Before entering the Northern Court Moon Palace, Mu Xujing lived in the mountains.

The mountains were majestic, the forests vast, with many birds and beasts. When he was small and had no one to rely on, he often fought with mountain animals for food.

He lived nothing like a human.

Later, he heard such a rumor: an infant abandoned in the mountains was carried back by a mother wolf to be raised as a wolf cub. Protected and taught by the wolf pack, the wolf child grew up intelligent and healthy, not only living carefree in the mountains but also achieving great things in the human world after being enlightened and taken away, becoming praised and celebrated.

Others told this story with relish and wonder, but Mu Xujing listened with an expressionless face.

Perhaps his luck was bad—the mother wolf he encountered didn’t take him back to raise as a cub, but instead nearly tore off his limbs as food.

Some people are born with bad luck.

He didn’t know why he was abandoned, growing up alone in the mountains.

What saved him from danger multiple times was the power of spiritual meridians, which he found difficult to understand at the time.

Mu Xujing didn’t know how to use this power, relying only on his spiritual meridians’ self-protection.

When hungry, he would look for food.

In his free time, he would squat on a tree and silently watch the sun, moon, and stars.

Often, his mind was empty.

Just quietly waiting for time to pass.

After several outbursts of spiritual power, animals became afraid of him, running away when they saw him, making his days much easier.

When Mu Xujing was six years old, he encountered villagers who came to the mountains to hunt. Because he ate raw meat and had a pitiful appearance, they were scared out of their wits, scrambling away.

It wasn’t the first time he had seen people.

Previously, he had quietly observed humans entering the mountains from the shadows. This time, they faced each other directly, and he was beaten and scolded as a monster that would eat children, causing him to retreat deeper into the mountains.

Though he disappeared, the villagers remained uneasy. Coincidentally, during that period, demonic beasts were causing trouble. In their ignorance, people blamed him, so they organized more than ten people armed with weapons to enter the mountains and eliminate this humanoid monster.

The villagers were determined to kill this monster to ease their worries.

Thus, they ventured deep into the mountains and successfully found the boy squatting on a tree watching the stars.

At that time, Mu Xujing had no idea why people were chasing him. Although he tried to fight back in the manner of beasts, he was still captured, his hands and feet bound to a pole as they carried him down the mountain.

His unfortunate life encountered its first turning point:

On the way down, the people met a cultivator battling the troublemaking demonic beast.

That Dao Lord wore a cloud-golden embroidered robe inscribed with complex incantations, handsome in appearance and powerful in skill.

After killing the demonic beast, he held his sword to block the villagers and asked, “What are you adults doing binding a child like this?”

“Ch-child?”

The villagers were stunned.

The Dao Lord casually used a sword incantation to cut the ropes, letting the little monster fall clumsily to the ground. He got up to run but was immobilized by a curse.

The man used his sword to lift the boy’s messy, tangled hair, saying with disgust, “Filthy.”

Then he looked at the dumbfounded villagers and threatened, “Child traffickers? Where did you kidnap this child from?”

The villagers fell to their knees begging for mercy, repeatedly protesting their innocence.

A young girl holding a raccoon dog in her arms ran over breathlessly, calling to the Dao Lord, “Qing Shun! Speak nicely!”

Hearing this, the Dao Lord looked speechless, “You talk to them, then.”

With that, he sheathed his sword and stood aside, watching at ease as the young girl walked toward the immobilized little monster.

The girl seemed a bit afraid, carefully using the raccoon dog’s paw to lift the little monster’s long hair. Seeing the pale face beneath the messy black hair, she sighed with relief and smiled, “What? He’s quite cute.”

The misunderstanding between the villagers and the Dao Lord was resolved.

But the little monster remained a little monster.

The villagers despised and feared him, not getting close to him. Some avoided him, while the more aggressive ones cursed him on sight.

Mu Xujing’s curiosity about the world outside the mountains quickly disappeared. On the day he decided to return to the mountains, it rained—a downpour that caused landslides, with mud and rocks flowing down, destroying the mountain paths. An old man walking home at night had his foot trapped under a large rock.

He heard the cry for help, but he didn’t know what it meant. To the little monster at that time, a human’s shout was a rebuke, meaning to drive him away, to make him leave.

The little monster felt rebellious for the first time, running toward the source of the sound with some anger.

How dare you shout at me!

Want to bet I’ll bite you to death?

That’s what the little monster thought.

But when he arrived, he saw the old man covered in blood and trapped by the rock, looking completely different from the villagers who had been fierce toward him.

So the little monster was confused.

Some kind of instinct made him step forward and push away the rock. A person with spiritual power is much stronger than an ordinary person, even a child.

The old man kept saying to him, “Thank you, thank you.”

This tone was gentle and full of kindness.

The old man lived alone at the foot of the mountain, far from the village.

He adopted the little monster.

The old man taught him to speak, taught him human common sense, taught him to make fire and eat cooked food, helped him wash his body and comb his hair, and bought him clothes and shoes.

The five-year-old little monster gradually became a seven or eight-year-old boy.

From then on, Mu Xujing began to look human.

The old man would take him to the market town, connecting him with the outside world. At first, Mu Xujing didn’t want to go, but later the old man said, “If someday I die, and you’re alone again, as lonely as before, how heartbroken I would be.”

Under the old man’s companionship and guidance, Mu Xujing gradually stopped finding humans frightening.

He seemed to live a normal life.

Occasionally, villagers would come to ask for his help with tasks.

Life in the mountains was peaceful, but with the changing seasons, different farming activities made life fulfilling.

Mu Xujing liked this kind of life.

The warm twilight fell on the flower and fruit trellis that he had repaired with the old man, and on the small courtyard in front of the house. Sweet potatoes grew in the ground below the steps, now blooming with purple-white flowers. The silk mouse that had followed him from the mountains rolled around on the lounge chair in the courtyard, making the old man, who was picking vegetables, laugh heartily.

One night, a group of people dressed in the same splendid attire as the Dao Lord from his memory descended from the sky on swords.

The sword energy was overwhelming, frightening the silk mouse on the lounge chair, sending it scrambling away.

The old man sheltered the silk mouse and him behind his back.

On this day, Mu Jingyi took him back to the Northern Court Moon Palace.

The young man refused to go and was severely beaten.

The old man knelt and begged for mercy. Mu Jingyi walked forward, his boots shiny and immaculate, stepping in front of the young man’s eyes, looking down to meet his angry red eyes.

The man’s demeanor was cold and stern, his gaze indifferent.

Mu Jingyi held his long sword across the old man’s throat and said to the young man: “You have no choice.”

“You are a member of the Mu family, the young master of the Northern Court Moon Palace. You have responsibilities that must be fulfilled. You shouldn’t be living an obscure life in such a rundown place.”

Mu Xujing was taken back to the Moon Palace. He was kept in the Mu family for a year before his identity as an illegitimate child was made public. His peaceful daily life was shattered, and once again, he lived amid others’ discussions and strange, appraising gazes.

Mu Jingyi told him: “Until you become strong, don’t allow yourself to have any weaknesses, and it’s best not to care about any life other than your own.”

So he learned about the Half-Day Calamity.

If he didn’t obey Mu Jingyi’s arrangements, the old man would lose his life.

Along with the peaceful life he had always hoped for.

Mu Jingyi taught him many things.

Killing was one of them.

“This world is unfair,” Mu Jingyi said. “Cultivators and mortals are divided into classes from birth. In the world of cultivators, the strong rule, while in the mortal world, status and position determine whose life is valuable and whose is worthless.”

Under the grand moonlight, he tightly gripped his long sword, expressionlessly watching the man lying in a pool of blood, while the woman beside him fainted from fear.

Mu Jingyi stood in the shadow of the moonlight and said quietly: “Your father was the son of an immortal sect family, and the master of a great immortal sect, with a lofty status.”

“And your mother was a courtesan. Skilled in dance and music, serving with her beauty, a lowly, inferior person.”

“Not every courtesan in this world can have the same luck as the one from Nanshan Snow River, but they all have the same purpose and scheming. Your mother bribed servants to avoid taking the medicine, thus conceiving you, and then used her pregnancy to threaten the Mu family.”

“However, the owner of the pleasure house despised women like her who acted on their own and disregarded the rules. The news of the pregnancy couldn’t get out. The pleasure house owner pretended to let your mother believe she would become the wife of the Northern Court Moon Palace’s master, watching her throw her weight around for a while. When the fun was over, he told her the truth.”

“Your mother had her tongue cut out, her eyes removed, her ears cut off, and her nose sliced off,” Mu Jingyi said quietly, looking at the fainted woman. “The pleasure house owner knew that if she truly gave birth to a Mu family child, it would be even more troublesome, but he was truly angered by her actions. Thus, he waited until after you were born and made her kill you herself to vent his anger.”

“The day you were just born, your mother agreed to kill you to survive.”

“But you were lucky. That day, people from Nanshan Snow River destroyed this pleasure house, leaving no survivors, though inevitably some escaped the net.”

Mu Xujing, hearing this, momentarily wanted to laugh.

He didn’t care about his parents—they were meaningless to him now. He just found it absurdly funny that this was the first time someone said he was lucky.

What luck? What lowly, inferior person? If you’re so high and mighty, why did you stoop to sleep with an inferior person? It’s all self-inflicted.

But Mu Xujing had already learned not to argue with Mu Jingyi, as only he would suffer.

He just listened in silence.

“A servant at the pleasure house couldn’t bear it and took you away during the chaos, but he didn’t live much longer, which cut off our clues to find you,” Mu Jingyi continued. “If your father hadn’t died, he would have had other offspring born, with nobler blood than yours, but everything became complicated because of that lowborn woman.”

This was the first time Mu Xujing heard about Jiang Miao from Mu Jingyi’s mouth, and also the first time he saw the calm and cold Mu Jingyi so disgusted and hateful toward someone.

“She killed your father,” Mu Jingyi said.

Perhaps he wanted Mu Xujing to hate Jiang Miao as much as he did, but Mu Xujing felt nothing toward Jiang Miao for committing such a crime.

Mu Xujing thought that not applauding Jiang Miao’s actions was already giving his father enough face.

“The Jiang family produced such a madwoman, they all deserve to die. You are of the Mu family, so you are destined to be irreconcilable with the Jiang family,” Mu Jingyi looked at the woman on the ground and said, “You must kill the Jiang family members to avenge him, not just one, but all of them.”

Mu Xujing had no choice.

He killed this woman.

At this time, Mu Xujing did not consider himself involved in the struggles of the Northern Court Moon Palace’s noble families. He just wanted to complete all of Mu Jingyi’s requirements quickly, so he could return early to take care of the old man and his silk mouse.

If he didn’t obey, he would be the one suffering.

Mu Jingyi didn’t see him as a person, only as a tool.

A tool with impure blood, picked up out of necessity, requiring time to polish.

Mu Xujing also regarded himself as a tool; he just needed to do as Mu Jingyi said.

Whatever demons, whatever grudges, had nothing to do with him.