Ultimate Villain's Return as a Doctor in the Cultivation World

Chapter 306: Chapter 306- Lin Ship’s Arrival

She was here without sect support — the Verdant Mountain Sect’s current leadership had declined to sponsor her entry. She had paid the entry fee herself from twelve years of carefully managed private cultivation resources.

Her body at thirty-eight was the body of a woman who had gone through everything she’d gone through and was still here — which meant it carried weight in the literal sense, curves that had deepened with the years, a figure that had been lean at twenty and was now something fuller and softer and considerably more present. She was not tall. She had a round, warm face and brown eyes that had seen too much to be surprised by most things, and she wore her dark hair in a simple braid that she’d been doing herself every morning for fifteen years.

The junior disciples who had been polite about her age had stopped noticing her age approximately ten seconds after she’d demonstrated her cultivation output. Peak mid-Nascent Soul. The looks after that had been different.

She stood alone near the western wall and watched the portal gate and thought about her daughter, who was twelve and currently being supervised by the neighbor who had agreed to three weeks of oversight, and did not think about anything else.

|| Yan Shu|| could not see the portal gate.

She could feel it.

The pulse of it — that slow, deep blue throb of ancient qi — reached her as a vibration in the spiritual atmosphere that she read through her cultivation base the way sighted people read with their eyes. Precise. Detailed. Complete. She had been blind since birth, and she had been cultivating since she was six, and the spiritual sense that most cultivators used as a supplement to vision had become, for her, the primary instrument through which she navigated everything.

She was twenty-two. She was from the Silkwhisper Pavilion — a sect that specialized in sensory cultivation arts, which had been delighted to discover one of their junior disciples had a foundational advantage in sensory training that they’d spent sixteen years building on. She practiced the Fairy Skin Art, which was what it sounded like: a cultivation method that refined the body’s surface sensitivity to the point where spiritual sense could be read through the skin at distances and resolutions that other cultivators required dedicated techniques to achieve.

The side effect of the Fairy Skin Art, which the Silkwhisper Pavilion’s senior practitioners discussed in purely clinical terms and which junior male disciples discussed in considerably less clinical terms when they thought she couldn’t hear them, was that it made her skin — all of it — extraordinarily, continuously, almost unbearably sensitive to touch.

She managed this. She had spent sixteen years managing it.

She was small — not short but small, fine-boned, with the particular economy of a person whose body had learned to carry itself with precision because she couldn’t afford to bump into things. Her hair was long and pale and she wore it loose because she found the sensation of it against her neck useful as a peripheral sensory reference. Her eyes were pale — not white, but the particular washed-out gray of eyes that had never had functional input to process, set in a face that was softly, quietly beautiful in a way that seemed more like an accident than an intention.

She was accompanied by one senior disciple from the Silkwhisper Pavilion — a calm woman of forty who served as her eyes in situations where spiritual sense alone wasn’t sufficient. Her name was Sister Yun, and she stood at Yan Shu’s left shoulder with the practiced attentiveness of someone who had been doing this for five years.

"Thirty-seven other entrants registered," Sister Yun said quietly. "The portal team is doing final qi-stone calibration. Estimated opening in two hours."

Yan Shu nodded. She could feel the thirty-seven other entrants herself — the distinct shapes of their cultivation bases, their qi signatures, their positions in the arena. She could feel the six Holy Ice Sect disciples in their neat formation to the northeast. She could feel the Cloudveil woman standing alone by the eastern gate, radiating the particular qi pattern of someone who is maintaining composure by force of will.

She could feel, from the western wall, the Verdant Mountain woman whose cultivation base carried the specific scar-texture of spiritual damage that had been rebuilt over and was probably stronger now than before the damage but would always carry the mark.

She turned her face toward the sky.

There was a ship descending.

Large. She could feel its qi-stone furnace from here — the distinct frequency of Lin Clan stones. The levitation array. And within it, at a distance that should have been beyond the range of even her refined sensory cultivation—

She went still.

"Sister Yun," she said. Very quietly. "What clan’s ship is descending?"

"Lin Clan. The family of the Giantess Tribe. The First Heir is entered in the competition — there was a notice last week about the succession." A pause. "They’ve apparently had considerable internal changes recently."

Yan Shu’s spiritual sense was pressed outward toward the descending ship, reading through the hull and the qi-stone array to the people inside.

One of the qi signatures she found made her take a very careful, very controlled breath.

She said nothing.

She turned her face back to the portal gate and folded her hands inside her sleeves.

|| Sun Mei|| was nineteen and she was the daughter of Elder Wei, and she was furious about it.

Not about being his daughter. About the circumstances of her current situation, which were as follows: her father had written to her three weeks ago informing her that she would be accompanying the Lin Clan’s First Heir to the Giant Lineage competition as a goodwill representative, that this was a politically important gesture of alliance between their families, and that she should conduct herself accordingly. She had written back asking whether her opinion on this matter was of any interest. She had received a second letter that had not addressed the question.

She was early Nascent Soul — younger than anyone else at this cultivation stage in the arena, a fact she was aware of and had complicated feelings about, since it was the thing her father pointed to most often as evidence that his decisions about her life were correct. She was also, she was aware, extremely pretty in the aggressive way of a young woman who had trained hard and eaten well and had the particular luminous health of someone whose cultivation base was advancing faster than almost everyone her age.

She had glossy dark hair cut blunt at the chin, a round face with a pointed chin that gave her expressions an emphatic quality, and a figure that her fellow junior disciples had been commenting on since she was sixteen in ways that she had gotten progressively less patient with. Her robes were the standard allied-family blue. Her sword was at her hip and she was keeping one hand near the grip because it made her feel better.

She had arrived with Elder Wei’s two attendant disciples, who were currently standing at a respectful distance and not commenting on her expression, which was wise.

She looked at the Lin Clan’s descending ship and felt the complicated knot of feelings that she’d been carrying for the three weeks since her father’s letter — resentment at being assigned, curiosity about the First Heir she’d heard sudden and extraordinary things about, and a general simmering irritation at the world that was her baseline state.

Around her, the assembled junior disciples were doing what assembled junior disciples do — watching, commenting, jostling for position, offering each other assessments of the competition’s likely outcome.

"Look at that — the Lin ship is huge."