Chapter 462: Use Her

’He wanted to use her,’ Ji’an’s mind reeled, genuine, burning nausea rising in her throat.

The aristocratic idiot.

The boy who broke his own leg for her attention.

The boy who wept when she yelled at him.

He wasn’t an idiot.

In the original timeline, in the unfiltered script of the universe, Lu Jianheng was the ultimate, two-faced villain.

He was a sociopath who lured a sheltered, innocent girl away from her family solely to use her as a disposable Yin-furnace battery to power his own ascension.

The original Ji’an escaped the sect.

The scroll shifted into a chaotic blur of terror.

It was the dead of winter.

A massive, howling blizzard raged across the Celestial Sword Sect.

The original Ji’an was running through knee-deep snow, her delicate silk robes torn, her bare feet bleeding, sobbing hysterically as she tried to escape the mountain.

Behind her, the glowing blue torches of the Sword Peak’s enforcers dotted the mountainside. Lu Jianheng had realized she knew the truth. He had dispatched his personal guard to hunt her down like a wild animal.

"Catch her!" Jianheng’s cold, furious voice echoed through the storm. "If she escapes the perimeter, the Lin General will mobilize the army! Break her legs and drag her back to the ritual chamber!"

The original Ji’an tripped.

She fell face-first into the freezing snow, out of breath, her delicate, uncultivated body completely failing her.

She looked up, shivering violently, as five heavily armed enforcers surrounded her, drawing their glowing blue swords with cruel, mocking smiles.

Transmigrator Ji’an pushed herself up from the floor of the corridor, her own teeth gritted in fury.

’Get up,’ she urged the memory, rage igniting in her chest. ’Pick up a rock! Throw the snow! Fight them, damn it!’

But the original host was not a Chef. She was a broken, terrified girl. She curled into a ball in the snow, sobbing, waiting for the blades to fall.

The enforcer raised his sword.

And then, the temperature of the blizzard dropped from freezing to absolute zero.

A massive spike of solid black ice erupted from the snow beneath the enforcer’s feet, impaling him through the chest, killing him instantly.

The remaining four guards spun around in terror.

Stepping out of the howling blizzard, his pristine white robes whipping wildly in the wind, was Xie Wangchen.

The Ice Demon did not look at the enforcers.

He walked directly into the center of the ambush. His ruby eyes were not cold and dismissive as they had been in the courtyard. They were wide, frantic, and burning with a terrifying fury.

He stepped directly in front of the sobbing, terrified Ji’an, placing his body between her and the drawn swords.

"Sovereign Xie!" the lead enforcer barked, his voice trembling. "This is official Sword Peak business! The girl is a traitor! Step aside, or you will be deemed an enemy of the sect!"

Wangchen did not speak.

He raised his hand. The thirty-foot executioner’s scythe of solid black frost materialized in his grip.

"You will not touch her," Wangchen whispered to the storm, his voice a melodic hum of genocide.

The battle that followed was not a duel. It was a desperate, bloody massacre.

Wangchen was a prodigy, but he was young.

He had not yet ascended to his peak strength. The enforcers were elite veterans. And Lu Jianheng himself arrived moments later, his icy-blue sword aura clashing violently against the black frost.

Transmigrator Ji’an watched in horror as the truth of the original timeline played out.

The Ice Demon did not fight to win.

He fought to shield, to protect.

Every time a blade swung toward Ji’an, Wangchen threw his own body into the trajectory. He took a slash across his shoulder. He took a deep, jagged thrust through his thigh. Blood, bright, stark crimson blood stained his pristine white robes, melting the snow at his feet.

The original Ji’an, the girl who had hated him, who had thought he was a cold-blooded monster, watched in weeping disbelief as the terrifying prodigy bled out to protect her.

"Why?" the original Ji’an sobbed, crawling toward him as he fell to one knee, coughing blood onto the snow. "Why are you doing this?! I hated you!"

Wangchen looked at her.

He didn’t offer a smirk.

He didn’t offer an arrogant young-master quip.

He looked at her with the exact same, obsessive, universe-shattering devotion that he looked at Ji’an with every single day.

"Because," Wangchen whispered, his voice cracking as he forced himself back to his feet, gripping his scythe with bloody hands, "you smiled at me once. In the garden. When everyone else called me a demon... you offered me a flower. Though, I don’t really know if it was a reason firm enough to help you, don’t ask me."

A flower.

A single, meaningless, polite gesture from a sheltered noble girl.

That was all it took.

That was the seed of the Ice Demon’s madness.

He had loved her from the very beginning, watching from the shadows, incapable of expressing it, letting her believe he hated her just so she wouldn’t be tainted by his monstrous reputation.

Lu Jianheng’s blade pierced cleanly through Xie Wangchen’s chest, exiting through his back in a spray of blood.

The Ice Demon’s ruby eyes widened. He dropped his scythe.

He fell backward into the snow.

"NO!" Transmigrator Ji’an screamed aloud in the dark corridor, breaking the silence, tears streaming down her face as the horrifying tragedy of the original timeline hit her with the force of a collapsing building.

The Ji’an crawled to Wangchen’s side, screaming his name, pressing her trembling hands against the massive, fatal wound in his chest, covering her delicate silk sleeves in his blood.

Wangchen looked up at her weeping face.

"Live," Wangchen breathed his final word, reaching up with a trembling, bloody hand to brush a single tear from her cheek.

His hand fell limp into the snow.

The Ice Demon was dead.

The scroll of light along the corridor walls flickered, plunging into a dark, sepia-toned hue of pure depression.

Lu Jianheng did not extract her Yin energy that night. The arrival of the sect elders, drawn by the massive energy clash, forced the Sword Lord to play the victim, claiming Wangchen had gone mad and attacked them.

The original Ji’an survived the night. But her soul did not.

The vision shifted rapidly. The original host was locked in a cold, secluded pavilion on the Sword Peak.

She did not eat. She did not speak.

The guilt of Wangchen’s death, the horrifying betrayal of Lu Jianheng, and the crushing trauma of the cultivation world had completely broken her mind.

Ji’an watched as the beautiful, radiant girl from the capital slowly withered away into a pale, hollow ghost.

Her dark hair lost its luster. Her eyes went blank. She sat by the window, staring out at the snow, clutching a dried, blood-stained piece of white silk torn from Wangchen’s robes.

Her life slowly died out.

The tragedy was absolute.

It was a timeline devoid of humor, spatulas, or redemption.

The villains won. The devoted died in the snow. And the innocent withered away in a cage.

Transmigrator Ji’an walked forward in the dark, her chest heaving with deep sobs.

The pieces of the cosmic puzzle were brutally slamming into place.

’This is the First Timeline?’ Ji’an realized, the tears blurring her vision, her grip on her spatula so tight her knuckles were bleeding.

The original host had died of a broken heart.

But her brother, Lin Feng, had refused to accept that reality.

’Lin Feng found out somehow,’ Ji’an’s mind raced, connecting the horrific dots. ’He found out what Jianheng did.’

But Lin Feng hadn’t just summoned a random soul from Earth.

He had summoned a soul with the exact same name.

A soul that possessed a spine of cold iron. A soul that had survived the grueling, abusive, relentless pressure of a commercial kitchen.

He had summoned an anomaly that wouldn’t fall for aristocratic poetry, an anomaly that would beat the ever-living hell out of anyone who tried to manipulate her.

He had summoned the Head Chef to fix the broken kitchen of the universe.

And Yan Zhaoge’s words in the kitchen echoed in her mind with devastating, crushing clarity.

"She said she was tired of returning so many times just for him."

Ji’an came to a halt.