Bo Xuenong eyed her remaining two thousand points and decided to first ask the system how many points it would take to exchange for Wu Qingshu and Zhu Ningfu’s original book plots. It was not mere curiosity; Wu Qingshu was Shen Yanting’s highly respected grand Shishu, so she was concerned on Shen Yanting’s behalf.
【System: Understanding a strategy target’s background aids the assistant in conquering the goal character. Original book plot requires no points to exchange. Life story expansion for one person costs fifty and reveals important stories beyond the original book’s depictions. Does the assistant wish to exchange?】
The original book was free.
No reason not to look.
Life story expansion was only fifty points.
After experiencing the system’s high prices, seeing something so cheap suddenly tempted Bo Xuenong.
Bo Xuenong stared at the exquisite white porcelain doll for a good while before deciding to get both. While Wu Qingshu and the others were not paying attention to her, with Shen Yanting tucked away, she opened the plots related to Wu Qingshu and Zhu Ningfu. What she saw left her dumbfounded: Zhu Ningfu was actually from a demonic sect, and Si Xianling truly died.
The female protagonist Yu Cenwan had chosen the pill cultivator path, which was not the best fit for her, solely to help the male protagonist recover his five senses. To torment the female protagonist, the author deliberately set her talents in other paths far superior to pill cultivation. After fusing the foluo fruit to boost her talent and meeting Mo Tingshu, her pill refining finally improved steadily, though she also encountered several teachers better suited to her, the best being Wu Qingshu.
Yu Cenwan had extraordinary talent in talisman crafting. Wu Qingshu repeatedly wanted her to abandon pill cultivation and switch to the talisman cultivator path to become her disciple.
In the book, Wu Qingshu was set to lose her daughter and treated the female protagonist like both master and mother, which was why she merited silver mark page time in the original book.
She was extremely good to the female protagonist.
Unfortunately, Nether Gate Sect Supreme Elder Sang Fan disliked the female protagonist as much as Wu Qingshu disliked the male protagonist.
The male protagonist’s master saw the female protagonist as a stumbling block on his path to success, while Wu Qingshu believed the male protagonist was a fickle playboy unworthy of the female protagonist’s devotion.
She was the greatest obstacle to the protagonists’ romance and thus doomed to die.
Like Shen Yanting, Wu Qingshu died in a secret realm, in a clash with Zhu Ningfu.
The Scale Eel County trial in the original book was quite special, with secret realms emerging one after another nonstop. The stories within them took up most of the plot, and many died inside—including her and Shen Yanting, as well as Zhu Ningfu and Wu Qingshu.
Wu Qingshu had substantial page time because of her kindness to the female protagonist, while Zhu Ningfu’s came from being the biological aunt of one of the male protagonist’s many ambiguous interests, the demonic woman. As both Beast Taming Sect sect master and a demonic sect member, she was one of the book’s major villains.
Their first appearances in the book were right before the Scale Eel County trial began: one as Cloud Smoke Sect leading elder, the other as Beast Taming Sect leading sect master.
They started fighting the moment they met, startling the female protagonist.
It was through Wu Qingshu’s recounting to the female protagonist that their enmity unfolded, originating from Si Xianling.
Si Xianling was the Beast Taming Sect Junior Sect Master and had always lived in the Beast Taming Sect.
One day, two pill cultivators in the sect snatched Si Xianling’s things, but Zhu Ningfu, as sect master, did not stand up for her. This caused Si Xianling to run away from home. Later, Zhu Ningfu sensed through bloodline that Si Xianling had died, yet they could not even find her remains.
Wu Qingshu believed Zhu Ningfu had caused her daughter’s death and wanted to tear her apart. She fought Zhu Ningfu at every opportunity.
She had been looking for trouble with Zhu Ningfu, which also led her and the female protagonist to inadvertently discover that Zhu Ningfu came from the Demonic Sect, exposing this villain’s identity. In the end, the Demonic Sect clashed with them, these Righteous Path cultivators, and Zhu Ningfu and Wu Qingshu perished together amid the chaos.
…
Bo Xuenong had not expected the story to unfold like this. She immediately spent the expansion points on the two women’s life stories, and this look startled her even more.
Wu Qingshu was nothing like what Si Xianling and Shen Yanting thought – she was not deeply in love and entangled with Tu Gaojun. She doted on Si Xianling not because she was the child of her beloved partner, but because she had sought a dao companion from the start precisely to have a child. The Cloud Smoke Sect, as the number one sect, had extraordinary foundations. All the outstanding disciples there who could be considered top talents were geniuses, and Wu Qingshu was one of the best among them.
In one month, she reached Qi Condensation Peak. In one year, Foundation Establishment Peak.
After Dao Seeking, she could memorize spirit inscriptions on talisman paper after one look. No matter how difficult the talisman paper, she could master it after drawing it a hundred times; simple ones she knew after seeing them. In just twenty short years, she successfully formed her core and broke through to the golden core realm. In less than a century, she had left the golden core realm behind and reached the nascent soul realm. Her cultivation slowed after the nascent soul realm, not due to any lack of talent, but because talisman cultivators inherently faced difficult breakthroughs, and it was extremely easy to perish during the thunder tribulation. Wu Qingshu deliberately suppressed her cultivation until she had prepared sufficient means to counter the thunder tribulation.
Even so, she reached the Out-of-Body Realm at a thousand years old, the Divine Transformation Realm at eighteen hundred, and broke through to the Body Integration Realm at twenty-seven hundred.
Wu Qingshu had always held the top position among talisman cultivators because she was different from Hua Jinshi and the others. She had not stopped breaking through at the Divine Transformation Realm out of fear for her life. Her status as a First-Grade Talisman Master matched her cultivation realm equally – she was already a great ascension realm cultivator, just one step away from ascension.
Wu Qingshu broke through to the great ascension realm at four thousand years old. Next, she only needed to await a stroke of fortune to ascend to the Divine Realm.
That day, she heard of a divine miracle appearing at Pure Glory Mountain and specially went there to seek her opportunity.
Wu Qingshu did find the opportunity, but it did not belong to her. The person who obtained it went mad from cultivation deviation right before her eyes due to excessive excitement. One step away from ascension, they ended up dead with their dao destroyed, and they even shattered one section of Wu Qingshu’s spirit bone. Those with incomplete spirit bones had no hope of reaching the Divine Realm.
Repairing a spirit bone was not difficult.
But Wu Qingshu had been injured by divine breath, a wound that mortal methods could not heal.
Wu Qingshu’s path to ascension was ruined, leaving her only with endless lifespan and loneliness – especially after her master, senior brothers, and senior sisters all perished one by one, her world felt even emptier.
In her youth, she had been single-mindedly focused on becoming a god and never thought of taking disciples.
By the time she considered taking disciples, Mo Tingshu and her generation already qualified to do so.
With Wu Qingshu’s seniority and strength on display, if she wanted disciples, all those with talent would flock to her, leaving the elders of Mo Tingshu’s generation facing deserted doors. Wu Qingshu did not want that. Her long life, with the immortal path that could no longer advance, was filled everywhere with emptiness and desolation. Gradually, she developed the idea of nurturing new life.
Her cultivation had long stagnated; she no longer even needed to cultivate. There would be no more thunder tribulations or heart demons – only time and energy to spare.
She chose Tu Gaojun not because he was exceptionally outstanding himself, but because of the uniqueness of the Beast Taming Sect.
Spirit root quality never relied on heredity, but on opportunities and fate. Wu Qingshu also feared giving birth to a child without talent. As the top talisman cultivator, she could not possibly dig out someone else’s spirit root to give to her own child. The Beast Taming Sect allowed high-rank beasts and their masters to share bloodlines; the sect master’s daughter would naturally not be shortchanged. That was the real reason she chose Tu Gaojun.
The main reason their relationship broke down rapidly after Si Xianling was born was that Wu Qingshu had only ever wanted the child from the start.
Wu Qingshu’s life was very long – so long that she had long lost any limits.
Her greatest wish was for Si Xianling to accompany her a little longer.
As long as Si Xianling lived, she would always have Wu Qingshu’s backing.
After Si Xianling died, Wu Qingshu no longer wanted to live.
At her final moment of death, Zhu Ningfu had not even thought of taking her down with her – it was Wu Qingshu herself, disheartened and intent on death.
Zhu Ningfu’s life story expansion was completely different from what Bo Xuenong had imagined. She did not love Si Xianling out of affection spillover from Tu Gaojun; it was because of Wu Qingshu.
Zhu Ningfu was indeed a formidable pill cultivator. The reason she had not made the Tianxiu Catalogue was that she came from the Demonic Sect – the Divine Pavilion would not send cultivation resources to crooked-path cultivators. People from the Demonic Sect and Harmonious Union Sect, those living in the shadows, had no qualifications for the Tianxiu Catalogue. She had not originally been surnamed Zhu either; her surname was actually Zhu.
She was the blood aunt of Zhu Miaotong, the Demonic Sect Junior Sect Master in the book who entangled with the male protagonist and treated Shen Yanting as a romantic rival.
Everyone from the Demonic Sect was ruthless and sinister, and those with the Demon Emperor Bloodline were especially cold-blooded and heartless.
This bloodline destined them to be powerful, but also destined them to be vicious.
Zhu Ningfu was the child of the Demon Emperor and a human cultivator woman. For her first ten years, she was raised by her mother’s side. She had felt familial love and the warmth of human hearts, only to be suddenly brought back to the Demonic Sect – a place devoid of any emotion, where only slaughter and power allowed survival. She was extremely unadapted.
