Chapter 1: Starting at the Mass Grave
A cold night, on the edge of a cliff.
"Grab her! Don't let her get away!"
"Are you tired of living? How dare you sneak into a military camp and steal the military tally?"
"His Highness has given the order: we must find the person, alive or dead!"
With a "whoosh," the sound of the arrow piercing flesh was more muffled than expected.
The arrow's momentum slammed Li Bao'er's body against the tree trunk, a metallic taste rising in her throat, and a sharp pain shooting through her left shoulder. But the torchlight behind her clung on like a venomous snake, and the pursuers sent by Prince Jing were already within ten paces.
That's it, I'm really going to die here this time!
Li Bao'er gritted her teeth, flipped over the rocks, and as her boots slipped, pebbles tumbled down from the edge of the cliff. She gripped the tiger tally in her arms tightly, her knuckles turning white.
She didn't want to die! Dying here for Mu Yuan would be a huge loss!
"Wait!" Li Bao'er suddenly raised the tiger tally, turned around to look at the pursuers behind her, and said in a hoarse voice, "I'll give you back the military tally! Let me go!"
The guards paused, exchanging bewildered glances.
The leader looked at Li Bao'er, who was trapped with no way out and a cliff behind her, and slowly drew back the bowstring. "No one who dares to infiltrate the military camp ever comes out alive, let alone... a spy like you, do you even dare to negotiate?"
The arrowhead gleamed coldly as it was aimed at her heart.
Li Bao'er felt a chill run through her body and staggered back half a step. Heaven was against her! "Crack!" A sound...
The rubble at the edge of the cliff suddenly collapsed!
"No!"
She futilely reached out to grasp at the void, and plummeted downwards!
The raging wind tore at my clothes, and suddenly an electronic voice exploded in my mind:
Ding! [System 001 successfully restarted!]
[Host?! Why are you jumping off a cliff?! Wait, the male lead's corruption level is 90%?! Oh no, oh no, oh no!]
Li Bao'er roared in the howling wind: "You've been dormant for over a decade, and the first thing you do when you log on is announce an obituary?! Can't you even look at the current situation?!"
The gust of wind as she fell stung Li Bao'er's face, and blood from her left shoulder splattered onto her cheek with the wind.
Well, now that I died suddenly in the library before time travel, I'm about to unlock the "Falling to Death" achievement.
001 scanned the history records at lightning speed, then cried out in despair: [Host, you've mistaken the target! The real target is Prince Jing, Mu Cenlin! The insane demon king you've been bullying all these years is him!]
Li Bao'er: "...?"
Her mind raced through her memories of Mu Cenlin's "glorious achievements" over the years: wounding his warhorse, spreading rumors of his cruelty, falsely accusing him of sexual misconduct, and now stealing his military seal...
Was it simply because she mistakenly took the Third Prince Mu Yuan as her target? So, in order to please Mu Yuan, she frantically targeted his biggest obstacle to the throne, Prince Jing, Mu Cenlin.
Adding fuel to the fire: [According to calculations, your current survival probability is 0.01%. However, this system has a buy-one-get-one-free ultimate solution: forced sensory binding! Pain sharing! His pain is your pain, your death is his death! Successful binding can buffer fall damage!]
Li Bao'er: "Tie me up! Immediately! Right now!"
Are you kidding me? She's been surviving in this world for nineteen years, all to complete the mission 001 assigned before going offline: to save the corrupted demon king and earn herself a second chance at life.
In Li Bao'er's world, nothing is more important than life itself!
The countdown at 001 synchronized with the approaching boulders at the bottom of the cliff: [3, 2, 1, binding successful!]
"Bang!" Her body slammed heavily into the pile of corpses at the bottom of the cliff. The excruciating pain was strangely delayed by half a second before it exploded, as if someone had shared the impact with her.
"Cough...cough cough! You're really not dead?"
Li Bao'er struggled to crawl out of the rotting pile of corpses and lay on her back on the bones, her whole body feeling as if her bones were about to fall apart.
She looked down at her unharmed limbs; only her heart was still pounding.
System 001's voice sounded softly: [Host, the empathy cushioned the impact; you two can share the remaining pain.]
Only then did Li Bao'er feel the tearing sensation coming from her limbs, her face turning deathly pale. "It really was transferred to Mu Cenlin?!"
Before losing consciousness, Li Bao'er uttered these words and then completely fainted.
001 was left anxiously in the mind, thinking that it was unfamiliar with the business and that there was a problem with the binding process. But after carefully checking Li Bao'er, it found that she had just fainted due to excessive fright and blood loss.
Fortunately, he didn't die. This is the eighteenth conqueror from this world. In order to increase the mission completion rate, 001 used all his power to transfer Li Bao'er into the body of the newborn eldest daughter of the Prime Minister's mansion. Unfortunately, he was forced to log off due to exhaustion of energy.
Above the cliff.
The pursuers looked at each other, holding torches and peering down into the dark abyss.
"This...we haven't even started yet, how did she slide down by herself?" A soldier scratched his head.
"What an idiot! He'd be a bloody pulp from that cliff!" The leader spat, putting away his bow and arrows. "To save my hands from getting dirty!"
"Those fools who don't know their own mortality, this is their retribution."
Under the firelight, the bottom of the cliff was deep and silent, without even a sound.
"Let's go back and report." The leader turned and waved. "The prince is still waiting."
The sound of horses' hooves faded into the distance, and silence returned to the edge of the cliff.
Inside the military camp tent.
With a "crack!", the teacup in Mu Cenlin's hand suddenly shattered, and scalding tea splashed all over his palm.
"Your Highness?!" Yuan Ting exclaimed in surprise.
Mu Cenlin slowly lowered his head. A sharp pain started from his lower limbs and gradually spread throughout his body. Although he was not injured, the pain was as if he had been hit by a huge boulder.
Mu Cenlin stared at his body, which was intact but in excruciating pain, his eyes dark and gloomy.
The pain came on in a strange way.
He tapped his knuckles lightly on the table, about to call for the army doctor, when suddenly hurried footsteps came from outside the tent.
"Report!" The leader of the pursuing troops who had just been at the cliff edge knelt on one knee, clasped his hands, and reported: "Your Highness, that little thief accidentally fell off the cliff and his body was never found!"
Mu Cenlin sneered: "So what if he's dead?"
Before he could finish speaking, Zhu Zhi hurriedly lifted the curtain and entered, lowering his voice to say, "Your Highness, we just received a secret report... The one who infiltrated the military camp today is probably Li Bao'er, the eldest daughter of the Prime Minister's family."
With a "crack", Mu Cenlin crushed another teacup.
Seeing his sudden change in expression, Zhu Zhi quickly added, "A scout reported three quarters of an hour ago that there was unusual activity at the Third Prince's residence, saying that someone would definitely come to steal the Tiger Tally today. You deliberately withdrew the guards in order to capture the spy alive, but if that person is Miss Li, things might get complicated."
The candlelight inside the tent crackled and popped, making the scar under Mu Cenlin's right eye appear even more grotesque.
Of course he remembered Li Bao'er.
The eldest daughter of the Prime Minister's mansion who served Mu Yuan faithfully, shot his precious horse, and wrote plays to tarnish his reputation was also the little girl who, nine years ago, trembled as she bandaged his wounds in the bamboo forest of Jinfo Temple.
She died just like that? Isn't that too easy on her?
"Search at the bottom of the cliff." He suddenly stood up, his black armor clanging with a cold, sharp sound.
A mass grave at the bottom of the cliff.
In her hazy state of consciousness, Li Bao'er recalled the scene when she first transmigrated to this world.
She died suddenly during the terrifying final week of medical exams, and when she opened her eyes again, she had become Li Bao'er, the newborn legitimate daughter of the Prime Minister's family.
Unable to escape the old tropes of transmigration novels, she also has a system called 001, but instead of being the strongest support, she is the strongest useless teammate.
I remember that 001 forced her to make a choice with his "decisive and ruthless" approach.
[System Binding or Soul Annihilation!]
They laughed at her, saying she was an orphan, all alone in the world, and that her most precious possession was her own life.
Naturally, one must seize any opportunity to survive.
"Tie me up! Tie me up!" The baby kicked her legs frantically in her swaddling clothes.
[Alright~ Mission super simple: Prevent the target from turning evil! If you fail... the world will "bang" disappear!]
Then a piece of garbled memory was forcibly injected:
Amidst the flames of war, a tall yet solitary figure in black armor stands with his back to the mountains of corpses and seas of blood beneath the burning banners, his blood-stained longsword hanging low in his hand.
The camera seemed to be trying to zoom in and capture the person's face, but the image shook and distorted violently, like an old television with a poor signal.
This is outrageous! Can't they just replace it with a larger LCD screen?
The only clear feature was a dark red beauty mark, like a congealed blood bead, below the eyelid on the side of her face!
[Key feature: under the eye...tear mole...] The system suddenly froze into a snowy screen.
[Insufficient energy, about to enter hibernation... Hold on, host]
Li Bao'er: ? ? ?
Transmitting a memory was like watching a horror movie trailer with a pixelated image, and the 001 Pitiful Number system never went online again after that.
For more than ten years, she had to rely on herself to survive.
From then on, she began a frantic search for targets with beauty marks under their eyes!
Finally, on the Lantern Festival of the fifteenth year of Linqing.
The city was ablaze with lights, and she met Mu Yuan for the first time at the imperial banquet.
The gentle and refined third prince had a striking cinnabar-like beauty mark under his left eyelid.
At that moment, she seemed to hear the gears of fate meshing.
From then on, the eldest daughter of the Prime Minister's family became the most loyal shadow behind the Third Prince.
Everyone in the court and the public knew that the sickly eldest daughter of the Prime Minister's family was willing to risk her life for Mu Yuan.
"Did Miss Bao'er go to deliver medicinal meals to the Third Prince again?"
"I heard she even embroidered a sachet by hand the other day!"
In teahouses and taverns, everyone was talking about this "good story".
Three days ago, when she went boating on the lake with the Third Prince Mu Yuan, he seemed rather uninterested.
On the painted boat, Mu Yuan raised his cup and lowered his eyes, saying, "My second brother's Xuanjia Army has now expanded to 50,000 men."
"Recently, the Emperor has been summoning him to the Imperial Study to discuss matters."
As his ultimate simp in the current version, she naturally understood the unspoken meaning.
With the Crown Prince confined to the Eastern Palace, undercurrents surged in the court, and Mu Cenlin, who held considerable military power, became the biggest obstacle on the Third Prince's path to the throne.
After catching up, Mu Yuan draped a cloak over her shoulders as they parted, his gentle eyes filled with worry. "Bao'er, you mustn't do anything foolish for me. Even though your brother has been very tolerant of you, don't act impulsively."
Do you think she's stupid? Her words were implying she should steal the military tally.
But in order to prevent him from turning evil and to help him seize power, she still has to remain naive.
She just didn't expect that she would infiltrate the military camp so easily and steal the military tally without any hindrance.
But her good luck didn't last. She was truly out of options, having wasted over a decade of her youth. She was no longer happy.
Suddenly, a sense of foreboding arose from the depths of my consciousness...
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com