"You only ever take, treating everything as your due."
"Bibi Dong, oh, Bibi Dong. You're an ungrateful wolf who eats at others' tables yet can't act like a decent human being."
By the time Xuan Jian finished those words, each one aimed at killing her spirit, Bibi Dong's expression had darkened completely.
Her delicate hand tightened sharply around Xuan Jian's neck, forcibly lifting his feet off the ground. Every bone in his body creaked beneath the unbearable strain.
"Insolence!"
An icy growl burst from Bibi Dong's lips. Her scarlet eyes locked onto Xuan Jian, their usual frozen indifference shattering completely, replaced by surging waves of hatred and fury.
"Who are you to judge me? Xuan Jian, do you think you've seen through everything? You're nothing but a bystander, casually passing judgment on my suffering!"
She leaned forward slightly, bringing her face close to Xuan Jian's. Her wine-red hair stirred softly, her voice low and bone-chilling.
"Spirit Hall raised me? Laughable. Spirit Hall never took me in out of kindness. They only coveted my exceptional Martial Soul talent and treated me as a weapon they could cultivate and control!"
"Back then, I was starving and freezing when Spirit Hall took me away. And what did I get in return? I was made their Holy Maiden to be manipulated, my fate never my own!"
"Yu Xiaogang told you all that, didn't he?" Xuan Jian sneered.
"Yu Xiaogang..." At the mention of that name, the emotions in Bibi Dong's eyes grew tangled and unreadable, hatred intertwining with her old obsession.
"That's right. Yu Xiaogang told me... I knew his cowardice, his limitations, his incompetence. And with your arrival, I learned of his deception too."
"But those days were the only glimmer left in my bleak life. Qian Xunji crushed that little light with