Am I Playing the Prince Consort?
“Get a grip on your theatrics. Keep it up and you’ll start getting annoying.”
The instant Yuan Qingfeng heard that female voice, his whole body gave a violent jolt, as if someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over his head in the dead of winter.
This time, he was just like Zhou Quan: his vision went black, his legs trembled, and his head felt as heavy as though it had been filled with lead. His entire body shook, leaving him looking small, pitiful, and helpless.
In the cultivation world of the present day, there was a saying that went like this:
On the Ninefold Sect’s Yaoguang Peak lived Master Tanhua’s four direct disciples: Honghu Liu Xiao, Jade Rabbit Zhaoyun, Merfolk Si Fei, and a human girl who called herself “Shu Fu.”
If you always walked upright and sat straight, conducted yourself with integrity, had nothing on your conscience, and had never done a single thing that harmed others for your own benefit, then everyone could live and let live. You could even become friends with them.
But if, in a moment of madness, you did something you shouldn’t have, committed some not-so-minor blunder, and happened to be caught by one of them…
—then you had almost certainly been beaten up by at least one of them.
This was Zhou Quan’s first offense, but he had witnessed other people getting beaten before, and he still remembered that petite, delicate red-eyed girl with crystal clarity.
Thus, he knew that the girl was named Zhaoyun. She was Master Tanhua’s second disciple—and the princess of the Jade Rabbit clan.
As for the other three, he had only heard their names and had never seen them in person—or perhaps he had seen one of them before and even fallen in love at first sight, but simply had no idea what she was called. He only knew that she was “the beautiful girl from the Ninefold Sect,” and there was no way to learn more.
Perhaps, for him, it was better never to find out.
As for Yuan Qingfeng, he had indeed seen one of them in person once.
He would never forget how, in an attempt to spite Bai Tian, the exchange student his master was supervising, he had tried to switch out the supplies distributed to him by the Tianyan Sect. Unfortunately, his luck had been abysmal. He had happened to run into a “friend” who had come along to take a tour…
Yuan Qingfeng refused to recall what happened afterward.
Yet that clear female voice, that sword qi as cold as windblown snow—chilling him to the bone and scattering his very ashes—and that slender, tall figure on the cliff had all been carved deeply into his memory.
In the dead of night, he would sometimes see that person standing at the foot of his bed, the icy edge of her sword brushing against his temple as she whispered in a sinister, viper-like voice:
“Fellow Daoist Yuan, you went to all the trouble of picking up cow dung and casting an illusion spell just to swap out Little Bai’s ox bezoar. Since you like cow dung so much, why don’t you eat it?”
“Come on. I’ll feed you. Say ah—”
“No, no, no, no! Aaaah! I was wrong, Fellow Daoist! I won’t do it again! I swear I won’t! Don’t come any closer! Don’t come any closer!”
For several months afterward, Yuan Qingfeng woke from more than half his nights of sleep screaming, “I don’t want to eat shit, aaaaah!”
Then he would have to face the silent, complicated looks of his fellow disciples:
“Qingfeng, you… ate it?”
…
Now, the nightmare he had desperately tried to forget had once again become reality. The voice was clear and bright, the sword qi frosty and sharp, advancing toward him with vivid, terrifying certainty. The figure itself was like a drawn sword, all exposed edges and murderous brilliance, stabbing painfully into his eyes.
“You… don’t come any closer! Stay back! I—I haven’t done anything! I haven’t done anything yet!”
Yuan Qingfeng surrendered at once. He threw himself backward, landed hard on his rear, and began inching away across the ground.
“I’m warning you, don’t do anything crazy!”
“Do anything crazy?”
The female voice replied, just as cool and crisp as her sword qi. There was a faint, irreverent smile in the upward lilt of her final words.
“Don’t worry. If I want to do anything crazy, I won’t do it myself. First, I’ll hire fifteen or sixteen burly men who aren’t picky about what they eat, and have them do it to you.”
Yuan Qingfeng: “??????”
“Fufu, Fufu!”
Perhaps she had grown tired of waiting. The elaborately dressed girl stepped forward, pouted her rosy lips, and flung open her arms as she called out:
“I’ve been waiting forever! Why haven’t you come to rescue me yet? Didn’t we agree that I would pretend to be kidnapped by Scarface, you would follow us to the black-market hideout, and then you would save me? The scene isn’t over yet!”
“…Senior Sister Zhaoyun, do you really enjoy playing the kidnapped princess that much? Besides, I can’t exactly be your prince consort.”
The person on the cliff sighed at last, then stepped out of the shadows and leaped down.
Anyone with eyes could see that she had neither summoned a sword nor used any levitation technique. Relying solely on her consummate physical skills, she bounded and shifted across the nearly vertical cliff face, her body seeming weightless. In the blink of an eye, she had already reached them, as light as a kite drifting on the wind.
Zhaoyun applauded.
“Fufu, you’re amazing! I knew sword cultivators were the coolest!”
Then she opened her arms again.
“Fufu, carry me.”
“………………”
The person she called “Fufu” was, of course, Shu Fu, who had spent three years diligently cultivating on Yaoguang Peak and had now grown into a young woman. If she had been living in the twenty-first century, she supposed she would be getting ready to take the college entrance exams.
Three years later, Shu Fu had shot up in height like a spring bamboo shoot. Her oval face had grown even more refined and otherworldly. Her brows were like distant mountains, her black hair piled high like dark clouds, and her starry eyes shone with a deep, luminous brilliance. Even her appearance alone had undergone a complete transformation.
She possessed a dignified, graceful beauty that could shame the peach blossoms, yet her figure was tall and straight like a jade tree. Her eyes and brows brimmed with vitality, while a cold, austere sword intent coiled around her entire body. The subtle contradiction in her air made her a peerlessly handsome beauty.
As the heroine of the original novel, Jiang Ruoshui had naturally been born with an exquisite face. In her early years, before she had fully matured, she had still looked like a childish little girl. At this age, there was no need to mention how others viewed her. Even Shu Fu herself would stare at her reflection in the mirror and exclaim:
“Holy crap, she’s even prettier than the illustrations in the original novel!”
Jiang Xuesheng and her two senior brothers, however, had begun to fret.
“Fuer is getting prettier and prettier. Disciples from the other peaks and sects keep coming over to make conversation. This is getting ridiculous…”
—Ridiculously annoying, that was.
Of course, it was not exactly appropriate to say so out loud. If they did, Master Qiu would start crying again, saying through his tears, “Knowing beauty and admiring the young—that’s only human nature,” and, “I’m begging you, be a little nicer to the disciples from the other sects. Otherwise, their sect masters will come crying to me, and I can’t take it either.”
Si Fei said, “Master, you’re unhappy. Should I drive them all out?”
Jiang Xuesheng replied, “No need. If they want to see Fuer, let them. Once they’ve seen her, they’ll give up on their own.”
Liu Ruyi said, “But they’re simply too annoying. The teleportation array has been ringing nonstop lately, and the disciples can’t get any peace. Every other moment, someone has to go out to receive guests. In my opinion, since Junior Sister isn’t interested in any of them anyway, we might as well refuse them outright and put an end to their hopes.”
Jiang Xuesheng: “Not necessarily. When it comes to Fuer making friends and forming romantic ties, neither of us is her, so it wouldn’t be appropriate to interfere rashly. Besides, the world is unpredictable. Maybe she’ll even take a fancy to one or two of them someday—unless she goes blind.”
“You’re the one who’s blind!!!!”
Shu Fu, who had been utterly absorbed in her own beauty, sprang to her feet the instant she heard that and hurled the mirror away with the force and posture of someone throwing a shot-put.
“I’m not blind.”
Without even turning his head, Jiang Xuesheng caught it with one hand and said lightly, “I know you’re wonderful. There aren’t many people outside who are worthy of you. Anyone who thinks they are ‘worthy’ must be blind.”
In other words, pretty much everyone he considered acceptable had already been sweet-talked and brought home.
The line was as shamelessly flirtatious as ever, but after years of Jiang Xuesheng’s influence, Shu Fu was no longer one to be outdone. Without so much as blinking, she shot back, “There aren’t many people worthy of me, which means there are a few, right? I’m thinking I’m old enough now. Why don’t you introduce me to one or two? I can take a look for myself.”
Jiang Xuesheng replied calmly, “I’m not old, and I’m nowhere near the age where I should be introducing people to potential partners. I don’t have one myself. How about you introduce someone to me first?”
Si Fei: “………………”
The two great masters of Yaoguang Peak had crossed swords, and the merfolk, who had failed his Mandarin exam, decided to keep his mouth shut.
Liu Ruyi did not join in. He was busy studying new makeup styles to match Tianyan Sect’s latest robes and jewelry. If he did not work harder, his title of “the Ninefold Sect’s Number One Beauty” might not be lost to Zhaoyun, but to a young junior sister instead.
Liu Xiao—male, bird, and absolutely unwilling to surrender the title of Number One Beauty.
…
Amid this chaotic, farcical atmosphere, Shu Fu welcomed her own—more precisely, Jiang Ruoshui’s—eighteenth birthday.
If she remembered correctly, at the same time in the original novel, Jiang Ruoshui should still have been suffering on Tianji Peak. Not only did she have to find every opportunity to care for the male lead, she was also ordered around by the little clique of girls led by Jiang Baozhu, enduring all manner of bullying day after day.
For that reason, although Shu Fu adored the naturally exquisite face she had been given, she had not allowed herself to become too complacent.
She knew perfectly well that this was originally the female protagonist Jiang Ruoshui’s face—and that it had never brought the heroine a shred of good fortune. All it had done was attract the hatred of a wave of female antagonists and help her win over one or two worthless men that even dogs wouldn’t eat.
Nowadays, most of the male cultivators who fawned over her were, as Master Qiu had said, young men just beginning to discover romance and beauty. They liked Jiang Ruoshui’s pretty face, not Shu Fu’s one-in-a-million, wonderfully peculiar soul.
Of course, that was the normal way of things.
There was, naturally, one person who had fallen for her soul… but it was probably best to ignore him.
He was a pervert, after all.
In short, to avoid the constant harassment of male cultivators who were nothing more than fans of her looks, Shu Fu had spent the past several years traveling with her second senior sister, Princess Zhaoyun.
As the youngest daughter of the Jade Rabbit clan leader, the Jade Demon King, Princess Zhaoyun possessed an extraordinary status. She was eighty-eight this year and had been raised in a life of pampering and adoration. She had all the standard features of a Mary Sue heroine, including some twenty or thirty older brothers.
Naturally, she had developed a fearless, domineering princess’s temper and the conviction that she was the greatest person under heaven. Her standards for men were astonishingly high. She had once declared that First Senior Brother Qi Yexin was merely the starting price, shocking the entire Ninefold Sect.
Most importantly, Princess Zhaoyun was also a little sapphic. She had taken to Shu Fu at first sight and had wanted nothing more than to cling to her every day thereafter, becoming conjoined twins with this sworn sister of a different surname.
With such a high-status accessory hanging off her, even the most foolhardy male cultivators would generally retreat rather than provoke Shu Fu—apart from the people of Yaoguang Peak, of course.
Shu Fu: Sapphic prospects: looking great.jpg
Still, on such a solemn occasion as vanquishing demons and defending the righteous path, the fact that her senior sister insisted on maintaining both her princess complex and her sapphic tendencies was beginning to wear Shu Fu down.
“Senior Sister Zhaoyun.”
She tried to reason with her. “You see, I’m holding a sword, so it’s not very convenient to carry you. How about you ride on my neck?”
Zhaoyun shook her head with utmost seriousness. “No, that won’t do. If I keep sitting on your head, Fufu, you’ll never grow any taller.”
Seeing the troubled look on Shu Fu’s face, Zhaoyun did not press the matter. She furrowed her brows over her adorable, snowy-white face and pondered for several seconds. Then, as if struck by a sudden revelation, she clapped her hands.
“Right! If Fufu can’t carry me, then I’ll carry Fufu! We’ll switch roles. Next time, you’ll be the one getting kidnapped, and I’ll come rescue you.”
Before she had even finished speaking, the girl took a graceful step forward. The instant her toes touched the ground, her entire body stretched upward by a foot.
At the same time, her figure, facial features, clothing, and everything else expanded proportionally. One of her measurements decreased while the other two increased, and she instantly transformed into a flirtatious beauty five feet nine inches tall, with fair skin, stunning features, and long legs. She was even taller than the already statuesque Shu Fu.
An eighty-eight-year-old beautiful demon cultivator came with built-in age manipulation. That was simply how she rolled.
Shu Fu’s expression grew even more helplessly amused. “Senior Sister, I’ve already dismantled half the stage. How are you still so invested in the performance—”
She had only gotten halfway through the sentence when she heard a disorderly rush of footsteps approaching like a surging tide. She immediately spun around and leveled her sword.
“Senior Sister, stay alert.”
With her movement, a great mass of figures poured out from the ruins of the collapsed white pagoda. Every one of them carried a weapon, wore black robes, and had a ferocious ghost mask covering their face.
The leader stepped forward and shouted, “Who are you?! Do you know whose territory this is?!”
“Of course I do. The black market.”
Shu Fu crooked one corner of her mouth, entirely unconcerned. “‘Ghostface’ He Xiuwen, right? The lowest-ranked of the Seven Demons. A Nascent Soul cultivator, technically, but unfortunately mediocre in combat. All he can do is hide behind the scenes and run a few disreputable businesses, bullying the weak. Truly the lowest of the low.”
She had actually wanted to say he was “the weakest of the weak,” but demon cultivators would not have understood the modern phrasing, leaving her with an unbearable sense of snowy loneliness.
The demon cultivator facing them was evidently a loyal lackey. He immediately turned hostile. “You dare defy the might of the Demon Lord with only the two of you? You must be tired of living!”
He raised his arm and was about to call on the demon cultivators to attack all at once.
“…”
Zhaoyun, who had only just completed her transformation into a beautiful woman, was deeply displeased. She frowned and said, “Fufu, there’s a Golden Core cultivator among them. Can you take him down in one move? They’re painful to look at, and I’m unhappy. I don’t want to look at them for even one more moment.”
Shu Fu was currently at the peak of Foundation Establishment, with her cultivation already beginning to stir as she prepared to form her core. She was a full realm below her opponent. At first glance, Zhaoyun’s demand seemed rather unreasonable.
But upon hearing it, Shu Fu merely raised her face and gave her a bright, easy smile.
“With Senior Sister’s help, of course I can.”
As if she had anticipated that answer, Zhaoyun smiled back. Then she flicked her sleeve.
“If that’s the case, then go.”
The instant her laughter faded, a vast, overwhelming chill swept across the entire wilderness. The wind rose beneath the high sky, cold enough to pierce the bones. Tiny particles of ice whipped against their faces, as though winter had descended without warning.
The lush green grass covering the ground was instantly coated in a layer of white frost.
“Wh—”
Even the Golden Core-stage demon cultivators could only manage to spit out a single word in the face of that sudden chill before their tongues were frozen solid.
—That’s right.
Princess Zhaoyun had been pampered from birth and carried all the airs of a young lady. Though she had the strength to shoulder a load, she hated doing so; though she could lift things, she had no desire to. From a young age, she had been unwavering in her determination to follow the path of spellcraft, eventually becoming a frost mage with a ruthless touch.
As it happened, her magic blended perfectly with the cultivation technique Shu Fu practiced, complementing it without the slightest discord.
The instant the demon cultivators were frozen into a row of ice statues, Shu Fu swung her sword with tremendous force. Empowered by the spiritual energy surging all around them, the sword light swelled several times over, like a northern gale sweeping across the earth and laying every blade of grass low.
“Go!”
Wherever the icy radiance passed, blood splattered in every direction. Heads rolled like snowballs, and not a single poisonous weed was left standing.
Yet Shu Fu’s customary barbs and cutting taunts did not reach them until after the demon cultivators’ heads had hit the ground, arriving fashionably late—
“‘The two of us alone dare to offend the awe-inspiring might of the Demon Lord,’ hmm?”
“You dare compare yourselves to Heaven? I say you’re only bullying Heaven because it can’t come down here and beat you senseless. That’s precisely why the world has the saying, ‘Carry out Heaven’s will in its stead.’”
