At Qingzhu Peak, I just got dragged into someone else's punishment.
My name is Yun Che. I'm the least well-behaved of my master Mo Xuan's nineteen disciples. My daily routine consists of making mistakes, getting punished, and being subjected to the collective "affection" of my senior brothers and sisters. My master may look like a lofty, dignified, aloof immortal, but in truth, he's a troublemaker who keeps getting made to kneel by his master, True Lord Jingyuan. My daily life has gone from "My master makes a mistake, so I get punished too" to "My grandmaster punishes my master, so I have to kneel alongside him."
Then one day, I accidentally discovered that Grandmaster Jingyuan, the man whose name strikes terror into the entire sect, is a completely different person in front of his Dao companion, True Lord Chiyan...
After that, the ancestral hall at Qingzhu Peak was lit up night after night, becoming a strange sight in the cultivation world: True Lord Chiyan glowering, Grandmaster Jingyuan kneeling ramrod straight with his ears bright red, my master bowing his head and pretending to behave, and me in the corner, desperately trying to make myself invisible.
Later, I got a little disciple of my own, Niannian. She blinked her innocent eyes and tugged at my sleeve. "Master, do your knees still hurt when you kneel on the cushion in the ancestral hall?"
I looked at the meditation cushion passed down through the generations in the ancestral hall and smiled just like my master and grandmaster.
"Good girl." I gently held out the disciplinary ruler. "You'll find out once you've knelt on it."
This is a story about "tradition." What's passed down isn't an unrivaled cultivation technique, but the cushion in the ancestral hall that someone is always kneeling on, the warmth of having someone look after you, and the clumsy but heartfelt bond of "I'm punishing you because we're in this together."
