When Yun Xi heard those words, she quickly smoothed her expression, coughed lightly, and replied,
"Nothing at all."
Ancestor Hao Yi smiled in an unassuming manner and said,
"The technique I cultivate comes from the Immortal Realm. I found it in an ancient secret realm. To ascend, one must complete nine cycles of cultivation. But each cycle requires discarding all cultivation and starting over from the beginning. With each cycle, however, my lifespan increases."
The moment Yun Xi heard this, she understood. Just thinking about it made her shiver. Such a method of cultivation was close to self-torment. To voluntarily disperse all one's cultivation was no small matter. If something went wrong, one could cripple themselves entirely. No wonder Ancestor Hao Yi would disappear from time to time without explanation.
Yun Xi held her tongue for a while, but in the end could not help herself. She lowered her voice and asked, "Ancestor, if an enemy were to discover the timing of your dispersals, wouldn't that put you in grave danger?"
Each time Ancestor Hao Yi discarded her cultivation, she would be no stronger than a mortal. Even a simple Qi Refining cultivator could strike her down.
Ancestor Hao Yi gave a small smile. "When I disperse my cultivation is entirely up to me. The speed and timing of rebuilding it are also under my control. For at least ten thousand years, no one has ever managed to strike me during my weakest moments."
Yun Xi nodded, her curiosity satisfied. She then presented the jade slip she had recorded to Ancestor Hao Yi.
The Ancestor skimmed through it quickly, her expression calm at first. But to someone familiar with her, it was clear that behind her eyes a storm was brewing.
Yun Xi, sharp as ever, immediately sensed her foul mood. She did not speak further, simply stood in place and waited for the Ancestor to question her.
Ancestor Hao Yi finally lifted her hand and stored the jade slip away into her bracelet. Then she spoke. "Other than me, have you told anyone else about this discovery?"
"No. This junior was concerned there might still be spies hidden within the Hive. I checked every message cautiously. In order not to draw suspicion, I reviewed all the filtered-out messages from the past five hundred years one by one."
Her voice carried careful restraint.
Ancestor Hao Yi gave a satisfied nod. She had not misjudged this little girl—bright and quick to grasp the heart of things.
"Then tell me, what do you think the evil cultivators are truly plotting?"
Yun Xi hesitated briefly, then answered, "Ancestor, based on the messages I gathered, I believe the evil cultivators are deliberately suppressing the Wei Yu Realm. More specifically, they are targeting the realm's most promising geniuses.
From what I found, in the last five hundred years, nearly every sect has lost one or two disciples who had begun to rise to prominence. Yet these so-called prodigies all died prematurely. Their deaths were varied—some fell in secret realms, some perished over petty disputes, some during duels where they lost control. Though the causes differ, not a single one was slain by the hand of an evil cultivator. It feels intentional, as if their deaths were being staged to look like anything but a targeted strike.
The loss of these talents inevitably stirred conflict: between sects and loose cultivators, between sects themselves, even between sects and great cultivation clans. These disputes escalated into unrest across the Wei Yu Realm. And once chaos broke out, the evil cultivators seized the chance to fan the flames, to divide and provoke, sparing no effort to plunge the realm into turmoil."
The darkness in Ancestor Hao Yi's gaze deepened. Her voice grew weighty. "What else? Keep speaking."
Yun Xi pressed on. "I also noticed that whenever a prodigy fell, there was always another 'outstanding disciple' ready to rise up and take their place as the sect's new leading figure. But after about a century, their cultivation speed would stall, their brilliance dim. They faded into obscurity, becoming objects of pity in the eyes of others.
Ancestor, I find this far too convenient, almost staged. And when I traced it deeper, I discovered that these so-called successors always had ties to elders of their sect or clan. Either they were of the same bloodline, or they were the disciple of an elder's disciple, or connected through marriage.
The exceptions were disciples taken from the mortal world, without backing or connections. These few managed to rise swiftly on their own. But when examined closely, their breakthroughs always coincided with lucky finds—rare treasures, stray pills, or abandoned artifacts that allowed them to surge ahead unnaturally.
That is all I could uncover. I have already compiled a list of every disciple within Haoran Sect linked to Ancestor Hao Ting. As for the other sects and great clans, I could not investigate deeply, so my conclusions remain speculative."
She finished her report and stood quietly, waiting.
Though Yun Xi called her words mere speculation, she was certain of her conclusions. They came from carefully sifting through tens of millions of pieces of intelligence across five centuries. Only because the relevant information had been deliberately suppressed or buried had no one else seen the pattern.
But she was an outsider, not a native of the Wei Yu Realm. From her vantage point, the connections stood out clearly. If she had been a native cultivator, she too would have accepted it as natural when a fallen genius was quickly replaced. After all, in the cultivation world no one was truly irreplaceable. Nor would she have thought to question these replacements, because strength was all that mattered.
And as for these so-called successors later falling into decline, that too seemed normal. Every cultivator faced bottlenecks and setbacks. To assume otherwise would be naïve. Yet by reviewing their entire cultivation histories, Yun Xi had unearthed a disturbing consistency.
Perhaps others in the past five centuries had glimpsed this pattern, but either they dismissed it, it was concealed, or they were unable to follow the trail.
What troubled Yun Xi most was that a tiny fraction of these successors did in fact reach the pinnacle of the Wei Yu Realm and ascend to the Spirit Realm. But once they ascended, she could no longer trace their fate.
Ancestor Hao Yi stayed silent for a long time before finally speaking. "Your findings are significant. I will need further evidence to confirm them. Once they are verified, I will inform the Divine Transformation Zūnzhě across the domains. Until then, you will remain in the Hive and continue screening intelligence."
"Yes, Ancestor."
Then, without warning, Ancestor Hao Yi asked, "Would you be interested in joining Umbral Rain?"
Yun Xi blinked, stunned. She hesitated before asking, "Ancestor, what exactly is Umbral Rain?"
A mysterious smile played on Ancestor Hao Yi's lips. "'Umbral Night' was the codename chosen by Haoran Sect's founding Ancestor. 'Mysterious Rain' is mine."
Yun Xi's eyes flew wide. She blurted out, "What? How is that possible? The Sect Master said Umbral Rain was Haoran Sect's strongest and final line of defense, an organization that only intervened rarely, but never once failed. How could it be just the two of you? And now, only you remain?"
Seeing Yun Xi's incredulous look on the face of "Yu Ling Zūnzhě," Ancestor Hao Yi looked thoroughly pleased. She chuckled. "Haoran Sect's name stands for righteous energy, but my Senior Brother believed that where there is light, there must also be shadow. That was why he called himself Umbral Night. My codename was chosen at random, it carries no special meaning.
"The codenames were only ever meant to make it easier for the two of us to handle matters that could not be managed openly. After all, we were from a righteous sect."
She ended with a sly glance that clearly said, "You understand," and Yun Xi's admiration for her Ancestor shattered into pieces.
===
Hou Yi's technique is somewhat similar with the Demon Sovereign's from Yun Jin's story (Troublemaker's Guide to Immortality)
-
===
Hey guys, just a quick heads-up about my recent activity. I've actually been caught up in a totally different project—fonts. Yeah, fonts.
So, on my Android phone I've been using Droid Sans since like ever. I used to be on Roboto back in my college days (around 2017/2018 when I got my first phone), but somewhere around then I switched over and just never looked back. Even when I change phones, I always reinstall Droid Sans because I've gotten way too comfortable with it.
Recently, I suddenly thought: "What if I make this my default system font on my laptop too?" Sounds simple, right? Well… nope. The font is smaller than the default, which meant I had to spend two whole days adjusting things—editing CSS through Stylus so websites like YouTube, ChatGPT, Claude, and Deepseek, etc, don't look microscopic, plus tweaking buttons, menus, and other elements. Windows Explorer was easy (thanks to Advanced System Font Changer), but websites were another story.
On top of that, Droid Sans doesn't support certain characters out of the box—no Hanzi, no Katakana, no Hangul. And don't get me started on Pinyin diacritics, which looked totally messed up since some glyphs were pulled straight from Calibri and slapped on without adjustments. The result? Absolute chaos.
I've been patching it together by pairing Droid Sans with Microsoft JhengHei for Hanzi, which looks way better now. But the real headache is editing and building the Pinyin glyphs manually so they actually match the font style. As I'm writing this (Sept 18 at night), I'm still knee-deep in glyph editing. My brain is fried, and all I can think about is fonts instead of translations.
Hopefully, I'll finish all this by tomorrow and get back to translating. If not… it'll mean I've gone four days without translate anything, which feels super long to me. Normally that's enough time to crank out a bunch of chapters, so yeah, I'm kinda anxious about it.
Anyway, I think I'll share some screenshots of the "disaster phase" (my cursed ChatGPT/Claude/Deepseek screens) and the CSS edits I made on the comment section. Wish me luck—I really love this font, but wow, it's been a ride.
so