[Calculating, Strong-Willed Orphan Girl X Madman with a Shattered, Corrupted Dao Heart]
In the ninth year of Tianxuan, Buzhou suffered a great drought.
The earth cracked for a thousand miles, and corpses littered the land.
With her parents' remains before her and her little sister dying in her arms, A Xu knelt beneath the blazing sun, her cracked lips pleading with the heavens for rain.
That night, blessed rain fell for three days straight.
Her little sister still died. A Xu was the only one left alive.
That night, beneath a sparse scatter of stars, A Xu buried her sister. Her feet sank into the mud, and she tumbled down the slope, landing on top of a man. The night wind howled. A Xu lifted her head and, through the gloom, saw his blood-red, hollow eyes, as if nails had been driven through them.
"Hey."
A Xu's gaze fell on the white jade pendant at his neck. She gently tugged at his blood-red robe. "I'll take you home. You can be my husband, all right?"
"Your husband?"
The river kept washing over the bank, soaking the hem of his robe again and again. The cold moonlight shone on the countless nail wounds covering his body, matching those in his eyes. He turned his face slightly toward her voice, blood streaming from his eyelids down his deathly pale cheeks.
"All right."
A Xu's husband was called Qiu Jing.
Aside from being handsome, he was good for nothing.
He rarely spoke. All day long, he sat on the bed, idly playing with his white jade pendant, which looked like a little sword.
But after he came to live with A Xu, she felt that her luck had improved. Her wicked neighbors stopped trying to seize the only piece of land her family owned, the matchmaker stopped coming to arrange a marriage with the village chief's foolish son, and there was always rice left in the jar.
She heard that a demon wreaked havoc in the world, slaughtering immortal sects, and that chaos had engulfed the land beyond. Yet their village remained peaceful.
Her husband was not always so gloomy, either. Whether A Xu was cooking or boiling medicine, she had to make several trips to the room to check whether he had water to drink or had grown tired of playing with his Luban puzzle.
Whenever he heard her rustling about, a hint of a smile would appear on his usually pale face.
That smile was so warm, as if it was how he had always been meant to look.
"You run around so much, like a little puppy."
He set down the Luban puzzle and beckoned to her.
A Xu pretended to be angry and hurried over. "If I'm a puppy, what are you?"
"Another puppy."
He could sense her approaching. He tilted his face up and said earnestly, "Just like A Xu."
A Xu was good at keeping up appearances. The truth was that she had taken him home to be her husband because she'd recognized at a glance that his pendant was valuable. She knew he wouldn't survive, and planned to claim his belongings after he died.
That was the last scrap of kindness left in her numb, meager life.
A Xu had no idea.
That year, as she knelt on the ground and begged for rain, a god in the clouds had watched her suffer.
He had secretly sent that rain.
It was why she survived.
But he, pierced by countless nails and with his Dao heart shattered, had fallen from being Penglai's greatest sword cultivator and a heaven-blessed prodigy on the path to ascension to a mass grave in the mortal world.
The year her husband died,
A Xu slung his sword across her back, determined to seek justice from the heavens for herself and for him.
"With your sword, point toward the nine heavens above, beneath boundless azure skies. I honor your flawless Dao heart. How could that not mean
standing by your side?"
Happy ending
Thesis: A flawless heart can move heaven and earth.
