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He killed her.
She was his daughter, his flesh and blood, and he killed her.
He crushed her to death underneath a fifty foot wide boulder as she cried, asking him why he had abandoned her and her mother, why he didn't love them.
He did it with a bored look on his face.
He had looked down on her. He had mocked her. He had broken her resolve. And then, when she was too deep in despair to defend herself, he had killed her in cold blood.
The agony of what had happened weighed so heavily on Natsumi's heart, that it was a long while before she noticed her surroundings. Noticed that she wasn't exactly dead.
The Vongola Sky Ring had been smashed as it had sought to store away the girl's soul, breaking her free from the normal flow of the cycle of reincarnation and turning her into a free spector like Daemon, with her memories still intact.
But her grief over her father's lack of love didn't produce the same resolve for staying in this world that Daemon's own desires to oversee and shape the Vongola Famiglia according to his interpretation of the wishes of his dead lover.
Natsumi's soul faded from the world, but as she went, floating up into the sky, she saw a man in his thirties, dressed in a suit and fedora kicking the shit out of the man who had been her father. A look of absolute rage on his face and tears in his eyes as his entire body was engulfed in yellow flames.
Many tried to stop the man, but he was simply too fast and too strong.
Before Natsumi's soul had even had a chance to drift far, the one who killed her had died as well.
Natsumi was unsure of how long her soul drifted. Time didn't really have any meaning to her at that point. She was just wallowing in her misery, ignoring her surroundings.
She ignored them until something snapped her out of her daze. It was the sound of a baby's crying and a woman begging for mercy.
Looking down, Natsumi found herself watching a scene playing out in front of her.
There was a man and a woman dressed in some kind of formal clothes, perhaps wedding clothes, standing before a table on which a baby girl, no more than a few hours old, was being presented to them as another woman, nowhere near as finely dressed was begging them for something.
While Natsumi couldn't understand their words, her Vongola Intuition filled in all of the blanks.
The begging woman was the man's first wife, who was being pushed aside so he could marry a higher class woman. The baby on the table was the first woman's daughter and she was begging her husband to accept her. The woman was weakened from having just given birth, but has still dragged herself there in order to beg for her daughter.
Even without Hyper Intuition, the man's face said it all. He would abandon the girl.
The new wife made a smearing face and comment, complaining about the crying baby, and to the horror of Natsumi and the child's mother, the husband lifted his hand and made to strike the child.
Natsumi's spirit rushed forward, taking possession of the baby girl's body and trying to use her power to defend the little girl. Natsumi's flames had been weakened from time drifting, but she could use the Zero Point Breakthrough to draw power in from her surroundings. She couldn't do it for long, lest she damage the child, but if she did it at the instant of impact, it should be fine.
During that moment of impact, she had used the Zero Point Breakthrough, absorbing the free energy in the air and in the man himself, using it to form a barrier to protect the child. The orange ripples were so brief as to be unnoticable.
Natsumi had underestimated the strength behind the man's attack. To think anyone would use such strength against a newborn baby.
The baby was flung off of the table and slammed against the floor hard enough to leave a small crack in the baby's skull.
Natsumi freaked, focusing more strength on the child. Absorbing energy from the surroundings in order to stop as much damage as possible. But as she did so, her own energy became more and more entangled with the baby's, until she found herself fusing with the girl.
With their soul's fused, Natsumi, now Lingyue, felt the injury herself and her vision started to fade to black as her new mother screamed, rushing forward to reach her. The last thing she saw was the man striking her mother, beating her, a seed of hate being planted in her heart at the sight.
Ye Huangyu survived, took her daughter and went home to her family in the countryside, prepared to face the punishment for not listening to her father when he warned her of Hong Fang's true nature.
This was to be Natsumi's new home, and would be the beginning of the story of Ye Lingyue. The useless cry baby girl who would eventually take the entire Da Xia Underworld by storm.
'Plain rice again.' Lingyue thought bitterly as she ate her food.
In the five years since her birth, it had almost always been plain rice, unless her mother managed to find something out in the forest to eat.
Despite her mother coming from an upper middle class Merchant Clan, they lived in poverty out in the woods, in what the family insists on calling the 'Northern Manor' but was really a mud hut.
Her father, the clan elder, had not been happy with her running away to get married, despite his warnings, and while some would say that what happened to her was enough punishment, the clan begged to differ.
While they hadn't thrown her out completely, they were making her live the life she would have lived if they hadn't chosen to bring her back in. Huangyu and her daughter would have to live in this hut, with only a monthly salary of 10 silver for support, before being allowed back into the clan proper.
They called it their allowance, but considering she had to work for it, it was really a salary. Even Lingyue was required to do cleaning, like the servants, and she was only 5 years old.
It sounded bad, but it could have been worse. 10 silver seemed to be about the same as 400,000 yen, as far as Lingyue could tell. So it was as if the two of them were each being paid a little below the minimum wage. Even after spending half of it on a nanny to look after Lingyue and teach what was required of her by the clan, they should have had enough money to squeeze by for a month even without extra work.
After all, you don't pay things like rent or electric bills while living in the forest.
Even so, for some reason, the money didn't seem to stretch as far as it should. Even with Huangyu doing some overtime hunting and gathering herbs after her normal work at the forge, they didn't ever seem to have money left over after basic food and clothing.
Lingyue didn't really mind the house or living in seclusion much, but she did wish that she could have something other than rice.
"Don't be selfish, No-Good Natsumi." Reborn said, giving Lingyue a pointed look with his large black eyes, causing her to flinch. Being much smaller herself, she was no longer that much bigger than the baby hitman, making him all the more intimidating to her. "Maman has been working hard to keep you fed. She's given you more than your fair share."
Looking up at her mother, Lingyue saw that Reborn was right. The bowl in front of Huangyu had barely had anything in it. "Mama's not eating?" Lingyue asked.
Huangyu blinked as she looked up at her daughter before a smile lit up her face.
Lingyue had always thought that Huangyu was beautiful, with her slightly sun kissed skin and long black hair framing her slender face, though for some reason, others disagreed. It seemed like this world had a very strict view on what it meant to be beautiful and unless you had jade skin, like Chrome, thin pale lips, like Chrome, and soft features with long lashes, also like Chrome, you wouldn't be considered beautiful.
It was something that Lingyue disapproved of, as while she would admit that Chrome in a night gown had been enough to make straight girls blush, there were other kinds of beautiful people out there.
Anyone who called women like Daniela, Bianchi and Aria 'common' needed a reality check. Natsumi had personally felt the 'girl next door' look as the best girl archetype, mostly for self-esteem reasons. The fact that Haru had thought she was an elementary school boy when they first met had been a serious blow to her.
"Don't you worry. I've had my fill. A growing girl like you needs to eat more." Huangyu said, trying to brush off her daughter's worries.
Lingyue frowned at her food before holding it out to her mother. "If mama doesn't eat, her injuries might get bad again." Lingyue said.
Huangyu hadn't gotten out of the Hong house unscaved either, and carried old injuries from that place that prevented her from cultivating and getting stronger. They also caused her great pain whenever she tried to use her Yuan Energy, making hunting beasts and quick traversal of the lands impossible for her.
"I'm fine. Children need more food than adults." Huangyu insisted.
"Medicine is expensive. Can't afford for your injuries to get worse." Lingyue countered. The pair would have probably continued, if both their stomachs didn't growl, much to their embarrassment. "Split it?"
Huangyu sighed and nodded her head, taking a small amount for her daughter's bowl.
Lingyue was a good, sweet little girl, and Huangyu loved her with all of her heart. Which was why it was heartbreaking sometimes to watch her.
The head injury she suffered on the day of her birth had left her with brain damage, milder than one would expect, but still crippling. She stumbled over her own feet a lot, tripping over her own feet and tongue. She also would just speak in nonsense words at times, or have a one sided conversation with herself.
Because of her odd behavior, and because they had earned the patriarch's displeasure, whenever they did venture near the Ye family's estate, she was mercilessly bullied by many of the children and servants. Huangyu would have given the brats a thrashing they would never forget if she had ever caught them in the act, but Lingyue, sweet girl that she was, didn't want to cause Huangyu to get into further trouble with the family and wouldn't give her mother any names.
But that didn't mean the beatings didn't affect her. Lingyue was like a twitchy rabbit, always seeming to be just moments away from dashing for a bush to hide in.
To try to help her daughter, Huangyu had started the girl's cultivation early.
The clan suggested that children should not be allowed to practice martial arts until they were entering they were around nine or ten, as there was risks of injury and development was slow before they hit their puberty anyways, but Huangyu figured that if Lingyue at least reached the first level of the Construction Domain, the first step of cultivation, then it would harden her skin and help her protect herself from bullies.
But for some reason, no matter how much Lingyue practiced the basics and mediated, her cultivation never seemed to grow, and her body remained as fragile as ever.
This was especially confusing as when Lingyue was sitting there with her hands forming a rectangle in front of her, it felt as though she was sucking in the yuan energy around her like a sinkhole, but at the end of the day, it would show no results at all.
Huangyu was afraid for her daughter, and as such she did what she could to save money, hoping to buy drugs to help boost her cultivation.
She worried about what the future would hold for the girl if she couldn't become a proper cultivator. While she was mocked for her clumsiness, everyone could see that she was as beautiful as a carefully crafted doll, even without the proper care to her appearance. Huangyu lost sleep thinking about what some man might one day do to her beautiful little girl if she couldn't defend herself.
What Huangyu didn't know was that Lingyue's cultivation was much higher than she thought.
As Natsumi, the girl's training for the Zero Point Breakthrough had beaten into her the importance of never wasting energy. If she wasn't about to attack, defend or move, she kept her output so close to zero that sometimes Huangyu wondered how she was alive.
Through the Zero Point Breakthrough Custom, Lingyue had absorbed enough energy to reach the eighth level of the Construction Domain within the span of a few months. Not that Lingyue herself knew that number. When actually powered up, the end result was about half as strong as the standard Dying Will Mode, from when Natsumi had first met Reborn, maybe a bit weaker than that.
While Ryohei hadn't been able to shoot lightning out of his hands, his punches were still stronger than what Lingyue had seen from the martial artists practicing where she could see them. Their ability to lift twice their body weight was impressive, but she had witnessed Ryohei lift a thousand pound, saltwater croc above his head with a single arm before slamming the thing against the ground hard enough to knock it unconscious. And that had been BEFORE getting a ring.
So, considering the strength of her Dying Will Flames, there didn't seem to be a need for using the 'Yuan Energy'. If the need arose, her Hyper Dying Will mode was far stronger. After all, she had been absorbing the natural energy out of the air during her mediations, through the use of the Zero Point Breakthrough, and it had nearly restored her Sky Flames to the point they were at when she was about to fight Xanxus in the Ring Battles. Though her body wasn't ready to handle that kind of power for more than a few seconds, she shouldn't be in real danger any time soon, or ever really. No matter what Reborn said, she had no intention of seeking vengeance on anyone, or of taking over the Ye Clan by force, or starting her own Mafia.
It was only Reborn's harassment and her mother's insistence that made Lingyue stick with the training.
Since most of it was playing with her mother and quietly mediating, Lingyue didn't complain. But she didn't give it her all either. She didn't have a clue of the importance, and her mother never mentioned Lingyue appearing to lag behind out of fear of discouraging the girl.
Lingyue looked up as her mother descended into one of her coughing fits. "Are you okay?" Lingyue asked, troubled by the harsh sound.
"I'm… I'm alright. Some food just went down the wrong…" Huangyu tried to make her excuses, but was cut off by another fit of coughing.
"Mama…" Lingyue said. She'd new it. Her mother's condition was getting worse again.
It always seemed to get worse in the beginnings of Fall and Spring.
She wanted to help her mother. She wanted to ease her pain more than anything, but what could she do? The Sky Flames didn't have any healing properties. Or at least, her's didn't. Dino had figured out a way of using Sky Flames to restore people's health and strength, but she had never found out how.
Lingyue watched helplessly as her mother suffered, powerless to do anything.
The symptoms didn't get better that night, and Lingyue hugged herself to her mother's side as the woman rasped and coughed in her sleep.
She was in so much pain that tears flowed from her eyes, but she was so exhausted from the day's work in the forge that she couldn't stay awake, even with the pain.
And they would force her to work tomorrow too. Even though she was ill, Lingyue's fourth uncle would never give her time off to take care of herself.
The man and his family hated Huangyu and her daughter, and the Patriarch simply let them do whatever they wanted to the pair without consequences.
Maybe Lingyue could appeal to her second uncle for help. The man's family had been relatively kind to the mother and daughter, even if it wasn't a popular stance to take. He had never been interested in pandering to his father and as such had nothing to do with his displeasure towards Huangyu.
"Do it yourself." Reborn's sharp reprimand shocked Lingyue. "You can't expect your uncle to be able to afford to buy your mother medicine when he has a wife and three kids to look out for."
Reborn did have a point. Because her second uncle refused to go along with his father's cold treatment of his little sister and niece, he received far less money and assets than his brothers. His family lived with few servants of their own and had little to no power in the family. Because he had less money to spend on his children's training, they didn't earn recognition from the clan, feeding further into this downward spiral. They are given no opportunities because they have no achievements and they have no achievements because they have no opportunities. It was unfair how his children were treated as inferior, when it was really that he couldn't spend the money on the same training boosters that his siblings used.
"If you want your mother to get better, then go out there right now and find the herbs yourself." Reborn insisted again.
"R...Reborn, I have no idea what kind of herbs I would need." Lingyue said, panicking at the thought of trucking through the forest in the middle of the night. "What if I accidently take something poisonous?"
"Do you have Vongola Hyper Intuition or not?" Reborn said as he stared into her soul with those large black eyes.
"I'm only five!" Lingyue protested.
"Ipin was already a professional hitman at your age. Or are you suggesting that I am a worse teacher than Fen?" Reborn said, as if daring Lingyue to say yes.
Lingyue didn't want to do it. It was scary to go out at night all alone, but as a pained whimper escaped her mother's lips, Lingyue's heart melted.
"Only you can help her now. Or are you going to abandon your mother in her hour of need?" Reborn asked.
Swallowing hard, Lingyue nodded her head. "I'll do it."
Lingyue stumbled a lot as she walked through the forest and mountain in the near pitch darkness, a basket as big as she was on her back. It had only been about three hours, but it was already half full of various herbs and spirit grasses.
As per usual, Reborn had been right. Even without any visibility and with no idea what she was looking for, she could still identify medical herbs on instinct alone. And she could also identify anything that was poisonous, just like she could always tell when Bianchi had been cooking again.
The spirit grasses in particular, grasses which contained their own aura, always called out to the girl, so she always grabbed them.
Her basket already weighed around twenty pounds, but she could move pretty freely with it on anyways, after she started to use a bit of her Yuan energy.
"Do you think I have enough?" Lingyue asked, looking in every which direction as she continued to jump at shadows, afraid that monsters were going to jump out at her, or worse wild dogs.
Some might find it funny that the girl would rather be attacked by a twenty ton rampaging armored boar than an normal dog, but Natsumi had been bitten by more dogs in her life than she cared to count, sometimes bad enough for her to be rushed to the emergency room and leaving lasting scars on her body. She had been afraid of dogs since she was just four years old.
Even Yamamoto's Box Weapon dog had given Natsumi the shivers, despite having the same aura as her Guardian of Rain.
People were scary. Monsters were scarier. Dogs were TERRIFYING!
"What does your gut tell you? Will these things be enough to help your mother by themselves?" Reborn replied.
Lingyue bit her lip as she thought about it. "...I think I still need something more." She admitted, before pressing forward.
She just hoped she would be able to find her way back home after she was done.
That was when she came across a large tree with many fruits dangling from it's branches.
Her Hyper Intuition started to shoot off fireworks, telling her that the fruits were exactly what she was looking for, even though she had no idea what they were. She could kind of feel the small heat of the fruit's aura, and was sure that it would have a positive effect.
Climbing up into the tree, Lingyue started to pick the fruits and drop them down into her basket below, until the basket was full to the brim. Then she climbed back down and put her treasure trove of herbs back on her back.
But as she was preparing herself for the trace back down the mountain to home, the bushes nearby started to tremble.
Lingyue turned her head in time to see a large ape, the size of a human man, stepping out from the thickets. The creature's silvery fur made it easily visible, even in the darkness of the night. The brightness of its fur also made it easy to see the seemingly out of place sling on its body, that allowed it to carry a large gourd on its back.
Lingyue didn't know this, but this was one of the metal-armed apes, a type of 'wild beast' made famous by the Hundred Fruit Wine that they brewed, which had many benefits to both healing and cultivation. It also temporarily strengthened the body to the point where it was as hard as iron, earning the ape it's nickname.
The ape looked at her, then its eyes went to the basket full of fruits on her back. The fruits that the ape used to brew its wine.
Seeing Lingyue as nothing more than a thief, the ape let out a loud scream of furry.
Lingyue gave a squeak of terror and started to run away as fast as she could, as the ape charged after her.
Being weighed down by the basket full of medical stuff, Lingyue couldn't outrun the ape as they went through the forest. Though it wasn't exactly gaining on her either.
"Reborn, help!" Lingyue cried.
"You don't need my help for this one." Reborn said from somewhere in the darkness. "You are plenty strong enough to handle this thing."
"No. I can't. I'm scared." Lingyue said, tears coming into her eyes.
"You can do it. You just need to find your resolve." Reborn's voice echoed around her.
The moment she looked to try to see if she could spot Reborn, she slipped on the uneven ground and fell, causing the contents of her basket to spill out on the ground in front of her.
As she looked at the jumbled mess of fruits, herbs and spirit grasses, her mind went to her mother. Her mother who was crying out in pain in their shared bed in that shack they called home. Lingyue's heart throbbed at the thought of returning empty handed, with nothing to help her beloved mama.
That pain weld up inside her chest... and then it turned into something much hotter.
As the metal-armed ape reached her, swinging down at her with all its strength, an orange flame burst into life on Lingyue's forehead.
The ape screamed as the arm it had tried to crush the girl with was hit by a bright burst of orange flames, causing it to stumble back.
The ape barely had enough time to try to figure out what had just happened before a tiny hand slammed into his chest, punching a hole straight through it. The beast gave one final gasp as it looked down into the orange orbs of the girl's eyes, glowing in the darkness, before it fell over dead.
"It's good to see you found your resolve again." Reborn said with a smile. "I told you you could do it."
"Nn." Lingyue said with a nod of her head, before her eyes went to the gourd that the ape had been carrying, her Hyper Intuition telling her that if the fruits had been a good find, the wine was the jackpot.
Grabbing everything she could, she once again started back towards home.
"Mama." Lingyue said, stirring her mother a bit from her pain sleep.
"Wh… what is it sweetie?" Huangyu said, trying to keep her voice steady as the little wits about her told her to put on a strong front for her beloved little girl. Though the throbbing in her body was too painful for her to even see straight.
"Drink this." Lingyue said, holding a bowl full of something that smelled amazing in front of Huangyu's mouth.
The girl helped her mother drink and the woman recognized the taste of the Hundred Fruit Wine. It's effects flowed through her body as she let out a sigh of relief. "Lingyue, where did you get…" Huangyu's question died as her vision cleared and she saw her daughter's hands, covered in blood and started to panic, afraid that her baby girl was somehow hurt. "What happened!?"
Lingyue teared up herself before throwing her arms around her mother's neck and she started to cry into her mother's shoulder. "I'm glad you're feeling better mama."
Huangyu was confused as she looked about the room, at the large open gourd full of the special wine and the basket full of various fruits, grasses and herbs.
Eventually, she managed to piece things together, and realized her daughter was a lot stronger than she had let on.
A LOT stronger.
Before anyone asks, no, Reborn isn't actually there. Lingyue is just insane and is imagining him there because she finds his presence reassuring.
Dying Will Flames will be connected to Spirit Force(stuff used by alchemists). Though without a ring to act as an amplifier, Lingyue will only be about a level Seven. (capable of lifting up about 1500 pounds with Spirit Force alone. A feat pretty close to one Tsuna does in mid canon, right after getting the crystal version of his gloves.)
If this continues forward, the biggest change I would have from the canon story would be having Lingyue showing up too late to stop her mother from getting whipped.
That happens, you can kiss any thought of loyalty to the Ye clan goodbye, which is honestly just, even if you discount the members of it who literally murdered Lingyue in the first chapter by beating her down and stuffing her mouth full of ashes.
Fuck the Patriarch, whipping their own already crippled daughter for acting out without getting her side of the story first. Do you know how bad 20 lashes is? It would probably have been death for someone with Huangyu's health. Then they spend everything after that trying to convince you that the Ye Clan are the good guys by bringing in villains so cartoonishly evil that it is just insane.
Oh yeah, that was a great assassination attempt you tried to pull off there. There was probably only half the town there as witnesses. The fact that no one did anything about it showing just how fucked up justice is in that world. And this happens again and again, with people just attempting murder in broad daylight without any sort of justification or consequences. It's insane. It's like the idea of plausible deniability doesn't exist in their world.
A guy tries to sell stolen goods that are literally dripping with the blood of the man whose hands he pried it out of and no one does anything about it. They caught them red handed, literally, but didn't do anything. And the fact that they thought they could sell it at a public auction is also completely mind blowing.
Why is it that in all light novels involving cultivation as a core concept, all of the characters always seem to have a third testicle instead of a brain? It's the reason I claim that all these pills and elixirs that everyone pops like candy in these stories have adverse effects on the people's brains and is the reason all the adults in these stories look and act like they are Jo Jo characters, with stupidly large muscles and chins and everyone being over 8 feet tall.
But maybe that is actually the appeal. I don't know.
Considering how many of these things there are, they have to be doing something right.
But with Lingyue's mother getting whipped, suddenly rather than helping the Ye clan, Lingyue is just going to kick the shit out of her grandfather, take her mother, and leave to search for a way to help her recover from her whip related wounds.
With Lingyue not there to magically save everyone, the Ye clan would be basically done for. Then turning around and seeing all the injustice that happens, she is motivated to do the same things as Primo did, dishing out justice and protecting people when no one else would, for the sake of the few family members who had treated her with kindness in the past.