Double pupils. The Supreme Bone. Bone extraction and transplant.
In the script she had designed, the mortal Gu Chengming was supposed to be born in a collapsing hut, his mother dead in childbirth, his father a stooped tenant farmer. He would learn to walk at three, take his first beating at five, start herding the landlord's oxen at seven, and never wring more than a few taels' worth of spirit stone out of an entire lifetime.
So what exactly was this?
The Qingxin Formula started to speak, then stopped, then tried again. "This seems a little different from the mortal life I was expecting."
Love's Qingxin Formula clearly found the whole thing humiliating, but she pressed on anyway. "It makes no difference. Mortal or prodigy, the world's suffering does not grant special mercy on account of talent."
The Qingxin Formula glanced sideways at her and said nothing.
From a certain angle, Love's Qingxin Formula wasn't entirely wrong. Her trial tested the original heart, after all. Even if the opening had him at max level, so long as there was still a narrow road ahead that had to be walked, the endpoint would test the same question.
As her words fell away, the scene inside the illusion began to shift.
[Year One. Gu Chengming was born into a branch line of the Gu family, a clan of immortal cultivators. Born with double pupils, he was regarded by the Clan Head as a monstrous omen. The Clan Head immediately ordered that the Supreme Bone be cut out of Gu Haiming, an orphaned girl of the branch line, and transplanted into him.]
[But on the very day of his birth, Gu Chengming spoke. With the divine power of his double pupils he saw straight through the Clan Head's private motives: what the man wanted was not the Gu family's flourishing, but to use a body bearing both sacred marks to curry favor with a Holy Land and buy himself a post. At these words the clan erupted, the Third Elder turned on him on the spot, and the matter of the Supreme Bone was dropped. From then on Gu Haiming shared a courtyard with Gu Chengming, the two of them raised by an old servant of the branch line.]
—Hold on. A set of double pupils and a Supreme Bone appearing out of nowhere in the opening is already absurd enough. How is he talking on the day he's born?
Love's Qingxin Formula badly wanted to say something about it, and forced it back down.
[Year Four. The double pupils first revealed their power: they could see through to the origin of spiritual qi, and he grasped the drawing of qi into the body entirely on his own. Because of the Supreme Bone affair, Gu Haiming was frozen out by the main-line children and grew solitary and withdrawn, clinging to no one but Gu Chengming. Gu Chengming taught her the qi-drawing method he had worked out, and the two of them often sat facing each other in the corner of the courtyard, cultivating.]
[That same year, the main line picked a fight. Three older clan brothers cornered Gu Haiming. She bit down and refused to cry. Gu Chengming picked up a dry branch and went looking for them, used his double pupils to read the flaws in all three brothers' techniques, and struck each once behind the knee, dropping all three to kneel in front of Gu Haiming. Then Gu Chengming said, "From now on, anyone who bullies you, I'll hit back for you" — and Gu Haiming finally burst into tears.]
[Year Five. Gu Haiming's Supreme Bone awakened and her strength ran wild. Gu Chengming turned over every damaged scroll in the Gu family's library until he found a crude solution. From then on, every night he sat by her side and used his double pupils to guide the Supreme Bone's power through her meridians, tempering them until she fell asleep. Gu Haiming pretended to sleep, cracking her eyes open to watch him doze in profile, thinking that in this life she would protect her big brother no matter what.]
[That same year, at the Gu family's year-end contest, Gu Chengming, though several ranks below them, defeated three older clan brothers. A wandering rogue cultivator passing through the Gu family saw his talent and gave him an incomplete sword manual, said to have come from some ancient cultivator's cave-dwelling. Gu Chengming treasured it like a jewel and drilled with his sword in the courtyard night after night. Gu Haiming corrected his stances, and sparring beneath the moon became their routine. That year, Gu Chengming came into his first small measure of skill.]
[Year Seven. The immortal city where the Gu family lived was struck by a tide of low-tier demon beasts. The clan elders ordered the gates barred. Gu Chengming climbed the wall and went out, carried his sword up onto the city ramparts, cut down three demon beasts with the manual's fragmentary moves, and rescued several trapped commoners. After the battle the Clan Head, furious, punished him with a month facing the wall for abandoning the clan formation and endangering them all. Gu Haiming sneaked over the wall to bring him food, was caught by the guards, and was sentenced to face the wall as well — so the two of them ended up with a full month alone together.]
Love's Qingxin Formula drew a long breath.
—All right. At least this part finally has some flavor of ordinary mortal setback. Wall-facing punishment can just barely count as hardship.
[That same year, at the foot of the mountain where he served his punishment, Gu Chengming picked up the missing second half of that incomplete sword manual. It turned out to be a top-grade sword cultivator's inheritance!]
Love's Qingxin Formula: "...?"
Clear-Heart Formula: [holding.back.laughter.jpg]
[Year Thirteen. An envoy from the Sword Sect's immortal gate came to the Gu family to select disciples. Gu Chengming and Gu Haiming were both accepted, and took their leave of the family.]
[Year Fourteen. Gu Chengming passed the inner sect assessment and was granted an exception to cultivate on Sword Peak. Among those who entered with him was a junior sister named Huiyuan, a quiet girl who was always trailing quietly behind him. Her talent was nothing exceptional, but she worked brutally hard, repeating the same opening form on the practice terrace every morning before dawn. Gu Chengming watched her through it and offered her some pointers. When the girl got back to her own quarters, she cried.]
[In all those days, not one Senior Brother or Senior Sister had spared her a second glance. Gu Chengming was the first person to show her any kindness, and so the girl quietly fell for him.]
—How did Little Huiyuan get in there too!?
The Clear-Heart Formula watched with a distinctly aggrieved air. Don't tell me every technique except me has gone in there to play.
She turned her head to look at Love's Qingxin Formula, who pretended not to notice.
[Year Fifteen. Gu Chengming descended the mountain to temper himself. On the road he encountered Zi Wuji, a demoness of the Demonic Sect, in the act of assassinating the local county magistrate. Zi Wuji's nature was free and unrestrained; she was killing the man because his corruption and abuses of the law had cost several commoners their lives, and she could not walk past injustice. Gu Chengming seized the chance to block her. After trading several exchanges without winning, Zi Wuji said bitterly, "Are all you sword cultivators this blind to reason? Do you all defend crooked officials?"]
[Gu Chengming answered, "If you cut his heart out in the middle of the street like this, by tomorrow the authorities will be charging commoners with collusion with demons and dragging their families down with them. And whatever the magistrate's crimes, it isn't your hand that should deliver the sentence."]
[Zi Wuji froze, understood, and used the opening to flee. Gu Chengming feigned an injury and let her go, while the magistrate cursed himself hoarse.]
[That night she killed the magistrate by strangulation instead and staged it as a suicide by hanging. Afterward she came looking for Gu Chengming. "You're an interesting one, kid." The two became friends.]
—So it really is every last one of them except me!?
[Year Sixteen. A girl carrying a wine-yoke appeared outside the Sword Sect's mountain gate. Her name was Cangxian. Her wine was rich with spiritual qi and fairly priced, and Sword Sect disciples flocked to her. Gu Chengming met her while buying supplies for the sect. Cangxian was bright and generous, her eyes curving like crescent moons when she laughed, easy with everyone — except that whenever the talk turned to sect rules or the state of the world, she would start muttering endlessly. Gu Chengming took to visiting her wine stall now and then to discuss the wider world with her, and the two grew close.]
[Year Seventeen. Having placed first in the Sword Sect's evaluations, Gu Chengming was recommended to the Ministry of Rites for three years of practical service. The Director, Zhou Lixin, was eight years his senior, gentle and upright, with a white jade hairpin habitually set at her temple. She was responsible for teaching him ritual statute and official documents, and their relationship steadily warmed. Gu Chengming solved a great many troubles for her, and Zhou Lixin came to regard him as a younger brother.]
[Year Eighteen. Infighting broke out within the Ministry of Rites. Someone framed Zhou Lixin for embezzling the silver from the sacrificial fields. Gu Chengming went sleepless for several nights and combed the true culprit out of seventy-two volumes of ledgers. Zhou Lixin was cleared. Leaving the prison, she was deeply grateful, and her regard for Gu Chengming deepened further — she now counted him among the most important people in her world.]
[Year Twenty-One. Gu Chengming returned to the sect and, at the sect's minor contest, broke into a new realm by the sword for the first time. Huiyuan had grown up that year too, the little junior sister who once wept like pear blossoms in the rain now a gentle young sword cultivator. She offered him her sword in challenge before the whole assembly, lost, and then said with red-rimmed eyes, "Senior Brother, wait a few more years for me to grow. If I beat you, you'll have to marry me."]
[Year Twenty-Three. At the Grand Tournament, the foremost young sword cultivator of that generation was named Yun Liuyue, proud and haughty by nature. In the final, Gu Chengming won by half a move. Yun Liuyue cried in frustration, and from then on climbed to the Sword Sect on the first and fifteenth of every month to cross swords with him. She never won, and she never stopped.]
[Year Twenty-Five. Seeking a breakthrough, Gu Chengming traveled to the Boundless Heavenly Palace, said to be the place where some ancient Immortal Emperor had fallen. Trapped inside the Secret Realm, he ran into Zi Wuji by chance. The two were sealed in a mirrored illusion formation for seven days, without food or water. On the third day Zi Wuji's fever would not break, and Gu Chengming fed her the last half-skin of water. On the fifth day they kept each other alive by circulating their true essence into one another. On the seventh day they broke the formation. Before parting, Zi Wuji looked at him, worked her mouth, and in the end only said, "Next time we meet, remember to buy me a drink." Then her red robes vanished into the sea of clouds. When Gu Chengming turned around, he found a red cord tied to his cuff.]
[Year Twenty-Six. After Gu Chengming's return, rumors about him flooded the sect: that his swordsmanship was nothing special, that he had colluded with a demoness of the Demonic Sect at the Boundless Heavenly Palace, that he had climbed to his position on Gu Haiming's Supreme Bone. The source traced back to a jianghu information broker known as the Shared Abyss Wanderer, who named him arrogantly in her own gossip sheet: If this Gu fellow dares come looking for me, I can crush him to death with one idle hand.]
[Year Twenty-Seven. Gu Chengming laid a trap. He let word slip that on a certain night, at the hour of Zi, he would be cultivating a certain supreme art alone in a ruined temple south of the city. The Shared Abyss Wanderer duly came to investigate — and Gu Chengming used the opening to track her home with the Red Dust Art of cause and effect. She walked into her own house and found him already waiting. She didn't even get her sword clear of its sheath before a single finger sealed her acupoints. Gu Chengming pulled back her hood to find a timid girl, tears already welling in her eyes, who burst out sobbing the moment he looked at her. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry! I only wanted to earn a little more spirit stone!"]
[From that day on, the information broker called the Shared Abyss Wanderer — whose true name was Zhongmiao — became Gu Chengming's exclusive information broker, and under his coercion and their daily proximity she quietly fell for him as well.]
[Year Twenty-Eight. Gu Chengming traveled to the East Sea on official business. On the way he met an unfettered rogue cultivator, Huan Hongchen, dressed as a man with a slender, sheathless sword at her waist, who called herself the Red Dust Wanderer. In an inn at the East Sea's fish-trading port, the two of them together exposed a cross-sea spirit stone smuggling ring. Afterward the Red Dust Wanderer clapped him on the shoulder at the docks. "Fine skills, Brother Gu. Until we meet again."]
["Safe travels, miss," Gu Chengming said.]
[The Red Dust Wanderer was curious how he had seen through her, but in the end she only laughed once with her back to him and strode away.]
[Year Thirty. Wounded, Gu Chengming went to the Harmonious Joy Sect for treatment and was assigned to a young woman physician named Hua Yinyang. Hua Yinyang was cheerful, generous, and blunt in her dealings, discussing cultivation with him without the least regard for the proprieties between men and women. After a month of convalescence the two became friends, and every year on Gu Chengming's birthday, a jar of her own Harmonious Joy brew arrived outside the Sword Sect's mountain gate.]
Outside the vision, the Clear-Heart Formula watched with open resentment. "So everyone's shown up. Why aren't I in it?"
Love's Qingxin Formula's composure cracked a little. "Aren't you standing right beside me?"
The Clear-Heart Formula sighed, helpless. "Are you really my 'future'? Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you're raising every other technique's favorability for them."
—That is not how I designed it either!
Love's Qingxin Formula was close to tearing her hair out.
How had this brat turned it into a harem power-fantasy game?!
[Year Thirty-Two. Gu Chengming became First Seat of the Sword Sect's inner court.]
[Year Thirty-Three. Gu Chengming came down the mountain on patrol and, in the dead of night, pushed open the door of Cangxian's wine shop. Cangxian seemed to have had rather a lot to drink that day; her cheeks were flushed, and she had abandoned her usual easy brightness. She caught hold of his sleeve and, emboldened by the wine, launched into a session of keyboard politics — savaging the hypocrisy of the reigning imperial house, cursing the sects' upper echelons for burying the truth about the evil breeding across the world for their own private gain, even pronouncing at volume that several Sovereigns were nothing but "freeloading bullies warming their seats." Gu Chengming did not stop her. He laughed softly, filled her cup, and joined her in trading unofficial gossip about those same Sovereigns. Cangxian stared at him for a long moment, then roared with laughter and shoved a hundred-year-old jar of her treasured Cangxian brew into his arms. After that, even sober, she spoke her mind about the affairs of the world in front of him.]
[Year Thirty-Five. Gu Haiming broke through to the Fourth Realm. That day she came to find Gu Chengming with her hair tied up in a high ponytail. "Brother, give me a few more years of cultivation and I'll be able to protect you."]
[Gu Chengming patted her head. "Then I'll be waiting."]
[Gu Haiming ran off, red to the ears.]
[Year Thirty-Seven. The age of chaos arrived and demons invaded. Zhou Lixin was promoted to Minister of Rites and argued fiercely at court for war against the demon clans. Yun Liuyue's sect concluded a temporary alliance with the Sword Sect, and the two of them entered demon territory shoulder to shoulder. Zhongmiao's intelligence network rendered great service in the war. Zi Wuji led the Demonic Sect's elites in an ambush against the enemy commander-in-chief at the southern end of the line. Huan Hongchen slipped behind enemy lines as a rogue cultivator and severed their supply routes. Hua Yinyang held the rear, commanding the field hospitals.]
[When the battle ended, Gu Chengming had cut down the Demon Venerate, and the cultivators of the world honored him together as the First Sword of the Age.]
[Year Forty. Two other Sovereigns on the same main trunk joined forces to hunt Gu Chengming down. He buried them both in the sea of clouds, proved the Sixth Realm, and took the title Sovereign Chengming. That day the well-wishers before the Gu family ancestral hall came in an unbroken stream. Gu Haiming sat composed at his side, her white hair loose, and frightened off no small number of female cultivators who had come hoping to strike up a conversation.]
[Year Forty-Six. In seclusion, Gu Chengming sensed something wrong: the lines of fortune running through this world did not seem natural. He investigated for several years, and at last discovered that this world's Heavenly Dao was not impartial at all. It regarded every cultivator as a chess piece; every bond, every calamity, was a move in the Heavenly Dao's arrangement.]
[Year Fifty. Gu Chengming proved the Seventh Realm and took the title "Chengming Emperor." Of the six Sovereigns upon the same main trunk, not one survived; all returned to the Heavenly Dao in that battle. The world said of him: with one sword, he opened the main trunk.]
[Year Fifty-Five. Gu Chengming wandered the world and met a blind historian called "Great Thousand." Great Thousand recorded all the affairs of the world, treating the cultivation realm as a scroll to be set down — yet he alone refused to record "the future" and "the mandate of Heaven." Great Thousand led Gu Chengming to observe the myriad conditions of living beings, and with Seventh Realm cultivation and double pupils Gu Chengming looked into heaven and earth. He found that the causal tracks of every cultivator in the world were locked down by a single invisible net, and that anyone who strayed from it, or presumed to transcend it, had a "Judgment Tribulation" brought down to erase them.]
[Gu Chengming understood at last: this heaven and earth had not evolved naturally. It was the Heavenly Dao's chessboard, and its cage.]
[Year Sixty. For the sake of the countless living beings of this world, Gu Chengming resolved to rebel against Heaven.]
[Year Sixty-Five. The Heavenly Dao brought down a "Judgment Tribulation" that warped the perceptions of the world. Mortals and cultivators who had once received their kindness turned around and laid siege to the Sword Sect. Zhou Lixin was stripped of office and imprisoned. Hua Yinyang's medicine valley was burned. Zi Wuji was hunted by the orthodox and demonic paths in concert.]
[Year Seventy. The Heavenly Dao brought down the "Dao Plague." Any who harbored irreverence toward the Heavenly Dao would rot in the flesh until their bodies fell apart and they died.]
Love's Qingxin Formula perked up sharply. Seventy years of pure indulgent power-fantasy, and now, at last — here it came!
The images did not stop.
The Dao Plague spread with terrifying speed. First the rogue cultivators, then the low-ranking sect disciples, then the high cultivators, falling one after another, flesh sloughing away, white bone laid bare.
Time inside the illusion passed unusually fast through this stretch, as though some force had accelerated it. The year-numbers flickered in the corner of the scene: Year Seventy-One. Year Seventy-Five. Year Eighty. Year Ninety…
[Year Ninety-Nine. Gu Chengming led his people to shatter the Ninefold Tianque and stood face to face with the origin of this world's Heavenly Dao.]
[The Heavenly Dao had neither form nor shape. Against it, Gu Chengming's sword intent was an ant trying to topple a tree.]
The Heavenly Dao let fall a vast voice.
["You were an anomaly in this world, and yet you attained the true fruit — that was My charity to you. Surrender that nourishment, and I shall grant you transcendence and dominion over three thousand worlds. Those feedstocks are nothing but phantoms in the long river of fate, while you will possess eternity…"]
["Take one step back."]
This was the place.
Here, in this moment, one step back — and he became the Reef Stone Daoist.
The Heavenly Dao's voice was still drifting through heaven and earth. Gu Chengming was drenched in blood, his blade nothing but a row of chips and gaps.
He set every last drop of the source-essence in his body alight and leveled it at the sky.
["Take one step back, my ass."]
[Sword-light lit the whole of that dark night. Knowing it could not be done, knowing it was a dead road, he drew his sword without a moment's hesitation and cut at the Heavenly Dao that could not be shaken.]
—And in the glare of that one strike, the illusion shattered with a roar.
Fragments scattered like a blizzard. Grey-white mist gathered in again from every direction and swallowed the sword-light whole.
Love's Qingxin Formula stood where she was, watching the fragments dissolve one by one into the mist, and for a long while said nothing.
This bastard. He'd taken her painstakingly designed mortal-suffering script and rewritten it into a power fantasy, swapped the tragic key for a full-blown harem, and even replaced the final boss with the Heavenly Dao itself. Honestly, from beginning to end, the script had been absurd beyond words.
And yet…
She watched the scene before her fade away piece by piece, revealing the pure white corridor she had looked upon ten thousand times over. At its far end, Gu Chengming's spiritual sense was waking slowly out of the illusion, the light between his brows dimming point by point. Then he opened his eyes and gave them both a mild smile.
However ridiculous the process, the answer he'd finally given had reached across a hundred years and shattered, with a single sword, the nightmare buried deepest in the Qingxin Formula — the one where fear made him sheathe his blade.
That strike had cut down the Heavenly Dao. It had also cut down a few words: take one step back, and the world grows wide.
"You win."
Love's Qingxin Formula sighed, and the corner of her mouth curved into a smile of release.
Her figure began to turn transparent bit by bit, breaking into motes of golden light that drifted toward Gu Chengming.
When the light settled, the Qingxin Formula was still standing where she had been, watching the last thread of that glow sink into Gu Chengming's spiritual sense.
She lowered her eyes. Then she heard footsteps.
Gu Chengming walked out of the dispersing golden light, stopped in front of her, and tilted his head. The Qingxin Formula raised her eyes to look at him.
She started to say something — some polite line like "congratulations on clearing it" — and in the end said nothing at all. She only put her arms around him, smiling.
I always knew I could never be wrong about my peerless hero.
[CG: Love's Qingxin Formula — Unlocked]
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