This Is the Power of True Love
He Xiuwen had been very unhappy lately.
Since the man really had no presence, he needed to be reintroduced every time he appeared, lest the masses forget him:
—He Xiuwen, known as the “Ghost-Faced Demon Lord,” ranked seventh among the Seven Demon Lords.
There were supposedly seven Demon Lords, but only six remained now. In order, they were:
The Heavenly Demon Zhao Jiugé; Cunning Hui, the Perennial Runner-Up (whose original name was supposedly Jiao Hui, but he felt it sounded too much like “cannon fodder”—which was exactly what he was in the original novel); Nangong Ming, the Overbearing CEO; Ning Lu, the King of the Harem (currently single, because Nangong Ming wouldn’t let her fool around at home); Taotie, the Man-Eating Demon; and He Xiuwen, the Black-Market Crook.
As for He Xiuwen—although he was ugly, not particularly gentle, and merely average among Nascent Soul cultivators, he was frequently belittled and mocked by the other Demon Lords…
At least he had one source of comfort.
Money.
The other Demon Lords loved authority and martial prowess. He, on the other hand, was more down-to-earth and had spent his entire life loving nothing more than glittering pearls, jade, and gemstones.
The first half of He Xiuwen’s life consisted of setting himself small goals every day: make enough money to buy another enormous mansion, and enjoy a little happiness every day.
However—
Ever since Shu Fu appeared in his young life, He Xiuwen’s happiness had steadily diminished, his smile gradually disappearing as his contentment faded into nothing.
At first, Shu Fu smashed up his shops.
He Xiuwen didn’t care. After all, he had countless businesses, with shops scattered across the length and breadth of the land. Losing a few was nothing. He could simply renovate them and reopen.
Later, Shu Fu looted all his goods and casually killed the men transporting them.
He Xiuwen still didn’t care. The righteous path was full of hardships, while the demonic path was a broad, easy road. Every day, countless people defected to the demons, dreaming of ascending to greatness in a single bound.
Later still, Shu Fu’s family foiled his scheme in Wei City, chopped off Ling Fengqing’s head, and caused him to lose a massive gamble, leaving him almost completely ruined.
He Xiuwen… cared very much.
But he couldn’t bear to smash the expensive ornaments within reach, so he could only roar at his subordinates and order them to find a batch of the cheapest clay jars available. Then he smashed them one after another against the walls until they were reduced to pieces.
After the incident in Wei City, Ning Lu lost her harem, while He Xiuwen lost his money. They could truly be said to have lost both wealth and beauty.
After much painful reflection, He Xiuwen decided to pack his bags and return to his hometown, where he would devote himself to making a living as a middleman in the Demon Realm.
However, his nightmare was far from over.
In the Demon Realm, he not only had to contend with the other Demon Lords and struggle for survival between them; even the Yaoguang Peak forces he avoided like the plague had followed him there.
Back then, only Shu Fu had smashed his shops.
Now, her entire family was smashing them together!
Over the years, He Xiuwen had to endure a round of smashing, looting, and arson every few days. His business became harder and harder to run, and at one point he even considered giving up the black market and going home to sell sweet potatoes.
But when profit was at stake, how could he simply give up?
So, he had a sudden stroke of inspiration and came up with an entirely new way to make money—
An arena.
Mortals enjoyed cockfighting and cricket fighting, so he would have cultivators fight each other, divine beasts fight each other—better yet, he would have fathers and sons, husbands and wives, fight each other. The more sordid, the better.
After all, the inhabitants of this backwater place called the Demon Realm were all seasoned scumbags. They had terrible manners, no shame, and loved watching exactly this kind of filthy spectacle.
This plan to gather gamblers for a “Divine Beast Fight” had been designed by Boss He himself. He only wanted to attract attention and make a huge profit while he was at it.
But Boss He never imagined that, just after the advertisement went out and before the arena had even opened, his mansion would suddenly explode on the spot—as though someone had planted a voice-activated bomb inside.
He Xiuwen flew into a rage. His blood pressure soared so high it nearly burst through the crown of his head, and he ordered his men to dig three feet into the ground in search of clues.
Unfortunately, the mansion had already been blasted into “the masts and oars reduced to flying ash”—not a single piece remained, cleaner even than an explosion in a Detective Conan movie. Don’t mention clues; there wasn’t even a loose thread left.
They investigated again and again. Apart from concluding that the culprit was at least in the late Nascent Soul stage, and possibly close to becoming a Deity Transformation cultivator, they found essentially nothing.
In short: some supreme big shot had just screwed you. Accept your loss.
Of course, He Xiuwen refused to accept it.
He had been a coward for half his life. Surely he could be stubborn at least once and fight this unknown supreme expert to the bitter end.
So, gnashing his teeth, he once again threw himself wholeheartedly into preparing the arena.
…
At the same time, Shu Fu and her family were at Nangong Ming’s residence, eating and drinking at his expense—of course, there was no marrying into the family involved. They were living in comfort, enjoying themselves while waiting for events to unfold, and leading a happy life entirely unlike He Xiuwen’s.
It had to be said that although Nangong Ming’s thought process seemed stuck in the last century, he was extravagantly generous. When it came to women he liked, he truly spared no expense.
On his territory, one could see the fishpond he had built for his former cat-demon girlfriend, the grasslands he had opened up for his former wild-horse girlfriend, and the Flower-Fruit Mountain he had created for his former macaque girlfriend…
Shu Fu: …Wait a minute. Was he actually a farmer?
Nangong the Farmer. The title fit him perfectly.
At the center of Nangong the Farmer’s domain stood a vast estate comparable to an ancient imperial palace, complete with sprawling manors extending for dozens of miles.
Only later did Shu Fu learn that this had been the property left behind by Nangong Ming’s father—the previous Demon Lord Nangong—and was also the place where he had been born and raised.
From the time he was little, he woke every day on a two-hundred-square-meter bed, received meticulous, all-around service from ninety-nine attendants, followed his father in cultivating and training day and night, studied civil and military strategy, learned the family’s secret techniques, and… received an education in cheesy pickup lines.
His mother was a little mouse demon who had originally possessed a short lifespan. Under his father’s loving care and generous nourishment, however, she had lived for several hundred years—a biological miracle by any standard.
Both generations of the Nangong Demon Lords believed that this was the power of love!
—Love was unshakable and supreme, capable of transcending even life and death.
Nangong Ming’s lifelong ambitions were to unify the Demon Realm, become the ruler of all demons, and find his one true love.
Shu Fu: Really? Wow, that’s so touching.jpg
Jiang Xuesheng: …Are you serious?
Shu Fu: Of course not.
Still, after this fantastical journey, she did develop a somewhat better impression of Nangong Ming.
—It turned out that it wasn’t just him who was abnormal. His entire family was abnormal!!!
Faced with Nangong Ming’s epic question—“What is it that you don’t like about me? I can change”—Shu Fu carefully considered the matter. In the end, she decided to give him another achievement from the many years she had spent in seclusion: The Core Socialist Values of the Cultivation World, handwritten.
She told him to study it carefully, beginning with “Women hold up half the sky,” and seriously reflect on exactly where his values had gone wrong.
As an aside, Shu Fu had spent several years painstakingly researching this set of core values, making sure that even children in ancient times could understand them. She had originally intended to use it for basic education throughout the cultivation world, raising moral standards, enriching the spiritual and cultural life of its people, and creating a harmonious, beautiful new world.
Nangong Ming was a man of his word. He really did obediently take the book back to read. He read through the night, and the very next day put what he had learned into practice.
He decided to replace the condescending form of address “woman” with something more polite, and greeted Liu Ruyi:
“Hello, Little Mom. Are you settling in comfortably here?”
Liu Ruyi: “...?!?!!!”
Don’t come any closer!!!
I’ve just gouged out the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang with my toes!!!
Shu Fu: “This... should count as progress, right?”
During the time they spent freeloading meals, Nangong Ming never made any outrageous moves. He simply took them sightseeing, proudly showing off the territory he had conquered with the air of, “Behold, the empire I won for you.”
Because he was unbelievably well-behaved, Shu Fu once cautiously asked him, “Demon Lord Nangong, you don’t seem quite like other demonic cultivators.”
There was no question that Nangong Ming was a demonic cultivator. He cultivated by drawing demonic energy—not spiritual energy—into his body, and he also used the magical artifacts and spells of demonic cultivators. At times, he even cultivated with the blood and bones of beasts.
However, the usual activities of demonic cultivators—massacring civilians, indulging in wine and women, or tormenting others for amusement—seemed to have nothing to do with him.
Nangong Ming found Shu Fu’s question very strange.
“Would doing any of that help me conquer the Demon Domain?”
Shu Fu: “...I guess not?”
Nangong Ming: “Then why would I do it?”
Shu Fu: “But dating doesn’t help either...”
Nangong Ming: “To me, love is just as important as conquest. What good is winning the world if I lose you?”
Shu Fu: “...”
—This logic is completely airtight. I actually can’t argue with it!!!
...
“Fuer, you wouldn’t happen to be falling for him, would you?”
Jiang Xuesheng had also noticed Nangong Ming’s attitude. Whenever he met Shu Fu, he would deliberately put on a worried expression.
“If you like that sort of thing, I can say those lines too...”
Shu Fu immediately covered his mouth. “You’d better shut up!”
During this period, whenever Nangong Ming was immersed in cultivation, inspecting his territory, or going out to clash with the other Demon Lords, Shu Fu and Jiang Xuesheng would meet in the courtyard. They would admire the Nangong family’s scenery, eat the Nangong family’s pastries, and exchange their own shameless flirtations and sweet nothings.
They were clearly a legitimate couple, yet somehow they had turned it into the thrilling rendezvous of a sheltered young lady secretly meeting her lover. It could only be described as a spectacular feat.
“Speaking objectively, although Nangong Ming doesn’t understand love, his faith in ‘love’ is absolutely genuine.”
One fair and breezy day, Shu Fu and Jiang Xuesheng lay side by side in a sea of kosmos flowers stretching across hundreds of acres. It was supposedly a gift Nangong Ming had given to one of his former girlfriends.
She sighed from the bottom of her heart. “If he ever admits that women can become Demon Lords and that women can fall in love with women, maybe he’ll finally find his true love.”
“Fuer, you should pay a little more attention to your own true love.”
Jiang Xuesheng propped his head up with one hand. His thin lips curved into a faint smile, and he turned to look at her from the corner of his eye, his expression meaningful.
“People say that a short separation makes the heart grow fonder. Yet after coming out of seclusion, you seem rather cold toward me.”
“Isn’t that how closed-door cultivation works? You shut your eyes, open them again, and three or five years have passed. As far as I’m concerned, seeing you again still feels like yesterday.”
Shu Fu’s words were perfunctory, but she leaned closer all the same. Cradling his porcelain-white, smooth cheeks in both hands, she gently pressed her lips to his.
“...”
The spring sunlight was soft and warm, and the spring breeze mild. Yet where their lips and teeth met, there lingered a faint coolness, like morning dew. Perhaps it was because Jiang Xuesheng had taken human form from a moonflower, and his body temperature was always a little lower than an ordinary person’s.
Neither of them was especially indulgent by nature. Most of the time, they were each absorbed in their own affairs, rushing about with the weight of justice on one shoulder and the fate of all living beings on the other. They rarely allowed themselves such carefree intimacy.
But when the moment truly came, they always fit together perfectly, as though they had rehearsed it a thousand times.
For example, Shu Fu was strong-willed and disliked being controlled. Whenever they lay together, Jiang Xuesheng would instinctively turn over and shift above her, lifting her onto himself.
That way, she was like a white deer lowering its head to breathe in the scent of a flower, while he was like the dark, warm earth, gently enfolding both her body and her soul.
However, as they enjoyed this brief moment of intimacy that day, they also took a small precaution.
Shu Fu knew that Nangong Ming placed complete trust in the women he favored, but his subordinates were another matter entirely.
For instance, the Bitter-Faced Attendant—the old retainer who had served two generations—had been keeping a close eye on their every move.
There was even a surveillance spell secretly set up by the attendant in this very flower field.
Of course, he was the only one who considered it “secret.”
Shu Fu wasn’t so thoughtless as to invite outsiders to watch a live broadcast of her private life.avi. She simply cut out the beginning and end, applied a generous censoring filter, and released the tiniest sliver of audio-visual information—more than enough for him to reach a conclusion.
“The Core Values of the Cultivation World”—Nangong Ming had more or less finished reading the entire thing. I think it’s time to make him suffer heartbreak and set off to find his next true love.
...
That very day, Nangong Ming received a report from the attendant:
“That woman and her elder brother have been secretly involved for a long time! She’s a pervert! Demon Lord, you’ve been deceived!”
Nangong Ming fell into a long silence and spent the entire night tossing and turning without sleep.
At last, as he faced the rising sun in the east, he said solemnly, one word at a time, “I understand now.”
“Miss Shu Xiaolou has made me realize that love comes in many different forms in this world. Men with men, women with women, humans with ghosts, humans with demons... Although I don’t understand it very well, if Miss Shu says so, she must have her reasons.”
“I’m not an unreasonable man. If it’s the woman I love, I can still accept her wishes.”
“Since that is the case, even if her love is unacceptable to the world, I should still offer her my blessings. No matter what happens, Miss Shu will always be my friend.”
The Bitter-Faced Attendant: “...Demon Lord! Don’t you think you’ve simply been played for a fool?!”
“What are you talking about?”
Nangong Ming slammed his hand on the table and rose to his feet.
“The reason she kept it hidden must be that she was carrying a forbidden love too difficult to confess.”
“Besides, I was the one who pursued her in the first place. Even if I was deceived, that is my own responsibility. I, Nangong Ming, am a dignified Demon Lord and a real man. How could I shift the blame onto a woman?”
“—No, wait a moment. Would women be happy to hear that last part?”
The Bitter-Faced Attendant: “My lord!!!!”
