Li Yunxian sent a voice transmission, expressing her disbelief, while Liang Xuan only managed to recover from the shock of this truth after quite some time.
But she only barely managed to recover.
She still refused to believe this fact.
Even though scenes of the increased bad luck she’d experienced since swapping fortunes with Li Yunxian replayed in Liang Xuan’s mind—much more frequent than before—she still didn’t want to believe it.
She couldn’t accept that all the risks she’d taken had only led to this outcome.
With a look that was part laughter, part tears, she struggled and said, “But my spell techniques really broke through, my cultivation advanced too…”
“It can’t be as you said, you must be lying to me.”
“You must be lying to me!”
Li Yunxian looked calmly at Liang Xuan. “Isn’t it possible that you could’ve achieved all of this on your own?”
“You’ve already reached the peak of Qi Refining, so you should know how important one’s state of mind is in cultivation.”
“This period of rapid progress was only because you always thought you had bad luck, and after swapping fortunes with me—the one you thought was lucky—you believed you could succeed.”
“You were just missing that bit of perfect mental state, and so you made your breakthrough.”
Liang Xuan stared blankly.
Li Yunxian’s words mercilessly tore open all the self-deception within Liang Xuan.
Mr. Ji Fa, witnessing this scene, sighed inwardly. He stepped forward and, in a serious tone, asked Liang Xuan another crucial question.
“Liang Xuan, where did you get your Fortune-Shifting Token?”
Liang Xuan pressed her lips together and muttered vaguely, “I didn’t get it from the Academy, it has nothing to do with the Academy.”
Mr. Ji Fa was speechless at her answer.
If the item had nothing to do with the Academy, did that mean he didn’t need to know where it came from?
The Academy was under the jurisdiction of the Academic Office—an official institution—so supervising and investigating students was his responsibility.
This girl clearly hadn’t learned a thing about this area!
Just then, Ling Zhou saw that Mr. Ji Fa was angered, and realized that Liang Xuan’s punishment could be increased because of her evasiveness.
He struggled for a moment, but finally stepped forward and spoke up.
“Teacher, four years ago, Kou City was invaded by a Foreign Tribe. Liang Xuan and I helped defend the Academy and fought against them.”
“After that…” Ling Zhou paused for a moment before continuing, “Liang Xuan, for the first time, sighed to me about my good luck.”
“She’d never mentioned luck before.”
It was clear: after obtaining the Fortune-Shifting Token in that incident, Liang Xuan had started paying close attention to everyone’s luck.
After speaking, Ling Zhou turned to look at Liang Xuan, unable to help but ask the question that had been lingering since he learned about the Fortune-Shifting Token: “Was I the first person you wanted to swap luck with?”
Ling Zhou still remembered, after losing to Li Yunxian on the stage, Liang Xuan’s words: ‘Does she have even better luck than you?’
In Ling Zhou’s mind, Liang Xuan had originally intended to swap with him.
But his tone, when asking Liang Xuan, was less of an accusation and more as if he was saying—
-If only you’d swapped with me.
-If you swapped with him, even if caught, he could have kept it a secret.
“Ling Zhou.” Mr. Ji Fa frowned and gave Ling Zhou a warning look.
He understood Ling Zhou’s underlying meaning.
But Liang Xuan didn’t pick up on it. She felt insulted.
Liang Xuan jumped straight off the hospital bed, glaring at Ling Zhou. “I never thought about swapping with you!”
“I’m not stupid. If I wanted to swap luck, would I go around talking about luck all the time in front of people?”
“How could you think of me that way!!”
“I never even thought of using it before. It was her…” Liang Xuan turned to look at Li Yunxian, but meeting Li Yunxian’s gaze, her anger faltered.
“She was just too much…” Liang Xuan’s voice was lacking in confidence.
Li Yunxian showed her no mercy, continuing to expose Liang Xuan’s self-deception.
“What do you mean you never thought of it?”
“The moment you kept the Fortune-Shifting Token without turning it in, you already had the thought to use it.”
“These Artifacts of Foreign Tribe must all be handed over to the authorities for unified processing.”
“I only gave you a reason to use it with a clear conscience.”
Li Yunxian looked straight at Liang Xuan and said, “At the time, you probably thought it was just giving me a little lesson for a couple of weeks or a month at most.”
Liang Xuan pressed her lips together again. She didn’t try to argue, and instead, in self-defeat, said, “My life is over now. You must be happy to see me end up like this.”
Li Yunxian couldn’t help but sigh.
Is this the point?
Now she finally understood why Su Wenjing wanted her to handle this matter.
Su Wenjing must have felt speechless many times while watching over Liang Xuan, and wanted her to experience this feeling for herself.
Right now, Li Yunxian felt like she didn’t even want to bother arguing with a fool.
“You’re still making excuses for yourself.” Li Yunxian finished speaking, then directly recited the rules to Liang Xuan.
“Using Artifacts of Foreign Tribe is punishable, depending on severity, from a verbal warning to having one’s cultivation abolished.”
“The lightest penalty is for using an Artifact of Foreign Tribe to kill Foreign Tribes in non-emergency situations.”
“The most serious is causing casualties among your own people.”
“In your case, since there were no injuries or deaths, it would normally just be a demerit on your record.”
Hearing Li Yunxian’s smooth legal analysis, Mr. Ji Fa gave her several extra looks.
Very few students bothered to study these dry regulations.
But in Li Yunxian’s intuition, given the situations she found herself in, chances to use these rules were likely not rare.
-Indeed, she’d already used them several times.
However, this time Li Yunxian didn’t get it entirely right.
After her words faded, Mr. Ji Fa continued with Liang Xuan’s actual punishment.
“Because this happened during a joint school exchange and you attacked a student from another school out of revenge, the nature of it is worse. If the school process finds no issues, you’ll be given a major demerit.”
At Ji Fa, they had to show a stance of strict punishment, to reassure Tiantong’s side.
Otherwise, why would any of the four major academies want to hold exchanges with Ji Fa in the future?
Hearing this adjustment to the punishment, Li Yunxian’s expression didn’t change; she was unfazed as she went on.
“Whether it’s a demerit or a major demerit, it just means you can’t go where most classmates do.”
That is, the Academic Office, Special Administration Bureau, or the Military Guard.
All these organizations check the school records.
“But it’s not like there aren’t students who go down other paths—don’t just declare your life over now.”
It just means cultivation becomes much harder.
You could say it’s similar to how rogue cultivators live in the cultivation world.
“Aren’t there plenty among them who do quite well?” Li Yunxian asked Liang Xuan.
Liang Xuan was momentarily at a loss for words.
Li Yunxian didn’t care how she answered.
She went on, “Also, the Academy’s punishment is their business, but I personally didn’t gain anything.”
“The two things aren’t interchangeable. There’s nothing for me to be happy about.”
“What I want more now, is for you to give me an apology,” Li Yunxian said.
Liang Xuan felt, with these words, everyone’s gaze converged on her.
She felt humiliated.
“……I’m sorry.”
Liang Xuan lowered her head. Her voice was choked, but there was no real resentment.
Just now, Li Yunxian’s final words of admonishment—she wasn’t so foolish as to miss the fact that those words were for her own good.
Hearing those three words, Li Yunxian:
She was a little dazed, and couldn’t help but send a voice transmission to Su Wenjing: “She really apologized to me just like that??”
Su Wenjing didn’t understand Li Yunxian’s reaction: “Is there something wrong with that?”
Li Yunxian thought it was wrong.
“Shouldn’t she have flown into a rage, scolded me, ‘You’re not worthy!’ Then someone protective would show up and say, ‘She knows her mistake, don’t press her further’”
“Or maybe she’d lash out, pull out some explosive artifact from who-knows-where, suddenly raise her cultivation by a whole major realm, and fight me to the bitter end.”
“Or look pitifully at some old ancestor, and then the ancestor would step in and say, ‘She’s under such-and-such Venerable, show some mercy where you can.’”
“We’re still on someone else’s turf; I was already prepared!” Li Yunxian’s voice was full of disbelief.
***
Back at the Academy, that kind of domino effect like with the Du Family was what Li Yunxian was most familiar with.
Su Wenjing:
Judging from Li Yunxian’s experience, she really had been through a lot.
But Su Wenjing didn’t say anything.
Because, in truth, he had been through… plenty himself.
Long, long ago, the cultivation world was nothing like it is now.
Li Yunxian’s stream of comments even dragged him into some unpleasant memories.
All in all, Li Yunxian had never before encountered someone who actually apologized when she asked for one, and it took her several seconds to respond.
“All right, I have no further objections.” Li Yunxian didn’t say any words of forgiveness, just packed up her things and withdrew from the center of attention.
The rest would be handled internally by Ji Fa’s staff.
Very soon, a teacher stepped forward and had Liang Xuan hand over the Fortune-Shifting Token.
Not long after, Li Yunxian felt her own luck return.
Only, seeing the fortune token so well disguised that no one could recognize it, some couldn’t help but ask Li Yunxian the very question that Liang Xuan had asked her in the beginning.
“How did you discover this?”
Even Foundation Establishment cultivators with divine sense couldn’t necessarily recognize what this was.
This time, Li Yunxian answered.
“I majored in artifact forging at Tiantong. My instructor is Li Tianying.”
Simple and direct. No further explanation needed.
Yet many people’s expressions twisted, and some even looked at Su Wenjing with odd gazes.
Those eyes clearly said: -You actually let such a fierce one, the student who trounced Ling Zhou, major in artifact forging?!
Su Wenjing ignored all the looks.
This reincarnated cultivator, besides artifact forging, really had nothing else suitable to study at the Academy.
The two of them didn’t bother about Liang Xuan’s aftermath any longer.
After leaving the infirmary, Su Wenjing, having finished his tasks, quickly vanished, but Li Yunxian did not leave.
She stayed a while longer and soon saw Ling Zhou, looking lost and listless, appear.
As the one who had fought a Jindan-stage Earth-Swallowing Beast alone, he was actually the least injured of the students.
He didn’t know how to interact with Liang Xuan now, so naturally, he’d left the infirmary early.
Before long, Ling Zhou noticed Li Yunxian standing in the distance, looking at him.
It seemed like she was waiting for him.
Ling Zhou hesitated, then walked over.
“Student Li, is there something you want?” Ling Zhou asked.
Seeing that Ling Zhou still hadn’t recovered from what had happened in the infirmary, Li Yunxian didn’t answer his question, but instead told him a story.
A story of someone killed by a friend over a box.
When she finished, Li Yunxian looked at Ling Zhou. “If someone can act against those closest to them, it means they’ve already abandoned their bottom line.”
“Don’t think just because you’re strong you can handle anything.”
Sometimes, the price of yielding to a friend is your own life.
Ling Zhou froze. After a long moment, he asked Li Yunxian, “Then… what happened to the student who killed his friend?”
Li Yunxian replied coolly, “He became a hunter—and died.”