Lingtai was not a Yao Palace or a high platform.

It was twelve high-hanging mountain cliffs connected by jade corridors. Each of the Twelve Immortals of Lingtai was in charge of one, and the highest one was where Immortal Leader Mingwu, Hua Xin, was stationed.

Each mountain cliff had a place specifically for kneeling punishments, and the torments endured were all different.

Yun Hai had his magical artifacts removed and was punished all the way through. By the time he was before Hua Xin, he could barely stand. But he still stood there stiffly, his once ethereal immortal robes dripping with blood, the hems of his sleeves and robes still bearing the glow of fire from the previous kneeling platform.

He would never forget the look Hua Xin gave him then. He was certain that he had caught a glimpse of heartache within that dark, heavy anger.

He was dripping with blood all over, yet he started to laugh.

"Yun Hai!" Seeing him laugh, Hua Xin's anger intensified, "You—"

It was the first time Yun Hai had seen his master so angry he was speechless. In the past, the other man had always been very good at reasoning—the kind of calm, to-the-point reasoning that left it up to you whether you understood or not.

The mortal world had countless trivial matters, and the Immortal Capital was not short on them either. There were all sorts of strange problems, but none had ever managed to get Hua Xin into such a state.

'I'm such a bastard.'

Yun Hai thought to himself.

But he couldn't help but feel happy about this "uniqueness."

"The day you entered the Immortal Capital, what oath did you swear here on my Lingtai? The Heavenly Edict you received clearly stated what could and could not be done. Do you think it was just a piece of scrap paper?!" Hua Xin rebuked.

"No," Yun Hai said. "I remember, Master. I know the consequences."

Hua Xin was about to speak again when Yun Hai added, "But I got my revenge."

Hua Xin was instantly speechless.

"I got my revenge," Yun Hai said. "I can't stand seeing that scum living carefree and without worries in the mortal world. You know I can't stand that. It's not right."

After speaking, he walked toward the kneeling platform.

Twelve peaks, twelve kneeling platforms, each with its own ordeal of knife mountains and seas of fire.

Hua Xin silently watched him step onto the stone platform pulled by chains. After a long while, he turned around and walked away with his back to him, saying, "The world is a vast sea of unreasonable matters. If you meddle in one, you'll have to meddle in another. Sooner or later..."

Yun Hai knelt on the stone platform, waiting for him to finish, but Hua Xin paused and didn't say another word.

The reaction couldn't have been more obvious—he didn't want his words to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, didn't want his disciple to truly face that "sooner or later," so he stopped at that sentence.

Yun Hai understood and felt happy.

Hua Xin swept his sleeve with his hands behind his back, and the stone gate of the kneeling platform fell.

Seeing his back disappear outside the gate, Yun Hai's smile faded, and he lowered his head, slowly sinking into silence again.

The kneeling punishment of Lingtai was grueling. Even for an immortal body, even for the most stubborn person, one would be unconscious and their vitality severely damaged after kneeling at all twelve places.

Yun Hai woke up in Hua Xin's residence.

When he woke up, immortal medicine had already been applied to his wounds, and they had mostly healed. His depleted Immortal Essence had also been replenished. Although it couldn't be restored to its original state, it wouldn't have a major impact.

One could guess whose handiwork it was.

The first thing Yun Hai did upon waking was to look for Hua Xin, but there was no sign of him in the vast Yao Palace. Only a few attendants told him, "The Immortal Leader said that if the Noble Official has awakened, he may leave on his own."

He actually had a title long ago, so logically, he shouldn't be called Noble Official anymore. But he loved to joke and was good at coaxing people, charming the immortal envoys and attendants around Hua Xin until they were dizzy. Somehow, they had agreed to it and always called him "Noble Official" this and "Noble Official" that.

Only Hua Xin would call him "Yun Hai" this and "Yun Hai" that. At their most intimate, it was just adding "my disciple" in front.

"What if I don't leave?" Yun Hai asked the attendant. "Did the Immortal Leader instruct you to chase me away?"

The attendant shook his head. "He did not."

"The Immortal Leader has not been here for the past few days. If the Noble Official is not feeling well, you may stay for a few more days." Hua Xin's attendants had all taken after his temperament and were also a bit stern and serious.

Kind words spoken by them would lose some of their charm, sounding more like pleasantries to the ear. Even "Noble Official" was said by them in a way that sounded like "this Immortal Lord."

Yun Hai sat by the couch for a moment, then shook his head and said with a smile, "I won't stay, I'm going back. Tell your Immortal Leader..."

He paused for a moment, then said, "Thank you for the medicine and the Immortal Essence. It was very thoughtful."

The young attendant was stunned for a moment, but he had already left.

It seemed that from that time on, he slowly went astray.

He didn't do it intentionally, but just as Hua Xin had said, the mortal world was a vast sea of unreasonable matters. He originally only wanted to handle that one incident and not interfere with the rest, but later he found that he couldn't; he had to go on to handle the second...

Because the second matter was triggered by the first one he had handled.

It was a simple story.

He presided over mourning and joy, so naturally, he witnessed all kinds of partings and reunions. Sometimes, a person who had just joyfully tied the knot would meet their end in the Yellow Springs a few days later.

He often sighed about it, but he would not intervene when he shouldn't. After all, this was the norm. Even the Immortal Capital couldn't avoid partings, and occasionally there were even Immortals who were cast back down to become mortals.

But on that day, he saw a little girl kneeling before his divine statue.

The girl was just at a tender age, a time when she should have been as lovely as a flower, but she was already dead.

It was the lingering yin soul of a little girl, dressed in wedding clothes. Some talismans were embroidered on the wedding clothes; it seemed she had been forced into a posthumous marriage. Her skin was pale and bluish, and her two eyes had become empty sockets, streaming tears of blood. Her lips were sealed, preventing her from speaking—a method used by some common folk to prevent the dead from filing complaints in the afterlife. But the killing intent on her was extremely heavy. Even without speaking, one could roughly understand what she was asking for.

These were often cases of girls whose families had been destroyed, leaving them with no one to protect them, who were then forcibly taken to be ghost brides. What they prayed for was nothing more than for their abductors to die a horrible death.

The supplicant always hoped the other party would suffer the same, or even more, pain. She had her eyes gouged out, so her abductor must suffer the same fate. However she died miserably, so too should the other party die miserably.

But this was impossible; retribution didn't work like that.

According to the rules of the God of Joy and Mourning, Yun Hai could intervene, but not too deeply—only to a certain point and no further. He had originally planned to do just that, even though "to a certain point" often produced no visible results when applied to the mortal world.

Until he traced the little girl's miserable death back a few years...

He discovered that the reason the little girl's family was destroyed and she had no one to protect her was because her parents had been murdered by an enemy when she was very young.

And that enemy was precisely Yun Hai himself.

Her parents were among the people who had framed Yun Hai's family back then.

This being the case, he had to get involved, and it couldn't be just "to a certain point." Otherwise, in the little girl's eyes, he would become the one who was "unreasonable, with no justice in the world."

And that was just the beginning.

...

Later, after returning from the mortal world for the umpteenth time, Yun Hai locked himself in his residence in the Yao Palace.

He finally understood what Hua Xin's unfinished words had meant—

Those matters, as vast as the sea—he handled one, then was forced to handle a second, and then the entanglements grew. This person's enemy was that person's benefactor; the one to be killed was the one another wanted to protect. It was tangled and complex. By intervening too much, sooner or later, his very existence would become the greatest "unreasonableness."

From the moment he killed those thirty-one people, it seemed this day was destined to come—

He repeatedly violated the Lingtai Heavenly Rules. Hua Xin, accepting the Heavenly Edict, had no choice but to demote him again and again, from the God of Joy and Mourning with abundant incense offerings to the ignored Mountain God of Great Sorrow Valley.

Not only that, but the incense offerings seemed to affect the Immortal Capital as well. Without worship and incense in the mortal world, his residence in the Immortal Capital also gradually became deserted.

Yun Hai was sensitive by nature. At first, he thought that even immortals couldn't escape snobbery. Perhaps there was some of that, but he slowly came to realize that it was a kind of forgetting brought about by the Heavenly Dao.

The other immortals still recognized him when they saw him, but when he wasn't in sight, they couldn't remember him. Only one person seemed unaffected by the Heavenly Dao, and that was the Spirit King.

Shortly after first entering the Immortal Capital, he had asked Hua Xin, "Tianxiu is in charge of punishment and pardon, so what is the Spirit King in charge of? I rarely seem to hear anyone talk about it."

At that time, Hua Xin thought for a moment and replied, "He is in charge of matters that other immortals cannot handle, but as for what those are specifically, I do not know either."

Back then, Yun Hai was very puzzled. After all, with immortals as numerous as clouds, they already encompassed almost everything in the world. What else could there be that an Immortal would find difficult?

He always felt it was an empty phrase meant to elevate the Spirit King, but he slowly realized that it might not be empty, nor was it an exaggeration.

For a while, Yun Hai was always uneasy, so he often went to the Spirit King, who remembered him. But that place was, after all, connected to the Immortal-Deposing Terrace, which everyone avoided. Later, the places he frequented most were Lingtai and Hua Xin's residence.

More than anything else, he was afraid that one day, even Hua Xin would not remember that he once had a disciple named Yun Hai.