Published: March 8, 2025
Pride of the Nine Heavens by Feng Ling Tian Xia
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Let us dance amidst the clouds like Qiongxiao, in the pride of the Nine Heavens; let us together read this splendid article!
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“I understand.” Nangong Shifeng carefully took the half-dagger, wrapped it up meticulously, and tucked it into his bosom. There was not a hint of discomfort from being coerced; instead, he was filled with excitement.
“Nangong Shifeng, don’t you find it awkward?” Chu Yang asked. “You were first struck by my hidden acupoint technique, and then you ingested my poison. Either of those could cause you to die without a complete corpse! Yet here I am, seducing you with promises of great benefits to do my bidding. Don’t you feel any frustration?”
Nangong Shifeng's bloodied face unexpectedly revealed a smile as he said, “Not at all! Not awkward in the slightest.”
His tone did not carry any flattery; it was serious, even sincere.
“Why?” Chu Yang was intrigued. He genuinely wanted to understand the mindset of this man he had just subdued.
This would determine the future development.
After all, Chu Yang truly had no one else to rely on; he had caught these five people at most. If there were any other principles, he would not want to associate himself with such infamous characters.
The question of whether these five people would stay by his side or be discarded later lingered in Chu Yang's mind, leaning more towards the latter for now.
“Coercion... In this Nine Heavens, is there ever a day we aren't coerced?” Nangong Shifeng chuckled with a trace of melancholy. “All along, we have been coerced by life since we were young. The five of us brothers, we once spent four whole years, every single day, barely having enough to eat! Sometimes we would only manage to get a steamed bun every three days, which we had to share among five…”
His expression grew somber. “Senior, do you think we brothers are this way by nature? We may not have been handsome, but we still had a semblance of humanity. However, during those years, we had no way out, no food to eat, and in desperation, we resorted to eating ghost face mushrooms.”
“Although ghost face mushrooms are toxic, they don’t kill you. After eating them for too long, a person's face becomes more terrifying than a ghost's... and hair becomes sparse until it disappears entirely. Luckily, we only ate them for a month and were fortunate enough to encounter a wild boar that fell from a cliff… But that month had already turned us into something unrecognizable.”
“Later, we gained opportunities and skills, no longer coerced by hunger, but instead coerced by the need to improve our strength, constantly training hard. And then, there was the coercion of face… We became uglier, yet we cared more about appearances. So we wanted to stand out and not be looked down upon… But in this Nine Heavens, the five of us brothers, due to our ugly looks, were not accepted by any noble family or powerful faction.”
“So we became Blood Reward!”
“By becoming Blood Reward, we could earn Amethyst, which allowed us to eat and cultivate. But we had to complete tasks. At that time, our cultivation level was below the Imperial Throne; how could we compete with others? With the bounties at the Blood Reward Hall, what simple tasks could we undertake? None that matched our cultivation level!”
“So we had to look for opportunities, waiting for others to suffer mutual destruction, and then rush out to pick up the spoils…”
“Over time, we managed to scrape by.”
“Others looked down on us, and we looked down on others; powerful factions looked down upon us, and we looked down on them even more!”
“We couldn’t afford to provoke them, but we could avoid them.”
“We’ve walked this path, enduring cold eyes and tasting the warmth and coldness of human relationships!”