CHAPTER 2: FIVE HUNDRED YEARS OF BLOOD, SACRIFICE, AND THE SEED OF REGRET
The transition was violent. Li Xiao felt his soul being stretched across the fabric of time, a sensation of being torn apart and stitched back together in a single heartbeat. When he finally opened his eyes, the suffocating walls of his wooden shack were gone. Instead, he stood atop the jagged peak of Cloud-Mist Mountain, a place where the atmosphere was so thin and spiritual energy so dense it felt like breathing liquid silver. He was no longer a weak boy; he was a Soul Transformation stage cultivator, his body radiating a pressure that made the very air hum with submission.
A fierce blizzard raged around him, but the cold could not touch him. He looked down at his hands, strong and unblemished, yet he felt a pre-programmed sorrow anchoring his heart. At the very edge of a crumbling cliff, he saw a small, shivering figure. It was a girl, barely seven years old, her clothes reduced to blood-stained rags. She was clutching a rusted dagger, her knuckles white from the cold and her eyes filled with a hollow, abyssal darkness. This was Lin Yue, the child who would one day be known as the Empress of the Eternal Sword.
"Do you want to live, or do you want to fade away like the snow?" Li Xiao asked. His voice was not his own; it carried the weight of centuries, booming through the mountain pass like distant thunder.
The girl looked up, her gaze vacant. "I want to make them pay," she whispered, her voice cracking against the wind. "I want to kill every soul that touched my family."
Li Xiao knelt in the freezing snow, his heart aching with a grief that felt far too real to be a mere simulation. "Then I shall be your Master. I will teach you the art of the sword until you can cleave the Heavens themselves. But know this, little one... the cost of your rise will be my very existence."
The following five centuries were a chronicle of silent agony. Li Xiao took Lin Yue to the deepest recesses of the mountain, where the world could not find them. He trained her with a cruelty that masked a divine, heartbreaking love. He forced her to fight mountain wolves while blindfolded and made her meditate in frozen lakes for months on end. Every time she collapsed, crying for mercy, he stood over her with a cold, expressionless face.
However, every night, while she slept, Li Xiao would use a forbidden life-transfer technique. He would place his hand on her forehead and draw the frost, the poison, and the internal injuries from her body into his own marrow. While Lin Yue grew stronger and more radiant, Li Xiao's internal organs were slowly turning to ash. In the real world, his physical body began to spasm as the multiplier of pain seeped through the soul-bond.
By the second century, Li Xiao realized that her natural talent alone would not be enough to reach the pinnacle. Using the hidden functions of his power, he crafted a legendary artifact within her soul—the Heavenly Sword Heart System. He secretly implanted it, telling her it was her own innate talent awakening. Under its influence, her progress became legendary. She was hailed as a once-in-a-million-years genius. Yet, this system was a beautiful parasite; it required Li Xiao's actual lifespan to remain active. For every level of power she gained, he lost ten years of his life. His hair, once black as night, began to turn a ghostly white.
As the fourth century arrived, Lin Yue founded the Eternal Sword Empire. She was worshipped as a Living Goddess, her name whispered in awe across continents. In her youth and newfound arrogance, she began to look down on her "weak" Master, who remained hidden in the shadows of the mountain. "Master, you have become stagnant," she told him one day, her voice as cold as the ice they once lived upon. "You are no longer fit to walk beside an Empress. Your path has ended, but mine has just begun."
Li Xiao only smiled sadly behind the emerald mask he had worn for years to hide his decay. "Then go, Yue'er. The sky is yours to conquer. Do not let the shadow of a dying man hold you back."
The climax came in the fifth century. Lin Yue attempted to ascend to the rank of Immortal Emperor, a feat unseen for ten millennia. The Heavens responded with a fury never before witnessed—the Nine-Fold Annihilation Tribulation. As the final bolt of purple lightning descended, a strike capable of erasing a soul from the cycle of reincarnation, Lin Yue felt a paralyzing fear. She was not ready.
But a shadow suddenly stood before her, blocking the sky. It was Li Xiao. His mask shattered under the pressure, revealing a face that was young yet exhausted beyond measure. His eyes were filled with a love that transcended time and space. "I have one final lesson for you, Yue'er," he whispered as the lightning tore through his chest, incinerating his soul to neutralize the strike. "The sword is not for killing... it is for protection. And I... have finally finished protecting you."
He disintegrated into golden ash before her eyes. In that horrific moment, the hidden truth was revealed to her soul. Every bit of her power was his blood. Every victory was his sacrifice. Every breakthrough was a decade stolen from his life. Lin Yue reached out, her fingers catching only the fading warmth of his dust. Her scream shattered the clouds, but he was gone.
In the real world, Li Xiao's eyes snapped open in his rotten shack. Tears, thick and hot with five centuries of grief, poured down his face. But as the tears fell, his body exploded with a blinding golden radiance. The shack disintegrated into splinters, and the earth for miles around cracked. His cultivation base tore through the shackles of mortality with the force of a thousand suns. Body Refining, Foundation Establishment, and finally—Golden Core Peak.
Simultaneously, in the distant Imperial Palace, Empress Lin Yue fell from her throne, clutching her heart as a phantom pain tore her soul apart. "That aura... that sorrow... Master? It cannot be... Is he back?"
Li Xiao stood amidst the rubble of his former life, his gaze cold enough to freeze the air. The simulation was over, and the real world was about to learn what happens when a Ma
ster returns to collect his due.