He Did It — Why Am I the One Taking the Blame? – Xiao Ming. You drugged your own cousin. You wounded your own little brother. Did you really think being the Young Master made you untouchable?” Xiao Ming stood in the center of his family’s main hall, watching his father’s face turn purple with rage. He did not flinch. He did not speak. The colder his father got, the colder he became. Nineteen years ago, Xiao Ming had died on Earth. He’d been a nobody—no money, no career, no future. Then he opened his eyes inside a baby’s body, in a world he’d never heard of, in a family he’d never asked for. He kept the memories. He also kept a Pure Yang Spiritual Body, the kind of constitution this world only produced once every few centuries. By age eight he was tempering his flesh. By ten his meridians had opened. By twelve he stood in the Condensed Origin realm. By fifteen, Mystic Core. By eighteen, Spirit Sea. At nineteen he was the proudest prodigy the Xiao family had produced in three hundred years.
The next Patriarch. The favored son. Until his little brother came home. Xiao Ren had been taken from the family at the age of five. A strange old man in white robes had walked into the courtyard one afternoon, looked at the boy playing in the dirt, and said, “His bones carry the embryo of a Supreme Skeleton. I will train him.” Then he was gone. With the child. For eleven years there was no word. Not a single letter. Not even a confirmation that the boy was still alive. Then, six months ago, the old man returned. He was, it turned out, a Peak Master of the Tai Yi Holy Land—a cultivator at the seventh stage of Sainthood, a power so far above the Xiao family that even speaking his name felt dangerous. He delivered Xiao Ren back home and said, “Let him stay with you for six months. He misses his parents.” That was the beginning of the end. Six months of indulgence.
Six months of every member of the Xiao family bending over backwards to please the long-lost son. Xiao Ren wanted a sword? He got three. Xiao Ren wanted to slap a servant? The servant said thank you. Xiao Ren wanted to swing at his cousin for looking at him wrong? Everyone called it youthful exuberance. And today, Xiao Ren had wanted his own cousin. Xiao Ming had walked into the courtyard expecting to find her tending the camellias. Instead he found her unconscious on the stone bench, and his brother standing over her with his belt half-unbuckled. Their eyes met. Xiao Ren did not panic. Xiao Ren did something far worse. He slammed his own fist into his own chest, opened his mouth, and screamed. “Big brother! Why?!” By the time the family elders arrived, Xiao Ren was on the ground with a bleeding sternum, sobbing about how his older brother had drugged the girl and attacked him when he tried to stop it.
Now Xiao Ming stood in the great hall, and his own father was about to pass sentence on him. “I treated you like family,” Xiao Ming said quietly. “And you treated me like garbage.” “One of you smears me without conscience. The other condemns me without listening.” A faint, joyless smile crossed his lips. “This is almost funny.” And then a voice spoke inside his head. [Host has been wronged. Life Choice System has successfully bound.] [Please select one path:] [Option 1 — Endure. Confess to the false charges. Bow to your parents. Continue as the good son.] → Reward: Coward’s Starter Pack [Option 2 — Die. Take your own life to prove your innocence. Let them grieve forever.] → Reward: Ghost’s Starter Pack [Option 3 — Sever. Cut every blood tie. Repay your debt. Walk out and never return.] → Reward: God-Demon’s Starter Pack [Option 4 — Argue. Convince them with reason. Force them to see the truth.] → Reward: Scholar’s Starter Pack Xiao Ming did not hesitate. “Three.” [Selection confirmed.
God-Demon’s Starter Pack delivered.] [Reward 1: Nirvana Creation Pill — reshapes a mortal body to match the cultivation method consumed alongside it.] [Reward 2: Chaos Dao-Demon Sutra — the cultivation manual of the Chaos God-Demon. Practice it to its peak and break the boundary between heaven and demon.] [Reward 3: Ten-Thousand-Mile Talisman — one-use teleportation. Ignores cultivator suppression and spatial seals.] Three rewards. Three more reasons to never beg this family for anything again. CRASH. His father’s palm shattered the tea table. “You worthless thing! Get on your knees!” Xiao Ming did not move. His mother stepped forward, eyes already wet. “Ming-er, kneel. Apologize to your father, your brother, your cousin. If you do not show humility, even I cannot help you.” “Apologize?” Xiao Ming looked at the two people who had given him life, and felt nothing. “Apologize for what?” He turned slowly and pointed at a young woman standing near the rear of the hall, dressed in white.
His cousin. Xiao Yating. The girl he had grown up with. The girl he had once carried home on his back after she sprained her ankle climbing the family pagoda. “Why don’t you ask the victim?” he said. His voice was perfectly even. “You haven’t even let her speak. Or is it that he is your son and I am not?” His father’s face went rigid. “Yating,” the old man said, his voice tight as drawn wire. “Speak honestly. Whoever harmed you—I, as the head of this house, will give you justice.” The girl flinched. She looked at Xiao Ren. She looked at Xiao Ming. For one moment Xiao Ming thought he saw something flicker behind her eyes—a memory, perhaps, of a small boy carrying her home through a thunderstorm. Then she lowered her head. “It was Xiao Ming, uncle.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “He invited me to drink tea in the courtyard. After one cup I lost consciousness. I don’t remember what happened after that.” The hall erupted. Xiao Ming did not move. He did not blink. He simply watched her, and watched the faint tremor in her shoulders, and understood. She was terrified of his brother’s Holy Land.
She was choosing her own life over his. It was, he supposed, the most rational choice in the room. But somewhere in the back of his skull, a voice that sounded exactly like his own—older, colder, more certain—whispered three words he would not forget for the rest of his life.