My Pretentious Grandmaster

On the day of Zhao Xuanzheng's wedding, Gu Yuefu watched him turn the last remaining bone of her late master into a phoenix hairpin and place it in the bride's hair.

Realizing she had been deceived, Gu Yuefu drew her sword and drenched the wedding in blood.

No one dared stop her once she went berserk. With no other choice, everyone summoned Jing Zhouhua, the judicial deity of the immortal realm, once more.

Facing the handsome god who showed compassion for all living things, Gu Yuefu could not stop herself from sneering. She said, "Grandmaster, no one disciplined me when I was little, and no one can discipline me now."

She remembered the first time Jing Zhouhua descended to the mortal realm to capture her. He had struck her palms hundreds of times with a ruler, scolding her for her reckless arrogance and for not behaving as a girl should. She had long strayed from the right path, he said, and he had to guide her back. Gu Yuefu had found him unbearably annoying.

He disliked her for lacking her late master's graceful bearing. She resented him for hiding away after her master's death. They parted on bad terms.

Now, as Jing Zhouhua looked at her, his eyes were no longer devoid of joy or sorrow. Gu Yuefu assumed there was no escaping her fate, but to her surprise, the thousand-year-old deity turned with a sweep of his sleeve and drew her behind him.

"Yuefu has erred, and as her grandmaster, I should discipline her. But I am the only one who may do so."

Looking at Jing Zhouhua's hand resting beside her, Gu Yuefu recalled how, in countless moments when a deity ought not to have been napping, she had taken his long, jade-white fingertips into her palm and to her lips, teasing them until they were as red as rouge.

-

Gu Yuefu's first half of life was mired in hardship. Jing Zhouhua's arrival spared her the storms of the years that followed.

She had once been grateful to have such a grandmaster, yet on countless sleepless nights, she resented him. Why did Jing Zhouhua have to be her grandmaster? Why did he always tolerate her impertinence, yet pretend not to notice it?

Bright as the moon, when can I pluck you from the sky?

All this pretense, when will it give way?

2022-12-27

Theme: A woman must make herself strong