Immortal Ice Empress: Path to Vengeance-Chapter 1: The End or the Beginning?
"Fuck you, GOD! Why do you keep doing this to me!!! What did I do to deserve this?!?" exclaimed Mira.
The so-called god scoffed, "What do you mean why? You refused to be my slave-concubine and killed yourself before I could taste you and now you ask me why? I will make you understand how wrong your decision is and have you beg to lick my feet. No matter how many times you die, I will reincarnate your soul with your memories still intact. I am still impressed though. You've already been reincarnated 10 times but can still barely make it past being a mortal, yet you still suffer endlessly. What willpower!!"
"You dirty bastard! I will have my revenge even if it takes me 100 lifetimes or 1000 lifetimes. It doesn't matter how long it takes, one day I will ascend and kill you! It will be a swift and easy death, one where you didn't even know how you died! I won't even give you the satisfaction of being tortured!"
"Hmmm, that's quite interesting. I really want you as my slave now. Breaking that willpower of a woman is the most satisfying thing there is in the world. Do you even know how many I've done this to? TO MANY TO COUNT HAHAHA! They all beg me to stop because they all 'die' at around 15-20 in every lifetime. They can't even start their journey to ascending before they die! HAHA, how great is that!"
It's true, this guy that Mira calls 'God' is just an immortal ascender that has a treasure that allows one to capture souls and reincarnate them. There are countless mortal worlds out there and every time someone is reincarnated, it randomly goes to some random mortal world. One's soul seldom returns to the original world, the chances are just too low.
And this guy names 'God' is just some asshole that finds it amusing to toy with mortals. Most of the time he just kills them after he breaks them and does not reincarnate them.
Since immortals live forever, then it isn't strange for them to have eccentric personalities. Living forever isn't exactly the most fun thing to do, but who wants to die? Nobody, even if you live forever, it's better than dying.
Mira just happened to be unlucky enough to bring this guy's attention to her. Mira used to be a sweet, confident, stubborn mortal. He was only 19 when this guy told her to be his slave.
Obviously, she said no. Who would willingly become someone's slave? Even if that person was an immortal. This guy might just torture her every day, or abuse and **** her then kill her after he's bored. Mira may be young, but she's not stupid.
Even she could figure it out, the only reason this guy has done this is that he's bored. Why else would an immortal mess with mortals?
In truth, this so-called god can't interact or kill them, that is just the laws of the heavens. Once somebody ascends, then they go to a higher plane of existence. They aren't omnipotent, but they can to a degree control laws of the world and affect nature.
If two immortals fought each other in the mortal plane, then billions or perhaps trillions of mortals would die. Every race would be extinct by now if that were the case.
Even with that being the case, some treasures can defy the heavens, and this guy has one of those items that control life and death itself. All he has to do is link that particular soul with the item, which he seems to call a soul lantern, and that's it. She will keep reincarnating with her memories intact until he unlinks her soul or she becomes an Immortal.
Naturally, Mira doesn't know this and only the 'god' knows that he only needs to link the soul. He doesn't know that it disconnects after she ascends. This is mainly because an immortal's soul is way too powerful to control even for something that can defy the heavens like this.
Mira has been suffering for hundreds of years now because of this. She's caused her original family to die, but even if she would've outlived them already. In her second lifetime, she was an orphan and lived a relatively normal life.
Until some young aristocrat tried to force himself on her so she decided to bite her tongue and kill herself.
Her third life was much better than the rest. She lived in a world that had no cultivators. A world called Earth, but after living for 25 years, a truck ran a red light as she was crossing the street and killed her. After living on Earth, she could only bitterly smile as that happened to a lot of protagonists in novels and animes. Except even after she reincarnated into a fantasy world in her fourth life, she died in her mother's womb.
After she realized that, she laughed like a madman because she was actually wondering if she could become some stupid hero and fight demons for a kingdom or something. But after that time though, she steeled her mind.
Screw being a hero! I've died enough for someone to go mad! I refuse to protect someone from a truck, screw kingdoms and countries! Even if I do become strong enough and can protect them, so what!?! If someone can't protect themselves and they die, that is their problem for being too weak!
Mira even has to experience the pain of dying. Most people will just die, then their souls will be erased and sent onto the path of reincarnation. Peacefully! But Mira has to experience the pain of her organs and bones shattering when she dies. And she can't do anything about his until her soul finds someone to reincarnate into. Even when she died peacefully as a mortal for her 8th life, she felt like her the skin on her body was cracking and peeling off while her organs were melting.
Dying is painful for her no matter if she is tortured to death or if she dies peacefully. On her ninth and tenth life, she started her path to become an immortal. Her ninth life was the hardest because she knew nothing about cultivating the body.
To start on the path to becoming an immortal, one must strengthen one's body enough to handle the vast amount of energy that one's body will hold. Body tempering and energy cultivation go hand in hand. If one doesn't have a strong enough body, they will explode when trying to gather energy.
Tempering the body is extremely hard. Even harder than cultivating energy. Especially that first step to shed your mortal skin. Tempering the body is essentially like breaking all of your bones over and over again until each cell can fill up with the energy of heaven and earth.
There are 5 main stages to transforming one's body. That is strength training, bone forging, meridian opening, organ refinement, and marrow tempering. Strength training, meridian opening, and organ refinement are relatively easy, but meridian opening and organ refinement are extremely painful. Bone forging is time-consuming and painful if you don't have any medicinal herbs to heal quickly or a pill that will release energy to break and restore the bones over and over again. Marrow tempering is by far the hardest. This is where most people get stuck in the mortal world. You can't temper marrow by reforging bone or strength training. Unless you have pills that can temper your marrow for you, then one needs to find an extremely hot place and absorb the volatile heaven and earth energy that is in the heat. After absorbing this and forcefully pushing it into your marrow, the heat from the energy will start to consume the marrow, while the heaven and earth energy will refine what was consumed. After this is 100% completed, your blood and marrow will have a golden-blue hue to them. This is the sign that you've stepped onto the path of becoming an immortal.
Mira was only able to make it to the organ refining stage until she died after trying to collect qi, or heaven and earth energy, she thought that she had stepped onto the path of becoming an immortal after that and stole a basic cultivation manual. Her body exploded after collecting too much energy.
In her tenth life only did she learn that she needed to temper her marrow. In her tenth life, she was able to complete this and was able to step onto the path of being an immortal. She couldn't join any sects because she was weak, and no weapon suits her. She didn't have an affinity with the sword, spear, or any other weapons that she tried. She did recall though that while living on Earth, the scythe was her favorite weapon. This is a rare weapon in the cultivation world, but not unheard of.
She continued using a spear as that was the closest thing to a scythe. She hunted magic beast, tried to explore ruins, search for inheritances from other cultivators, and searched for any lucky encounter she could find. She killed countless people and beasts. She would try to kill and rob lone cultivators, would brave and wonder every area she could find. Even if it was a danger zone with a high-tier magic beast that only needed to breathe to kill her.
She decided to make this life like a trial run. She would gather as much knowledge as she could. Since she would be reincarnated with her memories, she would gather experience after experience, battle after battle, and learn anything she could come across. She found countless martial arts manuals, cultivation manuals, alchemy recipes, forging, anything.
Mira wasn't the greatest at alchemy or forging but did it enough to be average at it. She was able to make herself a scythe and start practicing that. Once she became relatively strong but was getting close to the end of her life, she went to brave the dangers again.
This time, one could say that lady luck was shining upon her today. She found the inheritance of an immortal! Well, he wasn't a true immortal as he died while going through his tribulation. He set up the inheritance right before his tribulation because he had a feeling that he would die.
Mira benefited quite greatly from this. She got a lot of treasures from this inheritance. Especially a heaven-defying scythe martial art and cultivation manual that used to scythe as a base. She also got a spiritual scythe that resides in her soul. She can carry this with her through reincarnation. These were the two main things this guy used to reach the point of ascending. She decided to spend the rest of her life perfecting both manuals. After she was reaching the end of her life she was able to perfect both manuals. Even though the cultivation manual ruined her foundation because it wasn't what she started with, it didn't matter. As long as she memorized all of it and had practical experience, then she could use her next life to become a heaven-defying talent and reach the pinnacle.
Now Mira has died. And had this piece of shit god bothering her again.
"I don't give a shit how many you've done this to. It's not like you can come down here and smite me. Only when a mortal pledges to the heavens for an immortal to take us can you do something to me! Even if you come down here to kill me, the Heavens will immediately smite you to death! Not even you can escape the heavens!! I will reach the pinnacle, ascend, and annihilate your entire existence!! I will destroy your mind, body, and soul!! Even your Soul Lantern won't be able to save you!! Wait for me, I won't be long!!" Mira yelled to this asshole immortal.
"HAHA good! Good! I will be waiting for you! We'll see which comes first, you being my slave or you become an immortal! HAHAHA!!!"
That was the last thing Mira heard before her soul was sucked into the emptiness of space towards her new body and family.
