“Wait.”

Nana Toki caught the girl’s sleeve. Her voice was gravel, her throat a brazier burning low. Even a sip of air felt like needles in winter wind.

“What is it, Senior Sister?”

The girl in the blue robe clasped Nana’s hand. She sank back to the bed’s edge like a leaf settling on still water. She lifted a long-cooled cup of tea, steam long gone like a faded cloud, and offered it over.

“How long have I been lying here?”

Nana took the cup. One swallow was rain on embers, the fire in her throat easing like dusk settling over a ridge.

“Almost a week, Senior Sister.”

She accepted the empty cup, then gripped Nana’s small hand, worry written on her face like ink on fresh snow. “The Sect Master’s tournament is soon. After what Yiling Shen did, you fell to Qi Refining Fifth Layer. How are we supposed to face it?”

Tournament? Qi Refining?

Did I cross into a cultivation world?

Nana stared at the blue-robed girl, and a spike of pain stabbed her skull like a shard of ice. Four stark characters flared across her mind: Shuiqin Lin.

Then the world’s memories poured in like a flood breaking a dam.

This was a girls’ love, female-protagonist cultivation tale.

Wait.

Girls’ love?

Nana froze, bewilderment washing over her like fog. For a blink, even the headache vanished like mist in sun.

What kind of wild world is this?

System: “...”

Host, could you not cut off the plot upload without anesthesia?

Fine, fine, you go on.

The heroine Yiling Shen was a Great Vehicle Stage powerhouse in her original world, one foot already on the Immortal Realm’s jade steps. She failed her ascension tribulation, her body turning to ash like burnt paper, her Nascent Soul reincarnating into the mortal Shen clan’s Second Miss—same name, same face. Then she washed marrow and bone, and climbed toward the Immortal Realm again.

Since it’s a rebirth of a powerhouse, of course she starts at the roots like a seed under frost.

As a child, a Cloudpeak Sect recruiter tested her and found a single water spiritual root. In the cultivation world, water roots are “useless weeds”—slow to grow, fussy to tend, a stream that crawls instead of roars.

Most women with water roots get treated as cauldrons by the big sect’s old monsters, tools for cultivation like stoves that only burn.

But our heroine didn’t bow to that wind.

In her past life, she’d also had a water root. She knew the early stage was dull as counting raindrops, but once you formed a Golden Core and birthed a Nascent Soul, a water root became a surging river that outpaced every other stream.

The Cloudpeak Sect Master took her in as a closed-door disciple—on paper a disciple, in truth a prepared cauldron. The title was a silk screen; the intent, a hidden blade.

The heroine knew the game. Under the Sect Master’s umbrella like a great pine’s shade, she thrived in the sect and nurtured her own faction like bamboo multiplying after rain.

If you want a faction and you want your glow to eclipse the moon, you need foils. You need cannon fodder. You need stars to circle your sun.

The original host, Feng Luo Luo, was Third Elder Shrine Water’s personal disciple, born with an innate fire root, a torch in daylight.

She was a rich family’s eldest daughter from the lower realm, raised spoiled and proud, the brightest talent among Cloudpeak’s juniors, a comet across a dark sky.

She should’ve been a darling, a moon held by countless stars—but the heroine cut in like a knife through silk, and Feng Luo Luo loathed her like sand in the eye.

If there was no trouble, she made some. If there was a chance to provoke, she took it, throwing herself at the heroine like a moth to flame, dying right on cue.

In the original plot, she wanted to give the newcomer a hard slap of “welcome,” but the heroine schooled her like spring rain taming dust. She tried to steal a chicken and lost the rice; her cultivation slipped like a cliffside rockfall.

This world’s ladder has nine great steps: Qi Refining, Foundation Establishment, Golden Core, Nascent Soul, Spirit Void, Body Condensation, Cave Void, Great Vehicle, True Transformation. Qi Refining has ten layers at the start, like stairs up a watchtower.

After that, each realm up to Great Vehicle splits into nine sub-stages, like beads on a string.

Feng Luo Luo was at Qi Refining Tenth Layer, a breath away from Foundation Establishment. After the heroine’s “lesson,” she fell so far even outer-sect guards could kick dirt on her shoes.

Naturally, her hate for the heroine burned like oil on fire.

Luckily, she had a master who truly cared. Her master went to the Sect Master, begged for spirit medicine, and pulled her cultivation back like a fisherman hauling a net.

She was spoiled, yes, but soft-hearted too. To repay her master, she trained like a drawn bow, hoping to shine in the upcoming sect tournament like a lantern in a night market. Yet someone stirred the mud. In her match against the heroine, a hidden hand interfered, and the heroine took a grave wound.

The culprit was caught red-handed and claimed Feng Luo Luo ordered it.

But she hadn’t. She swore and wept, yet who would believe a sparrow over a phoenix?

Word reached the Sect Master. He raged like thunder. He swore to cripple Feng Luo Luo and take her life.

His own cauldron needed guarding like a pearl in a clamshell—who dared scratch it?

Even Feng Luo Luo’s master despised such low tricks. Yet still, that master shielded her like a willow in wind, bending to protect, never breaking.

In the end, Feng Luo Luo lost her cultivation, left with nothing but one thin life like a candle guttering in draft.

Without strength, her status dropped below a gatekeeper’s shadow. Her name sank like a stone in a pond.

Her hatred for the heroine became a black well with no bottom.

You’d think that was the end. But the grand sect assembly that followed cut the thread.

At the once-in-a-century Demon-Subjugation Assembly, a demon infiltrator broke a demonic seal under Cloudpeak’s roots. A vast demonic vortex rose like a black hurricane and tried to swallow the sect whole.

Feng Luo Luo, powerless, was a leaf in a torrent. Her master saved her and took demonic taint, her cultivation falling like frost-struck leaves, her essence wounded like a cracked jar.

Other sect scoundrels schemed, and her master perished in the seal’s raging currents like a lantern snuffed by storm.

Feng Luo Luo crawled out alive, but her fate was worse than death.

They branded her the true hand behind the broken seal, “on the heroine’s orders,” and every sect carved her flesh with a thousand cuts, a punishment like winter knives.

Her name stank for ten thousand years like rot in a shrine.

Even in death, her body found no peace. They hung her at Cloudpeak’s summit, a warning like a crow on a spear. Her clan in the lower realm was dragged into it and slaughtered root and branch, a field burned to ash.

It was misery past misery, a night without dawn.

Feng Luo Luo hated the heroine, hated the slander that drowned her. If not for the heroine’s arrival, she’d never have fallen so far, her parents never dragged into the abyss.

But more than hate, she regretted. She regretted picking fights out of vanity and dragging her clan into the mud. She regretted her weakness, hiding behind her master when the seal broke, letting that master die without knowing why.

So she had one wish.

Live well in this world. Be filial to her master. Protect her master. Keep her safe like a lamp behind glass.

“Senior Sister, what’s wrong?”

Seeing Nana bow her head, brow knotted like a tightened cord, the younger disciple, Shuiqin Lin, stepped close, worry rising like steam, hands ready to check for any hurt.

“I’m fine. Let me rest a bit and I’ll be okay.”

She gently moved her junior’s hand away like setting a bird free. She rubbed her throbbing temples, a tide pulsing behind the eyes, and spoke softly. “Go tell Master I’m safe. Don’t let her keep fretting.”

In the memories, this blue-robed junior was her master’s second disciple, entering later than Nana, always respectful like a younger willow beside an older pine.

During the Demon-Subjugation Assembly, Shuiqin Lin begged the Sect Master to spare the original host. The Sect Master branded her a demon accomplice and punished her alongside, sweeping snow from his own doorstep by burning the whole street.

That guilt sat on the heart like a stone.

“Alright. Take care then, Senior Sister. I’ll bring you some rice porridge later, warm as a hearth.”

“Mm. Thank you.”

Shuiqin Lin refilled Nana’s cup, clear tea shining like pale jade. She lit a stick of refreshing incense, thin smoke curling like a dragon whisker. Then she rose and left, footsteps quiet as falling petals.

Sigh. This world’s difficulty feels like a cliff face.

Watching her junior’s retreating back, Nana set down the cup, melancholy like drizzle.

In a cultivation world, who can guard someone for a lifetime? If someone stronger lives a thousand years and you live a hundred, your people turn to loess while she still stands like a mountain. How am I supposed to complete a “protect forever” quest?

Judging by my junior’s words, the plot now sits right at the point where the heroine knocked my cultivation back like a wave wiping tracks.

My master has double roots, water and wood, majoring in wood, her strength at Nascent Soul Sixth Stage, a pine old and tall. I haven’t even reached Foundation Establishment—I’m a chick under eaves.

That’s... a joke.

As for the lost cultivation—small matter. According to the plot, Master will beg medicine for me, I’ll recover, then step into Foundation Establishment like a seed breaking soil.

We can talk training later.

But this girls’ love power-fantasy...

What even is that?

Yuri?

Do people still write yuri in a female-power story? Is this the author’s guilty pleasure, a plum hidden in rice?

Just thinking of it gave Nana a shiver like cold water down the spine. In this world, she had better keep some distance from the ladies, like a cat from a bath.

She figured her orientation was “normal.” She didn’t hate same-sex love, but it still made her skin crawl a little, like an ill-fitting robe.

System: “Don’t worry. With your personality, even if Heaven grants you peach-blossom luck, no one will like you.”

Nana Toki: “?”

“You trashy System, are you questioning my inner charm?”

“Aren’t you the one who boasts your suitors could circle the earth?”

“So what if they could?” Nana bristled like a cat puffing up.

“This System still doesn’t believe it.” Especially after the last world.

Nana: “...”

Nutcase. Don’t believe me then.

She rested a while longer. Then she lifted the now-cold tea and downed it like a swallow of winter river, clapped her hands, and stood.

She combed through the memories again, checking every thread like counting beads. Once sure, she headed for the door like a traveler stepping onto a new road.

Sitting here is moss on stone. Better to learn the sect’s terrain now, so when the sky falls, I can grab Master and Junior Sister and run like a wild deer.

She pushed the door open. Sunlight speared in like bright spears, and she raised a hand to shield her eyes. Even after days of rest, that sudden blaze made her head swim like a boat in chop.

A cultivation world, huh... it feels like it could be wonderful, like dawn on a high peak.