“Mum~~! I’m hungry!” Reveling in the embrace of her mother, Jun Xiaomo sullenly remarked. Her current strength was far from that in her previous life. She had not even reached the Foundation Establishment cultivation level. Naturally, her body required physical food for sustenance.

“Alright, Mum is going to make you some porridge now.” Liu Qingmei caressed Jun Xiaomo’s hair. As she attempted to stand up, she realized that Jun Xiaomo had tightened her embrace and was even rubbing her head in her mother’s bosom.

“Now, now, why are you acting like a three year-old girl throwing a tantrum?” Liu Qingmei chuckled as she gently and playfully tapped on Jun Xiaomo’s forehead.

“It’s not that. It’s just that it feels like I haven’t seen you in such a long time, so I can’t bear to see you leave me.” Jun Xiaomo deeply missed the familiar lotus fragrance gently diffusing from her mother. Ever since the death of her mother in her previous life, she could only experience this fragrance in her dreams.

“Mother only wishes that you will stop getting your mischievous self into trouble. If you can do that, mother will be very satisfied.” Liu Qingmei helplessly sighed. She had thought that the “long time” which Jun Xiaomo was talking about was merely these ten over days where she was bedridden. Never in her wildest dreams would she have thought that Jun Xiaomo was in fact referring to an entire lifetime.

“Mm. I won’t let you worry anymore! I will definitely focus on my cultivation from now on!” Jun Xiaomo raised her head and looked at her mother seriously. Her eyes glistened with unprecedented firmness.

“Good girl~!” Liu Qingmei patted her daughter’s head with gratitude. Her daughter had finally grown up.

Jun Xiaomo’s eyes brimmed with tears again. Having lived life once, she was finally able to discern with clarity those who were worth her time and effort.

“Are you crying again?” It dawned on Liu Qingmei that her daughter seemed to have turned into a little crying cat after awakening from her slumber, shedding tears at the smallest of things. Even though this mischievous daughter had shattered her heart time and again, yet she could not help but feel some sourness in her heart seeing her daughter silently shedding tears before her eyes.

“It’s nothing.” Jun Xiaomo lowered her head, obfuscating the tears in her eyes.

She was not a weak person. Otherwise, when faced with the destruction of her Peak, the annihilation of her family and the persecution of several upstanding sects, how could she have made a name for herself as the intimidating, one and only Lady Demoness? She was ruthless to others, and even more ruthless to herself!

Presently, it was just that her emotions were stirred time and again because she could now once again see the ones whom she had loved and lost.

Fortunately, Jun Xiaomo’s stomach growled in a timely fashion, alleviating the embarrassing situation.

“It seems that Mo-Mo is really hungry. Mother is going to make food for you now.” Liu Qingmei stood up. This time, Jun Xiaomo did not keep her any further.

Watching her mother leave, Jun Xiaomo gently waved her hands and caused the doors of the room to close.

However, even this simple act caused Jun Xiaomo to experience excruciating pain! She groaned in pain and slammed back down onto the bed, fading in and out of consciousness.

After receiving the Sect’s punishment this time, her body was truly and thoroughly wounded. Jun Xiaomo gritted her teeth and endured the pain. She bitterly smiled to herself.

About half an incense of time later, Jun Xiaomo’s pain had slightly receded. Completely drenched in cold sweat, Jun Xiaomo painstakingly clambered up and sat down cross-legged, setting her palms facing up on her knees, closed her eyes, and entered into a meditation posture.

She had to check what kind of damage her body had sustained. She remembered that this year was the year where her cultivation speed suddenly slowed down, such that she was no longer even a match for regular martial brothers and sisters. Even when her parents scoured high and low for spirit pills and miracle herbs, they did not seem to have any effect on her. No one could diagnose what the cause of such a change was. In the end, they could only suspect that her talent for cultivation had fallen as a result of the Sect Elders’ punishment.

Because of this, Jun Xiaomo’s father, Jun Linxuan brashly wanted to pick a fight with the five Sect Elders. However, Liu Qingmei was able to dissuade him. After all, it was already considered a light punishment that Jun Xiaomo was not excommunicated from the Sect. If Jun Linxuan had pressed the issue, they would certainly be in the wrong. Furthermore, discounting the fact that Jun Linxuan would not be able to defeat the five Sect Elders on his own, this matter would in any event give people a basis to allege that Jun Linxuan was placing his own interests before the Sect’s.

In reality, Jun Linxuan was really known to be a selfless person in the Sect. If not for the fact that the problem arose in her daughter’s body, he would never have lost his cool and almost break off relations with the Sect.

Jun Xiaomo sent a trace of spiritual energy throughout her body’s meridians. Bestowed with the experience from her past life, even if her cultivation level right now were not too high, her control of spiritual energy would still be far better than most cultivators at her age.

Probing at her meridians, Jun Xiaomo discovered that her meridians were severely blocked. She even faced a strong resistance when re-converging her spiritual energy to her Dantian. 

What is going on? Jun Xiaomo faintly remembered that just before she got injured, the flow of spiritual energy had been very smooth.

Jun Xiaomo was not flustered at all. She converged her spiritual energy around her Dantian, swirling them around ever so slowly and carefully, like a hunter seeking out a prey. 

As her concentration deepened, Jun Xiaomo entered a mysterious state where her “inner vision” enabled her to inspect her Dantian’s condition. 

Consequently, she found an anomaly – her body was actually absorbing demonic energy?!

Being a reputable, righteous and upstanding sect, Dawn Sect’s premises had very little demonic energy. Therefore, the amount of demonic energy absorbed by Jun Xiaomo’s body was also minimal. Even so, a light and delicate layer of demonic energy surrounded her Dantian, preventing Jun Xiaomo’s spiritual energy from leaving or re-converging.

If not for the fact that she had been very familiar with demonic energy in her previous life, she would not have so quickly discovered this power which was different from the energy absorbed by spirit cultivators.

The only difference between spirit cultivating and demonic cultivating lay in the type of energy absorbed by the cultivator. Spiritual energy was gentler and found almost everywhere. Thus, spirit cultivators were ubiquitous. However, demonic energy thrived only in places associated with ruthless, vicious, and even evil purposes, including jails, dungeons, ravaged villages, forests which did not see the light of day, and so on. In order to gather demonic energy, some demonic cultivators even utilized formation arrays to attract or create numerous vengeful spirits and souls. This was one of the main reasons that the public spurned and disdained demonic cultivators to begin with.

Furthermore, demonic energy was by nature difficult to control. If one were careless when cultivating, the manifestation of the demonic energy would turn the cultivator into an irrational killer. Even Jun Xiaomo almost succumbed to such manifestation of demonic energies in her previous life, only to finally manage to re-stabilize her energy at the very last moment.

Jun Xiaomo knew full well that the inception of her tragic past life was exactly the existence of demonic energy within her body. Overnight, she was castigated and excommunicated from the Sect, and even persecuted by righteous, upstanding sects.

However, the very same demonic energy also turned out to be her greatest source of strength. It can be said that she had walked further on the path of demonic cultivation than most others in her generation, even attracting the envious gazes of cultivators of a higher cultivation level than her.

Jun Xiaomo had not planned to walk down the path of demonic cultivation again in this present life. Her previous life experiences were sufficient to pave a way for an extremely smooth spirit cultivation. That is why she saw no need to risk her life pursuing the ways of demonic cultivation. However, life had already determined otherwise. At the young age of sixteen years, Jun Xiaomo’s body had already been pervaded with demonic energy.

Save for people who possessed a demonic body, the people who could automatically absorb demonic energy were few and far between.  Some people are naturally born with demonic bodies, and fated to become demonic cultivators; while others acquire a demonic body later on in their life.

For Jun Xiaomo, the odds of her being naturally born with a demonic body is practically zero. This was because her body had absorbed spiritual energy very smoothly before she had turned sixteen years old. It was only after she turned sixteen years-old that her body’s absorption of spiritual energy inexplicably slowed down to the point of stagnation.

Perhaps her acquisition of a demonic body was artificially caused by someone’s meddlesome orchestration and schemes. Jun Xiaomo’s eyes flashed coldly. She had a few suspects in mind, but she was not able to say with any certainty.

Forget it, these people will eventually show their true faces. As long as these people made an attempt at the lives of her loved ones, she would not let a single one of them off! A wave of boiling hatred surged within Jun Xiaomo’s heart, but she quickly repressed it.

Mulling over the situation in her Dantian, Jun Xiaomo’s lips curled to reveal a calm and even bemused smile.

Unfortunately, this schemer is going to be sorely disappointed. So what if she had demonic energy in her body? Having a lifetime of experience behind her, how would she let herself fall again into the same predicament as in her past life?

Since some people decided to ‘bestow’ upon her an acquired demonic body, Jun Xiaomo would have to gladly accept their goodwill!

Only then, the end result would be completely out of the scheming person’s control.

Jun Xiaomo’s grin gradually blossomed into a wide smile – it must never have occurred to these schemers that there was in existence a refinement technique that enabled the conversion between demonic energy and spiritual energy!

With such a refinement technique, the demonic energy in her body would not only cease to be a misfortune to her; it could even be said to be her greatest blessing!