Chapter 14
Ling Xu ignored that last comment.
Then she looked at Huan Zheng with eyes that suddenly sparkled.
Not because of hope.
But because of a curiosity that had yet to be satisfied.
"You've already explained about the Latitudinal Foundation, Huan Zheng. But you haven't explained what lies above it. What comes after the Thirty-Third Level of Supernatural Star? What is the Heavenly Longitude? And what lies beyond all of that?"
Huan Zheng fell silent for a moment.
His lazy eyes suddenly changed—becoming heavier, deeper, like an ancient well that had never been touched by sunlight.
He yawned—but this time, the yawn felt forced, as if he were trying to hide something behind a fabricated boredom.
"That," he finally replied, his voice flat, "is a story for another time, Miss Poison. I will tell you—but only if you've broken through the limit of the Thirty-Third Level of Supernatural Star. Only if you've overcome the obstacle that prevents you from stepping into the First Level of the Bright Sky."
Ling Xu frowned.
"Obstacle? Limit? You mean—"
"I mean," Huan Zheng cut her off as he stood up, dusting off his pants, "you're asking too many questions for someone who hasn't even gathered a hundred fragments yet. Focus first, Miss Poison. Don't dream of the sky before you can stand on the ground."
He walked ahead, leaving Ling Xu still standing by the riverbank, her lips pursed—caught between irritation and disappointment, between wanting to argue and realizing that the lazy man was right.
The war in the border region continued like rain that had forgotten how to stop.
Hhhh!!
For three full months, the sky was never truly clear, only shifting between gray and red, between the rumble of Qi and screams that eventually dissolved into silence.
Ling Xu, with her robe now patched in seventeen places and her patterned white hair tied loosely because she no longer had time to tidy it, walked among the makeshift tents with hands that were never dry of blood.
The blood of soldiers.
The blood of civilians.
The blood of children whose eyes remained wide open as she bandaged their wounds.
"Nineteen patients today," she said one evening to Huan Zheng, who was lazily sitting atop a coffin—because there were no chairs, and because the man never cared where he rested, "thirteen of them survived. The other six… at least they didn't die alone."
Huan Zheng did not respond with words.
He simply took out a small pouch from his clothes—a pouch containing 777 fragments of Humanity Star, pulsing softly like a heart separated from its body—then tossed it onto Ling Xu's lap without even looking.
"Collect those, Miss Poison. You've earned your promotion."
That very night, beneath a sky still red from the remnants of battle, Ling Xu sat cross-legged on ground damp with dew and blood, feeling the 777 fragments melt into her chest, merging with her previous 51 fragments, then erupting into something new.
Not a loud explosion.
But a silent one, like a flower blooming inside a cave that had never known light, and when she opened her eyes, she had already reached the Third Level of Lower Latitude, with 228 fragments remaining as provisions for her next journey.
"Congratulations," Huan Zheng said flatly from a distance, his lazy eyes suddenly blinking—and in that single blink, 2666 fragments of Humanity Star appeared out of nowhere in his palm, spinning like a small galaxy that had forgotten it should not exist, "I advanced as well."
Ling Xu stared at Huan Zheng with wide eyes.
Not out of envy—she was far too exhausted for that—but because it made no sense, because it was impossible for a man of the same realm, the same condition, with the same food and sleep, to gather four times as many fragments in the same time.
"Where did you get all of that?" she asked, her voice caught between admiration and suspicion, but Huan Zheng merely shrugged lazily in a way that made her want to throw a stone at his head.
"I cultivated them," he answered lightly—as if he were merely duplicating something trivial, not creating something from nothingness.
His tone was flat, almost lazy, yet that was precisely what made it strange.
Like someone calling rain insignificant, even though he had just summoned it from an empty sky.
"Any cultivator can actually do it," he continued, his shoulders slightly raised, "it's just that most are too lazy—or too stupid—to truly understand how."
Ling Xu wanted to ask further, wanted to uncover the secret behind an ability not even recorded in the ancient texts she had once read in the Scripture Pavilion, but Huan Zheng had already stood and walked westward, leaving behind only a long shadow beneath the fading dusk.
"Come on, Miss Poison. The next country is waiting—and I'm starting to get bored of seeing your face every day."
The next country turned out not to be a country—but a dying small kingdom, with a king lying paralyzed on a bed far too large for a body reduced to skin and bones, and nobles who, instead of tending to him, were preparing to divide the throne like chicks fighting over a worm in a decaying coop.
Ling Xu and Huan Zheng arrived as traveling physicians—or at least, that was what they told the gate guards who initially barred their entry with rusted spears.
But when Ling Xu cured the crown princess whose fever had not subsided for seven nights, and Huan Zheng—lazily—kicked a power-drunk war general until he flew through three palace walls, the gates opened wide, and they were welcomed not as guests, but as saviors.
"I don't want to be king," Huan Zheng said when the very old prime minister knelt before him, offering a crown made of gold and diamonds, "but she—" he pointed at Ling Xu with his dirty thumb, "—does. Make her king. I'll just be a lazy minister."
Ling Xu wanted to protest, wanted to shout that she had never dreamed of becoming a ruler, that she was only a physician skilled in mixing remedies and even more skilled in brewing vengeance, but when she saw the eyes of the common people gathered in the palace courtyard—eyes no longer empty like those of the girls in Xuelan Camp, but eyes that still held a glimmer of hope despite their thin bodies and tattered clothes—she let out a long breath, then nodded.
"Very well," she said, her voice soft yet heard by all because the silence in the courtyard was so dense, like the still water of a pond that had never stirred.
"I will become your king. But on one condition: you must be willing to change. Because I will not lead a kingdom filled only with beggars waiting to die."
And under Ling Xu's leadership—with Huan Zheng as a minister who only worked two hours a day yet somehow every policy he made was always precise—the kingdom changed.
Taxes were reduced.
Rice was distributed.
New wells were dug.
And for the first time in thirty years, children in the deepest villages did not sleep on empty stomachs.
To be continued…