Chapter 247

Chapter 247: Yu Zhao, do you think you won?
A vast pressure swept forward and crushed everything in front of her like rotten wood.

Then the space before Yu Zhao shattered into countless fragments.

The next moment.

The wailing sound of wind echoed in her ears.

A deep pool lay right below her, so close it was almost within reach.

Yu Zhao instinctively stirred the spirit power inside her body, trying to slow her fall.

But the resistance she deliberately created was dissolved by an even stronger force. Yu Zhao could only watch as she plunged into the dark pool.

Splash.

The icy water rushed in and sealed her mouth and nose.

Cold seeped into her bones through every limb.

Yu Zhao felt chilled all over. Even her soul trembled.

Her thoughts grew slow.

As her consciousness blurred, Yu Zhao suddenly bit the tip of her tongue. An unyielding light flared in her eyes.

[No.]

[I will not allow myself to fall here.]

She tried hard to move the spirit power in her body to ease her discomfort, but the cold in the pool clung to her like a bone-deep curse and would not go away.

She was like a puppet that had just gained awareness, wanting to escape yet unable to break free from her shackles, floating up and sinking down again and again in the Abyssal Pool.

One day, all of a sudden.

Yu Zhao noticed that the little finger on her right hand had fallen off.

Because her body was frozen hard like an ice sculpture, she felt nothing when the finger dropped. The broken end did not bleed. It was a ghastly, bloodless white.

Another day passed.

The thumb on Yu Zhao’s left hand also fell off.

The two events were like a signal.

They announced Yu Zhao’s cruel fate.

In the water that could freeze a person into a solid block of ice.

Yu Zhao watched her body parts crumble bit by bit. She could not stop it and could not even make a sound.

An indescribable fear wrapped around her heart.

[Am I going to die?]

The experiences of two lifetimes flashed past her eyes like lantern scenes. At some point, her restless mood calmed down, and her rushed breathing slowly grew long and steady.

There was no more panic in her eyes. In its place was silence and cold as deep as the pool itself.

“Heart Devil, you lost.”

Illusory realm after illusory realm. She had almost fallen into the Heart Devil’s trap.

But after she spoke, there was no reply for a long time.

Just then, her left ear fell off and drifted past her eyes, followed by her right ear, her nose, her lips…

In the end, only a pair of pitch-black eyes were left, hanging in a bloody skull.

“Clack, clack.”

Her jawbones rubbed together, but in those eyes there was still calm and composure.

Crack.

With a strange surge of energy, Yu Zhao’s organs returned to her body. Her fingers were reattached one by one, as if time itself had reversed.

When Yu Zhao opened her eyes again, she was back in the cave where she had gone into closed-door cultivation. A smile rested on her lips.

In this life, she had formed her Nascent Soul ahead of time. She would surely go farther than in her previous life.

She was full of ambition when a cold, stiff voice suddenly rang out in her sea of consciousness.

“Yu Zhao, do you want to speed up your cultivation? Do you want to become a true heaven’s chosen of the cultivation world? Do you want to step on everyone who once looked down on you?”

“Come, make a contract with me. As long as you help me plunder other people’s fortune, everything you want can come true.”

Yu Zhao jolted in shock. She remembered this voice.

In her last life, after she was driven out of the Five Elements Dao Sect, she did not cut her losses in time. Instead, she obsessed over proving herself and washing away her false charges.

Back then, Ye Cong Xin had already become the new leading figure of the younger generation. None of the other so-called heaven’s chosen could match her.

Yu Zhao had been deeply suspicious of Ye Cong Xin’s sudden rise. So she used a flaw in the formation array arts to sneak back into the Five Elements Dao Sect, planning to search for evidence. By accident, she overheard a quarrel between Ye Cong Xin and a Malevolent Spirit.

The Malevolent Spirit scolded Ye Cong Xin for being short-sighted, saying that after she gained power she no longer wanted to move forward.

Ye Cong Xin said that she and the Malevolent Spirit were only using each other and that it should not force her to act. The Plunder Fate value it gave her was too high and easy to trace back to her, so she could only wash away suspicion little by little.

After learning this shocking secret, Yu Zhao could not bear to see her Master and Senior Brothers have their fate plundered by Ye Cong Xin and be squeezed to death. So she chose to reveal herself, hoping to remove this hidden danger.

The result was clear.

She failed.

She even lost her life.

After she was reborn, Yu Zhao sometimes wondered: if the one who made a deal with the Malevolent Spirit had been her, would she have made the same choice as Ye Cong Xin?

She believed she would not.

But deep down, she still felt unsure.

Now the scene she had only imagined was truly happening. Yu Zhao could finally put aside her stray thoughts and give a firm answer: “I do not want it.”

“Why refuse? Do you not want to be like Ye Cong Xin, only putting on a show in daily training while your cultivation speed multiplies, and earning the sect’s love with a bit of acting cute?

“Were you not jealous before that Ye Cong Xin was more favored than you? Now is the best chance for you to take her place.”

Confusion flashed in Yu Zhao’s eyes. She frowned and did not speak, while the voice in her mind kept trying to persuade her.

After a long silence, she tested out two words.

“Heart Devil?”

The voice in her mind cut off at once.

Yu Zhao let out a small laugh.

It seemed she had guessed right.

Yu Zhao no longer had her previous memories and did not know that she had already gone through the Heart Devil’s test twice.

She was relying only on her habit of close observation to notice many things that felt wrong.

For example, that Malevolent Spirit had already made a deal with Ye Cong Xin. Why would it suddenly give up and choose her as a new partner, for no reason other than to increase the risk of exposure?

That clearly made no sense.

Also, if the other party really was the Malevolent Spirit that stayed by Ye Cong Xin’s side day and night, it would never say that Ye Cong Xin was only pretending to cultivate.

In the Five Elements Dao Sect, Ye Cong Xin was famous for her hard work. Many fellow disciples and junior disciples felt ashamed when they compared themselves to her.

Because of that, Ye Cong Xin’s progress had been slow, and everyone pitied how hard she tried.

When her cultivation suddenly advanced by leaps and bounds, they said it was because of the solid foundation she had laid in the past and that she had finally reaped what she had sown.

She had never relied only on acting cute to become the center of attention. She used many methods at once so that everyone would remember her.

The Malevolent Spirit who stayed with her all the time could not possibly be unaware of these little tricks.

So, based on the clues she had, Yu Zhao made a reasonable guess that this was the work of the Heart Devil, and she tried probing it with her words.

That one probe exposed the truth.

“Yu Zhao, do you think you won? Hahaha, this is only the beginning. Get ready to taste pain.”

Yu Zhao’s vision went black, and her mind went blank.

Then many memories appeared in her head, both familiar and strange.

She tried to clench her fist.

Slender, pale fingers with a faint bluish tint came into view. They looked like glass, beautiful yet fragile.

Yu Zhao felt a strange sense that something was off.

It was as if she was not the master of this body at all, but only a short-term guest, a wandering stranger.

“Junior Sister Ye? Junior Sister Ye? Junior Sister Ye!”

Yu Zhao was still pondering her connection to this body when someone patted her on the shoulder.

She turned her head and saw a sunny, bright smile.

“Third Senior Brother.”