Chapter 298: [The Top of Death and Life] Man's Plan is Better than Heaven

The rain pounded on the tiles, and in the silence, Shi Mei took a sip of tea, as if she had made up her mind, and said, "Let me show you something."

He took out a rusty bronze mirror from his Qiankun pouch, the rim of which was engraved with a flying phoenix swimming in a dragon and the sun, moon and heaven.

"This mirror is called Yesterday's Mirror and it is my father's relic. My father's surname is Mu Master must have guessed it more or less. Mu Yanli and I are half-sisters and half-brothers."

After he finished, he bit his finger and dripped blood onto the mirror, which began to fog up. The mirrors gradually took shape, giving rise to clear scenes and faces

The viewpoint of the Tianyin Pavilion shows a lotus flowering in full bloom and red dragonflies flying in the pond below the viewpoint on a hot summer's day.

There is a woman in a fancy dress standing at the edge of the appartment, with her pinky finger smeared with vermilion kohl, feeding the fish with a plate of minced pastry, and the pool is therefore full of floating light. When she turns her head to speak to her attendant, she can be seen to have a pair of phoenix eyes, the pupils of which are slightly upturned, with a fierce look of beauty and arrogance.

Chu Wanning frowned slightly and looked at her, then up at Shi Mei.

"She is not my mother." Shi Mei smiled as if she could see Chu Wanning's misgivings, "She is Lin, Sister Mu's birth mother."

Shortly afterwards, a young woman wearing a silk embroidered dress and a Tianyin Pavilion maiden's bun enters the scroll from the edge of a bronze mirror, about seventeen or eighteen years old, with a delicate, gentle face. Shi Mei caresses the mirror and says, "This is my mother. She is the descendant of Song Xingyi, the God of the Blue, who was raised by Lonely Moonlit as a beast of burden and was not given a name. When she escaped, she wanted to give herself a name, but Song was a big surname for the Butterfly Bone Beauty Seats, and she didn't dare to do so, so she used the word Hua of the Dignity of Hua Bi and took a harmonic name, calling herself Hua Gui from then on."

"Return means to return home, and my mother has always wished to bring all her people back home once she learned that the Butterfly Bones could still return to the Demon Realm."

Chu Wanning notices that Lin is cold and the other maids are frightened, but Hua Gui is the only one who smiles and speaks with the utmost sincerity to her mistress.

Chu Wanning raised his eyes: "How did she get into the Tianyin Pavilion?"

"It was that Tianyin Pavilion high ranking disciple who helped her in the first place. What is written in the book is not the truth. After she escaped from Lonely Moonlit, my mother did not leave his side. They were in love at the time, and my mother begged him to find a way to release her kinsman. The disciple did as she was told, and managed to steal the plundered fire of the Tianyin Pavilion to help her."

Chu Wanning's brow rolled with a light mark, and he thought to himself that this was the case.

Some of the truths are slowly eroded by the flow of time, and no one will ever know the true nature of the past when the people of that era are old and faded.

Shi Mei paused for a moment and continued: "After two years, the Xianxia community gradually forgot about the Lonely Moonlit fire. At that time, Lady Lin of the Tianyin Pavilion gave birth to a daughter, and as Lin was a strange woman who was not good at taking care of children, she needed some quick girls to help her. That disciple took this opportunity to introduce my mother to the Pavilion. Since then my mother has been Lin's maid of honour."

Hearing this, Chu Wanning looked again at the bronze mirror, which had somehow changed to show Lin reading by the Xuan window, while Hua Gui was at her side, holding a swaddled child and coaxing it dutifully.

The scene is gentle at first glance, the mistress graceful, the handmaid faithful and the child naive.

But on reflection, it is a dark tide.

"She later took the place of Lady Lin."

"Well." Shi Mei said, "After being in Tianyin Pavilion for a long time, my mother saw the supremacy of this sect in the Xianxia realm. She was still a bit naive at the time and came up with what she thought was a better idea than going back to the demon world."

"What."

"To become the wife of the Tianyin Pavilion." Shi Mei said. Shi Mei said, "An heir of the gods, a word is worth a thousand pieces of gold, and she thought that as long as the Pavilion Master could open his mouth, no one in the Xianxia realm would ever again mutilate or at least no one would blatantly mutilate the Butterfly Bone Beauty Pavilion."

The light shifts, the patina on the mirror shades and reflexes, and it is the same viewpoint as the original one, but in the winter of an unknown year.

The lotus blossoms are withered under the stage, scattered and faded. There are no dragonflies, and no red carp lively in the pond. Gone are the bright and cheerful creatures and the cold beauty of yesteryear, Lin. In their place are flying snow, the dark scent of wax plums and the back of a woman clad in a thick white fox fur.

After a moment, a man approached and she looked back at the sound of his voice, a gorgeous face shrouded in soft, tumbled fox fur. She smiled at him, and the new snow lost its colour.

By this time Hua Gui, by some unknown means, had caused the then Lord of the Tianyin Pavilion to repudiate her original spouse, and Lin died shortly after her repudiation. She died shortly afterwards, along with the high-ranking disciple who had helped her.

She finally got what she wanted and became the Lady of the Pavilion of Tianyin, heir to the gods.

The sky is leaden grey and snowy. Hua Gui walks up to her husband and first blesses him, then smilingly reaches out and touches the hair of the little girl at his side.

"It's Mu Yanli"

Shi Mei laughs, "Yeah."

""

"Does Master not quite understand why, as the daughter of the Lin family, Sister Mu is bent on my mother and has abandoned her own birth mother instead"

Chu Wanning doesn't say anything and continues to look in the mirror.

Mu Yanli, who was at most four or five years old at the time, was picked up in Hua Gui's arms without resistance and even laughed as she wrapped her arms around Hua Gui's neck, seemingly amused by her stepmother.

Shi Mei said, "Lin is by nature anxious and silent, and she has little affection for children. After Sister Mu was born, her condition became more and more serious, to the point where she would hurt people or harm herself. On one occasion, when my mother was not in the house to watch, she took a pair of scissors to the back of her hand and poked four or five holes in it when my mother came back. She was the one who saved Sister Mu, who was already crying tears."

"A birth mother who would have stabbed herself to death, and a Sister who grew up loving and caring for her. Sister Wood chose the latter."

The scene shifts to a window with a thin layer of frost and a red blessing of longevity. It must have been just after the Chinese New Year one year, and Hua Gui is sitting at a small rosewood table writing.

Beside her sit two children, a boy and a girl, the girl aloof and cool, the boy with gentle eyes, Hua Binan and Mu Yanli as children.

"All right." Hua Gui smiled as she picked up the paper and blew on it, smiling, "Look at your mother's copy of the Drug Clan Elixir, it's good, isn't it?"

Mu Yanli, who was still speaking in a milky voice at the time, said in a sharp voice, "Of course Mother's writing is beautiful."

Shi Mei, who is even younger and can't even nurse, just sits and smacks her fingers with interest as she watches the two of them laugh and play.

"My father was so absorbed in the practice of magic that he neglected my siblings, and it was she who taught my sister and I our initiation." Looking in the mirror, Shi Mei recalls, "She taught us to read and write, and taught us the most basic of small spells."

"She can do spells."

"Only a little." Shi Mei paused, "A fake trick to scare the common folk, and I'm afraid I can't even beat the worst of the monks."

""

"But she is willing to stay with us, to be with us day and night." With a sigh, Shi Mei's eyes straightened a little, "No matter how scheming she is, how she treats outsiders. But she treats me and Sister Mu with the kindness of her heart and soul."

The scene on the mirror spins quickly, as if time is passing like water through the fingers. In this rush of many scenes, Mu Yanli and Shi Mei grow up.

And in the process, the siblings were guarded by Hua Gui almost every step of the way.

On the night of the thunderstorm, she lulled Mu Yanli to sleep.

On a sunny mid-summer afternoon, she feeds Shi Mei with red bean and barley soup.

All this, little by little.

"Later, when I reached the age of enlightenment, my father personally taught me the spells of Tianyin Pavilion, but I was too dull to learn them. He was very disappointed and I also felt that I was a loser and a mediocrity at that time After all, Sister Mu had successfully built her foundation when she was eight years old. And I had put in all the effort, but I didn't even have the slightest sense of qi."

The image shows little Shi Mei sitting at the edge of a pond, a smaller sword resting on her tiny lap.

Hua Gui walks across the driftwood bridge with a frown on her face as she trails her long, winding dress. Her eyes darted around and found the lone child, her anxious expression finally relaxing.

She walked up to him, leaned over and said something to him, then took Shi Mei in her arms and turned back towards the end of the garden.

"Having spent a lot of time with Lonely Moonlit, she has seen many people with weak spiritual powers who have been able to get a place in the Xianxia realm through the practice of Drug Clan." Shi Mei says, "She didn't just knock everything down because Lonely Moonlit had mistreated the Beauty Seat. She convinced my father to start me on the path of Drug Clan from then on."

When Shi Mei was talking about the private love affairs between men and women, Chu Wanning knew in general that Hua Gui was a man of means, but he didn't know enough to say exactly what it was.

And when he heard it, he suddenly felt clearly the sharpness of this woman

Lonely Moonlit was like a nightmare from hell for her, consuming her for the first half of her life. Anyone who didn't hate her to the core would have been disgusted by Drug Clan. But she knew exactly what Drug Clan was, what she needed and how to do it.

She has an extremely calm eye and is never impulsive, even if her enmity runs deep.

"She has always been methodical in her planning. Taking one step, she may have thought of the hundred steps that follow. So in addition to looking after me and Sister Wood, she had room to go around and gather the whereabouts of her people and then hide them from the world and give them shade."

But it is clear that the status of the Butterfly Bone Beauty Seat remained unchanged afterwards. Moreover, Chu Wanning recalls that this Lady Hua passed away at a very early age. There must be some hidden agenda here.

Chu Wanning had a vague suspicion in his mind in relation to all the rumours about the descendants of the Butterfly Bones and the Gods. He asked, "And then Lady Hua's identity was revealed."

Shi Mei did not answer immediately, but his pupils glowed with an overly bright light that at first glance was sharp, like bitter hatred. But on closer inspection, it looked like a tidal wave of sadness.

"It wasn't supposed to fall through." He said, "Father had little brain and would not have sensed anything different about his mother. But he is still a descendant of the gods, even if the blood of the gods is already minimal in him, he still has some natural senses."

He glanced down at the glasses and the scene had shifted to the bedchamber of the Master of the Pavilion at Tianyin, where a man with slightly mottled temples was languishing on his deathbed.

"When I was nine years old, this man became seriously and strangely ill, and the best doctors were brought in to see him without finding out the cause of his illness."

Shi Mei said, smiling coldly, "In fact, knowing the inside story, the reasoning is clear. He is the heir of a god, and my mother is the heir of a demon. After the battle of the gods and demons, the demon daddy put a curse that from now on, for a thousand generations, there must be no union of gods and demons, and those who violate it should die."

"It was because of this ancient curse that my father's strange illness was born, but because he did not know about it. And what about the gods, perhaps out of pity, perhaps because they wanted to embarrass the demon lord. In any case, one night a divine ruler entrusted his father with a dream and told him the original story. And he said that if he wanted to live, he needed to make a clean break with the demon lady."

Chu Wanning looked at Shi Mei's somewhat grimacing face and waited for him to say more.

He knew that things were never as simple as a clean break.

Shi Mei said, "When I woke up from my dream, my father was furious. Tianyin Pavilion was always ready for the wind and the rain, and his position in the Xianxia Realm was so great that everyone respected him as a god. But this woman, a slaughterable pile of flesh, a double-cultivation censer, actually schemed him, used him, and lied to him."

""

"She even almost got him killed with her. What a vicious thing to do. So."

Shi Mei's voice was raspy, even if she had suppressed it well.

He squeezed his teacup, which was already cold, but he had not finished it. In his thoughts, he pushed too hard and the cup burst with a loud bang.

Tea splashing around

The mirror is also splashed with tea, and the image is blurred with amber tea juice. The man on the sickbed can be seen vaguely summoning Hua Gui.

He stepped off the bed barefoot, pretended to have nothing to do with her, chatted with her, walked smilingly to the door, turned his back on Hua Gui and clicked the door shut and locked it.

The man turned his head back towards his wife. Out of the distorted mirror light and water stains emerged a face with a leopard's change of face.

Shi Mei shuddered suddenly and slammed the mirror down violently in reverse, turning her back on it and not looking at it again.

The backs of his hands were sinewy, like the roots of a gnarled tree, and fear and hatred pulsed through every vein.

After a few moments, he buried his face in his palms. The voice seemed extremely tired.

"He"

The opening of the mouth stops after one word.

"The animal" seemed to have a flood of hatred to give vent to and a thousand words to spit out, but a thousand horses and armies were fighting for the throat, and you didn't know which sentence to say first, so they were dumb.

Shi Mei slowed down and slowed down, he should have seen this bronze mirror many times, but after so long, after so many years, he still hated it.

He slowly stopped shaking. Eventually, all this hate became a seemingly banal sentence.

"That day, my divine father, ate my mother alive."