CHAPTER 120: CHAPTER 120 - TIANLONG FUCKS BRAIN AND BODY ALIKE

’Huh?’

He walked past them without so much as a glance.

Yu Xiang’s body trembled with the shock of it, her carefully prepared expression crumbling as she turned to watch his retreating form.

Beside her, she could feel Chen burning with rage, his cultivated composure cracking as his bronze eyes blazed with barely contained fury.

But it wasn’t just that Tianlong had ignored them.

It was the ’casualness’ of it.

The complete and utter indifference, as if they weren’t even worthy of acknowledgment.

As if Chen was so far beneath notice that he might as well not exist.

’Wait.’ The realization hit her like a qi backlash. ’Zhao Chen thinks this man is his enemy. But... he doesn’t even see Chen as competition.’

Her mind, honed by years of manipulation and survival, quickly processed the implications.

Chen’s hatred, his wounded pride, his burning need to prove himself—it was all one-sided.

To Tianlong, Chen wasn’t a rival to be defeated or an enemy to be crushed.

He was nothing. A nonentity. Background noise in the story of someone far more important.

’How foolish was I to think Tianlong would ever see Zhao Chen as worth his time?’

She exhaled slowly, frustration giving way to a different kind of calculation.

If Chen wasn’t even on Tianlong’s radar, then her entire strategy had been built on faulty assumptions.

She turned her gaze back to the Emperor, studying him with new eyes.

There had to be some angle, some approach that would work.

Every man had weaknesses, desires that could be exploited.

She just needed to find his.

Meanwhile, Tianlong’s lips curved as he looked towards a translucent screen invisible to others but visible to him, clearly reading her body language, showing she was just falling for the trap—the trap called, catch the ambitious bitch.

[System Notification: Reality Manipulation - Minor Emotional Amplification Applied]

[Target: Yu Xiang - Frustration levels increased by 300%]

[Duration: 24 hours]

[Cooldown: Activated]

He had received not just the power to return ten minutes into the past, but also several perks after accepting the Villain route: making him appear charming to women, adding protection from being debuffed by Heaven’s will, granting major reality manipulation per month and minor reality manipulation per day, and so on.

It was only natural to use some of those things to deal with a heroine as well.

If he had tried to act nonchalantly, he would have been caught by the woman who most likely had seen many men acting in her life.

No matter how perfect acting is. Just like how he caught Yu Zheng’s maiden acting through subtle energy movement and such, due to his sharp senses.

He needed to be natural, with no need to act out of character.

So rather than acting himself, he just brought one of his attractive wives out to display power, beauty, and closeness to him, which Yu Xiang can never have—to trigger her ambitions.

After all, his genuine love for his wives required no performance—it was simply who he was.

So what he needed was to trigger all the openings of that woman—from the inferiority of her beauty to her ambitiousness and all the right points that would make her feel he was different from other men—so that finally, like a pebble thrown into a lake, he could rile her up.

Knowing her type—calculating, power-hungry, used to having her beauty open doors—her heightened frustration would make her more desperate, more likely to take risks.

He could already imagine how she was probably running her mind, thinking of all the possibilities and ways she could trap him.

Her mind would be like a fire right now, so he just needed to pour some water into it after letting it warm up a bit more.

In the end, the human mind loves what it cannot predict and feels satisfied when it can—and he liked women’s bodies to be satisfied, not their minds.

"Wuji," he called out, his voice carrying easily across the courtyard.

His crippled third son straightened immediately, sweat beading on his weathered forehead. "Yes, father."

Tianlong didn’t even look at him. "Not Zhao Wuji. Zhang Wuji."

The legendary swordsman materialized beside him with fluid grace, bowing slightly. "Yes, Master."

Tianlong’s smirk widened as he finally turned his attention to his groveling son, the man who had poisoned him, imprisoned him, stolen his empire, and left him to rot.

Though he didn’t take it personally, because Zhao Wuji was soon going to have the kind of life his father would have had in the absence of cultivation strength.

In this world, when a person reaches a certain cultivation level, their age becomes stagnant.

They just stop aging.

Each level had hundred-year, decade, century, and even millennia-long age boosts depending on cultivation stage.

But it wasn’t like they aged in reference to cultivators—their age count simply froze.

From a mortal perspective, he might be a few hundred years old, given he was an emperor and then had a long journey.

Yet, he was seventy from his own perspective, since his age had stopped at that point and his youthful appearance had been regained.

So in this world, the actual age that is counted is from where the person’s age stops aging.

But for mortals, they age. And for crippled cultivators, they age too.

The difference is, they age slowly due to having once experienced true de-aging in their body.

So, Zhao Wuji would wither again since he had crippled his dantian, but that aging would be slow and sufferable in a body that could now get diseased and wither, yet not completely die soon enough.

"From now on, your name will be Pig," he said with casual cruelty. "I cannot have you sharing a name with someone this strong. So tell me—what is your name?"

The broken man trembled, his body shaking as age finally caught up with him. When cultivators hit bottlenecks or lost their power, the years they’d held at bay came crashing back all at once.

While Tianlong had regained his youthful appearance—the powerful emperor who had built this empire—his son was rapidly becoming the old, withered creature his crimes deserved.

"It’s... it’s Pig, father," he whispered, his voice cracking with humiliation and fear.

Yu Xiang watched this casual display of absolute authority with growing unease.

The man didn’t even need to raise his voice or release his aura.

She was still processing the implications when those red eyes—the ones that had been so tender when looking at his wife—turned toward her.

’Haah.’ She didn’t expect anything. As her pupils shifted, she tried to avert her gaze, thinking maybe it was just a coincidence.

"You look beautiful."

’!’

The words seemed to make her heart skip a beat. She was totally caught off guard, not because of what they were, but because of what they ’weren’t’.

There was no desire in his voice. No hunger. No calculation or interest.

He spoke the words the way someone might comment on the weather—a simple, objective observation delivered with the same emotional investment as noting that the sky was blue.

"Th-Thank you, Empero—" The sound escaped her lips before she could stop it, her carefully maintained composure cracking slightly, as if finding a loophole that at least to him she was beautiful. With a smile, she tried to give a bow.

But,

"Zhao Chen, I see you are about to break into Middle Core Formation Realm." Tianlong stated, his eyes amused, clearly taunting him, though it wasn’t that evident to others except for the man who bore hatred for him, fueled by the clash of villain and son-of-heaven resistance between them.

A result of heaven’s resistance.

After all, why would Zhao Chen even hate him this much, when Tianlong had not even cucked the guy yet?

"What? Are you mocking me—!"