Severing Ties: The Sect Regrets My Departure

Chapter 246: The Backlash of Misfortune, Abandoning Senior Sister to Flee for Her Life

The Origin’s attraction? Was she truly going to do all the bloody work just to hand the prize to someone else?! The moment the realization struck her, Qin Meran froze in place. Then, a volcanic, irrational fury erupted in her chest.

“Damn it!” she shrieked. “That Dao Rhyme is mine! I don’t care who is inside that pavilion, no one takes what is mine!”

With a furious roar, Qin Meran shot into the sky, rocketing after the two Divine-grade Dao Rhymes that were being drawn away by the Origin Dao Rhyme. Those belonged to her teacher! Naturally, a teacher’s legacy should be inherited by his disciple. More importantly, she was already suffering the karmic backlash of the curse to get them! If she walked away empty-handed now, she would go completely insane.

But… the moment she launched herself into the air, a lethal, suffocating sense of crisis spiked in her mind.

Instinct took over. She violently twisted her body to the side.

BOOM! A terrifying Spiritual Qi cannonball the size of a carriage screamed past, missing her shoulder by a hair’s breadth. The sheer kinetic force of its passing tore at her robes. If she hadn’t dodged at that exact millisecond, she would have been vaporized.

Every single head in the courtyard snapped toward the Ten Thousand Treasures Pavilion barricade.

More specifically, they stared at a pale, trembling shop assistant standing behind one of the heavy warship cannons. The crowd exchanged bewildered looks. Was this guy a madman? Did a mere shopkeep really just try to snipe a Peak Master of the Azure Mystic Sacred Land in broad daylight?

Even Wan Xiaobei looked stunned.

Before she could demand an explanation, the shop assistant dropped to his knees, his face devoid of color. “I didn’t do it on purpose!” he wailed, pointing frantically at the smoking barrel. “The cannon misfired! I tried to lock the swivel, but the muzzle slipped, and it just happened to point at Fairy Qin! I swear on my life, it was an accident! Fairy Qin, Pavilion Master, you have to believe me!”

The poor man was sweating so profusely he looked like he had been dragged from a river, utterly terrified that his slip-up would bring apocalyptic doom upon his head.

Seeing him practically wetting himself in fear, Qin Meran’s rational mind accepted the excuse. Heavy ship cannons were designed to be bolted to a warship’s hull and integrated into a massive grand formation. Ripping them out and jury-rigging them on a cobblestone street made them notoriously unstable. A misfire was statistically probable.

Snorting dismissively, she ignored the pathetic mortal and resumed her ascent toward the sky.

Swish! She had barely moved ten feet when a shaft wreathed in chilling, dark light and pulsating Talisman runes shot out of the distant melee, curving directly toward her face.

She violently jerked her head back. The arrow grazed her cheek, the razor-sharp aura slicing a thin, bloody line across her flawless skin.

Qin Meran’s eyes burned with homicidal rage. She recognized that dark light. It was a Four Seas God-Piercing Arrow.

She whipped her head toward the Four Seas Gang. They had been thoroughly cowed ever since they realized “Ning Yuan” was actually an Azure Mystic Peak Master. Even after she murdered Yin Wenshu right in front of them, they hadn’t dared to flee, instead awkwardly pretending to help her fight the White Jade Tower to avoid her wrath.

Who among them had the absolute sheer audacity to shoot her in the back?!

Before she could unleash her fury, a gang member a hundred yards away threw himself onto the ground, bashing his forehead against the dirt. “Gang Leader! Fairy Qin! Forgive me! It wasn’t on purpose!” he screamed, his voice cracking with panic. “I aimed at a White Jade Tower cultivator, I swear! But the stabilization Talisman on the shaft spontaneously detonated mid-flight! It knocked the arrow completely off course! I deserve death ten thousand times over, but I would never, ever dare to ambush you!”

The man was whiter than a sheet, paralyzed by the sheer horror of accidentally shooting a supreme cultivator.

The narration of his excuse rang true. The Four Seas God-Piercing Arrows relied on cheap, mass-produced Talismans to boost their lethality. They were powerful, but notoriously defective.

Qin Meran ground her teeth together so hard she nearly cracked a molar. She didn’t have time to butcher him now. She let out another cold hmph and continued her climb toward the Dao Rhymes.

But the universe wasn’t finished.

“Ahhhh! Hot! Hot!”

Down in the White Jade Tower camp, an elite cultivator suddenly began flailing. A Lightning Summoning Talisman he had been holding in reserve had inexplicably burst into spontaneous combustion. Terrified of having his hand blown off, he frantically threw the burning parchment away, deliberately aiming for an empty patch of sky to avoid hitting his allies.

The moment the Talisman left his hand, the spell triggered.

High above, the clouds parted, and a blinding bolt of heavenly lightning crashed down without a shred of warning.

It aimed precisely for the activated Talisman.

Normally, this wouldn’t have harmed anyone. But by a stroke of absolutely astronomical coincidence, the spot the cultivator had randomly chosen to throw the Talisman was situated directly beneath Qin Meran’s current trajectory.

The heavenly lightning possessed no sense of irony, and it certainly didn’t care if Qin Meran was an innocent bystander. It simply took the shortest path to its target—which happened to be straight through the top of her skull.

Qin Meran looked up just in time to see the sky turn white.

No—! Her soul nearly left her body. She desperately tried to throw herself backward, but human reflexes could not outrace lightning. She had moved barely an inch before the bolt slammed into her.

KABOOM! A thunderous explosion shook the heavens, followed by a blinding flash that forced the entire battlefield to shield their eyes.

When the light faded, a collective gasp echoed across the courtyard.

Hovering in the air, emitting thick plumes of black smoke, was Qin Meran. Her face was covered in soot, her pristine robes were scorched, and the flawless, silky black hair she had spent decades cultivating was now a violently frizzy, charred bird’s nest that stuck out in every direction.

She looked less like an elegant fairy and more like a deranged madwoman who had just crawled out of a chimney.

Why me?! Paranoia finally pierced through her rage. A deep, unsettling wrongness settled in her gut. She glanced at the two Divine-grade Dao Rhymes, which were now fully merging into the Origin Dao Rhyme, then looked down at the chaotic battlefield.

She needed to get out of the sky. The open air was a shooting gallery. She needed the safety and stability of solid ground.

Gritting her teeth, she abandoned the chase and plummeted toward the earth.

The moment her boots touched the cobblestones, a heavy sigh of relief escaped her lips. Solid ground. Safety.

But before she could fully exhale, the ancient stones beneath her feet—having survived thousands of years of wear and tear—suddenly groaned. Without a single warning crack, the street simply dissolved into dust.

A massive, forty-foot sinkhole opened up directly beneath her, swallowing her whole.

Normally, a cultivator of her caliber could effortlessly fly out of a pit. With Shi Siling’s power-sharing art coursing through her veins, she could have survived a fall into a bottomless abyss. But the universe was nothing if not thorough.

This was Cloud Firmament City, the ultimate sanctuary of Rogue Cultivators. The foundational restriction arrays woven into the earth were absolute. The second she fell below street level, the city’s suppression wards slammed down on her, completely severing her connection to her Spiritual Qi.

Stripped of her cultivation, the grand, scheming Peak Master of Ink Scroll Peak was reduced to a mortal. She had to literally dig her fingernails into the dirt and physically drag herself up the sheer walls of the crater, grunting and panting with exertion.

By the time she hauled herself over the edge and collapsed onto the street, she was a pathetic sight. Covered head-to-toe in mud, face blackened by soot, and sporting a hair-raising afro of charred frizz, she looked utterly destitute.

“What… what is happening to me?” she stammered, her voice trembling with rising hysteria. “How can anyone be this unlucky?!”

Then, the realization hit her like a physical blow.

“The ‘Zha’ Character Rune! It’s the backlash! The curse of absolute misfortune!”

She wasn’t an idiot. In the world of cultivation, bad luck happened. Accidents were a part of war. But a cannon misfire, a defective homing arrow, a spontaneously combusting Talisman, and a random, geologically impossible sinkhole? All within the span of sixty seconds?!

And wait—she looked up and froze.

Across the street, a second Ten Thousand Treasures Pavilion cannon suddenly groaned. The heavy iron gears snapped, the barrel swung wildly on its broken pivot, and locked dead onto her chest.

“Immortal, save me!”

Qin Meran didn’t hesitate. She threw her dignity to the wind and bolted toward the Listening-to-Rain Pavilion, desperate for Gu Xiu to dispel the curse.

But the moment her foot hit the pavement, CRACK! A second bolt of lightning fell from the clear blue sky, striking the ground inches from her toes.

Swish! Swish! Swish! Up above, three stray arrows violently altered their trajectories, plunging downward like heat-seeking missiles aimed at her back.

Qin Meran’s face turned a sickening shade of green.

She looked at the endless row of cannons at the Ten Thousand Treasures Pavilion. She looked at the hundreds of drawn bows in the Four Seas Gang. She looked at the thousands of highly explosive Talismans clutched in the hands of the White Jade Tower cultivators.

Run! Her internal monologue shattered into pure panic. She didn’t know how the “Zha” Rune worked, but she knew one absolute truth: as long as she stayed on this battlefield, the universe was going to use every single weapon here to orchestrate her gruesome, accidental death.

She had to leave. Now.

Without a single glance backward, Qin Meran spun on her heel and sprinted in the opposite direction. She moved with a speed born of absolute terror, a blur of soot and frizz that vanished past the city gates before anyone could even blink. She didn’t stop to breathe until she was miles outside Cloud Firmament City.

Her escape was decisive. It was efficient. It was completely cowardly.

Meanwhile, high above the city, the battle raged on.

Shi Siling hung in the air, her breathing ragged, her pristine robes soaked in her own blood. She had pushed herself to the absolute brink, fighting four Void Refining experts simultaneously to buy her beloved junior sister enough time to secure the Dao Rhymes.

She parried a lethal strike, wiping blood from her mouth as she glanced down to check on Qin Meran’s progress.

The street was empty.

Shi Siling blinked, her stoic facade cracking into an expression of utter bewilderment.

Did… did Fifth Junior Sister just abandon me and run away?!