Chapter 59: A Life Of A Mortal

[Shen Qingxue’s POV]

Before I was an immortal disciple plunging toward an army of screaming men, I was simply Shen Qingxue, the third daughter of a border garrison commander in the small, mortal Dayun Kingdom.

My early life was not extravagant, but it was warm. Raised amidst the harsh northern winds, surrounded by the rough laughter of loyal soldiers and the clatter of iron spears, I grew up relatively sheltered from the darker currents of the world.

Our family was far from perfect, my father was stern, my mother was constantly worrying, and minor disputes frequently flared up under the pressure of garrison life.

Yet, no matter how severe the conflict, we always sat together around the wooden hearth at dusk, breaking flatbread and resolving our grievances with laughter.

I grew up happy, blissfully ignorant of the rot festering in the kingdom’s capital, spoiled by the protective iron wall my parents built around me.

Then, the sky collapsed in a single night.

The King, the very sovereign my father had bled for across thirty years of brutal winter campaigns, betrayed us without a second thought.

Whispers of court conspiracy, fabricated letters, and cowardly prime ministerial slanders framed my father for colluding with foreign border enemies. Decades of unyielding loyalty were repaid not with honor, but with black-clad imperial assassins descending upon our private estate in the dead of midnight.

I still remember the smell of that night. The acrid stench of burning cedar wood, the wet, metallic tang of blood pooling through the tatami mats, and the horrific gurgles of our household guards dying in the dark.

In a matter of hours, our clan was wiped from the earth. The kingdom my father had sworn his life to protect celebrated our destruction, spitting upon our ancestral name and dragging our family’s reputation through the gutter.

I was only supposed to be another severed head tossed into an imperial cart.

The only reason breath still lingers in my lungs is because my mother threw herself between me and an assassin’s poisoned spear. She took the blade through her own heart, using her dying convulsions to pin the killer against the stone pillar while screaming for me to run.

My father, wounded by poisoned arrows, shattered the courtyard wall with his bare fists to carve an escape path for his useless daughter.

Both of them possessed martial cultivation, with their strength, they could have easily broken through the encirclement and vanished into the mountains alive.

Instead, they chose to die in the mud so that I could live.

Escaping the burning estate was only the beginning of a living hell. The King knew the commander’s daughter had slipped through the net, and imperial bounty hunters flooded the highways, plastering my face across every post house in the realm.

In those first weeks, I didn’t even want to survive. The grief was a bottomless, suffocating abyss that crushed my chest with every ragged breath. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw my mother’s blood splattering across my face and my father’s dying roar.

I wanted nothing more than to lay down in a ditch, close my eyes, and let the cold winter frost take me away.

Yet, every time I neared the brink of surrender, the memory of my mother’s dying gaze pulled me back from the precipice.

They died so you could live. If I allowed myself to rot in the mud, their sacrifices would become nothing more than a pathetic, meaningless joke.

That agonizing realization burned through my grief like a brand, transforming my sorrow into an all-consuming, venomous hatred.

If heaven was blind enough to let traitors feast while loyal blood watered the soil, then I would survive by any means necessary, crawl back from the depths of hell, and drag every single one of them into the flames.

Fueled by that burning desire to survive at all costs, I clawed my way out of the Dayun Kingdom.

It was during that desperate flight that the naive, sheltered commander’s daughter died completely, and the real world tore open before my eyes.

I saw the terrifying ugliness of humanity that my father had shielded me from. I saw refugees selling their own infants for a handful of moldy grain, I saw traveling merchants butchered by bandits for a pair of cloth shoes, I saw mortals groveling like dogs before arrogant rogue cultivators who flattened entire hamlets on a whim.

To stay alive, I became a feral beast among the dregs of the earth.

I begged for scraps, slept in hollowed-out tree trunks covered in rotting leaves, and fought starving mangy dogs in back alleys over half-eaten steamed buns.

I traded blows with cutthroats, learning to drive broken ceramic shards into men’s throats when their backs were turned.

Now that I stand here in clean silk, I can scarcely comprehend how that bruised, emaciated girl survived those months of freezing rain, gangrenous wounds, and bone poison without snapping her own neck.

Throughout every second of that waking nightmare, my mind had only one singular obsession: Power.

I needed strength. Not the mortal martial arts of my father that crumbled before royal decrees, but the unfathomable, terrifying power of the immortal path, strength capable of sundering mountains and tearing an entire kingdom to ash.

That was when the rumors of the Mystic Cloud Sect reached my bleeding ears.

A righteous immortal sect perched above the clouds, opening its gates to recruit mortal disciples from across the vast territories. Yet, even as hope sparked in my chest, a cold weight dragged it down.

In my childhood, my father had paid a traveling Daoist a heavy sum of silver to inspect my dantian, the cultivator had scoffed, tapped my wrist, and proclaimed that my spiritual roots were chaotic and unfit for cultivation.

I knew that traveling to Mount Mystic Cloud was an utterly futile, impossible endeavor. The immortal elders would laugh at me, discard me, and slam the doors in my face.

And yet, looking at my calloused, bloody hands, what other choice did I have? Go back to the capital and be beheaded? Rot in an alleyway until an infection ate my lungs?

Mount Mystic Cloud was my sole, desperate gamble.

I walked. I crawled. I crossed three entire mortal kingdoms on foot, dodging slavers, wolves, and winter storms, until the colossal titan of Mount Mystic Cloud pierced the heavens before me.

Then came the trial: nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine white-jade steps stretching into the sky.

My worn cloth shoes shredded within the first thousand steps. By the third thousand, the jagged stone had torn the flesh from the soles of my feet, leaving crimson smears across the pristine jade. By the seventh thousand, my fever from the residual bone poison flared, turning my blood into boiling lead, and my knees cracked against the stone.

The physical shell of Shen Qingxue was utterly destroyed. My bones screamed, my vision blurred into black spots, and blood seeped from my cracked lips.

But my soul refused to bow. Every time my hands slipped against the stairs, I heard my mother’s voice, every time my vision faded, I saw the smirking faces of the imperial ministers.

I dragged my shattered body across the final threshold on hands and knees, collapsing onto the grand plaza like a half-dead animal. And just as my father had predicted, the heavens spat upon me once more.

The outer sect testing stone remained pitch-black, lifeless and cold beneath my trembling fingers. The outer elder barely spared me a second glance, waving his sleeve with open disgust.

"Move along! You are blocking the path! Five Elements Muddled Root, zero elemental resonance! A complete waste! Next!"

I wasn’t surprised. A bitter, cold numbness settled over my heart.

Yet, even as two burly disciples moved to drag me toward the cliffs, my bloody fingernails dug into the cracks of the jade plaza flagstones.

I refused to let go. I had crawled through three kingdoms of mud and butchery, I had shredded the flesh from my bones simply to reach this summit! If I was thrown down that mountain, I had nowhere left to run.

My life would end as a nameless, discarded corpse at the foot of an immortal peak, and my family’s killers would die of old age in silk sheets.

I was sinking into the blackest depths of despair, drowning at the bottom of the world.

And then... a hand reached down from heaven.

Out of the crowd of sneering elders and arrogant young masters, a figure stepped forward.

He wore snow-white scholar robes that billowed in the mountain breeze, so pristine, so clean, and so utterly untouched by mundane grime that he seemed carved from celestial jade. His face was calm, handsome, and carried an aura of effortless, aloof majesty that made the surrounding immortals look like noisy sparrows.

He stood in direct opposition to me, the pure, radiant immortal perched above the clouds, looking down at a filthy, blood-soaked beggar shivering in the dirt.

I expected him to sneer. I expected him to turn away in revulsion.

Instead, he crouched down right into the mud. He didn’t care that my ragged clothes were caked in dried gore and filth, he didn’t care that the disciples around him were shouting in horror, and he didn’t care that the arrogant Peak Master Zhao was openly mocking my trash roots.

He looked past the blood, past the ruined meridians, and stared straight into the burning core of my soul.

"Do you want to live?" he asked me.

When I nodded, he grasped my filthy, blood-stained hand in his warm palm without an ounce of hesitation, lifting me from the cold stone as if I were the rarest treasure under heaven.

"From this day forth, you are the first disciple of Lonely Cloud Peak."

When the entire sect council rose in outrage, when elder after elder stepped forward to challenge his decision and demand my expulsion, that white-clad back never bent by a single millimeter.

He stood before the entire world like an unyielding mountain, shielding me behind his wide sleeves, taking every insult, every sneer, and every ounce of pressure upon his own shoulders.

In that single, breathtaking moment, the suffocating terror that had haunted me for months evaporated into thin air. Looking at his broad, steady back, a quiet voice whispered in my heart: You are safe now. You don’t need to be afraid anymore.

That night, he brought me to the tranquil peak of Lonely Cloud.

He didn’t treat me like an expendable servant, nor did he look upon me with pity. He personally prepared a steaming cedar bath infused with precious spirit spring water and soothing medicinal herbs, washing away the blood, the grime, and the bitter nightmares that had clung to my skin for ages.

Afterward, he placed a warm porcelain vial into my hands, a legendary marrow-cleansing pill that completely purged the deadly bone poison from my marrow and healed my shattered meridians, giving me the miraculous, impossible chance to step onto the immortal path.

Sitting in that quiet guest pavilion, dressed in clean, fragrant silk with the poison gone from my veins, I clutched the empty jade vial to my chest and wept.

How could a discarded mortal ever repay a man who plucked her from the gates of hell and handed her heaven itself? My life, my soul, my blade, and every drop of blood in my veins already belonged entirely to him.

Curled up beneath the soft quilt, listening to the gentle rustle of the mountain wind outside, I closed my eyes.

And for the first time in what felt like an eternity, Shen Qingxue slept in absolute, undisturbed peace.