The Right Guardian Just Wants to Retire - Chapter 1

The sky was red on the day Ji Xian died.

He pinched my cheek. “All right, Xiaoyu. Time for me to go die.”

He was still smiling when he said it.

As if it were nothing at all, his long hair streaming through the smoke that filled the sky.

The world called him a monster, and to be fair, they weren’t wrong.

Then he turned and walked into the flames. He never looked back.

That was a long time ago.

I thought I had forgotten.

I was once the all-powerful Right Guardian of the Demon Cult.

Then I retired.

Recently, I cleared a patch of mountainside. What I sowed, I reaped—quite literally.

The harvest was too plentiful to finish, so I asked an old vegetable farmer who went to the market below the mountain to take the excess into town and sell it for some silver.

The old farmer was always punctual.

But this time, five days passed without a sign of him.

I went down the mountain to look for him myself.

The old farmer lived in a ramshackle house with his granddaughter, the two of them depending on each other. Now the girl was nowhere to be seen, and he sat inside alone, withered and weeping.

I leaned half my body cautiously through the doorway. “Hello. Are you still buying vegetables?”

The moment he saw someone, he burst into howls of grief.

“God strike them dead! My sweet, pretty granddaughter was snatched away to be a child bride by that hideous Right Guardian of the Demon Lord’s remnants!”

I was silent for a moment. “So… are you still buying vegetables?”

He looked at me as though I were already dead.

Thinking of my cabbages, which would soon wilt, I asked, “If your granddaughter comes back, then you’ll be able to buy them?”

The old farmer stared blankly. “She… can still come back?”

“She can.” I nodded. “I’ll bring her back.”

He poured me a cup of cold tea and told me what had happened.

The Demon Cult was making a comeback, and the area had grown unsafe. The same Right Guardian from back then was leading them. Every unmarried village girl with even passable looks had been abducted.

—They hadn’t even spared the boys.

They really must have been desperate!

Every time he cursed them, I sneezed.

He broke off and said earnestly, “Girl, haven’t I always told you? That mountaintop is thick with yin energy. A young woman like you shouldn’t spend all day in a place like that. Once the cold gets into your body, it’ll be hard to nurse yourself back to health.”

I said nothing and merely babbled incoherently.

The old farmer said the new Demon Cult had taken over the neighboring mountain.

He led the way with his back hunched, yet his legs were nimbler than mine. He had plainly scouted the place in secret more than once.

Halfway there, we ran into two sect disciples coming the other way.

One was fat and the other tall, and both wore neat uniforms.

I looked at them twice. They seemed familiar—and familiar in an irritating way.

They said they were training away from their mountain and had come to wipe out the Demon Cult while they were here.

The old farmer was both startled and delighted. “The Tianyan Sect? That’s the greatest sect under heaven! Please, heroes, save my poor granddaughter!”

He bent his knees to kneel, but they hurriedly caught him and said it was their duty.

The old farmer whispered his praise to me. “A great and prestigious sect really does have a different bearing.”

Me: Sure. Still the same pretentious act as ever.

Our party passed through an old forest. Beneath a cliff lay a hidden cave entrance under heavy guard.

The two disciples warned us, “Wait here in hiding. We’ll be back shortly. The Demon Cult is dangerous—whatever you do, don’t act rashly.”

The old farmer watched them go with ardent eyes that practically said, Farewell, heroes.

The sun rose, then set. Neither returned.

The old farmer stamped his feet in panic.

I rose and dusted myself off, taking up the refrain. “Wait here in hiding. I’ll be back shortly.”

He looked as though he were watching a doomed warrior march off. “What can you possibly do in there…? Even two disciples from a great sect…”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It won’t take long.”

After all, how long could it take to go home?

As for overturning the counterfeit nest…

Well.

It did take a little more than the flick of a finger.

Unfortunately, I was one step too late.

The blood pool before me was foul and turbid. The old farmer’s granddaughter had already dissolved into it.

I wrinkled my nose.

These people had planned to use the flesh and blood of fifty virgin boys and girls to choose a demon child as a vessel and bring the Demon Lord back into the world.

Nice idea. Better luck never.

The impostor I had just sent flying with a slap lay crumpled against a stone pillar, coughing blood. Shards of his demon mask littered the ground.

He stared at the chain sword in my hand, his eyes full of disbelief. “You… You’re the real Right Guardian!”

I nodded in acknowledgment. “Thanks for your hard work. And you are?”

He forced out one last breath. “If it’s you… why would you sabotage our plan…?”

?

Our?

The only plan I had was retirement.

A lotus dais stood at the center of the blood pool, with a demon child seated upon it.

I flew over, landed on the dais, and formed a hand seal to wake him.

He opened his eyes.

The boy looked about ten and was beautiful, though unfortunately he had the expression of a corpse. It seemed to ask: What do you want?

Oh. A demon child indeed. One glance was enough to tell he was trouble.

I crouched down. “Whose child are you? It’s safe now. You can go.”

He answered with a question. “Where?”

He really had been frightened senseless. “Home, of course.”

“I’m a bringer of disaster. I have no home.”

I paused and considered this.

“Then why don’t you come with me?”

“I’m a bringer of disaster,” he repeated, his voice as flat as if he were reciting from a text. “The last person who took me in was a beggar. He walked beside a river, fell in, and drowned. Before him, there was a family of three. Their house caught fire, and they burned to charred corpses. Before them…”

He paused. There was nothing in his pitch-black eyes.

“How many do you want to hear?”

I pinched his little cheek. “Don’t interrupt when adults are talking, kid.”

He fell silent.

I extended two fingers and poked him on the forehead. “I said my fate is too tough for your curse to hurt me. So, why don’t you come with me? If you don’t have a home, I’ll raise you.”

On our way past the entrance, we found the two Tianyan Sect disciples trussed up like rice dumplings, both unconscious.

I casually cut them down. They jolted awake, and their faces changed the instant they saw me. “Miss! How did you get in here?! The Demon Cult is dangerous—”

Then they looked around.

The blood pool had been overturned, the lotus dais smashed, and underlings lay scattered everywhere.

The whole scene looked as though something ten thousand times more vicious than the Demon Cult had rampaged through it.

The tall one swallowed. “Did… some ferocious beast come through here?”

I blinked and drew the child closer against me. “No idea. I don’t know anything about it. I’m frightened too.”

Once the others had gone on ahead,

I stroked the blade coiled around my waist. “Good work.”

The chain sword hummed as if to say,

Not hard work. A hard life.