The Heroine Made a Pact With Senior Sister (GL) Chapter 2

Enji Village sat east of Hanyou Valley. Because it had been under Hanyou Valley’s protection for many years, it had changed its name from Baihua, or Hundred Flowers, to Enji, or Grace and Aid. Now, apart from the elderly villagers, few people still called Enji Village by its old name, Baihua Village.
The name Baihua Village had suited it well. Before the four of them even reached the village, the flowers along the road were already much denser and brighter than elsewhere. Clusters of blossoms competed in beauty, and their fragrance drifted through the air. Butterflies of every color wove through the flowers, giving the place a special charm.
The moment Mu Yinfeng saw the butterflies, her heart tightened. She looked at the two women and one man ahead of her, but swallowed the words she had been about to say.
“Yinfeng, what is wrong with you today? You have looked unhappy since we set out.” Chang Zui noticed something off about her, left the two women behind, and returned to Mu Yinfeng’s side. As usual, he smiled and reached out to touch the white jade hairpin in her hair.
If it had been the original owner, perhaps Chang Zui would have succeeded. But Mu Yinfeng would not let him. She nimbly stepped aside, just in time to avoid that wandering hand, while saying, “What would I be unhappy about? Where do I look unhappy to you?”
The sky could fall and the earth could split, but her character setting could not collapse.
The original owner’s interactions with Chang Zui were an important part of the early plot. If Mu Yinfeng broke character too badly, in this cultivation world, it would be very easy for people to think she had possessed someone else’s body. The cultivation world would never show mercy to someone who had taken over another body, even if this possession had not been under her control.
If she died, how was she supposed to win over the Senior Sister Huixue she had been dreaming about?
Mu Yinfeng forced down her disgust and smiled at Chang Zui, then flashed behind the woman in green. “Sister Bi, are you not going to rein him in? Are you just going to watch him bully me like this?”
The woman in green was called Abi. Her talent in both sword cultivation and music cultivation was ordinary, but in medicine, she was startlingly gifted. Every time they went out on a mission, she served as an excellent healer. If she had been allowed to keep developing, she could almost have become a grandmaster. Unfortunately, as the plot moved forward, Abi eventually died at Mu Yinfeng’s hands. Mu Yinfeng turned her corpse into a puppet, and her soul was destroyed, never to be reborn.
The sword-carrying girl over there was named Lin Qiudi. Lin Qiudi was a sword cultivator and a genius of her generation. Right now, Lin Qiudi and Mu Yinfeng were close friends, but after Mu Yinfeng turned dark, Lin Qiudi became the person most determined to eliminate her. Her powerful sword intent was frightening even to someone reading outside the book. Mu Yinfeng had no doubt that if the original owner had not died in the ending, she would have died under Lin Qiudi’s sword sooner or later.
The reason Mu Yinfeng had not asked Lin Qiudi for help was that she remembered Lin Qiudi chasing her in the book for decades without giving up. Just reading it had given Mu Yinfeng a mental shadow. Abi felt a little safer.
Abi naturally protected other girls without question. She raised her fan and smacked Chang Zui with it. “Second Senior Brother, even joking needs limits. You keep saying Senior Sister bullies Junior Sister Yinfeng every day, but from what I see, the one bullying her is you.”
“Exactly. You are always trying to take advantage of Junior Sister Mu. If the Valley Master found out, she would break your legs!” Lin Qiudi chimed in from the side.
The three girls stood together, and Chang Zui was left speechless. He could only laugh awkwardly, lift the case file in his hand, and change the subject. “I say, have you all read the file or not? A mission serious enough for the Valley Master to send the four of us out is no joke.”
“Nonsense. Who would dare leave without reading the file? Do they not want their life anymore?” Abi rolled her eyes at Chang Zui and put away her folding fan. “Right, Junior Sister Qiudi, Junior Sister Yinfeng?”
“Of course,” the two women said at the same time.
With Chang Zui’s reminder, Mu Yinfeng remembered. In Enji Village, there had recently been repeated cases of villagers losing their minds. The victims were all young and beautiful girls. In just one short month, three or four cases had already appeared. These girls kept babbling. In milder cases, they became dazed and crazy. In serious cases, some had even taken knives and killed their entire families. No matter how many immortal prescriptions or ritual methods the villagers tried, nothing worked. In the end, they could only gather silver and seek help from Hanyou Valley again.
“What do these girls have in common?” Abi asked with a firm tone, but among them, she had actually read the file the least carefully. She specialized in healing, so fighting was not truly her duty.
“They were all girls dressed in wedding clothes and preparing to marry,” Chang Zui said. “But that may not be all. Enji Village is not small, and more than three or four girls were married in a month. Not all of them lost their minds.”
“I think it must be a ghost or monster at work. There was a precedent in Hanyou Valley’s Langhuan Pavilion. A vengeful ghost who had never married in life once caused trouble because she envied women with marriage agreements. She harassed them until they broke off their engagements. If a woman refused, she harassed her to death. This should be about the same,” Lin Qiudi analyzed.
“Junior Sister Qiudi makes sense. Junior Sister Abi, Yinfeng, what do you think?” Chang Zui frowned, his gaze fixed on the village below the ridge. That was their destination, Enji Village.
Mu Yinfeng’s eyes sharpened. Like Chang Zui, her gaze fell on Enji Village.
This Enji Village mission was full of killing danger. The culprit was the mass of colorful butterflies fluttering tenderly all around them.
These butterflies were controlled by the Butterfly Spirit behind the scenes. The Butterfly Spirit was a strand of divine sense from the Butterfly Goddess, who had once willingly fallen from the heavenly realm into the mortal world. The Butterfly Goddess had once been abandoned by the one she loved. This broken strand of divine sense inherited her will. Like her, it envied girls who had obtained marriage and love. Out of jealousy, it possessed girls dressed in wedding clothes. Because the yin energy inside it was extremely heavy, those girls could not bear that yin energy at all, so it was no surprise that their minds became confused until they lost reason and self-control.
The Butterfly Spirit’s power came from offerings at the Butterfly Spirit Temple in the village. If Mu Yinfeng said this ahead of time and cut off the root of the Butterfly Spirit’s power, that would solve the problem once and for all, but only in terms of the Butterfly Spirit’s supply. The Butterfly Spirit’s true body was not inside the temple. To eliminate it completely, they had to find its true body.
“Yinfeng, what are you thinking about? You look so distracted.” Chang Zui saw that Mu Yinfeng had unusually ignored him and could not help asking.
“Nothing,” Mu Yinfeng said softly. “No matter what is going on, guessing from up here on the hill is useless. We might as well go down and investigate.”
Chang Zui agreed. “Yinfeng is right. We should go down and look. Yinfeng, once we are down there, you should know what to do.”
Mu Yinfeng nodded and grasped the jeweled necklace tied at her neck. Because the original owner’s primordial yin body was a rare cultivation vessel material in the cultivation world, even powerful cultivators close to ascension would covet it. If she went down the mountain without hiding it, she would be like a slab of meat thrown among wolves. People with crooked hearts would do anything to seize her.
It was not as if the cultivation world had no such precedent. Once, after a woman with a primordial yin body appeared, she alone sparked a war of pursuit across the entire cultivation world. The war lasted nearly ten years and finally ended with the woman’s death. After that, no woman with a primordial yin body dared go down the mountain casually without concealing herself.
This jeweled necklace was a spiritual artifact that hid the aura of a woman with a primordial yin body. It had been made personally by the Master of Hanyou Valley, Bing Ling’er. Bing Ling’er was a grandmaster-level figure in the entire cultivation world. Her cultivation was profound, and she was extremely protective of her own. No matter how wicked someone was, if they encountered a disciple of Bing Ling’er, there was no one who would not give way. But because a primordial yin body was simply too rare, it was hard to rule out people willing to seek fortune in danger. That was why Bing Ling’er had specially made this necklace for Mu Yinfeng to suppress the yin energy in her body.
Although the necklace could completely cover her pure yin energy, it also made her almost the same as an ordinary person. So whenever she carried out a mission, she would take the necklace off. Evil creatures usually had extremely heavy yin energy. Her yin energy mixed among theirs and was generally hard to notice.
The four of them descended from the ridge and entered the village. They found the village head to ask for information. The clues they received from him were about the same as the case file and brought no extra gains.
“This is…” Since the group had descended the mountain together, everyone tacitly treated Chang Zui, the most senior, as their leader. Just as Chang Zui finished asking questions and was about to leave to investigate on his own, Lin Qiudi, who was outside the door, gave a low cry.
“What is it?” Abi walked to Lin Qiudi’s side. When she stared at the fragment in Lin Qiudi’s hand, she sucked in a cold breath. “No way.”
“Resentment taking shape,” Chang Zui judged at once after glancing at the object in Lin Qiudi’s hand. “Resentment is originally a kind of energy, formless and traceless. Now that it has taken shape, that proves the resentment is extremely heavy. It seems this evil creature will not be easy to handle.”
It really would not be easy. Mu Yinfeng silently recalled the plot. After their group discovered the shaped resentment, they decided to gather all the solid fragments of resentment together. But gathering the resentment had no effect at all. Then they decided to risk themselves and dress as brides to lure the evil creature’s attention. The evil creature did fall for the bait. Just as it was about to possess the bride, all four of them attacked together. At that moment, the evil creature used the resentment they had pieced together as a foundation and began laying down an illusion realm, sweeping all four of them inside.
Without resentment as a foundation, it should still be able to create such an illusion prison with its own power. But then the illusion prison would definitely not be as sturdy as it had been in the original book, and the Butterfly Spirit would consume a great deal by laying the illusion alone. It would be easier to fight.
Upgrading herself while lowering the difficulty was a choice Mu Yinfeng would never refuse.
“Purify this resentment,” Mu Yinfeng said. “If we let this resentment become the evil creature’s reserve power, it will take us a lot more effort later.”
Influenced by the extreme yin power inside her, Mu Yinfeng in a battle state always gave people a chilly feeling. Gloomy, cold, and eerie, she made others afraid to approach.
The other three were already used to Mu Yinfeng’s strange transformation, so no one found it odd.
But Lin Qiudi did not immediately agree with Mu Yinfeng’s suggestion. “Purify the resentment? It has already taken shape. This is only a fragment. There must be more scattered elsewhere. Would it not be easier to gather it all and purify it together?”
“Absolutely do not gather it before purifying it.” Mu Yinfeng remembered the plot and spoke solemnly. “If resentment condenses, it can also become a source of power for the evil creature. With resentment this deep working together with the evil creature’s true body, it will be even harder to deal with.”
“Yinfeng is right.” Chang Zui stepped forward, his gaze landing on Abi. “Junior Sister Abi, you do it.”
Abi’s spiritual root was wood, leaning toward the yin branch of wood. Its purifying effect was not as strong as a natural yang spiritual root, but people born with yang spiritual roots were far too rare. Purification by a wood spiritual root was still passable.
Abi focused and took the resentment fragment from Lin Qiudi. Green light spread from her palm and slowly poured into the shard. The shard gradually faded in her hand and began to melt away.
Just then, heaven and earth changed color. The light suddenly dimmed, as if an invisible net had fallen from the sky and covered the radiance of the sun and moon.
“Who is there?” Lin Qiudi drew her sword at once and pointed it at the sky. “Come out!”
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…”
Wild laughter surrounded them from every direction. Before their eyes, it was as if thousands upon thousands of butterflies had risen with rustling wings. They circled the group, their wings covering the sky, their powder blowing into the four people’s faces. Standing within it felt like being in hell, and all four of them felt an indescribable fear at the same time.
“What exactly… is going on?” Abi, who was purifying the resentment, did not dare open her eyes, but she also sensed that something was wrong around her. “What happened?”
“I do not know.” Lin Qiudi watched her surroundings warily. Everything around them looked unchanged, but the sound of butterfly wings never stopped. The buzzing stirred her head until it hurt.
This was…
An illusion realm!
It was different from the book’s setup. The illusion realm had appeared early!
Mu Yinfeng was shocked. She had just been about to take out her bone pipa to defend herself when a chill suddenly ran down her back. A hand reached from behind and firmly grabbed her shoulder.
“Yinfeng!”
“Junior Sister Mu!”
Chang Zui and Lin Qiudi cried out at the same time. Mu Yinfeng only felt the scenery around her rush past at terrifying speed, so fast that everything she saw became unreal. She was so frightened that her whole body went weak, and she could not use any strength at all.
Where was that cold, eerie claw taking her?
“Ha ha ha ha ha! A woman with a primordial yin body! A woman with a primordial yin body! I finally found one. The heavens have not failed me! The heavens have not failed me!”
Arrogant laughter echoed beside her ear, almost shattering her eardrums.
Only then did she realize the claw had set her down. She was at the mouth of a pitch-dark cave. Though flowers and grass grew thickly around the entrance, beneath the scents of blossoms and greenery, she could clearly smell a strong stench of rot and blood.
“Are you going to kill me?” Though this was Mu Yinfeng’s first time facing such a scene, she calmed down quickly. She recited the true formula and summoned the bone pipa from her storage ring.
“Woman with a primordial yin body, I will slowly absorb your power and make you merge with me… Ha ha ha ha ha…” The Butterfly Spirit already saw Mu Yinfeng as something in its bag. Its sharp claw smugly lifted Mu Yinfeng’s face, admiring its prize. This prize that countless cultivators had failed to obtain now belonged to it!
The Butterfly Spirit’s face was covered in black cloth, with only two small holes cut at the eyes. Mu Yinfeng could not see its appearance clearly, but from the exposed skin and its pale, slender hand, she could faintly tell that the Butterfly Spirit must have been a beautiful woman when alive.
Beautiful, mad, and dangerous.
“Now?” Mu Yinfeng let it meet her eyes and did not panic at all. One of her hands rested on the pipa strings. As long as she plucked them, she could instantly blast the Butterfly Spirit away. If she opened enough distance, few opponents of the same level could defeat her.
Seizing the Butterfly Spirit’s arrogance would often be the key to victory.
On her first day in the cultivation world, Mu Yinfeng had familiarized herself with all the original owner’s moves. Although the bone pipa did not have the Changyin Pearl’s support right now, the Changyin Pearl was only icing on the cake. It was not as if she was useless without it.
The Butterfly Spirit seemed surprised that Mu Yinfeng remained so calm. “You are not afraid of me?”
Before Mu Yinfeng could answer, a white silk ribbon suddenly dropped down, tightly wrapped around the Butterfly Spirit’s neck, and pulled it into the air. At the same time, flakes of flying frost fell from above. In an instant, the vast world stretched cold and boundless, and heaven and earth turned into a pure white field of ice and snow.