Aspiring to the Immortal Path

From the moment Lin Xin could think, she could never remember a time her father had smiled.

He was always looking at her with eyes full of worry.

As a child, Lin Xin saw many people going in and out of her home. They wore strange clothes and made all sorts of strange gestures. They looked at her like a monster, their eyes confused, or fearful, or excited.

While some of them brought cheer into Lin Xin\'s life, most of them brought pain.

Even after a long time, Lin Xin still remembered the pain that came from that Spirit Master cutting off a chunk of her flesh.

This situation lasted for a very long time before finally coming to an end.

Those strange people suddenly stopped coming, and the house of the Lin Clan began to grow more lonely.

The Lin Clan had once been a prestigious clan, but to save its daughter, it had spent far too much money, causing the clan\'s circumstances to decline. Thus, word quickly spread that the daughter of the Lin Clan was a star of disaster, that she was possessed by a ghost that spread misfortune.

At the height of this rumor\'s influence, people would even attack Lin Xin.

Whenever Lin Xin went out, she would be assaulted by children, some of them throwing rocks at her and others spitting at her, and she would often break out in tears.

But soon, Lin Xin found that people didn\'t dare to provoke her.

For those children who had thrown stones either got sick or fell, and one boy even fell into a well while playing and died.

The local people were scared witless.

They no longer dared to bully Lin Xin, or even approach.

Lin Xin grew up in this lonely environment.

Her sixteenth birthday.

This should have been a day worth celebrating. In her area, girls were considered adults at 16, of marriageable age.

But nobody cared about Lin Xin.

There were no celebrations or cheer, for everyone knew that this was a star of calamity. Everyone feared her and so kept their distance.

But there would always be some people who didn\'t know.

It was a dark and windy night.

Sitting in the fields by herself, she counted the stars in the sky.

This was the only method of celebration she could choose, breathing in the air of nature and enjoying the serenity.

At that moment, a man walked past these fields.

He was thirsty and hungry, worn from travel.

He saw Lin Xin seated on a rock like one would see a little white flower growing in a field.

Greed overcame his rationality, and he lunged at the maiden, ignoring her struggles and yells.

Lin Xin felt a stabbing pain, and she thought that she was going to die.

Her eyes blurred, and then she saw a green flash of light come from her body.

A green snake flew out from her, went up to the man\'s head, and swallowed it.

It swallowed the man whole.

She dumbly stared at the sky, gazing at the snake as it flew about. After a while, it landed back on the ground and flew back to Lin Xin, where it returned to being a motionless tattoo.

"From that day forward, I realized that it wasn\'t hurting me, but protecting me," Lin Xin said, but her eyes were full of grief.

"But you couldn\'t tell anyone this," Tang Jie said.

Lin Xin nodded.

Yes, what did it matter that she understood?

Nobody would believe her, and she couldn\'t tell anyone, for that would let others know that she had been raped. For a woman, integrity was more important than life. And she couldn\'t say that her snake had eaten someone, for she would end up in prison.

She couldn\'t say anything, only watch as others regarded her as a walking disaster.

As the days passed and she grew older, it came time for her to be married off.

But nobody dared to make a proposal.

Nobody wanted to invite disaster into their home.

By now, the Lin Clan had fallen into complete ruin thanks to this reputation.

A father\'s love reached its limit, and through a matchmaker, Lin Xin was to be married off to an old man in his fifties.

In this area, only that old man suffering from consumption was willing to marry her—it wasn\'t like he had long to live anyway.

Lin Xin was horrified when she heard the news.

She fled her home that night.

There was no place in her hometown she could go, so she just wandered through the wilderness.

Without anything to eat or drink, Lin Xin believed that she would starve to death in the wild.

But she didn\'t die. Whenever she felt hungry or thirsty, she would feel a sliver of energy enter her body from the snake birthmark. Thanks to the birthmark, she could keep going. She found that she could go a long time without eating or drinking, and she rapidly healed from her injuries. Even falling from a high place couldn\'t kill her.

Like this, she wandered about for twelve years.

"\'Twelve years\'?" Tang Jie gasped.

Lin Xin didn\'t seem more than twenty to him.

"Unexpected, right?" Lin Xin chuckled. "It\'s a star of calamity, but it\'s also a star of fortune. It made me live a life of suffering and robbed me of my home, but it also protected me and granted me eternal youth. Thanks to it, anyone who attempts to harm me will meet a nasty end, but it also means I can\'t cultivate… I once encountered a Spirit Master and incidentally helped him. As a reward, he taught me an introductory cultivation method, but he discovered that I couldn\'t open my Jade Gate no matter what, so I couldn\'t cultivate."

"Then did you ever try to drive it out again?" Tang Jie asked.

"No, but some others tried. They thought it was a treasure and wanted to strip it from my body, but they all ended up dying."

"All of them?"

"Except one." Lin Xin looked at Tang Jie and chuckled.

Tang Jie understood. "The Silver Eyes Fiend Emperor."

Lin Xin nodded. "He\'s the only one who didn\'t die, but he didn\'t fare well either. After running into me, he became certain that my birthmark had to do with the Azure Dragons of High Antiquity and wanted to devour it. He said that if he could have this birthmark, he could control the power of Fate. But he never succeeded. Instead, after his failure to devour it, he suffered thirty whole days of bad luck. Crises popped up around the empire, the harem descended into mayhem, and fiends were going around killing each other every day. As for him, a mighty Divine Division sovereign, he would trip while walking, or bite on a rock in his rice, and there was even one time where he suddenly felt uneasy while cultivating, causing energy to flow the wrong way, resulting in energy corruption. Thanks to his immense strength, he managed to turn everything around and survive. But this made him even less willing to give up… He tried many times, and he also failed many times, but he managed to survive, until he met you… At times, I wonder if his death at your hands was a coincidence, or if it had to do with me. Could he have provoked my birthmark too many times, finally enraging it into calling you over? If that was the case, then even he didn\'t manage to escape."

"Is that so?" Tang Jie narrowed his eyes.

He looked at Lin Xin. "Why are you suddenly telling me all this?"

Lin Xin dropped her head and thought it over before saying, "In those years, I would occasionally have bad dreams. Most of them involved my neighbors surrounding me as they cursed, criticized, and beat me. But sometimes, I would have other dreams."

"What kind of dreams?"

"They were all very strange. One was that I was caught by someone who sold me to an old man in the mountains to be his daughter. The very next day, I saw a person identical to the one in my dream. Scared to death, I immediately ran away. I never saw that man again, so I never knew if he was a slaver or not."

Tang Jie narrowed his eyes again.

"There are also times when I dream about things that have nothing to do with me, like wars, or the world crumbling. I don\'t know if these things actually happened or will happen, but I experience these things as if I was right there. One time, I even dreamed about a person falling from the sky, his body covered in flames…"

Tang Jie\'s heart tightened. "Do you have any dreams that you\'ve verified?"

"I do!" Lin Xin smiled. "A few days before the Silver Eyes Fiend Emperor died, I dreamed that I was seated in his palace, garbed in luxurious robes and dining on the finest foods, servants attending to my every need. I thought that I had gone mad, to dream of something like that."

"Then… what did you dream about yesterday?"

"I dreamed that I was seated in front of you like this, telling you everything."

Tang Jie understood.

It was no wonder that she had volunteered all this information, because that dream had guided her.

"And then…?"

Lin Xin shook her head. Clearly, her dream had stopped here.

After some thought, Tang Jie nodded. "I understand. You can relax. I won\'t try to take your snake. Right, is today your birthday?"

Unexpectedly, Lin Xin shook her head. "No, it\'s not."

Tang Jie was startled. "Didn\'t you say that it only moved on your birthday?"

"In the past, but it changed. Now, it can move around at any time."

"When did this start?"

"The day I met you."

———————————

Keee!

A Punisher Ghost let out a hoarse screech, but it was unable to throw off the transparent ghost on its back.

This little ghost was like a bloodsucking leech, clinging to its body and sucking out all of its ghost energy.

Gradually, its vision darkened, and it collapsed, emptied of ghost energy.

Little Three jumped down from the back of the Punisher Ghost, patting its belly in satisfaction.

While searching for the two worlds, it was also hunting ghosts.

Thanks to its powerful spatial abilities, it could hunt ghosts as it pleased.

After hunting this ghost, Little Three sniffed at the air, seeking out the direction it should go. Within its translucent little belly was a flashing white ball made from intertwined threads.

This was the power of Karma and the light of Fate that Tang Jie had left in Little Three\'s body, linking it to its distant destination. With the power of Karma and Fate, all it needed was to keep on the path to eventually reach its end.

But Fate didn\'t mean constant fortune.

Not long after Little Three left, two figures, one black and one white, appeared at the site where it had brought down the Punisher Ghost.

Holding mourning staffs, they floated over to where Little Three had been standing, looked at each other, and took in a deep breath.

A few moments later, the black figure said, "Yes, it\'s a Hunter Ghost."

It was an unpleasant voice, like metal sheets being slammed together.

The white figure had a weeping voice. "A Hunter Ghost has returned! This is no laughing matter! We must inform the Nether Emperors and have it hunted down!"

The two figures disappeared.