The greatest sect in the cultivation world, Guiyuan Sect, is actually taking a concubine! No one knows who the person is yet, but the one being taken as a concubine is Xin Su, the newly named third-place winner of the imperial exams in the Kingdom of Chanzhou and its princess's prospective husband!
This is the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever heard. Guiyuan Sect cultivators are making a grand show of snatching a man from a mortal princess, and he is a mere mortal at that!
Overnight, Xin Su goes from being a newly crowned scholar and prospective prince consort to being lower than the dirt beneath someone's shoe. People first sigh that he has luck as vast as the Eastern Sea, then lament that misfortune is written in his fate.
As soon as he arrives at Guiyuan Sect, he is shoved into a sedan chair and brought in through a side gate to a pigeon cage. Some say he is debasing himself, but how can a mortal resist immortals from the heavens?
He assumes his husband must be a scoundrel who does every evil under the sun. But one night, a man as ethereal as an immortal enters his room and encourages him to smash the birdcage. Xin Su thinks this must be his husband, only for a young man in red to barge into the house the next day and take him on a rampage through Guiyuan Sect. While Xin Su is still wondering what is going on, a man in bloodstained robes enters on the third day and tells him that none of the three is his husband.
His true husband is the immortal sect, or rather, the sect's glory. He and the sect are one: when one prospers, both prosper, and when one suffers, both suffer.
Later, Xin Su learns that he is the reincarnation of an ancient spirit stone. Everyone who approaches him is doing so for their cultivation, with ulterior motives.
Everyone in Guiyuan Sect, it turns out, cultivates the Path of Ruthlessness.
Xin Su swears that if one person is his husband, he will kill that person; if an entire sect is his husband, he will destroy that sect.
Later, the ethereal man becomes nothing more than dirt beneath his feet, kneeling and begging him for a little love. The handsome young man in red loses his family and home, tries to kill Xin Su, and ends up badly injured himself. The cold killing machine, after saving countless people, only wants to save one...
In the end, this world is a sea of sin and a heaven of passion, and no one can walk away cleanly.
Theme: The benevolent are born to answer the call of fate; the accursed are born to meet their calamities.
