Daily life of a cultivation judge

Guided by his skewed philosophy, Liu Ying's father cut corners on the cultivation resources he provided. Worse still, he insisted on personally overseeing his children's training, refusing to entrust the task to others. This decision proved disastrous.

As a cultivator who had climbed the ranks by consuming alchemical pills and natural treasures rather than through genuine comprehension, his insights were shallow, even compared to an average core formation expert. His only redeeming quality lay in his skill in alchemy. Yet, paradoxically, he forbade his children from learning it, convinced it would distract them from advancing their cultivation.

Given these limitations, it was little surprise that none of his children ever met the impossibly high standards he set. When they failed, they were discarded along with their mothers—after being berated and forced to repay every resource spent on them.

Liu Ying, the fourteenth child, was born during his twilight years, a time she often wished had not been her fate. By then, years of disappointment and the looming specter of death had rendered her father even more ruthless and deranged.

The children born during this period bore the brunt of his descent into madness. Some were permanently crippled, victims of his uncontrolled rage or the dangerously extreme training regimens he imposed. The scars they carried—both physical and emotional—were a testament to the price of his ambitions.

Liu Ying was fortunate enough to scrape by in her early stages. She reached the Qi Refinement realm at just six years old, and by sheer determination, she managed to break through to the Foundation Establishment realm at nineteen. This modest achievement earned great praise from her mother and even her deranged father.

However, her streak of luck ended there. The relentless pressure to perform, coupled with her father's extreme and often brutal training methods, took a toll on her mind. Her progress faltered, and her once-promising pace slowed to a crawl.

By the time she turned thirty, she had only managed to reach the middle stages of the Foundation Establishment realm. When the dreaded thirty-five-year mark arrived—a deadline her father had set as the ultimate benchmark—she had only advanced a single level, moving from the fifth to the sixth stage of the Foundation Establishment realm.

Perhaps because he was nearing the end of his life, or because her siblings had performed even worse, her father displayed an unusual tolerance. Unlike others who failed his expectations, Liu Ying and her mother were spared the usual fate of being cast out and forced into grueling labor to repay the resources spent on her.

Instead of berating her or subjecting her to punishments worse than death, her father made an unprecedented gesture. He began providing her with higher-quality resources—ones that were a step above what she had previously received. The low-tier Earth-grade items she had been accustomed to were replaced with mid- and even top-tier Earth-grade resources. Additionally, he arranged for a more skilled cultivator within the clan to guide her training, a rare concession she had never thought possible.

But by then, she was so broken mentally that even with all the additional resources, her progress didn't improve—it only seemed to slow down. Ten years later, when she was 45 years old, she was still stuck at the eighth stage of the foundation establishment realm.

It was when she hit 50 and remained at the same stage that her father finally lost it, worse than he ever had before.

Had it not been for her new trainer at the time, who intervened and called for help from the rest of the clan, her father would have killed her. In the end, she managed to escape with just a heavily injured body that would take years to heal, and a tortured mind. The torment she endured wasn't just from her father's cruelty, but also from what her mother did after her father nearly killed her.

Even in her haze, bloodied and broken, she could still hear her mother's distinct words as she cast her only child aside. She begged the man who had left her daughter in such a pitiful state to allow her to stay in the clan as his concubine, promising to bear him another child—one that wouldn't be as useless as their daughter.

Her mother called Liu Ying all sorts of names, all in an attempt to curry favor with her father. The image of the doting mother Liu Ying had clung to shattered in that moment, leaving her with nothing but the loss of one of the last remaining anchors in her life.

The rest of the clan intervened, and Liu Ying kept her life—though at the time, she didn't see it as much of a win. After everything her father and mother had done, life seemed like a hollow victory.

The grace of the clan only extended as far as her life was concerned. She still had to leave. Her father, whether deranged or near his end, was still one of the best alchemists in the clan. So, when it came to the bigger picture, outside of saving her life, the clan chose to respect her father's decision to banish her.

To the clan, it was better to appease a seasoned alchemist than to anger him by siding with a 50-year-old foundation establishment cultivator. Looking back, it was a decision that left her struggling to understand how they had gone along with it. Even though her cultivation had lagged a bit as she grew older, her achievements still placed her at the higher end of the spectrum, especially in a rank four clan like theirs.

There couldn't have been more than twenty members within the clan with the same cultivation base as hers who were younger than she was. Yet they still kicked her out. Despite it all, Liu Ying was eternally grateful to them for it.

Banished, she wandered as a rogue cultivator. It took time for her to start functioning again and to begin escaping the shadows of her past. Slowly, her long-stagnated cultivation started moving, and within seven years, she had broken through to the core formation realm.

For the first time, she even made friends, one of whom became her sworn sister. But, as the world often does, it showed its cruel side once again. She lost that sworn sister to an attack by spirit beasts. She would have been next, had Jiang Hao not passed by and intervened, saving her and two of her friends in the process.

The name she now goes by—Liu Ying—is the name of the sworn sister she lost. She adopted it after her death, abandoning her original name, Shi An, a name that held nothing but pain for her.

After Jiang Hao rescued them, she and a few friends, as a way to repay the favor of saving their lives, joined the escort agency. Liu Ying had originally intended for it to be brief—maybe fifty years or so—but the place and its people grew on her.

Bai Chen helped her feel what it would have been like had her father acted like a normal father. He encouraged and supported her wholeheartedly. And not just him—Duan Ting, Jiang Hao—they all made her feel a sense of belonging, made her realize that she wasn't the useless person her father and mother had made her out to be.

But now, with everything that had happened, the voices from her past that she thought she had long overcome were slowly resurfacing. She couldn't help but wonder if this was the reason she felt so paralyzed in her current situation. Perhaps she had never truly exorcised those demons; maybe they had just been lurking, biding their time.