Midnight. A waning crescent hung slantwise at the edge of the sky, a few stars winking in and out. At the foot of the mountain a cold pool mirrored stars and moon, and the occasional cicada chirp only deepened the secluded silence around the water.
A caravan rolled slowly along the small path at the mountain's foot, wheels rumbling, breaking open the silent moonlight.
The caravan looked a little different from an ordinary one; the main difference was that its guards appeared to be all women.
A light curtain was rolled up at the carriage window, revealing a girl's tender, pretty face. A pair of big, shining eyes stared curiously at the pool for a while, then she suddenly spoke: "Master, Master, is that the Wending Pool?"
Her voice was crisp as an oriole's, and bursting out so suddenly in the night, it startled the roosting birds into a flapping, fluttering flight.
Beside the girl sat a young married woman with a gauze veil over her face. She had been leaning back with her eyes shut, feigning sleep; at the girl's question she opened them to a narrow slit, swept a hazy glance out the window, and sighed softly. "That is the Wending Pool."
The girl asked curiously, "Weren't you saying this is a holy pool, always guarded? There isn't even a ghost's shadow here."
"Holy pool? That's just talk." The woman smiled mockingly. "There used to be guards posted here only because, back when the cauldron fell and made this pool, the water took on spiritual Qi leaking from the World-Suppressing Cauldron. Bathing in it aided cultivation, so the imperial house fenced it off for itself. Over a thousand years have passed and the spiritual Qi has all scattered away. It's ordinary pool water now, and the imperial house has no mind to keep it up. It's been abandoned for nearly a century."
The girl seemed a little unwilling to let it go: "So there's really not a scrap of spiritual Qi left?"
"None." The woman glanced at her, amused. "You just saw a pool you liked and wanted to soak in it, didn't you?"
Her little scheme seen through, the girl grinned. "Master still knows me best. We've been on the road a whole day and night—I'm all sticky..."
The woman said in exasperation, "With your cultivation, dust doesn't even cling to you anymore. Where would sticky come from?"
The girl's eyes rolled in a sly little circle, and her smile turned faintly seductive; she leaned her whole body against her master. "I'm all sticky from thinking about men..."
The girl was thirteen or fourteen at most, still all childishness, yet in that instant her air shifted and the makings of a femme fatale seeped out of her—a coquettish charm that should never have belonged to her age. To say nothing of words no ordinary girl should ever say. Yet the woman only laughed soundlessly, not the least bit annoyed, and said, "Oh, very well. It's only your nature to love cleanliness. Mm... we'll rest a short while, and I'll go with you."
Had any outsider seen them, he would have known at once that these two were no respectable, decent sort.
The caravan halted. The female guards scattered, quietly taking control of every approach to the pool. The master led the girl by the hand, and the two stepped barefoot out of the carriage; under the moonlight their sleeves and skirts lifted, and two slender, lovely figures went gliding away treading the moon, carrying a beauty like something out of a dream.
The gauze veils dropped onto the grass, and two exquisite bodies, fine as mutton-fat white jade, slowly stepped into the pool. A day's travel was no strain for them, but the cool of the water seeping into their skin still drew a comfortable sigh from master and disciple alike.
"Master..." The girl stroked her own white arm and said softly, "The Nine Cauldrons hold the world, and the realm has been at peace for a thousand years. Can our goal really be achieved?"
"A cauldron is a dead thing. If it were truly that stable, the great sects wouldn't have grown into the unwieldy, uncontrollable powers they are today." The woman answered casually, lifting the veil from her face and rinsing it idly in the water, revealing a face lovely enough to topple cities and nations.
In truth, this so-called master was still young; that jade-like face looked twenty-six or twenty-seven at most, but it held a mature allure her disciple lacked. Tempered by blood and fire in the jianghu, bearing the management of an entire sect, and hailing from the Demon Sect besides—heroic spirit, noble bearing, mystery and seductive charm blended perfectly into an utterly distinctive presence.
The girl looked at her with open envy. "Master, you're so beautiful. There must have been plenty of men who went mad over you in the past, right?"
"Heh... men are all wretches. They only go mad over what they can't have. So remember this, Chan'er: feelings are nothing but toys—play with them, never take them seriously, or else you'll be the one going mad."
Clever as the girl was, she was still too young, and she only half understood.
"Besides, seducing men is a job for the people beneath us. You and I both carry the weight of the sect; neither of us needs to stoop to such things ourselves." The woman smiled faintly and ran a hand over her disciple's creamy bosom. "If someone looks at you, gouge out his eyes. That's what you ought to be doing."
Before the words had faded, she sensed something and jerked her head up to look at the sky.
Ten-odd zhang up in the air, the air warped bizarrely, then thunder crashed and a wild wind tore past. Within the thunder a hole appeared, and a human figure abruptly tumbled out of it.
The instant the figure fell out, the wild wind and thunder vanished together, as if the whole thing had been a bizarre hallucination.
Master and disciple stared blankly as the figure screamed and plummeted from midair. Just before he hit the pool, he seemed to spot the people by the water; his eyes lit up and he shouted, "Help!" Then with a splash he crashed into the pool and sank away in a gurgle of bubbles.
Master and disciple looked at each other, each staring for a good long while at the snow-white chest bared above the water across from her, then both turned at once toward where the man had fallen, eyes full of murder.
Only a few rings of ripples remained where he'd gone under, bubbling and gurgling.
Xue Mu was the operations manager of a music agency back in the country. He had launched and built up a flop of a girl group—most people had probably never even heard there was such a flop group at home—but Xue Mu had a certain name in the business, one of the men riding the front of the idol-manufacturing wave. He wasn't short of money either; in his spare time he toyed with escort girls and sweet-talked his way into bed with starry-eyed little sisters chasing fame, and life was pretty comfortable.
In his spare time Xue Mu liked to hunt for antiques. That day he'd picked up a bronze shard not even the size of a fingernail. He'd studied it all evening without finding any clue to it, then accidentally cut his hand on it—and whoosh, he vanished from his home.
He read plenty of novels in his spare time, so the concept of transmigration was nothing new to him. Ever since he'd been dumped in midair over some strange, desolate wilderness, Xue Mu had known he'd run into an inexplicable transmigration.
For heaven's sake, I never wanted anything like this. I finally had that little starlet almost in hand after days of work—why the hell transmigrate...
And he'd discovered one more thing... transmigration comes with no coordinate lock. With good luck, a man might land right in a beauty's fragrant bed; with bad luck, in a cesspit, to drown. As for appearing in midair like this, he couldn't tell whether it counted as good luck or bad. The one consolation was that there was a pool below—at least the fall wouldn't kill him.
His head spinning with these pointless questions, he was at the water's surface in the blink of an eye. Only then did he notice that there were two women at the poolside—bathing, it seemed?
Before he could even make out what they looked like, Xue Mu only had time to shout "Help!" before he smashed heavily into the water. It turned out that the wuxia-movie notion that jumping off a cliff into water won't kill you is a lie: falling from at least thirty or forty meters up, hitting the surface was like being struck by a sledgehammer. The violent impact nearly jolted his internal organs out of place; he spat out a mouthful of blood and passed out cold.
If no one rescued him, he really would die in that water.
The jade beauty at the poolside flicked one slender hand, and a column of water shot straight up, blasting him out of the pool; then the current held him steady and drifted him slowly to the two women's feet—wizardry, pure and simple.
"Strange. Such a powerful toxic emanation..." The two women had been glaring murderously, planning to dig out an eyeball for fun, but as Xue Mu drew near they both frowned at once and circulated their Qi to seal every pore on their bodies.
The man gave off a bizarre toxic aura, and familiar as they were with poison as members of the Demon Sect, they could not tell what poison it was.
The girl, Chan'er, stared at Xue Mu's short hair and murmured to herself, "A monk, of all things? Could he have been hit by some strange new poison one of our fellow cultivators just developed?"
The woman laid her slender fingers on Xue Mu's wrist and probed carefully, her eyes growing even more astonished. "How strange..."
"What is it, Master?"
"This man's body is riddled with at least a thousand kinds of toxin, from skin to organs down to the very marrow, and many of them spread through the air—utterly unheard of... In other words, if he walked into an ordinary town, he'd be a walking plague source. Within days, a hundred li around would be dead land."
Chan'er gaped. "And he's still alive?"
"Even Eldest Young Master Zhao, who treats poison-testing as his daily bread, would long since be dead if a strange poison like this had soaked into his marrow. Yet this man isn't merely alive, he's healthy—he only took an injury to his organs from that impact just now."
Recalling the man's bizarre entrance, Chan'er felt a flutter of unease. "Could this man be even stronger than Eldest Young Master Zhao? But how could someone that strong get his organs shaken just from falling into a pool?"
The woman withdrew her fingers from Xue Mu's wrist, her eyes full of incredulous bafflement. "That's the strangest part of all... he has not a scrap of cultivation. He's an ordinary man, through and through!"