Chapter 1 - Me? Just a Passing Transmigrator, That's All

『 Translator – Divinity 』

South Sea, Ye Mu City, Luomu Canyon.

"Sacrifice! Sacrifice! Sacrifice!"

In the gloomy, rainy weather, within the dim valley, a group of torch-wielding villagers shouted as they formed a long line. They crowded around a white-haired young girl, trudging unsteadily along the mountain path toward the depths of the canyon.

A river ran through the center of the deep canyon, where a small wooden boat waited quietly on the water. Although its hull was constantly battered by the rain, the dark red stains on its deck remained conspicuous, unable to be washed away.

Evidently, countless bloody sacrifices had already taken place on this dilapidated little wooden boat.

In the rain, the villagers placed the fruits and fresh flowers from their hands onto the deck one by one, making the originally blood-stained wooden boat look considerably better.

The beautiful, white-haired young girl yawned and hopped onto the sacrificial boat, calm and composed. Her white robe was soaked by the rain, clinging tightly to her body and outlining her graceful curves. A few raindrops dripped past her long eyelashes, tracing a path across her fair skin before falling into the river.

This was a tradition of the several nearby villages: offering a sacrifice to a yao beast. As long as they sacrificed a young girl to it at regular intervals, the nearby villages would be blessed with favorable weather in the period that followed.

Bidding farewell to their parents and friends, the young girls had to endure despair, come to this place all alone, and board the boat to bravely sacrifice themselves.

But this time was different!

Luo Jiutian sat at the bow, lightly humming a tune.

She was here to kill this yao beast!

That's right, Luo Jiutian was not from any of the nearby villages; this was her first time roaming the Jianghu. After hearing about the villages' experiences, she had volunteered to take the place of the girl who was originally to be sacrificed.

How ridiculous. What era is this, that there's still a place that worships a yao beast capable of human speech. But it's also perfect. A yao beast that can speak human language must be at least Fourth Grade or higher, which is just right for practice.

The boat left the shore and drifted downstream, continuously advancing toward the depths of the canyon.

Luo Jiutian pulled a longsword out from under her skirt. She hugged the sword and sat on the bow, the tips of her toes lightly touching the surface of the river.

She watched the ripples spread across the water, quietly awaiting the monster's arrival.

The rain fell harder and harder, but the sound of the yao beast's earth-shattering footsteps never came. The canyon remained deathly quiet.

Strategy!

Swordsmanship!

Tactics!

She had thought of everything, but... why wasn't this thing here yet! Could a yao beast really not show up at mealtime?

By the time the sky gradually darkened, her boat had finally reached the bottom of the canyon. A deep cave appeared before her, and faint sounds could be heard coming from within.

This must be the place.

Luo Jiutian drew her sword. With a surge of killing intent, she leaped up and charged into the cave.

After a moment of darkness, the view before her suddenly opened up.

The interior of the cave was far larger than she had imagined. Torches were placed at regular intervals, illuminating the chamber.

Girls were playing beside the river, laughing and splashing water on one another. Droplets trickled down their thighs, the cleavage at their chests faintly visible. Some other girls had set up stone stoves by the stream and were lighting fires to stir-fry dishes.

Another group of young girls, carrying vegetables, walked past the riverbank, chatting amongst themselves.

Everything was so harmonious, it had absolutely no connection to a cave inhabited by a yao beast.

Sword in hand, Luo Jiutian looked around in confusion, feeling like she couldn't quite keep up with the pace of the plot's development.

The girls in the cave also noticed her. Smiling, they turned to look toward the depths of the cave.

"Lord Ye, a new little sister has arrived."

A young man with a somewhat melancholic expression walked out from the depths of the cave. Upon seeing the newcomer, he immediately scratched his head in anguish.

"Fuck, I already told that bunch of people not to send anyone over anymore! Why do they keep coming? Even the landlord's family has no surplus grain left, ahhhhh!!"

Luo Jiutian was stunned: "Who are you? What do you do?"

"Ye Mingchuan," the young man replied. "Just a passing transmigrator, that's all."

Ye Mingchuan really was just purely passing by. It had already been several years since he transmigrated into this cultivation world.

Generally speaking, transmigrating to another world comes with a standard three-piece welfare package: a System, a harem, and a golden finger. But he was clearly an unlucky bastard; aside from one special ability, he had nothing at all.

Such bad luck! Might as well not stay in this shitty place; it's best to go home as soon as possible.

Luckily though, while he didn't have these cheats, other people did.

Ye Mingchuan set his sights on another transmigrator who was freakishly strong. Convinced this buddy was the protagonist, he partnered up with her on the road back home, slaying demons, exorcising devils, and roaming the Jianghu.

Of course, acting as a righteous hero was just incidental; the main reason was that they needed the cores of these yao beasts as an energy source to open a path for transmigration.

And during these past few years, Ye Mingchuan's unlucky bastard constitution continued to work its magic reliably.

A while ago, when they went up a snowy mountain, Ye Mingchuan snuck to the back mountain spring of the Heavenly Cloud Sect to fetch water. As luck would have it, he ran into the Holy Maiden of the Heavenly Cloud Sect healing in the snow spring and saw her completely naked.

The entire Heavenly Cloud Sect mobilized. From the sect's old ancestor down to the gatekeeping grandpa, everyone surrounded and attacked them, scaring the other small surrounding sects into trembling, thinking they had provoked a great power and were about to be annihilated.

Ye Mingchuan wanted to cry but had no tears.

Heaven and Earth be my witness, just one mouthful of that spring water could make a heavily injured person hale and hearty. He just wanted to fetch a ladle of water to save someone, but he never expected that people healed by soaking in it, which is why he happened to stumble upon her.

Sure enough, poverty limits one's imagination. Ye Mingchuan fled in disarray, and in the world of the righteous martial path, he earned the dual-stigma of being a peeping tom and a thief of girls' bathwater.

Another time, a bit before that, when they were down at the Moling Sea, they were unbearably hungry. Ye Mingchuan and his partner posed as guests to attend the wedding ceremony of the Lige Mountain Demonic Cult.

Originally, they just planned to freeload a meal and leave right after, but by a strange fluke, they knocked the groom unconscious.

In order not to be exposed, Ye Mingchuan had no choice but to take the groom's place and complete the entire ceremony. In a daze, he even became the Demonic Cult's Leader... and then he was discovered just as he was trying to sneak away.

Although Ye Mingchuan later managed to escape with his life while being pursued by his Demonic Cult brothers, his reputation as a married man and a scumbag has been widely spread among the cult's members ever since.

In just a few short years of being a transmigrator, he had provoked pursuits from both the black and white paths, becoming wildly famous and shaking the Jianghu with his prestige.

Ye Mingchuan was truly streaming with tears; he had never been so homesick.

A month ago, to lie low for a while, he came to this canyon. He dealt with the yao beast entrenched here and planned to live in the cave for a bit to escape the clamor of the Jianghu for a moment.

But the girl Ye Mingchuan had saved clung to his leg, refusing to leave no matter what. Because if they were sacrificed and then ran back to the village, their fate would likely be even more miserable.

For a moment, Ye Mingchuan's heart softened, and he agreed to pull some strings to send them to a nearby town.

As a result, before any news came back from the town, the small village began sending more and more girls.

Ye Mingchuan used the limited knowledge he remembered from watching wilderness survival shows before he transmigrated to help these girls survive. Before long, he had nearly established another "Village of Daughters" in this place.

Alright, fine. Building up the village could be considered a good deed. Ye Mingchuan counted on his fingers, calculating the day the village would be completed so he could finally leave.

But just as his great work was nearing completion, why did another new girl have to show up, and a cultivator at that?

Sigh, can't you just let me lie low in peace for a few days?

"A transmigrator? Someone from another land? You're really not from our world? This is the first time I've seen a living transmigrator."

Luo Jiutian sized up the young man, clicking her tongue in wonder.

"You don't look any different from us. Still one nose and two eyes, two arms and two legs."

"What kind of impression did you have of transmigrators before..."

"'When odd it changes, when even it doesn't; the sign depends on the quadrant.'"

"Please stop with the stereotypes about transmigrators," Ye Mingchuan said.

"We stopped using such cliché things for passphrases ages ago!"

"Then... 'Hoeing grain at high noon, sweat drips onto the soil beneath'?"

[TL/N: The verse "Hoeing grain at high noon, sweat drips onto the soil beneath" is from the Tang dynasty Chinese poem Pity the Farmers (悯农, Mǐn Nóng), by Li Shen. The poem reminds people of the hard labor that produces their food.]

Ye Mingchuan was speechless: "Forget it. Whatever makes you happy."

"Speaking of which, what about the yao beast that was entrenched in this place?" Luo Jiutian asked.

Ye Mingchuan pointed to the side: "Oh, you mean that thing?"

Luo Jiutian turned her head to look.

A huge, ferocious yao beast skull sat quietly gathering dust in a corner of the cave. The rest of the skeleton had been dismantled and scattered; some parts were being used as clubs for beating clothes clean, while others served as a rack with a pile of firewood stacked beneath it.

A yao beast that ate humans in life was, after death, turned into a tool to be used by people. It seemed like a bit of a black comedy.

"You killed this yao beast," Luo Jiutian stated.

Ye Mingchuan nodded casually.

"Yeah. Took care of it since I was here."

Luo Jiutian clicked her tongue softly.

Senior Lei was right. As expected, transmigrators are all freaks.

A yao beast of at least the Fourth Grade, and he says he just took care of it on the side.

Through natural decomposition alone, it would be impossible for it to be reduced to a perfectly preserved skeleton. This means that when it was killed, its flesh was directly separated from its bones. It put up no resistance at all; its death couldn't have been more miserable.

This person's strength must be immense.

But none of that matters anymore. The most important thing now is.....

Luo Jiutian leaped up, kicking Ye Mingchuan in the waist. She then raised her slender legs, viciously clamping his neck in a perfect scissor leg hold, and roared:

"Bastard! Who told you to kill my midterm project?! Now all my credits are gone!!!!"

In truth, she wasn't an ordinary Jianghu person, but a student of the 78th class of the Capital Academy.

The academy's midterm exams were coming up, and the students had been kicked out by the academy to participate in Jianghu practical experience.

As long as they could accomplish some great deeds and then have the people from the 'Jianghu Monthly' periodical publicize it for them after returning to the capital, they would be considered to have passed the midterm exam... but merely passing was not Luo Jiutian's goal.

During this trip through the Jianghu, whoever achieved the greatest merit would receive the best academic credits and have a greater chance of entering the Inner Court.

To use this opportunity to enter the Inner Court, the young women of the Capital Academy could be said to have racked their brains and come up with all sorts of schemes.

Some people picked up their ancestral treasured blades and gathered a group to go slay a dragon in Xiqi.

Others shouldered their bags and set out for Dongyi, preparing to test their skills against those folks from the Demonic Cults.

Some were even more fierce, going directly to the frontlines at the Great Wall, to the battlefield against the Red Sea yao beasts, vowing to display their great skills and protect their homeland.

It was too competitive.

It was really way too competitive!

In order not to get dragged into the rat race with them, Luo Jiutian decided to take a different path, choosing to head for the countryside. The poorer the place, the more reason to go; the more uninhabited the area, the more reason to charge in.

That was why she had charged all the way to Ye Mu City.

If you were to ask the various gossip tabloids of the Jianghu to compile a top-ten list of the nation's poorest cities, then no matter the ranking, Ye Mu City would be included.

In fact, anyone with a conscience would probably rank it number one. It wasn't that the Imperial Court hadn't considered supporting the small city, but after repeated assessments, they concluded that the place had absolutely nothing worth developing.

Develop tourism? The nearby mountains had nothing but trees, or else gullies and streams. You couldn't even find a single mildly threatening wild animal. There was absolutely nothing special about it.

Develop mineral resources? The higher-ups had come to inspect before, even mobilizing an entire Sword Sect to excavate and survey. After investigating the place inside and out, they discovered there was truly nothing.

The Sword Sect wasn't even mad; they just clicked their tongues, clapped, and uttered two words to express their heartfelt admiration—"Unbelievable!"

Excellent.

In a place this poor, surely no one would come to compete, right?

Full of confidence, Luo Jiutian came here, and after asking around for several days, she finally found a demon. But when she arrived at the location and took a look...

It had already been reduced to bones.

"I know you're desperate, but just calm down a second." Ye Mingchuan frantically slapped the girl's thighs.

"Don't wake her up! She..."

Burning with rage, Luo Jiutian was in no mood to hear his explanation and immediately tightened her leg-lock even further.

"I have to go back to the capital in one week! You'll compensate me! Compensate me for my midterm project!!!!"

The young girl's miserable screams echoed throughout the cave, making it difficult for the crowd of onlookers to tell, for a moment, which of the two was in greater agony.