When Snow Ends, Green Returns - Chapter 5

“If you are unwilling, then never—”

“I’m willing! Willing, willing!”

I hurriedly cut him off and caught his sleeve with my filthy hand.

I had no idea what a discipleship ceremony looked like in this world, so I knelt, kowtowed, and solemnly declared, “Shizun, please accept this disciple’s bow!”

Yu Xuejin sighed. “Then your relatives… Give them a proper farewell. Once you have put things in order, come with me.”

I spent the next several days burying the Ji family properly.

After some hesitation, I set memorial tablets for the body’s parents and elder brother in the Ji residence’s front hall.

I knelt staring blankly at them for a long time.

At last I kowtowed several times and said softly, “You weren’t my family, but I will find the true mastermind and avenge every one of you.”

“Rest in peace.”

I followed Yu Xuejin into Tianheng Sect.

He never made me take the sect’s entrance examination.

Instead, at the discipleship ceremony, before everyone present, he announced that he had accepted me as his one and only disciple.

The sect master: “???”

The elders: “???”

The disciples who had barely passed the examinations: “???”

In an instant, I became everyone’s target.

The elders urged Yu Xuejin to reconsider.

Countless disciples stared at me with scrutiny, doubt, and jealousy, many showing naked disdain and hostility.

A tall youth rashly spoke first, his loud voice openly aggrieved. “Immortal Venerable—this breaks the rules!

We fought through trial after trial to enter the sect. Why can he become a disciple directly—and yours, at that?”

Yu Xuejin had never accepted a disciple in ten thousand years.

Countless people revered him, joined Tianheng Sect for his sake, and hoped they would be the special one who caught his eye and entered his tutelage.

All had been disappointed.

Yu Xuejin merely glanced at the youth. “In Tianheng Sect, this venerable one is the rule.”

The youth went pale. Belatedly realizing whom he had questioned, he shrank back, fear flickering in his eyes.

Yu Xuejin’s meaning was plain.

At the summit of strength, he could accept whomever he wished. Who else had the right to comment?

Rules were for the weak.

His favoritism moved me deeply.

But wasn’t this turning me into a living target for everyone to attack?

I expected exclusion, plots, ridicule, suppression, and endless open and covert struggles.

Yet!

For five whole years, I scarcely managed to leave Clear Snow Peak!

I remained on the mountain, cultivating bitterly under Shizun almost all the time.

My rare trips down the mountain were all beside him.

Joining other disciples on sect missions to fight monsters and level up was out of the question.

Time flew. The disciples who had once resented me forgot about me long ago.

Not that I was complaining.

During those five years, I spent every day beside Shizun.

I was happy.

Very, very, very happy!!

At first, the System told me how some readers had described Yu Xuejin.

This backdrop and golden finger for the hero was not the traditional cold, aloof Immortal Venerable.

Apart from his excessively ethereal beauty, he had the temperament of a kind, harmless, honest man—steady and gentle.

After long acquaintance, he seemed as bland and dull as plain water.

However, his methods when training the hero were brutal, vicious, and utterly merciless.

Even a genius like the hero had nearly lost half his life under him.

One reader’s savage verdict: an honest man without color or flavor, yet lethally poisonous.

One word upon seeing him—run!

As far as you possibly can!

The System leafed through the original with lingering fear. 【Host, if you’re becoming Yu Xuejin’s disciple, be prepared to suffer.】

Greedily watching the immortal’s peerless figure nearby,

I was unconcerned. “Could anything be worse than those ten-odd years I suffered in the modern world?”

I calmed my pounding heart and said earnestly,

“Besides, love kills pain.”

The System: 【???】

Even after a century, those scenes remained vivid.

Yu Xuejin truly was as strict as the novel described—

He gave me three days to memorize twelve abstruse tomes as thick as modern doorstoppers;

Half a month to master a thirty-six-form sword art, each form containing seventy-two variations;

And periodically threw me into illusion arrays filled with flashing blades or dreadful environments, ordering me to escape before a deadline.

…

Others might have found it unbearable, complaining that the tasks were too harsh and Shizun too unfeeling.

But in my old world, a human experimentation organization held me for more than a decade.

Electrocution, live dissection, genetic alteration, viral infection, brain development, injections of every neurochemical imaginable…

Even with a single breath left, they forcibly dragged me back to life for more torment.