Severing Ties: The Sect Regrets My Departure

Chapter 248: You Say, You Are the Master of the Listening-to-Rain Pavilion?

“It has been a while, Fellow Daoist Shi.”

The words barely left Gu Xiu’s lips before the air fractured. The Carefree Jade Pendant and the Du Xian Sword, previously guarding the shattered porcelain, materialized before him. They hovered with lethal intent, thrumming like drawn bowstrings, ready to carve into flesh at his command.

A short distance away, the little black monkey and Sui Xing coiled their muscles, radiating a suffocating killing intent. They recognized the encroaching predator. The woman stepping into the courtyard possessed a crushing gravity. Despite her graying hair and the heavy crust of drying blood painting her robes, the four spirits dared not blink. This was Shi Siling, the absolute apex predator beneath the Qingxuan Supreme.

Yet, Shi Siling remained utterly blind to their hostility. Her gaze was driven like a nail into Gu Xiu. Disbelief cracked her usually impenetrable mask. “Gu Xiu? Is it truly you?”

“It is.” Gu Xiu offered a glacial nod.

“Why are you here?” The confusion in her voice thickened. “What ties do you have to the master of this domain?”

“The master of this place…”

Before Gu Xiu could carve the rest of the sentence into the silence, Shi Siling’s eyes dilated. The tectonic plates of her reality shifted. “I feel the pulse of Spiritual Qi within you. You… you can cultivate again?”

“I can.”

The single syllable had barely fallen when Shi Siling blurred. She breached the distance instantly, her pale, jade-like fingers clamping onto Gu Xiu’s forearm like a vise. Gu Xiu’s brow furrowed by a fraction of an inch; in his palm, a sliver of finger bone silently shifted into a lethal grip.

He halted the strike. The woman beside him manifested no murderous intent. Instead, she drove a surge of Spiritual Qi into his meridians, prying into his physiology.

A heartbeat later, she gasped, the sound tearing through the heavy air. “It is true! You have reignited the dead ashes! Although you only stand at Foundation Establishment, you have actually shattered your ruin and rebuilt your foundation? You walk the path again!”

“This is a myth made flesh. Your Dao platform crumbled into dust. Your Qi Sea and Dantian were annihilated, your very source of Qi bled dry! There should be no earth left for the seed of cultivation to take root!”

“How… how did you forge this impossible reality?”

Shi Siling was a creature of absolute arrogance. Anchored by vast experience and crushing power, her heart had always mirrored an undisturbed, dead lake among her martial sisters. But today, a hurricane ravaged that dead water. The perpetually serene woman stared at him, her face a canvas of raw, bleeding shock.

Gu Xiu… had defied the mandate of heaven?

“A convergence of fate. Mere luck,” Gu Xiu replied, his voice a flat, dead monolith.

“Luck does not resurrect the dead,” Shi Siling countered, her tone frantic. “I dissected your condition myself. The abyss you fell into had no bottom. To climb out, to reach Foundation Establishment—no mundane Fated Chance possesses such gravity.”

“Yet… there is a shroud over your Dantian and your Qi Sea. An alien weight repels my probing. Bizarre. Truly bizarre. When the Spiritual Source is severed, the world’s Spiritual Qi turns its back on you. How did you force the heavens to yield…”

Her ravenous curiosity was abruptly strangled. The blood drained from Shi Siling’s face, leaving it the color of ash. A dark crimson line spilled over her lips. Her knees buckled. Instinctively, she clutched Gu Xiu’s robes, anchoring her collapsing weight against his frame to avoid smashing into the stone tiles.

Gu Xiu stared down at the woman relying on his physical strength to stand. His brow tightened.

“The backlash of the Zha Character Rune is this vicious,” Shi Siling wheezed after several agonizing breaths, fighting to shackle the internal devastation. “It gnaws at my roots, relentlessly draining the marrow of my life essence.”

She wiped the blood from her chin, her breathing ragged. “I am broken right now. If I do not chain my focus to suppressing this ruin, the fire consuming my lifespan will turn into an inferno. I cannot drag you back to the Sect at this very moment.”

“Back to the Sect?” The words tasted of rust on Gu Xiu’s tongue.

Shi Siling gave a strained nod. “When you were a mortal husk, you were a ghost haunting Qingxuan. You did not belong. Leaving was a mercy. But now, you have clawed your way back onto the path. Though your cultivation is pitifully weak, the Sect is not a slab of unfeeling ice. They will not cast you into the abyss.”

“Rest your heart. Once I cage these injuries, I will carry you back. I only need to offer a single word to the Supreme, and you may reclaim your Clumsy Peak…”

She spoke with feverish speed, her internal foundation crumbling by the second. Yet, her eyes burned with absolute, dictatorial sincerity. She truly believed her own charity.

“I have severed my marrow from Qingxuan. There is no ‘return.’ Fellow Daoist Shi need not bleed herself over my fate,” Gu Xiu stated, his voice devoid of a single ripple of emotion.

“You harbor resentment?” Shi Siling’s brow slammed together. She did not wait for his defense. “It is only natural.”

“But you once stood at the summit. You know the weight of the heavens. When a cultivator falls into a crippled husk, their duty is to sever the rot, to vanish from the world of the divine and cut all karmic threads.”

“It bleeds of cruelty, but it is the iron law. For you, and for us, it was the only pristine choice.”

She straightened, wrapping herself in the arrogant mantle of one who dictates the cosmos. Her expression frosted over; her eyes turned into twin voids. Her words were a guillotine dropping.

“The mortal dust loves to weave delusions of Immortals mingling with the mud. They write myths of celestial maidens descending to marry into the dirt. But fantasies shatter against reality.”

“Cultivators and mortals are separated by the chasm between the starry void and the deepest trench. Forcing them to intertwine only breeds tragedy.”

“Look at the peddlers and porters you once called brothers. How many have turned to dust? How many can shield you from the storm? You know this truth.”

“You have no right to resent us.”

Her decree was absolute. She was the grand scholar delivering the singular, uncompromising truth to a dense pupil.

Gu Xiu absorbed the onslaught of her arrogance without a flicker of movement. He let the silence stretch, heavy and suffocating, until her final word died in the air.

Then, he spoke.

“Your rhetoric carries the illusion of profound weight. But you are blind to two facts.”

“Which are?” Shi Siling demanded, a crack forming in her composure.

“First,” Gu Xiu began, “Resentment is a chain for the weak. Whether you believe it or not, when I carved Qingxuan out of my life, my heart was as empty of hatred as a hollowed grave.”

“And the second?”

“Second. I am not you.”

Shi Siling’s mind stalled. Before she could demand an answer, Gu Xiu turned his back to her. He deliberately tied the Carefree Jade Pendant to his belt. He slung the Du Xian Sword across his spine. The metallic scrape of the scabbard was loud in the quiet courtyard.

Without turning around, he asked softly, “Shi Siling, why do you cultivate?”

“What?” Thrown off balance, instinct answered for her. “To seize power. To become stronger.”

“Stronger for what purpose?” Gu Xiu pressed.

“To…” The word hung in the air, hollow and aimless. She had no answer.

Gu Xiu did not wield her hesitation like a blade. He merely let it exist.

“Five centuries ago,” his voice resonated with the heavy timbre of ancient bronze, “I bled on the path to forge a stronger Qingxuan. To build an impenetrable fortress for the Sect. To weave a shield of flesh and bone around those I cherished.”

“Today, five centuries later, I bleed on the path to shatter the cages built around me. To cut the strings that make me dance. To ensure no one ever orchestrates my fate from the shadows again.”

“The Dao of cultivation, to me, is the act of walking the world itself.”

“To strike down the tyrant in the mud—that is cultivation.”

“To witness a fleeting spark of joy in a mortal tavern—that is cultivation.”

“To bleed on jagged stones in the dark—that is cultivation.”

“To watch the sunrise over a peaceful empire—that, too, is cultivation.”

“The road is the earth beneath my boots; the Dao is the horizon.”

“You draw a line of iron between Immortal and mortal. But to me, every soul breathing on this road is a Fellow Daoist. If we walk the same earth, where is the boundary between the heavens and the mud?”

“But the rot of lifespan—” Shi Siling tried to thrust her logic through his philosophy.

Gu Xiu crushed her interruption under the weight of his calm. “You claim my mortal companions have long turned to ash, useless to my ascent. But to me, the collision of meeting, the warmth of knowing, the agony of parting—it is all the grinding wheel of the Dao.”

“A face may vanish into the river of time, never to be seen again. Yet, the memory of that encounter will one day ignite a smile in the quiet dark.”

“If they are the Dao, if they are Fellow Daoists, why does the fleeting nature of their lifespan matter at all?”

The serene, immovable mountain of his conviction pressed down on her. Shi Siling’s brow locked into a vicious knot. Her entire being violently rejected his truth. She opened her mouth to tear his philosophy to shreds.

But the memory of his words—I am not you—jammed in her throat.

She let out a long, heavy exhalation, the breath carrying the bitter scent of blood. “It is written in stone, then. Our Daos are parallel lines traversing different cosmos. They will never intersect.”

Gu Xiu possessed zero desire to hammer his truth into stone for her. “Fellow Daoist Shi. The ink has dried on this conversation. If you have no other business, vacate my sight.”

The moment the eviction fell from his lips, the atmosphere shifted violently. The grand formation she had violently ripped apart earlier suddenly roared back to life, its gears grinding invisibly in the air. The latent, suffocating pressure of countless hidden Talisman restrictions locked onto her. They were coiled cobras—dormant, but utterly lethal.

This was the undeniable manifestation of a master ejecting an intruder.

Except…

“Wait!” The tectonic plates of Shi Siling’s mind finally slammed together, producing a catastrophic earthquake of realization. “You… what is your connection to the master of this Listening-to-Rain Pavilion?”

“I am the master of this domain,” Gu Xiu answered, immovable as iron.

The words struck Shi Siling with the force of a falling meteor. She froze, petrified into a statue of shock, staring into Gu Xiu’s eyes.

The master of this domain?

Gu Xiu is the master of the Listening-to-Rain Pavilion?!

Until today, the Listening-to-Rain Pavilion was a ghost to her. She had shed blood at its gates mere hours ago, clashing with the monstrous killers of the White Jade Tower to defend it. Yet, the truth of the battlefield was a fog.

She arrived as the carnage was peaking. The Junior Sister who summoned her vanished into the chaos. The assassins of the White Jade Tower evaporated into the shadows after crossing blades with her. She had been left standing alone in the bloody aftermath, entirely blind to the core of the conflict.

Her only intelligence was rumors: this domain belonged to a supreme offering of the Ten Thousand Treasures Pavilion. Furthermore, the White Jade Tower claimed this offering had successfully completed the Divine Invocation of the Origin Dao Rhyme.

The first rumor was fact. The second? A profound mystery to a cultivator ignorant of the Talisman path like her.

She had shattered the gate’s restrictions out of raw arrogance and burning curiosity. She wanted to unearth the titan hiding within these walls.

But the titan… was Gu Xiu?

That apocalyptic siege, the rivers of blood spilled at the door… was all for Gu Xiu?

A more terrifying implication ripped through her mind like a jagged blade. Qin Meran. Her Fifth Junior Sister had thrown her life onto the pyre to defend this courtyard.

Fifth Junior Sister… has she been feeding Gu Xiu information this entire time?

Did she harbor the absolute madness to burn her own soul to ashes just to shield him?

If that was the truth… if Qin Meran could willingly walk into the abyss for Gu Xiu, why did she project such venomous hatred toward him when facing Shi Siling?

A chill, cold as a mortuary slab, crept up Shi Siling’s spine. Some abysses were not meant to be stared into. Because once you stared into this specific darkness…

The sickening realization threatened to tear her sanity apart.