My Wife Aman: Beautiful and Coldhearted - Chapter 4

I became an immortal.

It happened the day after Song Wenyan died.

Ten thousand rays of rosy light filled the sky as celestial music rang out.

Everyone in the Xiaoyao Sect came to congratulate me.

Master’s expression was complicated as he looked at me. He opened his mouth, but in the end, said nothing.

My chief senior brother patted me on the shoulder.

“Aman, congratulations.”

“Thank you,” I said.

My voice was so flat that even I was surprised.

After ascending, my days grew idle instead.

There were no more bottlenecks in my cultivation to trouble me. No urgency of a lifespan nearing its end.

There was so much time.

So much that I had no idea how to spend it.

I lived in a vast immortal residence. Each day brought little besides meditation, tea, and watching the clouds.

Other immortals occasionally visited and made inconsequential small talk. I found it tedious, and gradually stopped receiving anyone at all.

I became a recluse.

Now and then, I thought of Song Wenyan.

I remembered the night he died in my arms.

I could not tell whether what I felt was sorrow or bewilderment.

Many years later, while traveling through the mortal realm, I passed a wasteland overgrown with weeds, where several crooked-necked trees stood in the wind.

I stopped.

Something about the place felt familiar.

This was the road along which Song Wenyan had once carried me.

Now, nothing remained but desolation.

In what seemed like the blink of an eye, a century had passed in the mortal world.

I stood amid the lush weeds and, for the first time, felt lost and helpless.

I went to the bamboo cottage where we had once lived and sat in its courtyard for a very long time.

Long enough for dusk to close in and the sunset to fill the sky.

Somehow, I fell asleep.

Immortals were not supposed to dream.

But I dreamed of Song Wenyan.

He looked just as I remembered him: gentle as warm jade, smiling beneath that crimson-gold sunset while his robes danced in the wind.

His smile was as tender as it had always been.

“Aman,” he asked softly, “have you found your Way?”

I wanted to say yes.

The answer rose to my lips, but I could not force it out.

I could only stand there, frozen, my eyes brimming with tears as I gazed at him from afar.

“Aman.”

He drifted toward me like the wind and cradled my face, the pad of his thumb gently wiping the tear from the corner of my eye.

“Don’t cry,” he said. “You’re an immortal now. You should be happy.”

Should I?

But I was not happy.

The tears in my eyes broke free and spilled down my face.

Song Wenyan held my cheeks and sighed. He kissed my forehead, his voice so soft the wind nearly carried it away.

Confusion filled his eyes. He did not understand, and yet there was also a trace of heartache in his gaze when he asked, “My Aman, why are you crying?”

When I woke, the sky was dark.

I touched my cheek. It was wet.

The stars overhead flickered in and out.

I drew my knees to my chest in the courtyard and sobbed at the top of my lungs.

Only then did I understand.

Killing one’s husband to prove the Way was nothing but a corrupt and heretical path.

I had killed him, but I had not truly attained the Way.

That night, wild thoughts overran my heart.

I fell completely from immortality and became a demon.