I saved the entire sect by playing idly by letting things fall apart.

……

After five days of lightning strikes, the tribulation entered the Nascent Soul stage trial. Ye Qinghan had never been to this so-called trial ground before. Suddenly surrounded by a group of unknown creatures, his feelings were complicated.

The worst part is that this group of people not only stood around watching, but they also pointed and whispered about him.

The boy's indifferent expression and "don't mess with me" attitude surprised the group of judges.

Ye Qinghan heard them whispering.

"The last one was the Path of All Living Beings, but this one is the Path of Ruthlessness."

"The Path of Ruthlessness, it's rare to see someone so devoted to the Path of Ruthlessness."

There's even a joke in the cultivation world that the Path of Ruthlessness is meant to be broken. It's a path of great love without ruthlessness, which has been tested and challenged by all sorts of oddballs, leading them to abandon their own path.

"Yo yo yo, this year in the cultivation world, one is the Path of Common People and the other is the Path of Ruthlessness." He clapped his hands and laughed twice. "Interesting."

These two extremely rare Daoists actually became Nascent Soul cultivators one after the other within just a few months.

After observing Ye Qinghan for a while, their smiles vanished, and they quickly began the trial.

In this trial, Ye Qinghan will completely lose himself. He will be killed repeatedly, which will temper his mind. As long as his mentality remains unaffected by the end of the trial, then he will have succeeded.

During the period of being killed, he will forget everything except the memory of being killed each time.

The Nascent Soul Trial has always been unfair and perverse; those who enter it are completely manipulated.

If Ye Qinghan fails, it wouldn't be surprising.

But if she succeeds, Ye Qinghan deserves a perfect score in this trial more than anyone else.

One of the judges, curious, pressed further: "What is the way to break this deadlock?"

"There's no way to break this deadlock." The judge who set the question chuckled, "What I'm testing is his true nature."

Ye Qinghan, having been raised as the heir of the Ye family since childhood, naturally knew about the trials of the Nascent Soul stage. He didn't ask Ye Qiao what the trials were about, but since even someone as abnormal as Ye Qiao could stay inside for thirty days, it was easy to imagine that the trials were very unfriendly to her.

He was mentally prepared, but he never expected the trial to be so unexpected.

When Ye Qinghan was killed for the first time, she died in a state of complete confusion.

The second time, he watched indifferently as those cultivators who claimed to be benevolent and righteous slit his throat in order to save their own lives during the trial.

The trial content is related to one's character. Ye Qinghan plays the role of a kind-hearted person who tries to save the world from suffering through kindness, but is successfully devoured by the malice of the very cultivators he wanted to save.

The monks he tried to save offered him up in order to survive in the face of the demons.

Ye Qinghan died in the night in various ways.

After his death, the fate of those cultivators was obviously not changed; they were all slaughtered overnight by the rampaging demons.

After gaining a general understanding of the trial's content, Ye Qinghan's memories were erased, leaving only the memory of being killed, which led to repeated rebirths and reincarnations.

He died a hundred times during that period.

He was numb.

The person in the story is him, yet not him.

But Ye Qinghan could clearly sense that the protagonist in the story had the ability to fight back. Ye Qinghan looked down at the trial and saw that the person he possessed was holding a spiritual weapon from beginning to end.

A magical artifact, used to fight against a group of Foundation Establishment cultivators.

It was incredibly easy.

But he didn't resist until he was finally killed; it's unclear whether the other party was stupid or just plain dumb.

When Ye Qinghan was released from the trial after one hundred trials, his expression was blank.

"They were willing to be fodder for evil because of their incompetence. In the end, they held the sharpest weapon and pointed the blade at you." He stood gently in front of them, looking at the bloodstains on the boy's face, and a smile played on his lips. "However, the protagonist of the story, who is you, clearly had the ability to resist. You should have been the one holding the sharpest knife, but in the end, you didn't even lift a finger."

Why is that?

Ye Qinghan agreed with his view. The scene in the trial was realistic enough. He had truly died a hundred times. Ye Qinghan admitted that at that moment, he could not suppress his evil fire at all. His heart was filled with resentment. After desperately suppressing it, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him.

Ye Qinghan replied, "Because he's stupid."

"..."

Then he heard a lot of snickering laughter from the judges.

"What if you were the man inside back then? What would you have done?" Would you have stood still and waited to be killed, or would you have fought back?

He didn't care about Ye Qinghan's answer; this trial was meant to temper Ye Qinghan's character.

Although the Path of Ruthlessness is not the Path of Slaughter, cultivators of this path are also neither entirely righteous nor entirely evil.

There's no need for such a test for the Path of All Living Beings; they have always been more steadfast than cultivators of other paths, but the Path of Ruthlessness is slightly different.

He wanted to see what this person, born with sword bones and a disciple of the ruthless path, would choose.

"In other words, what if you were the knife?"

Ye Qinghan heard someone ask him.

Ye Qinghan was in a daze for a long time. The scenes in the trial were too realistic, as if he had really been killed a thousand times.

He carefully recalled the scenes from the trial: was it a fight back or a wait to be killed?

Ye Qinghan knew what kind of answer they wanted.

They simply wanted his forgiveness for those people. After all, the Path of Ruthlessness was somewhat tainted with evil, and they were afraid he would go astray, so they devised this perverted trial. Ye Qinghan knew this perfectly well. Even his master had told him that when it came to trials, you should always try to make them seem righteous and noble.

He suppressed his anger at being killed, as well as his eagerness to strike back at these judges, and said seriously, "The fact that we cultivators have been forced to this point by the demons is ultimately because we are too weak."

"I don't blame them."

"After all, if they could resist the demons, they would never have offered me up." The boy lowered his eyes and replied, "In the end, it's simply because I'm not strong enough."

"..."

and so--

"If I were a sword."

Ye Qinghan quietly gripped the longsword, vaguely understanding that this was probably the spiritual weapon he could take away from the trial. He whispered, word by word, "To slay the injustices of the world."

He grasped the chilling longsword in his hand, then turned to look at the assembled judges.

The boy's near-perfect answer, along with his excellent facial expression control, greatly pleased the powerful figure in the trial.

Whether Ye Qinghan was faking it or making this choice sincerely, the fact that he could suppress all his hatred and not return to the trial grounds the moment he opened his eyes was enough.

"Good boy, good boy, this is the attitude that we righteous disciples should have, unlike that Ye Qiao..." His smile instantly twisted, and his old face darkened: "He gave us a sword before he left."

Ye Qinghan: "?"

He was being tortured to the point of death, yet Ye Qiao still had the leisure to turn the tables and strike the judges with a sword during the trial.

"Excuse me for asking," he couldn't help but say, "I'd like to ask, how did Ye Qiao, whom you all speak of, pass the trial?"

Ye Qinghan knew about Ye Qiao's feat of completing the trial in thirty days, but she couldn't understand why Ye Qiao took thirty days to come out. What had she done to make a group of judges hate her so much?

"Her trial was one of being repeatedly reborn and killed, successfully taking the Holy Maiden of the Spirit Race away and surviving."

The trials aren't actually difficult; some are just a bit extreme, testing one's character.

Ye Qinghan: "It doesn't seem difficult?"

"It's not difficult." He nodded, then gritted his teeth: "She relied on premeditated suicide, repeated deaths, and then memorized the secret techniques of the Half-Moon Clan. With her miraculous methods of evasion and foresight, she avoided the deaths of everyone. That trial tormented us for a full thirty days!! All for the sake of eliminating all the demons and ensuring that all the spirits survived."

Ye Qinghan's lips twitched. It was true; a mere trial was no challenge for her at all.

Even knowing the result, he couldn't help but ask with concern, "Did she succeed?"

"She succeeded." The judge's gentle voice turned sinister, quickly transforming into a raging inferno: "She's the only one in nearly a thousand years of Nascent Soul trials to have single-handedly defeated all the demons in this trial! Can you believe it?!"

Ye Qinghan: "Thank you for informing me."

He readily expressed his gratitude, "So the magical artifact is mine?"

"That's right." They nodded, preparing to see Ye Qinghan off. Just as they were saying goodbye, the young man suddenly turned around and unleashed a sword aura as sharp as a quasi-divine cultivator, cleaving through the sky with his longsword. In an instant, the entire trial space was ravaged and disrupted by the sword aura.

This move looks so damn familiar.

The judges: "???"

"Ye Qinghan!!"

Are you kidding us?