Immortal Paladin

It had been five years since I stole Wen Yuhan’s body.

Living in a woman’s body wasn’t easy… not physically and not emotionally. But it wasn’t impossible either. Once the initial awkwardness faded, I adapted. I couldn’t afford to be weak. Survival and strategy left no room for vanity. Besides, this body came with perks. Wen Yuhan’s Destiny Seeking Eyes had proven more refined than Nongmin’s Heavenly Eye. If it had been like the latter, which gnawed at one’s humanity with every use, I might’ve crumbled long ago. I couldn’t allow that. Not when I still had work to do.

Most days, I remained secluded in the shrine erected in “my” honor. Technically, in Da Wei’s honor. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Me… Da Wei… worshiped as a god while trapped in another’s flesh. It was a scam of cosmic proportions. My Divine Sense, merged with the Destiny Seeking Eyes, blanketed the city like a second sky. I could feel it… the intangible threads of faith slowly weaving into my core. Whispers of prayers, sacrifices, and declarations of devotion. They accumulated not like words but like energy, forming something potent and strange inside me.

I didn’t know what I was doing. That truth sat heavily with me.

Digesting Wen Yuhan’s memories took years, especially with how some of them were altered… gutted, twisted, and suppressed.

However, that was an issue for another time…

My thoughts turned to Jue Bu.

The moment I sensed he would attempt to seize my body with finality, I took Yuhan’s instead. Jue Bu’s tricks had been subtle at first, but slowly, he had been eroding my essence with yin energy without my knowing. I had no choice. Losing my physical self to Jue Bu would’ve been worse than death. This vessel was flawed and complicated, but it was a necessary contingency.

Moreover, the Destiny Seeking Eyes had proven to be quite a valuable boon.

Still…

Here I was, five years in, running a growing religious faction in my own name while pretending to be someone else. The absurdity wasn’t lost on me. I never planned to be a cult leader, but survival reshaped ambition. Faith became power. I learned that early on when I reached the Spirit Mystery Realm and discovered my unique Spirit Mystery Ability: the ability to perceive and absorb faith. Not just believe in it, but use it and convert it into quintessence.

It viciously made sense to me.

Now, people believed in me blindly, and their faith was literal power.

However, that wasn’t where the boons ended.

Stealing Wen Yuhan’s Pure Yang Spiritual Root was the true turning point. Through Divine Possession, I didn’t just take her body. Instead, I stole her cultivation and her root. Normally, spiritual roots were classified as Pure, Mixed, or Muddled. In my case, I had been born with a Muddled root in both lives here and in the Hollowed World, which made cultivation a perpetual struggle.

With Yuhan’s Pure Yang root, though, everything changed. Pure Yang was said to embody male essence, heaven, heat, and light. It was the positive principle of the universe. Odd, though… why would someone like her, biologically female, carry it? I suspected the answer lay in her unique constitution.

“There is still so much to do…”

To say I’ve done a lot would be an understatement.

Nongmin’s Heavenly Eye. Gu Jie’s Sixth Sense Misfortune. Two seemingly different abilities, yet I had learned they were fractured remnants of a singular Immortal Art, the Destiny Seeking Eyes. Now that I possessed the complete version, I could feel it sharpening with use, polishing my perception beyond ordinary comprehension.

Tonight, the shrine was quiet. The world beyond its stone walls had gone still. Only the wind, the whispering of qi, and the unblinking stare of the full moon kept me company. The night was perfect, silent, and uninterrupted. It was ideal for working. I intended to immerse myself in research: draw plans, map probabilities, and initiate the first blueprints of my own Immortal Art… It was an absolute necessity to reach the Perfect Immortal Realm.

But fate, as usual, had other ideas.

A familiar pressure hovered just outside the shrine. It was Da Ji. I sensed her even before she called my name.

“Wen Yuhan!” she shouted. “I want to talk!”

I didn’t move at first. Her presence stirred things I didn’t want to examine too closely. I couldn’t even tell if she hated Wen Yuhan, missed me, or if the lines were so blurred she no longer knew the difference. Still, she had never once set foot inside this shrine in five years. And now, in the middle of the night?

”I guess, this has to happen at some point...”

As a brother and son, it was a shitty move for me to ’hide’ like this, but this was the only way. I’ve been delaying this ’talk’ as much as possible, hoping to avoid upsetting the cart and tug at certain butterflies of fate to fly in a certain direction.

I sighed and stood from my meditation, adjusting the loose robe around my shoulders. As always, I forced myself into Wen Yuhan’s mannerisms… a graceful step, a soft breath, and the tilt of the chin that suggested both patience and distance.

Whatever this conversation was going to be, I had to be careful. After all, it wasn’t just Da Ji at the door.

It was my sister.

And she still thought I was missing.

“It’s been a long time,” I said, stepping out from the shadowed corridor of the shrine. ”Is there something I can help you with, young lady?”

Da Ji stood beneath the moonlight. “It’s because you keep on avoiding me,” she replied flatly. ”While I try to avoid the shrine, I’ve been making efforts to meet you, but you keep on avoiding me...”

That was true. I had been avoiding her. Of all the people tied to this life, Da Ji was the most difficult to face. It wasn’t because of guilt or sentiment. No, something darker clung to her presence… something the Destiny Seeking Eyes kept flagging in hues of suspicion and dread. Ever since I took over Wen Yuhan’s body, certain threads of memory had emerged. Foreign ones. Twisted echoes from times I’d never lived but could somehow remember.

There was a tale, half-erased and half-imposed, about a Da Ji who once seduced an emperor. She wasn’t human… she was a fox spirit, a nine-tailed demon serving some distant Supreme Being. The tale fractured through the Eyes, replaying itself again and again in surreal variations. Tentacles turned into tails. Tails turned into tentacles. And in the center of it all was her… Da Ji, smiling, devouring, and whispering things that unraveled sanity. That narrative didn’t belong in this world, but it clung to her name like mold to damp wood.

The impulse to kill her wasn’t born from fear or hatred… it was instinctual. An urge rooted in something deeper than reason, like a command issued by fate itself. I resisted it, but it made her unbearable to be around. That was why I stayed distant from her. From my parents too. I was afraid of what I might see next, and I’d hate to set off a chain of events I’d rather not see happening.

“What do you want?” I asked, keeping my expression placid, though I tightened the invisible threads of Divine Sense around the shrine.

“Kill me,” she said.

I blinked once. “What?”

“Kill me,” she repeated, her tone disturbingly casual. “My brother wouldn’t let it happen, I’m sure. But you’re different. I’ve seen the good you’ve done for Willow. You care. So I know I can ask this of you. Please. Do it while he’s gone.”

I frowned. She was serious.

Her gaze didn’t falter, not even to blink. She stood still as a blade poised above silk. She wasn’t bluffing… There was no trembling in her stance, and no hesitation in her voice. This was something premeditated, maybe even rehearsed.

“Kill you?” I scoffed and folded my arms. “And what? Earn Da Wei’s grudge? I’m not a fool, little girl. Moreover, Da Wei is our lord and savior.”

She rolled her eyes. “You don’t believe that.”

I paused, only for a breath, but it was enough.

“There’s a technique my brother uses that lets him tell truth from lies,” she said, stepping closer. “He doesn’t realize it, but I figured it out. I learned how it works.”

Divine Sense. There was no other possibility. But how had she reverse-engineered it? To perceive truth through intent was one of the more abstract applications of Divine Sense. Even I struggled with that part of my ability, especially since I lost David_69 in me. Da Ji wasn’t supposed to be this capable. But she was. And that terrified me.

I exhaled slowly, keeping my tone even. “You think dying will fix something? What makes you believe Willow, or the people, will benefit from your death?”

“Because I’ll kill them all otherwise,” she answered.

The air dropped several degrees. Her qi exploded out in a storm of frost and illusion. Mist coiled around her feet, spreading like a cancer across the tiles of the courtyard. I watched in silent disbelief as her Spirit Mystery Realm cultivation unfolded before me for the first time.

I was alarmed by the sight.

She had hidden her cultivation perfectly. Even with my eyes, I hadn’t seen through her veil until now. To reach the Spirit Mystery Realm with muddled roots… unless she had stolen something, changed something… it was a feat bordering on the unnatural. But more concerning than her power… was her sincerity.

She meant what she said.

“I’ll do it,” she went on, voice soft and eyes hollow. “If you don’t kill me, I’ll break down the walls of Willow and reduce every house to bone and ash. I can’t hold it in anymore. There’s something wrong with me. Every time I close my eyes, I see people die. And every day, it feels closer to happening.”

I didn’t respond.

I just stared at her, at the girl I used to call my sister. Whatever madness had taken root in her… it wasn’t just psychological. It was metaphysical. Something old was whispering through her soul, and it was calling for blood.

This was bad.

Very, very fucking bad.

“Do you really think that’s the right choice?” I asked, gaze steady on her as frost clung to the eaves and the air buzzed with killing intent. “No. That’s the coward’s choice.”

Da Ji said nothing.

She stood there, mist curling around her feet like snakes unsure of their prey, her eyes empty yet brimming with something wild. I didn’t want to push her further, but this was turning into a no-win scenario. I had no interest in testing how serious she was about wiping out New Willow. At this rate, someone would die. So, I decided to gamble on the safest and most dangerous option… the truth.

She could read truth from lies now, just like I could. If so, there was no point hiding.

“You asked for this,” I muttered, steadying my breath. “So don’t blame me.”

I raised my head, squared my shoulders, and said it plainly: “I am Da Wei. Your brother. I stole Wen Yuhan’s body, and I’ve been moonlighting as a shrine maiden and pretending to be her for the past five years. Please don’t kill everyone. Just… calm down.”

She blinked. The mist dispersed like fog at sunrise. “…”

Her mouth opened slightly. Then closed. Then opened again.

“…What?” she asked, as if I’d spoken another language.

I repeated, slower this time. “I am Da Wei. Your brother. I stole Wen Yuhan’s body. And I’ve been moonlighting as a shrine maiden, pretending to be her. For five years. Please don’t kill everyone.”

She blinked more, then raised her voice. “I heard you the first time, idiot! But… no way. You’re not lying. That’s impossible. I had a sister all along? No… wait. A brother? Maybe you’re just a ghost who lies so well, you believe your own lies.”

I placed one hand on my hip and narrowed my eyes. “Really? You think Divine Sense works on everyone except people who lie to themselves? If that were the case, none of us could trust anything. So no, I’m not lying. This isn’t a trick or delusion. Since you’ve reached the Spirit Mystery Realm and are surrounded by circumstances that make no sense, I figured you deserved to hear this from me.”

She looked at me like she wanted to claw the sky open. “No. You can’t be my brother.”

“Sure, I can,” I said, walking a few steps forward, just enough to close the distance of doubt. “We used to hang out near the creek. You hated martial arts training, but you loved dancing. You always said dancing let you feel free, that it made the world quiet.”

Da Ji scoffed. “Anyone who knows me well enough could say that.”

I nodded. “Fair. Then how about this… You used to rip apart small animals. Dead cats, dogs. You’d cut them open and poke around their guts. Not for fun. Not even to hurt them. Just because you wanted to know. Like some morbid curiosity that never left you.”

“NO!” she shrieked, staggering back a step. Her voice cracked. Her expression trembled between rage and horror.

I really looked at her with a deadpan glare. And then I said the thing I knew would end the argument, even if it killed the last shreds of our old relationship and left her dignity in tatters.

“You have a mole on your right thigh. Near the base. Hidden beneath your groin. If I weren’t your brother, your husband, or your parent, how would I know that?”

She stopped moving.

Her lips parted slightly, but no sound came out. The frost in the air was gone completely. The mist dispersed. Her entire cultivation… Spirit Mystery, terrifying as it was… collapsed back into dormancy as her knees hit the ground. She didn’t cry. Instead, she just sat there, breathing hard, eyes hollow.

There was no victory in this, only a cross-dressing brother and a scarred sister.

Da Ji buried her face in her hands, her shoulders trembling. Then she shouted, voice cracking, “I hate you, big bro… I’m already a grown adult!”

The way she said it, so much like the child she used to be, fighting tears as if they betrayed her, almost made me smile.

I stepped forward and pulled her into a hug.

She resisted, half-heartedly, before leaning into it. The heat between us wasn’t romantic. It was raw, jagged, and old. It smelled of childhood fights and days under the sun, of hidden tears and unspoken guilt.

I rested my chin on her head and muttered, “Well, what can you expect? That’s the destiny of the little sister… to be shat upon by their big brother.”

She hit my chest once, weakly. “You bastard…”

“Yup.”

“You died.”

“Not really.”

“You made me cry.”

“Frequently.”

“Don’t go disappearing again,” she said, voice muffled by my robes.

“I’ll try,” I whispered. “No promises, though. I’m still a lying bastard, remember?”

She held on tighter. Neither of us said anything after that. The full moon watched us. The shrine stood still. And for once, there was no storm. Just silence, and a little bit of peace, however fragile.