CHAPTER 45 Hyunjeong's story

"Let's have breakfast... we don't have time... just a moment."

Now that the interruption is gone, things escalate quickly.

Three days ago, we sealed our relationship.

One day, Hyunjeong felt lonely and a bit depressed.

She called me in the middle of the night to come see her, and I obviously went, and we formalized our relationship.

Of course, this brought back the story of the "Truth" and, with it, the story of her past life.

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In a carriage, there were at least 20 women, though a bit crowded, all fit perfectly.

How? It's simple; they had nowhere to sit.

The carriage was a metal cell pulled by horses.

"Why is this happening to me?" lamented a young 14-year-old Hyunjeong.

It was an era where parents could sell their children for money since they considered them their "property." It was an era where death from malnutrition and not reaching the age of 30 was commonplace.

A drunken and drug-addicted father sold his young daughter to a brothel for a measly 30 copper coins and a bag of drugs. 

"Don't be sad; you're very beautiful; you'll get many clients," another imprisoned woman tried to reassure the young girl. However, her words only terrified her more.

Her fear turned when she saw the face of the woman trying to calm her.

Why was she beautiful? No, Not as much as young Hyunjeong.

So why was it so impactful? Simple, she had a huge bruise on her left eye, an eye so swollen that she couldn't open it.

"Are you okay?"

"This? Yes, I'm fine. It's just an annoying client. I'm used to it. That doesn't matter now; you should eat. I know it doesn't taste good, but you'll need the energy to continue."

"I don't want to continue," she said while sobbing again.

"I know it's hard, but it seems like they're not taking us to another brothel; you might have a chance. I heard we're being taken to meet someone important looking for beautiful women, and you're the most beautiful one here."

"Why are you telling me all this?"

"I don't know... maybe you reminded me of my younger self. Believe it or not, I was the most beautiful in my village. I'll give you another piece of advice: years wait for no one, make use of your beauty while you can, and if you manage to catch the attention of the important person, don't forget about this older sister," she chuckled.

The days passed, and more carriages filled with women joined their journey.

Not all of them arrived in cells; some had privileges.

They were dressed beautifully but revealingly, like the main stars of a brothel. All the girls came from different brothels in the east, which were controlled and protected by the Ten Thousand Geese Sect.

These were the main source of income for the sect, and that's where all the carriages were headed.

The Ten Thousand Geese Sect, one of the major sects in the eastern region known for practicing dual cultivation techniques.

It was true; they were being taken to meet someone very important who was looking for beautiful women.

As expected from the harsh reality, it wasn't a prince charming who bought them to save them.

It was an old sect deacon.

For better or worse, he wasn't looking for them to satisfy his carnal desires, at least not with the virginal girls.

He wanted them for something worse. The old man sought virginal women to turn them into his cultivation cauldrons.

These cultivation cauldrons are people who cultivated a special technique, and when they lost their virginity, they gave everything to their partner, including their cultivation base, energy, and life.

The old man's idea was to use the girls as his cauldrons to break through his bottleneck and reach the eighth realm.

The requirements were simple: be a virgin and have a bit of talent in cultivation. The girls who weren't virgins but were beautiful were just appetizers for the old man.

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After two weeks, they arrived at the sect's gates.

Before arriving, they cleaned up all the women and adorned them to highlight their beauty, as if they were selling a product.

They were classified from "A" to "F" based on their beauty, talent, and cultivation. From there, a young girl stood out who broke all the ratings.

If she reached adulthood and dedicated herself to cultivation, she would become one of the generation's most important figures.

Our little Hyunjeong stood out, but this would cause her more problems in the long run.

Hyunjeong had the rare body of the Thousand Poisons, a cursed body for its owner and fortunate for the sect's central elder.

Why? Because the owner had to fuse with a poisonous flame from heaven and earth before the age of 18.

If they failed to do so, they would be consumed by the poison. Unfortunately, that flame was in the possession of the Immortal Sect, and they would never give it to an outsider.

An advantage of this body was that if the owner cultivated it to the level of the Ninth Realm's Poison King, the side effect would be eliminated.

However, that was a secret to most people because no one with such a body could live that long.

Her body was compared to a celestial treasure for greedy individuals. Since her body was perfect for creating the Ten Thousand Poisons Pill, once the owner of this body reached the Fifth Realm, they would be hunted down everywhere to refine them into a pill.

In the Fifth Realm, known as "The True Element", it combines poison with every cell in its body, turning the owner into the poison itself and instantly generating immunity to any poison.

Knowing all of this, the central elder was jumping for joy. He had been looking for copper and found gold.

Hyunjeong became the central elder's top disciple, and he would support her in reaching the peak of the martial world, or so the lie they sold to the poor girl who was treated like high-quality cattle.

The poor girl wasn't ready for her future.

Her training would be torturous to reach the Fifth Realm as soon as possible.

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Three years passed. There were exactly nine months left until she turned 18 and had to die from the poison.

Two of those years, the naive Jeong devoted herself to training until her bones broke. She didn't want to disappoint her master.

She believed her master's training was for her own good and thought he wanted what was best for her.

Until one day, luck blessed her to discover the truth.

The sect celebrated an anniversary banquet for its thousand years, a grand feast where they invited all the great people from the eastern province.

They spared no expenses, equivalent to ten years' worth of taxes. Her master was so drunk that Jeong had to take him out of the party and bring him to his study, where her master spent most of his day.

She didn't dare take him to his room; she noticed that as she grew, so did her body, and with it, her master's gaze focused on her body.

That fear helped her in a way. She laid him down on the couch and, when she was about to leave the room, she noticed a strange book on her desk.

A book about her poisonous body, the book was filled with annotations. At first, she thought her master cared for her and was looking for the best way to train her.

She was happy until she reached the last chapter, "Poisonous Bodies and Their Dangers." It was the chapter with the most annotations, narrated from the perspective of a user of that body, and how everyone pursued him to turn him into a pill.

In it, he described how he tried to extinguish all the pill's ingredients so that no one else had to go through what he did.

The annotations were filled with ingredients and possible substitutes for the extinct ones. The author accomplished some of his goals, but at the end of the book, he left a note for future users of this body to finish his work and eliminate all the ingredients.

Ironically, by leaving the missing ingredients, he also left the recipe for the pill.

What was worse is that her master sent Hyunjeong on missions to collect nearly extinct rare herbs, missions where she risked her life and nearly died. The herbs she collected on those missions were on the list from the book.

Her reality crumbled. The loving master who had taken care of her when her father sold her to a dirty brothel only wanted her for her body.

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Note:

I really like writing cliché stories about cultivation and martial arts. Not so much to write a novel about it, but to write short cliché stories like the ones right now.

Create a discord to add images of the characters I add, and everyone can keep up. It has few people, I don't use it much. I just like novels where I can see the characters.

https://discord.gg/ZCMRVxe497