Transmigrating as the Heart Demon of the Ruthless Sword Venerable – Chapter 57
by Little PandaShattered Sound (Part 7)
Demonization
The instant that single word — “good” — rang out, every cultivator’s hand flew instinctively to their sword hilt.
Yu Zhaoming, more than anyone, yanked Tang Wenchun behind her. The scene fell straight into Yunzhongjun’s eyes, and the red in her pupils deepened, tinged now with fury and jealous hate.
“What touching sisterly devotion.”
As she spoke, she raised the flute to her lips and blew softly. The sound was drenched in lingering sorrow — and in a single instant, a hundred twisting turns of longing coiled around everyone’s hearts. Even the most profound cultivators, those who had severed love and cast off attachment, had been young once. Every one of them had passed through that season of youthful longing1.
As the flute notes rose, it seemed to drag them back to bygone years — to a corner of the mind they’d believed forgotten, where a figure still stood, tugging at their heartstrings.
Expressions went hazy. Even Yu Zhaoming swayed for a heartbeat — she thought again of that year’s festival lanterns, of her heart demon cradling a handful of snow, turning her head to smile at her beneath the lamplight and moonshadow.
Her mind had never been so tranquil — and yet within that tranquility, a small flame quietly kindled.
It was at just such a moment that Yunzhongjun’s finger tapped lightly against a flute hole. A white thread flashed. In their trance, many cultivators’ throats burst open in great spurts of blood — yet blissful smiles still hung on their faces, which made it all the more ghastly.
But among the crowd, someone leapt up and tackled Xuanjiu and Yu Zhaoming to the floor. Their foreheads cracked against the boards with a heavy thud — graceless, yes, but it snapped the two of them back to their senses.
“Yu Zhaoming. Yu Zhaoming. Are you all right?”
Yu Zhaoming heard Tang Wenchun’s voice, thick with sobs. She reached out without thinking and seized Tang Wenchun’s fingers. “I’m fine.”
She struggled to lift her head. The great hall was already thick with the smell of blood; many had been robbed of their lives without ever waking from the reverie.
Yu Zhaoming pressed her lips together and gripped Tang Wenchun’s hand harder still, as if to confirm something by it.
“Tang Wenchun. You again!”
At the furious cry, Yu Zhaoming shielded Tang Wenchun with her body. Even so, Tang Wenchun felt her chest cave in as though struck by a great hammer, and she vomited a mouthful of blood.
She raised her eyes to meet Yu Zhaoming’s startled, twisted-back gaze, and managed a bitter smile. With a gap like this, there was just no fighting it — none at all. She looked at Yunzhongjun. Gone without a trace was the woman she’d once chatted with so pleasantly; she looked utterly enraged, and yet her body still stood, half-consciously, blocking the space in front of Nüluo.
A heart demon is born of its host’s obsessions…
The words surfaced abruptly, and Tang Wenchun stared blankly at Nüluo. Nüluo’s body was swollen beyond bearing, her expression contorted — just barely recognizable as agony. Sealing runes wound around her, and the violent surges of her spiritual energy distended her meridians again and again, sliding beneath her skin like serpents, so that she looked to be suffering beyond endurance.
The pain of that single instant of self-detonation had been locked in place by this bizarre runic array, stretched out endlessly, on and on. She couldn’t even die.
Tang Wenchun couldn’t suppress a shudder. She recalled the few scattered lines the original novel had devoted to Yunzhongjun, and suddenly realized they might now be standing inside that very stretch of history. Except — the book never mentioned any Person in Black!!
Could this be a change she’d carried over with her in transmigrating? Tang Wenchun wondered, baffled.
Her gaze fell upon the Person in Black. He seemed to sense her look; his eyes narrowed slightly as he turned toward her. “Hmm?”
“You… seem to be hiding something inside you.”
Then the Person in Black took a step forward, and Tang Wenchun couldn’t help retreating. Yu Zhaoming caught her disciple’s distress and swiveled her sword tip toward him at once. She tilted her head slightly. “Are you all right?”
“N-no. I’m fine.” Tang Wenchun kept her head bowed, not daring to look at him.
“How interesting.” The voice drew closer, and Tang Wenchun felt her whole body begin to tremble. But then Yunzhongjun spoke: “My shijie is nearly at her limit.”
The Person in Black clicked his tongue. “Fine, fine. Truly tedious. I’m merely a frail demon without the strength to truss a chicken2. Only a few of them are left anyway. Kill them, and I’ll have kept my promise.”
Yunzhongjun nodded. She closed her hand around the flute, and her gaze came to rest on Nüluo with the utmost tenderness. “Soon. Wait for me a little while.”
“Zhaoming, take Wenchun and go. Quickly.” Xuanjiu rose slowly to her feet. Only a handful of people remained in the hall now. She swept a glance over the fellow cultivators around her whose will to fight had already broken, and a bitter smile crossed her lips.
Holding Yunzhongjun back with these people was plainly impossible.
Even Xuanjiu herself couldn’t suppress the urge to flee. But her disciples were there, behind her, and she had to carve out a road to the future for these young people — just as… her own elders had done before her.
Xuanjiu gripped her sword and planted herself in front of them all. Yunzhongjun’s gaze settled on her. “It’s always your Sword Sect that steps forward. If you hadn’t stepped forward back then, perhaps only Shen Feng would have died — and none of you would have to die now.”
At those words, every face shifted. Xuanjiu drew a deep breath and grasped her sword hilt. “A demon is a demon, ever skilled at sowing discord. To make others stretch out their necks for the slaughter3 so you can keep your own — how is that different from a beast? The lives of the many are lives; is the life of one not a life too?” She leveled her sword, raised it before her chest, and cried out in a low voice: “Heaven and Earth Cease Together!!”
In an instant, her oppressive pressure climbed step after step, until it stood faintly level against Yunzhongjun’s own. She planted herself before them all — and in the space of a single breath, her head of black hair turned completely white.
“Shizun!!” Yu Zhaoming and Tang Wenchun cried out as one. Both of them were of the Sword Sect; the sword Dao has ten thousand variations, each one a different person’s understanding of life and the grand Dao. But some things are shared — as, for instance: though ten thousand people stand in my way, I shall go forward4.
Heaven and Earth Cease Together was exactly that — burning one’s divine soul as fuel for the self, feeding one’s lifespan to the fire, in exchange for a brief elevation in cultivation.
Xuanjiu did not look back. With a powerful enemy before her, she could not afford to. “Fiend! I will stop you!”
Yunzhongjun gave a low laugh. “In that case, I’ll kill you first.”
Xuanjiu had been stalled at Soul Emergence for over a century — a full major realm below Yunzhongjun. But Xuanjiu had lived long, and her combat experience was the more solid of the two. With her cultivation forcibly raised, the two of them — one wielding sword, one wielding flute — sent blade-light and sound-waves crashing together, and for a time fought to a dead standstill.
Red Dust Sword Intent was the intent Xuanjiu had comprehended while wandering the mortal world. Driven with all her strength, scenes gradually surfaced in the empty air: someone halting a horse beneath a willow, someone listening to rain drumming on banana leaves5, tender longing winding through it all.
Every cultivator had been mortal before setting foot on the path. Mortal affairs, mortal feelings — the Red Dust Sword conjured such feelings and drowned opponents in them. In this it bore some resemblance to Yunzhongjun’s illusion music. The one difference: Xuanjiu’s Red Dust Sword plunged the opponent into a passage of the mortal world, tugging at the threads of affection, hooking the heavenly soul.
But Yunzhongjun was a heart demon. She knew only obsessive love and hate, and held no attachment whatsoever to the red dust of the past.
Seeing this, Yunzhongjun sneered. “Nothing but smoke and mirrors.”
The flute notes turned softer still, and the two of them were soon locked in a tangled melee. Xuanjiu, deliberately or not, kept dragging the fight outward — carving out a single escape road for everyone. The onlookers saw it clearly. They faltered a moment; many bowed to Xuanjiu from afar and turned to flee.
Someone passing Yu Zhaoming and Tang Wenchun dropped their voice: “Young friends, go, quickly — don’t let your master’s sacrifice go to waste.”
Yu Zhaoming said nothing. And the Person in Black, for whatever reason, made no move to stop them either. Then Yu Zhaoming turned to look at Tang Wenchun and said quietly, “I have to stay. You don’t.”
“You’re going to throw me away?” Tang Wenchun’s brows knitted at once — then she broke into a smile. “Yu Zhaoming, don’t forget: if you die, I die too. I’d be better off killing myself — at least that would improve your odds…”
“No.” Yu Zhaoming covered Tang Wenchun’s mouth. Her lashes lowered, veiling her eyes. “No. I don’t want your life.”
Tang Wenchun knew Yu Zhaoming wanted to raise her cultivation; she knew, too, that behind that burning hunger there had to be a reason — something that had nothing to do with the longevity Yu Zhaoming kept insisting on. Tang Wenchun had even prepared herself to die.
But Yu Zhaoming had refused her — refused her even after learning the truth of her heart demon.
In that moment, Tang Wenchun’s heart pounded hard against her ribs.
“Since our lives are bound together, then we advance and retreat together,” Yu Zhaoming said.
With a powerful enemy before them, there was no room for another word. But here and now, someone was marching to death beside her, and Yu Zhaoming thought: all those years I walked the grand Dao alone, I never once felt lonely. The great Dao is long, and walking it alone is the ordinary way of things — every cultivator knows it.
Yet now, with someone at her side whose life was knotted to her own, who would live and die with her — looking back on all that solitary walking, she could suddenly taste the loneliness in it.
So that’s how it was. I was lonely, back then…
Yu Zhaoming understood, all at once, what the word “lonely” truly felt like. It was only because someone now walked beside her — because her ears held more than wind and rain, because there was the warm noise of human speech — only because she had first learned what bustle was, what companionship was, that she could feel loneliness at all.
Yu Zhaoming raised her eyes. A powerful enemy stood before her — but, she thought, the odds weren’t entirely hopeless. She still remembered that one instant when Yunzhongjun’s attention had slipped. And that instant was her opening!
She glanced at Tang Wenchun. In that moment, no words seemed necessary; the two of them already shared perfect understanding, and they swung their swords as one.
“Divine Prison Piercing the Firmament — rise!!”
With a single clear cry, ten thousand swords loosed together, all of them streaking toward Yunzhongjun. Yunzhongjun was locked in stalemate with Xuanjiu — Xuanjiu, after all, had dwelt at Soul Emergence for many long years, and now, with her divine soul burning, could not be bested in the space of a moment.
Nascent Soul cultivation may be frail, but it’s a nuisance. Yunzhongjun’s brow creased, and a great black-red palm came slamming down toward Tang Wenchun — as though swatting an irritating little insect.
It was then that Yu Zhaoming unleashed Asking the Dao once more. Yunzhongjun faltered into a momentary daze — and afterward, her rage burned hotter than ever. Demon flames surged around her body; the skin of her hands began to flake away bit by bit, gradually baring sharp claws and fangs.
In the fury of the battle, not one person noticed Yunzhongjun’s transformation.
The Person in Black stood in midair, smiling as he watched it all. “I told you from the start — that human skin is nothing but a cage you’ve wrapped yourself in. What’s so good about it? Devour it. Let it become your nourishment utterly, and you’ll return to what you truly are.”
The author has something to say:
Moving house is so exhausting, so exhausting…
Begging for comments, wuwu — I need comment comfort
Footnotes
- 少年慕艾 | shaonian mu ai | Literally 'a youth yearning for the young and lovely' — from Mencius's line that once a boy knows the allure of beauty, he longs for it; a classical phrase for adolescent awakening and first romantic pining.
- 手无缚鸡之力 | shou wu fu ji zhi li | Literally 'lacking the strength to truss a chicken' — a colloquial idiom for utter physical frailty; here the demon wields it as silkily mock self-deprecation.
- 引颈就戮 | yin jing jiu lu | Literally 'stretching out one's neck to the slaughter' — a classical idiom for submitting to the executioner's blade without resistance; Xuanjiu condemns buying one's own life with others' necks.
- 虽千万人吾往矣 | sui qian ren wu wang yi | Mencius's declaration of moral courage — 'though ten thousand people stand in my way, I shall go forward' — spoken of righteousness that admits no retreat; a byword for pressing on against impossible odds.
- 雨打蕉叶 | yu da jiao ye | 'Rain drumming on banana leaves' — a stock image of solitary melancholy in classical Chinese poetry and guqin music, evoking a listener alone with the sound.
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