Chapter 127#

The Disciple’s Rebirth and Revenge#

For some reason, Lin Xiaodong was suddenly a little nervous.

He walked to the drawer and found that the thing was locked by Xiao Nian. Although he could use demonic energy to break it by force, it would definitely leave a trace.

…Let’s look at the wardrobe first.

Lin Xiaodong reached out and, under the guidance of the system, groped to uncover the seal attached to the wardrobe.

At the moment the wardrobe door opened, he was shocked.

“Holy shit!”

The youth blankly “watched” with his spiritual sense the man lying in the wardrobe with his eyes closed, whose appearance was almost identical to Xiao Nian’s. He thought to himself, Is this a lapse in morality or a distortion of human nature? Xiao Nian actually hid… himself in the wardrobe of his own room?

He carefully reached out his palm and pressed it against the man’s chest, then took a sharp breath—

It was actually warm!

Not just the temperature, the man was even breathing. Lin Xiaodong could clearly feel the slight rise and fall against his palm, and the sensation of tiny air currents brushing across his skin.

He felt he had a new understanding of the level of Xiao Nian’s perversion.

“I remember there seems to be a type of spell in the immortal realm for controlling puppets, right?” he said solemnly to the system. “So the one who was just talking to me, is he the true Xiao Nian or not?”

Thinking deeply about this was simply terrifying.

“No,” the system, which had been silent, suddenly spoke. “This person has a problem. He has no soul!”

Lin Xiaodong didn’t understand what method it used to determine the soul, but the system’s words became another strong piece of evidence that Xiao Nian was secretly refining a puppet in private. He sneered and said, “Xiao Nian really has some nerve. Although I don’t know what he’s refining a living human puppet for, once this matter is exposed, his status as an Immortal Venerable will basically be condemned by everyone.”

System: “Are you going to expose him?”

But Lin Xiaodong fell silent.

If he had discovered the truth himself, Lin Xiaodong would definitely choose a public occasion where Xiao Nian couldn’t deny it and the Cloudsoaring Sect couldn’t protect him, to accuse him to his face, pulling this high and mighty master down from the clouds, preferably to be infamous for ten thousand years.

However, from beginning to end, this matter revealed something fishy.

First was Xiao Nian’s proactive hint and hesitant attitude, followed by the man’s ambiguous words in the illusion; Lin Xiaodong was practically guided step by step to the front of the truth. He even began to suspect: did Xiao Nian leave just now specifically to give himself enough time to discover the so-called “truth”?

“This man is truly arrogant,” he said in a heavy tone. “System, I’m very unhappy.”

System: “…So?”

“So, I refuse to follow his plan,” Lin Xiaodong took one last deep look at the man in the wardrobe, closed the wardrobe door again, and then reapplied the sealing strip in its original position. “I want to see what Xiao Nian is actually up to.”

He actually wanted to see the seal in the drawer as well, but since he had already made up his mind, Lin Xiaodong temporarily suppressed the impulse in his heart, cleaned up the traces of his presence, and left the room nonchalantly.

“By the way, system,” he waited in his room for half an hour before vaguely sensing Xiao Nian’s aura gradually approaching from afar. It seemed the man had indeed calculated the time perfectly.

But it didn’t matter.

The blind youth sat by the bed, the corners of his lips curling into a trace of an almost imperceptible arc: “Help me check what kind of symptoms appear in people who are backlashed by vengeful spirits in this world?”

When Xiao Nian returned to the room, he didn’t find any abnormalities.

His gaze lingered on the undamaged keyhole of the drawer for a moment, and then he placed his fingertips on the seal of the wardrobe.

There was a slight vibration of residual demonic energy on the sealing strip; someone had been here.

He lowered his hand, his expression relaxing slightly.

If Lin Xiaodong saw the person in the wardrobe, it meant he had already grasped the handle to manipulate him, the man thought silently. When the time came, as long as the other party took the opportunity to expose him to the Sect Master or any of the elders, his goal would be achieved.

Over the years, Xiao Nian had deliberately displayed a heartless and unfeeling attitude before other cultivators precisely so that when this day arrived, no one would stand by his side and speak for him.

06: “Sir, you didn’t have to do this.”

Xiao Nian, or rather Gu Xi, pressed his lips tight and whispered, “This is what I owe him.”

In the previous several worlds, he had temporarily sealed his own memory just to indulge himself once, to be able to embrace the other to his heart’s content. But only in this world, this world that had been restarted countless times, Gu Xi simply couldn’t continue to act blindly and without awareness, letting Lin Xiaodong follow the plot just like that.

This was the world where they first met.

Among the thousands of small worlds, it was very special because there were cultivators, an immortal realm, and a set of laws that operated independently.

And the so-called upper realm that cultivators reached after ascending was the location of the Heavenly Court.

Lin Xiaodong was once an Immortal Lord of the Heavenly Court.

Unlike those cultivators who ascended from the lower realms, as a second-generation immortal whose parents were both deities, he hadn’t even seen what a heavenly tribulation looked like. At that time, headquarters happened to be in contact with the Heavenly Court, and Immortal Lord Lin volunteered to become one of their first testers.

—And then, he met Gu Xi here.

Since the Heavenly Court and the headquarters belonged to two different factions, the information exchange between each other at that time was not as smooth as it is now. So Lin Xiaodong was quite happy to bump into a colleague in the middle of a mission—although Gu Xi always did things strictly by the book and never admitted he was a high-level official at the headquarters, Lin wasn’t a fool; he could see such things at a glance!

Falling in love with a native of a small world is a tragedy, after all, humans and gods walk different paths; but Lin Xiaodong felt he didn’t have such worries. He even told his system at the time, 06, that when the mission in this world ended, he would take Gu Xi to the Heavenly Court to meet his parents.

Mutual affection, everyone was happy, but no one expected that Immortal Lord Lin, who had been at ease in the Heavenly Court for hundreds of years, would face the first tribulation of his life after being moved—

The Love Tribulation.

Sensing the change in the laws and based on his trust in Gu Xi, after greeting the man, Lin Xiaodong stripped away all his memories of several hundred years as a deity and gave them to him for safekeeping.

From then on, he only had the memories of this life as Xiao Nian’s disciple, harboring admiration for his master but not daring to voice it.

“I was the one who pursued you before,” the night before stripping his memories, the youth sat under the peach tree, put down the pale green cup in his hand, and told him with a smile, “The tables have turned. This time, it’s finally your turn to take the initiative.”

Gu Xi curled his lips: “Aren’t you afraid I’ll find someone else?”

This move of Immortal Lord Lin’s was equivalent to entrusting his life and soul to him. If Gu Xi took away his memories, Immortal Lord Lin would not only fail the tribulation but even his entire cultivation would completely dissipate, leaving him to become a mortal and live a mediocre life from then on.

“Go ahead then,” the youth shrugged, his eyes indifferent. “I don’t care about being an immortal or how long I live. If you really do that, I’ll just consider myself blind. Besides, don’t I still have 06?”

Gu Xi understood: “You didn’t hand 06 over?”

“Of course.” Immortal Lord Lin stood up and walked before him, slowly leaning in, breathing like an orchid, smiling like a mischievous fox. “If Master fails me, I’ll restart this world, dozens of years, a hundred years, we’ll take our time.”

Tugging at the youth’s waist, Gu Xi let out a sigh with a bit of a headache.

He found that he seemed to have accidentally provoked a demon star and brought him back.

However, he was willing.

Not long after they were intimate that day, they were seen by the Sect Master who came to Cold Maple Peak without saying hello. Although he didn’t know what the other party had imagined, since then, the entire higher-ups of the Cloudsoaring Sect had looked at Gu Xi with slightly odd gazes.

Gu Xi knew they were concerned about the Heavenly Demon Body matter.

But this was actually not a problem for him and Immortal Lord Lin at all. First, it was impossible for Gu Xi to act against his Dao companion because of some mysterious sacrifice; second, even if the array was damaged because of no sacrifice and the demon realm invaded in force, the Heavenly Court would certainly not sit idly by.

When Immortal Lord Lin came to the headquarters, his fanboys and fangirls back at the Heavenly Court cried so much that the Heavenly Emperor hadn’t slept well for over a decade.

Therefore, when the headquarters entrusted him with a “test android” mission, Gu Xi didn’t think too much.

“What is your character setting in this world?” when designing the personality, the programmer at the headquarters asked him.

“An Immortal Venerable of the Cloudsoaring Sect who practices the Path of Ruthlessness and is cold-hearted and unfeeling,” Gu Xi answered.

The next day, a cross-boundary delivery box was packed and sent into his wardrobe.

Gu Xi tested it for a few days and found that besides having no soul, the android’s way of doing things was almost no different from the image he himself projected in this world. He was quite satisfied, reported to the headquarters, and then focused all his mind on preparing for his wedding with Lin Xiaodong in this world.

Immortal Lord Lin had lived too long and took feelings very lightly. Although he was the one who proactively pursued Gu Xi before, Gu Xi always felt that if one day he really wanted to break up with the other, as long as he explained the reason clearly, Immortal Lord Lin would probably be able to find a successor from his large group of young and aggressive fanboys and fangirls after a while.

In short, the partner was too popular, and Gu Xi felt a great sense of crisis.

Taking advantage of the other’s amnesia, he had to get the wedding done first and bind the person!

But none of them expected that on the very night of the wedding, something happened at the headquarters.

Gu Xi was summoned back overnight to handle the trouble caused by those programmers. He didn’t intend to leave for too long and thought that letting the android stand in temporarily wouldn’t cause any major issues. But he didn’t expect the chaos at the headquarters this time was precisely about the time ratio of the small worlds. By the time he had been busy for a day and a night and wanted to return to Lin Xiaodong’s side, he found that he couldn’t go back.

The world had been restarted.

Upon discovering this fact, Gu Xi finally realized things were bad.

Even though the android was designed to be almost identical to himself, as the closest partner, even an amnesiac Lin Xiaodong would of course find something wrong. He thought Xiao Nian had cultivated the Path of Ruthlessness, leading to a drastic change in personality, so he cleanly restarted time back to the eve of the wedding.

But no matter how many times he restarted it, the android was still that android.

He would have no emotions and no soul.

As time was traced back again and again, Lin Xiaodong despaired.

06, acting as a protection mechanism, cleared his memory and froze the time of the entire world. Gu Xi could not enter the small world and could only resort to the second-best plan—letting 06 instill the original plotline into Lin Xiaodong’s mind as a false memory, making him mistakenly believe he had been betrayed by his beloved and died.

After the world line returned to normal, Gu Xi took the unconscious Immortal Lord Lin back to the Heavenly Court and implored the Heavenly Court for help. The deities said Immortal Lord Lin must undergo seven more Love Tribulations, so there was this new round of reincarnation.

06: “07 has been asking me about this lately, and I don’t think I can hide it from him much longer.”

“Two more worlds to go,” Gu Xi said indifferently. “Endure it a bit longer.”

But his lips and tongue couldn’t help but feel a burst of bitterness, and a sharp pain came from his heart.

On the day Immortal Lord Lin regains his memory, it would likely be the day they completely part ways.