Chapter 51: Cruel and Vicious Heart

The delicate and tender expression could no longer be found on Qiunuo's exquisitely beautiful face. Instead, she wore a smile that caught me completely off guard—mature, seductive, and bone-chillingly cold. This was a completely different person from the Qiunuo I thought I knew.

The ward door was pushed open, and I struggled to look away from Qiunuo's face. The man walking in from outside wore an inscrutable smile, yet every gesture and movement exuded an extraordinary and imposing aura.

Whenever Wei Yong looked at Qiunuo, his smile invariably softened and warmed, as if his eyes could hold only this single woman.

"I told you, he would find out sooner or later. You just wouldn't believe it," Wei Yong said softly to Qiunuo.

Qiunuo turned back to look at me, dumbfounded as I was, and offered a radiant, gentle smile.

"It's a pity it's a little late."

I leaned heavily against the pillows, my head throbbing with a violent ache and my thoughts blurring into chaos.

"Since you're one of Wei Yong's people, why did you burn the *Nine Heavens Hidden Dragon Manual*?"

"I'll tell you a secret." Qiunuo lowered her head, slowly leaning in close to my ear, and said casually, "Aunt Qing forced me to read the *Four Books and Five Classics* and the *Siku Quanshu* since I was a child. If I couldn't recite them from memory, she would severely punish me. Yet every time, I could recite them quickly and without missing a single word. Do you know why?"

I no longer had the energy to guess the meaning behind Qiunuo's words, and I simply waited coldly for her to finish.

"Because I have a photographic memory!" Qiunuo's faint smile felt like a dagger piercing my heart.

"You've read the *Nine Heavens Hidden Dragon Manual*?!"

"It doesn't matter that it was burned." Qiunuo tapped her head lightly and said with ease, "It's all memorized right here!"

I would rather have destroyed both jade and stone together than let Wei Yong obtain the *Nine Heavens Hidden Dragon Manual*. I had calculated everything, yet I failed to guard against the person right beside me. If Qiunuo had a photographic memory, Wei Yong would acquire this ominous book sooner or later.

At that thought, I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth against the searing pain of my wounds, and picked up a jagged shard of glass from the floor. The only thought in my mind right now was that Qiunuo could not be allowed to live!

At such close quarters, injured though I was, I believed that with a full-strength strike, Qiunuo as a woman could never dodge it. The sharp fragment aimed straight for her carotid artery.

...

I was knocked heavily off the bed and slammed against the wall by a single strike. It seemed there were too many unexpected twists today. The glass shard, just inches away, was effortlessly caught between Qiunuo's two fingers. Then, with a casual sweep of her palm against my chest, delivering heavy force to a precise location, it was hard to believe this was the palm-power of a woman.

I only heard the sound of my ribs cracking in the middle, and a mouthful of fishy, bitter blood spewed from my lips. Then I saw, creeping out from beneath the white lace-trimmed cuff of Qiunuo's sleeve, a thin red thread winding around her wrist.

I lowered my head and violently tore open the gauze on my chest, revealing five clear red fingerprints on my bare skin.

"Life-Drawing Soul-Breaking! You... you know Taoist sorcery?!"

Seeing my gaze fixed on her hand, Qiunuo slowly lowered the red thread and said calmly, "I told you, you found out much too late. I had zero interest in the things Aunt Qing taught me when I was young, but fortunately Aunt Qing had quite a collection of books. Among them were many secret Taoist arts, mostly true transmissions from renowned masters—even some belonging to Yuan Tiangang and Li Chunfeng. So I just picked up a few things casually."

Qiunuo called it casual, but I knew this was merely her understated way of putting it. Life-Drawing Soul-Breaking was one of the ten great Taoist evil arts, requiring immense cultivation to master. The red thread in Qiunuo's hand alone was refined using corpse fluid—extreme in yin and malevolence, inviting backlash at the slightest mistake. Yet Qiunuo could wrap this corpse-refined red thread around her hand without a trace of fear; it was clear her cultivation far exceeded what she casually claimed.

"Taoist secret arts?!" A sudden realization dawned on me as I stared at Wei Yong. "I've always wondered why I could never divine your fate. So it turns out you had Qiunuo by your side to conceal your soul and spirit. When Aunt Lan cast lots, she said you were beyond the Six Paths and untouched by the Three Realms. I could never understand how a living human being could exist outside the Three Realms and the Six Paths. So you were afraid I would divine your fate all along, and that's why you had Qiunuo cast the soul-concealing spell. Since you were so afraid of me knowing who you are, and now I can't escape your grasp, can you tell me now?"

"Heh, you might find that out later, or perhaps you never will. But who I am doesn't matter to you," Wei Yong said with a relaxed smile.

I slowly turned my head to glare at Qiunuo and said coldly, "From the very first day I met you, you were setting all of this up!"

"Actually, I wasn't. It was you who stumbled into it by a twist of fate," Qiunuo said with a pleasant smile. "Though later I suddenly realized that perhaps only you could help us find the Ming Fourteenth Imperial Tombs!"

"I stumbled into it myself?!"

"Originally, everything was arranged. Who would have thought our people would be ambushed by the police on Mount Qingcheng, and the Dragon Head Wood detained by Fang Yanan? I had originally planned to move against Fang Yanan."

"That day, Lianshan and I were taken to the police station for tearing the painting. I inadvertently discovered that Fang Yanan had been struck by sorcery and wanted to save her," I said with a dawning, somewhat powerless realization. "Yet the Dragon Head Wood wasn't at the police station at the time, and I miscalculated Fang Yanan's birth characters, almost killing her. You were afraid I would ruin your plan, so you saved Fang Yanan instead. I never figured out who that person was—it was you all along!"

"Perhaps it was destiny that the Dragon Head Wood wasn't mine to obtain, but I discovered two things instead," Qiunuo smiled placidly. "First, you actually possess an imperial destiny. Second, you wear a necklace set with the Eight-Dragon Pearl."

I pressed a hand to my chest and said coldly, "So you needed me to help you find the Ming Fourteenth Imperial Tombs, because only my blood could unlock the secret within the white jade tofu. As for the Eight-Dragon Pearl necklace, that's because you heard Aunt Qing mention that the *Nine Heavens Hidden Dragon Manual* isn't just a book, but a book and a piece of jade—the two complement each other and neither can do without the other."

"Naturally, whether you truly possess an imperial destiny still required a method of verification," Wei Yong remarked calmly from the side.

"So you had Gu Xiaotian arrange a martial contest," I blurted out without thinking. "It didn't matter who won, because you believed the Golden Dragon Turtle and the Luo Xuan Divine Strategy would be yours sooner or later. But if I truly had an imperial destiny, the winner had to be me, because the Eight-Dragon Pearl holds the supreme mysteries of the five Taoist numbers, which only someone with an imperial destiny can fathom. If I had an imperial destiny, naturally no one else could be my match."

"I told you you were a smart person, figuring it out so quickly," Wei Yong nodded and said.

Qiunuo looked at me with a beaming smile and said indifferently, "Since it was confirmed that you are a person of imperial destiny, the subsequent matters became much simpler. I only needed to go with the flow at the crucial moments."

"So you took me to see Aunt Qing, because you knew I only had one volume of the Luo Xuan Divine Strategy, and I had to get the other one from Aunt Qing. The two had to be merged into one before we could continue searching for the Ming Fourteenth Imperial Tombs."

Qiunuo nodded noncommittally and said calmly, "Everything after that was even simpler. With your ability, the clues left behind at the Ming Fourteenth Imperial Tombs naturally couldn't stump you."

"Were the people at the police station also killed by your arrangement?"

To my surprise, Qiunuo let out a cheerful laugh, her unmasked smile tinged with a bone-piercing chill.

"For all your cleverness, there are times when you still get things wrong."

"What did I get wrong?"

"None of those people were killed by my arrangement."

"Then who killed them?"

"Myself!" The smile lingered on Qiunuo's cheeks without a shred of remorse, as if killing people was an entirely ordinary affair to her.

The corners of my twitching mouth tightened as I spoke with righteous indignation, "Those people had no grievance with you, yet you could still bring yourself to do it. Are you even human?"

"I know you are benevolent; when you have time, you can perform some rituals for them to help them attain transcendence. Anyway, you'll have plenty of time in the future." Unfazed, Qiunuo squatted down. The smile, devoid of the slightest trace of shame, looked to me like a writhing venomous snake. "Oh, perhaps you'll be very busy, because I didn't just kill them—I need corpse fluid to refine the red thread. As you know, the more corpse fluid used in refinement, the greater the power of the sorcery. However, to extract the ultimate yin corpse fluid, one must use infants—and living infants at that..."

My body trembled, and I stared at Qiunuo with a pale face. I never expected that this exquisitely beautiful woman before me could be so vicious, nor could I understand how I had failed to notice it after being by her side for so long.

"Men may sin, but heaven is watching. You'll get your retribution sooner or later."