The Fallen Cauldron

At midnight, a crescent moon hung askew in the sky, with a few stars flickering in and out of sight. At the foot of the mountain, a cold pool reflected the starlight and moonlight. The occasional chirping of cicadas only served to highlight the profound silence and seclusion of the lakeside.

A caravan slowly passed along the mountain path, the rhythmic clatter of wheels breaking the silent moonlight.

This caravan appeared somewhat different from ordinary ones; the primary distinction was that its guards seemed to be entirely female.

The light curtain of a carriage window was rolled up, revealing the youthful yet exquisite face of a young girl. Her large, sparkling eyes stared curiously at the pool for a moment before she suddenly asked, "Master, Master, is that the Tripod-Asking Pool?"

Her voice, crisp as the song of an oriole, rang out suddenly in the night, startling the roosting birds into flapping away in a flurry.

Beside the girl sat a young woman with her face veiled in light gauze. She had been leaning back with her eyes closed, feigning sleep, but upon hearing the girl's question, she opened her eyes a sliver. She swept a hazy glance outside the window and sighed softly, "That is indeed the Tripod-Asking Pool."

The girl asked curiously, "Isn't it said that this is a sacred pool, always under guard? I don't see a ghost of a soul here."

"Sacred pool? That's just talk." The young woman gave a mocking smile. "It was once guarded only because, when the World-Suppressing Tripod fell and formed the pool, the water became infused with the spiritual energy radiating from it. Soaking in the water was beneficial for cultivation, so the Imperial Court cordoned it off. Over a thousand years later, the spiritual energy has dissipated, and it has become an ordinary pool. The Imperial Court lost interest in maintaining it, and it has been abandoned for nearly a hundred years."

The girl seemed somewhat unwilling to accept this. "Is there really no spiritual energy left at all?"

"None." The young woman glanced at her, amused. "You're just taking a fancy to the pool because you want to take a bath, aren't you?"

With her intentions laid bare, the girl giggled, "Master knows me best. We've been traveling day and night, and I feel all sticky..."

The young woman retorted crossly, "Your cultivation has long since reached the point of being untainted by dust; where would this 'stickiness' come from?"

The girl's eyes darted around, her smile taking on a hint of seductiveness as she leaned against her master. "I'm feeling sticky from thinking about men..."

The girl was at most thirteen or fourteen, her childishness not yet fully shed, but in this instant, her temperament shifted. A latent potential for being a femme fatale emerged, a bewitching charm that should not have belonged to her age. Not to mention that this was certainly not something an ordinary girl should say, yet the young woman only laughed in spite of herself, not the least bit annoyed. Instead, she said, "Fine, it's just your natural love for cleanliness. Hmm... let's rest for a moment. I'll go with you."

If an outsider were to see them, they would know these two were certainly not from a respectable household.

The caravan came to a halt, and the female guards fanned out, subtly controlling all approaches to the pool. The master took the girl by the hand, and both stepped out of the carriage barefoot. Under the moonlight, their robes fluttered as the two slender, beautiful figures drifted toward the water, carrying a dreamlike, ethereal beauty.

As their light veils fell onto the grass, two exquisite bodies, white as mutton-fat jade, slowly stepped into the pool. Even though the day's journey had not been exhausting for them, the coolness of the water seeping into their skin still drew a soft, comfortable sigh from the pair.

"Master..." The girl gently stroked her jade-like arm and whispered, "The Nine Cauldrons suppress the world, and the realm has been at peace for a millennium. Can our goal truly be achieved?"

"The cauldrons are but dead objects. If things were truly that stable, we wouldn't have the current situation where the major sects have become too powerful to be controlled." The young woman replied indifferently. She lifted the veil from her face and rinsed it casually in the water, revealing a face of peerless beauty.

In truth, this so-called master was still young; her jade-like face looked at most twenty-six or twenty-seven, yet she possessed a mature charm that her disciple lacked. Having experienced the blood and fire of the martial world and bearing the burden of managing a sect—all while hailing from the Demon Sect—her heroic spirit, nobility, and mysterious allure blended perfectly to form a unique aura.

The girl looked on with envy. "Master, you are so beautiful. Surely many men must have gone mad for you in the past?"

"Heh... men are all base creatures. They only go mad for what they cannot obtain. So, Chan'er, you must remember: affection is merely a toy. It is to be played with, not taken to heart, otherwise, you will be the one who goes mad."

No matter how clever the girl was, she was still too young and only half-understood.

"Besides, the business of seducing men is for those below us to handle. You and I carry the weight of the sect; such matters do not require you to step into the fray yourself." The young woman smiled slightly, stroked her disciple's creamy chest, and continued, "Whoever dares to cast a glance at you, just gouge out their eyes. That is what you should do."

Before she could finish, she suddenly sensed something and jerked her head toward the sky.

Ten-odd yards above, the air twisted in a bizarre fashion, followed by a thunderous roar and a sudden, violent gale. Within the lightning, a hole appeared, and a figure suddenly tumbled out.

The moment the figure fell, the wind and thunder vanished as if they had never been, leaving everything like a strange hallucination.

The master and disciple stared blankly as the figure screamed while plummeting from the sky. Just before hitting the water, the man seemed to notice the people by the pool. His eyes lit up, and he shouted, "Help!" Then, with a "thud," he plunged into the pool and sank with a series of bubbles.

The master and disciple looked at each other, staring for a long time at the snow-white chests exposed above the water, before simultaneously turning their gaze toward the spot where the man had fallen, their eyes glinting with murderous intent.

Only a few ripples remained where he had fallen, with bubbles still gurgling to the surface.

Xue Mu was an operations manager at a music agency in the country. He had launched and managed a failed girl group—though most people had likely never heard of such a flop—but Xue Mu had some reputation in the industry as someone at the forefront of the idol-making wave. He had plenty of money on hand, and in his spare time, he would play around with high-end escorts or trick young girls dreaming of stardom into bed; his life was quite comfortable.

In his leisure time, Xue Mu liked to hunt for antiques. Today, he had picked up a bronze fragment smaller than a fingernail. He had studied it all night without finding any clues, and when he accidentally cut his hand on it, he "whooshed" and vanished from his home.

He had read many novels in his spare time, so the concept of transmigration was not foreign to him. From the moment he was dumped into the air over an unfamiliar wilderness, Xue Mu knew he had encountered an inexplicable transmigration.

Heaven have mercy, he had never had such expectations. He had finally been on the verge of success with a young starlet these past few days; what the hell was he doing transmigrating?

Furthermore, he discovered one thing... there was no such thing as coordinate positioning in transmigration. If you were lucky, you might appear in a beauty's boudoir; if you were unlucky, you might end up drowning in a septic tank. For instance, appearing in mid-air right now—he didn't know if that counted as good or bad luck. The only consolation was that there was a pool below, so at least he wouldn't die from the fall.

As these idle thoughts raced through his mind, he reached the water's surface in the blink of an eye. Only then did he notice two women by the pool—were they bathing?

Before he could even see what they looked like, Xue Mu only had time to shout "Help!" before he slammed into the water. Facts proved that the idea of jumping off a cliff and surviving because of water in martial arts films was a lie. Falling from at least thirty or forty meters, hitting the water was like being struck by a heavy hammer. The violent impact nearly shifted his internal organs, and he spat out a mouthful of blood before passing out cold.

If no one saved him, he would truly die in the water.

The jade-like beauty by the pool flicked her slender hand, and a column of water surged up, lifting him out of the pool. Then, the flow of water steadily carried him toward the two women—a display of miraculous skill.

"Strange, such intense toxic fumes..." The two women had originally been full of murderous intent, planning to gouge out his eyes for fun, but as Xue Mu drifted closer, they both frowned and used their internal energy to seal their pores.

This man was emitting a bizarre poison. Even with their deep familiarity with toxins from their time in the Demon Sect, they couldn't identify what it was.

Chan'er stared at Xue Mu's short hair and muttered to herself, "Is he a monk? Could he have been struck by some strange poison newly developed by a fellow practitioner?"

The young woman placed her slender fingers on Xue Mu's wrist to investigate, her eyes widening in astonishment. "How strange..."

"What is it, Master?"

"This man's body is riddled with at least a thousand types of toxins, from his skin to his internal organs and even his marrow. Many of them are volatile and unheard of... which means if he were in a town of ordinary people, he would be a source of plague, capable of turning a hundred miles into a dead zone within days."

Chan'er was dumbfounded. "But he's still alive?"

"Even Young Master Zhao, who treats testing poisons as his daily bread, would have died long ago if his marrow were soaked in such strange toxins. Yet this man is not only alive but healthy; he only injured his internal organs from the impact just now."

Chan'er recalled his bizarre entrance and felt a bit uneasy. "Could this man be even more formidable than Young Master Zhao? But how could someone so powerful be injured by falling into a pool?"

The young woman withdrew her fingers from Xue Mu's wrist, her eyes filled with an incredulous confusion. "That is the strangest part... he has not a shred of cultivation. He is nothing but an ordinary person!"