it.

In the comic, Storm Riders, every character wanted to become a martial artist, so all of them focused on learning martial arts and the royal courts were weak. The court lost its authority and the might of martial artists became the driving force of that world. A tyrant later wanted to conquer the world and struck terror in the hearts of everyone, so the two MCs of the comic appeared to save the world. That’s what everybody wanted.

Back to the story.

Before this, I already mentioned that besides looking like humans, cultivators were basically no longer humans.

It only took about a hundred years for them to become no longer bound by the constraints of worldly desires and human needs. The bulk of a cultivator’s life was actually free time.

A few years ago, a signboard that read “No Money? Don’t Bother” was hung up and this bookshop quietly opened for business.

There was no opening ceremony and the owner did not seem interested in competing with the other shops in the neighborhood.

This nondescript, ordinary looking bookstore that never had any customers continued to stay open for years. Everyone was so surprised that it was able to stay afloat.

But it didn’t take long for everyone to guess that the owner of this shop had opened it just for fun. Why else would he have given it such a ridiculous shop name?

They were relieved when they were sure that this new shop wasn’t going to threaten their livelihoods. From time to time, they would chat and play chess with the owner.

From these interactions with him, they were even surer of their guess now. I mean, seriously. Have you ever seen an owner whose clothes were expensive enough to buy the entire shop despite being in his 20s? Not just that – they had seen it for themselves. The three young ladies serving the young man were so pretty and elegant, they were no less than the pampered daughters of the rich and powerful of the city.

....

Gu Suihan placed an incredibly luxurious looking and immensely expensive chair in front of his shop in the morning and lay down lazily on it. He pulled away the book on his face and asked the young lady massaging his back, “Meihua, how are you doing in your cultivation lately?”

Meihua..

..was obviously Fang Rou.

Every time this name rang in Fang Rou’s ears, she would instinctively feel a sense of oppression, sadness and anger.

But it was too bad that she couldn’t fight her circumstances. No matter how conflicted she felt, she never dared to show any of it on her face. The young man before her looked harmless and even looked just like one of those spoiled wastrels from a rich family, but he was really a cultivator at Origin Core, whose origins nobody knew anything about.

Author’s note: Alright, I’ll address the complaints you guys had about the names like Taohua (peach blossom) and Lihua (pear blossom)..actually, I’m just too lazy to think of something so I simply typed one.. Don’t you guys know that thinking of a name is an extremely, particularly, especially, and incredibly difficult thing to do?

Meihua = Plum blossom

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