Three hundred springs and autumns passed, and the mortal world underwent many changes.

For example, the Shangqing Immortal Sect fell into decline. Lu Yao, with his weak character, was unable to lead, and under his rule, Shangqing was barely surviving.

Moreover, with Yin Wuhui adding insult to injury, the three thousand disciples of Shangqing Immortal Sect were nearly wiped out. Fortunately, Elder Qianyang's persistent efforts prevented the ancient immortal sect from being completely destroyed.

Meanwhile, Chu Binghuan inherited the position of sect leader of Yuntian Shuijing, elevating it to the top rank among immortal sects.

Furthermore, regarding the twenty-six cultivators from the immortal sects who participated in the massacre at Drunken Mansion all those years ago, time has brought many changes. Some of them have died, some remained mediocre, and some had inherited family businesses and returned to farming. For example, the sword cultivator named Miao Sheng was now living a life of comfort without worries about food and clothing.

Seeking immortality and enlightenment cannot compare to having beautiful wives and concubines.

Simple meals cannot compare to fine wine and good meat.

Leaving the sect and returning home to enjoy a peaceful life was indeed a wise decision.

On this day, Miao Sheng was indulging in the pleasures of the flesh. After a while, he looked down at the pale-faced concubine beneath him with some displeasure. "What's wrong with you? You're as stiff as a board. This isn't the first time you've served me."

"Master, this lowly one... this lowly one is scared."

Miao Sheng was puzzled. "What are you afraid of?"

"Haven't you heard, Master? The house at the west end of the street was robbed. All five members of the family were killed, not even the dogs and chickens were spared."

Miao Sheng's heart skipped a beat, and a sense of unease crept in. "Was it... Zhang Shan's son?"

"Yes, I remember you knew Zhang Shan. You were brothers back when you were cultivating together. Zhang Shan passed away last year, and now his son..."

"It was bad luck that they were robbed. What are you afraid of?"

The concubine trembled all over. "The neighbours say it was a robbery, but it didn't look like it! They had their hearts cut out, their intestines spilled, it was horrifying! The worst part, the worst part was the blood writing on their screen wall."

Miao Sheng's face changed drastically. "What did it say?"

Tears streamed down the concubine's face. " Father's debt, son's retribution."

Miao Sheng's complexion turned ashen when he heard this, and he fell off the bed. "Shut up! Shut up! Ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. What nonsense about repaying a father's debt, absurd!"

"Master..."

Miao Sheng scrambled back onto the bed, grabbing the concubine's thin shoulders and shaking her violently. "Has he come back? Has he really come back? It can't be, it can't be! He was clearly annihilated, body and soul! It's been hundreds of years, how could he possibly still be alive?"

The concubine was terrified. "Master, this lowly one doesn't know."

"He's back for revenge, isn't he? Digging out organs, cutting out the golden core, dissipating the soul—that's the work of a demonic cultivator, isn't it? He's not dead, right? He faked his death back on the Shangqing Platform! He couldn't take revenge on Zhang Shan, so he's going after Zhang Shan's descendants!"

Suddenly, the candles in the room were abruptly extinguished!

Darkness enveloped the room, and Miao Sheng's soul shivered. At the same time, he heard the sound of a blade slicing through flesh, followed by a sticky sensation on his face and a wet feeling on his body, accompanied by the metallic smell of blood.

Miao Sheng touched his face and sniffed his fingers.

It was blood!

A chill ran down Miao Sheng's spine, and he quickly jumped out of bed to grab his sword from the table. "Who's there? Come out!"

As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he instinctively turned back to the bed, only to see blood splattered all over it.

"Ah!!!" Miao Sheng screamed in terror, stumbling as he rushed to the door. As he flung it open, two bodies fell at his feet one after the other —one was his legally wedded wife, the other his beloved second concubine.

Miao Sheng cried out in shock. The courtyard was strewn with corpses—his concubines, his servants, his workers, even his favourite dog. Blood flowed through the cracks in the stone tiles, creating a chilling silence in the entire residence. The dead body of an oriole lay on a beauty's couch, dismembered rats were scattered in the corridor, and everything, from people to flies, had been nailed to the walls in a gruesome display.

"Come out, come out!!" Miao Sheng, driven mad with fear, swung his sword wildly. "Hua Che, is it you? I know it's you! Come out! You slaughtered my entire household, you beast worse than an animal!!"

"Worse than an animal?"

The sudden voice made Miao Sheng's legs go weak. He turned stiffly, only to fall to the ground in shock, warm urine dripping down his legs.

A man stood on the rooftop.

Tall and elegant, dressed in a red robe as vivid as blood, with hair as dark as ink, and phoenix eyes gleaming with a vicious, oppressive light.

He exuded an indescribable aura of fierce malevolence, standing there under the moonlight. Miao Sheng could see his deathly pale face and shouted in disbelief, "Hua Qingkong!?"

Hua Che took a step forward, leaping lightly down like a feather: "Back then, you massacred Drunken Mansion, now I kill your entire family. Isn't that fair? You call me worse than an animal, but aren't you the same?"

Miao Sheng screamed, "They... they were all defenceless mortals! You're utterly insane!"

"Weren’t the people at Drunken Mansion defenceless?" Hua Che's tone was unsettlingly calm, a faint smile playing on his lips as if he were merely a passerby in this bloodbath.

"One hundred and thirty-eight lives, two dogs, three cats, one parrot, and ten rabbits—that was all your doing!" Hua Che's expression carried a cold pride. "I'm merely repaying you in kind."

"Zhang Shan said it too, a son repaying for his father's debt s. I think it's very reasonable! Yin Wuhui killed five thousand disciples of Shangqing Sect. I crawled on my knees from the bottom of Kunlun Mountain to atone for my sins. I paid with my life. And Zhang Shan? He and you slaughtered Drunken Mansion. What about his blood debt?"

Hua Che laughed lightly. "He was lucky to die before I returned. So I had to seek vengeance on his descendants, and make them repay."

Miao Sheng stammered, "You, you..."

Hua Che's eyes flashed with malevolence. "But I won't let Zhang Shan off so easily. Tomorrow, I'll dig up his grave and desecrate his corpse."

Hua Che suddenly reached out with a skeletal hand, not yet covered in flesh, and gripped Miao Sheng's throat tightly.

Miao Sheng was stunned, lifted off the ground by the immense strength, his legs kicking frantically in the air, his eyes bulging. "Ghost... ghost cultivator..."

Hua Che sneered, "The son of the Demon Lord is born evil. You thought I would follow the demonic path, become bloodthirsty and kill indiscriminately. Fine, I'll fulfil your expectations!"

Twenty-six people, twenty-six families.

Those who were still alive faced extermination, without exception.

Those no longer in the world had their graves desecrated, their corpses whipped, and their residual souls summoned through dark arts to be torn apart by a horde of ghosts.

From then on, everyone knew Hua Che for his ruthless cruelty. With a single disagreement, he would massacre entire families. No one dared provoke him, and no one ever again called him "the son of a prostitute."

Merely mentioning his name struck fear into people's hearts, causing them to flee in terror.

Life as a ghost cultivator was far from easy. Beyond the constant slaughter in the underworld, Hua Che's initial return to the mortal realm nearly destroyed his three centuries of cultivation due to a sort of "rejection of the elements."

Later, countless heavenly tribulations followed.

Heaven tolerated humans and animals, but not ghosts, especially those who roamed the mortal world in ghostly form.

By the time Hua Che had completely restored his flesh, he was no longer a ghost but had transformed back into a human, reborn through nirvana.

Naturally, he chose to follow the demonic path.

After three hundred years of practicing ghost cultivation, switching to the closely related demonic cultivation came genuinely to him. With three hundred years of cultivation backing him, his abilities grew exponentially.

*

"Master…"

Hua Che, burning with fever, suddenly spoke. Chu Binghuan quickly went to check on him, but he wasn't awake, merely muttering in his nightmares.

"What?" Hua Che's voice was too faint for Chu Binghuan to hear clearly.

Hua Che trembled all over, mumbling indistinctly, "Master…"

"Master?" Chu Binghuan was taken aback. "Are you looking for your master?"

Hua Che: "Patricide…"

Chu Binghuan's heart jolted: "Hua Che."

"Kill…" Hua Che continued to murmur incoherently, as if he were dreaming of something terrifying. His hand reached out from under the blanket, grasping at nothing.

Seeing this, Chu Binghuan offered his hand, allowing Hua Che to cling tightly to it. "Mother…"

Hua Che's body was burning hot. Despite Chu Binghuan's efforts to wipe him down and administer medicine, nothing seemed to help. Even the best medicine required a robust constitution, and Hua Che's weak and sickly body absorbed it slower than normal.

Seeing Hua Che shivering, Chu Binghuan pulled an extra quilt over him, wrapping him in three layers before his shivering subsided somewhat.

Chu Binghuan was reluctant to recall events of his previous life…

*

Years ago, during the third Martial Arts Tournament in which he participated with Hua Che, Chu Binghuan was eliminated in the first round due to a backlash from a Shangqing illusion, suffering serious injuries.

He returned to Yuntian Shuijing to recuperate for five years.

During that time, he heard that Hua Che had been kidnapped by the Demon Lord. Despite the opposition from Chu Changfeng and Mei Cailian, he tried to infiltrate the Fen Qing Palace to rescue him.

As a result, Chu Changfeng set a prohibition spell on him, causing him to fall into a deep sleep. Yuntian Shuijing quickly severed all ties with Hua Che under Mei Cailian's leadership, firmly denying the engagement and expressing their stance of uniting with other immortal sects to jointly fight against the Demon Lord’s son.

When he woke up and mentioned Hua Che again, he was shocked to discover that he had been asleep for five years, and the world had changed.

Since then, Hua Che had betrayed his master and ancestors, defected, and even slaughtered five thousand disciples of the Shangqing Sect. Eventually, the combined forces of a hundred sects captured him, forcing Hua Che to kneel from the foot of Kunlun Mountain to the Shangqing Platform, where he received the ultimate punishment to appease the spirits of the murdered Shangqing disciples.

These were the events Chu Binghuan learned from historical records.

Was Hua Che really dead?

Was Hua Che truly as evil as described in the history books?

In the years that followed, Chu Binghuan traveled across the nine provinces and four seas, trying to find Hua Che's remnant soul or any scattered consciousness, although the chances were slim.

He uncovered the truth that the immortal sects had tried to conceal—Drunken Mansion had been annihilated, not relocated as the public believed.

Since then, Granny Jiang was never seen again.

Regarding Granny Jiang and Drunken Mansion, the entire cultivation world remained silent, as if by unspoken agreement, no one mentioned the event, treating it as concluded.

Chu Binghuan knew Hua Che as a resilient, uncompromising person who would never willingly crawl up Kunlun Mountain on his knees or accept humiliation. How could he easily accept the extreme punishment on the Shangqing Platform?

There were too many suspicious points.

Granny Jiang’s mysterious disappearance further convinced Chu Binghuan that there was more to the story.

He vaguely suspected that perhaps the Shangqing Sect had captured Granny Jiang, and Hua Che had sacrificed himself to save her...

A hundred years later, Hua Che mysteriously returned.

He slaughtered countless people, rivers of blood flowing.

Later, news spread in the demon world that Hua Che had killed his father, Yin Wuhui, unified the scattered tribes, and ascended to the throne of Demon Lord.

Chu Binghuan had imagined countless scenarios for their reunion, but he never expected Hua Che to come directly to Yuntian Shuijing, enter his bamboo pavilion, and speak to him alone.

Three hundred years had passed, with countless days and nights of suffering, joy, and sorrow. Upon seeing this person again, Chu Binghuan’s first thought was...

He had grown thinner.

Chu Binghuan had pondered for a long time about what to say after three hundred years. Yet, in the end, it was Hua Che who spoke first: “Ice cube, I won’t use Hanxue (NT: 含雪 ‘containing snow’, a martial technique. Also the name of his flute), and you won’t use Zhuohun (NT: ‘Soul burning’). Let’s settle this with our swords!”

Flowing Wind Soul burning and Clear Moon Gentle Breeze.

The clash of two supreme sword techniques made the entire Yuntian Shuijing tremble.

Hua Che’s lips curved into a sinister smile, "Yunmiao Jun, the Demon Slayer, avenge them!"

Hua Che threw away his protective sword and walked directly towards him, without a trace of hesitation, intending to clash with his bare body against the Listening Spring Sword.

Had Chu Binghuan not instinctively withdrawn his sword, Hua Che would have died with a sword through his heart.

"You..." Chu Binghuan looked at him in horror. Although Hua Che had been mischievous before, often joking and playing pranks, this time it was real—Hua Che truly wanted to die by his sword!

Hua Che's reaction was not much different from Chu Binghuan's. After a long pause, he finally spoke, "Father is dead, mother is dead, granny is dead, my master and friends are all gone. I thought there was nothing left for me in this world..."

"Really," Hua Che lowered his phoenix eyes, his expression bitter, but a smile of delight spread across his lips. "You don't want me to die, is that it?"

Chu Binghuan, "Hua Che."

"In this filthy and hopeless world, I still have something to hold onto." Hua Che's smile grew even more joyful. He picked up his sword and grabbed Chu Binghuan's wrist. "In that case, come with me to Fen Qing Palace!"

Of course, he refused, but was then “tricked” by Hua Che.

A fake kidnapping, a fake sealing of his cultivation, a fake forced confinement.

In the end, Hua Che still...

—I'm sorry, I wasted your whole life.

No, perhaps it was Chu Binghuan who had wasted Hua Che's life.

If Hua Che had fallen in love with someone else, maybe he would have been happier, more carefree.

Unexpectedly, there really was a miracle; he was reborn.

Even more astonishing, Hua Che was reborn too.

Chu Binghuan lowered his eyes and looked at him, gently stroking Hua Che's sweat-dampened hair at his temples.

Hua Che seemed to find it ticklish. He affectionately hugged Chu Binghuan's arm, rubbing his face against the warmth of his palm.

—If you had been there then, would you have believed me?

Chu Binghuan bent down slightly and placed a soft kiss on Hua Che's forehead.

"I believe you."

 

Translator: DarNan