Hu Ze and the others left shortly after, leaving He Peiyao in the company of Gui Yin and Ye Liuxing. Once most of the guests had dispersed, He Peiyao also dismissed the servants that trailed after her. They cast looks of distrust upon Gui Yin and Ye Liuxing before leaving. There was an obvious distaste towards humans in this area.
“Lord Immortal Ninglan, you are the one who will be putting the barrier up, correct?”
“If the conference goes well,” Gui Yin said.
“Is there anything you will be asking for in return?” He Peiyao asked, settling at the seat under the gazebo.
“Asking for anything in return?” Gui Yin echoed. He lightly shook his head. “I am doing this only because I witnessed the horrors humans have done unto your kind. This has nothing to do with repayment.”
“Simply because of that?” He Peiyao asked.
The skepticism was barely veiled, making Gui Yin smile. He took a seat beside Ye Liuxing and accepted the teacup that He Peiyao slid over.
“You must not believe me,” Gui Yin said.
“Forgive me for the skepticism,” He Peiyao said, not even bothering to deny it. “In my experience humans are…”
“Selfish, greedy, narrow minded?” Ye Liuxing offered.
“To say the least,” He Peiyao nodded. “In order to keep a tight grasp on your own power, you are willing to subjugate your own kind. In the end, you’re all human, yet you split yourselves into various other factions. Humans may have respect for nature, for swords, for money, for power, but they have the least respect for mankind itself.”
“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” Gui Yin said, his eyes still trained on his teacup. “No one does things just out of the goodness of their heart. There is always some kind of hidden agenda.”
“And? What’s yours?”
“Mine?” Gui Yin met He Peiyao’s gaze. He smiled. “I’m probably one of the most self-centered people I know. The masses believe I do things out of sheer kindness, but I know I do it so that I won’t feel guilt.”
“Guilt?”
“On a smaller scale, I suppose it would be like seeing a drowning man,” Gui Yin explained. “If I didn’t act and only stood there and watched him die, I would feel guilty for the rest of my life.”
“You act for your own self-satisfaction.”
Gui Yin smiled, his fan moving slowly to cool himself.
“Very well,” He Peiyao nodded. “I can respect that. Then, once you erect the barrier, you will return to your own life and us at Kunlun will return to ours.”
“That sounds splendid,” Gui Yin said with a light nod.
He Peiyao called for a servant to send Gui Yin and Ye Liuxing to their rooms.
Once the servant left, Ye Liuxing turned to Gui Yin. “What a waste! You could have had Kunlun owe you a favor.”
“You know as well as I do why that is a bad idea,” Gui Yin said, sitting down at his bed. “We’ll just do our duties and leave. Let’s try not to make things overcomplicated.”
Ye Liuxing let out a long sigh. He rounded the table and collapsed on the bed behind Gui Yin. He rolled slightly before he settled down on his back. “Shixiong, what do you think of Heiress He?”
“She’s pretty.”
“She sure is, but isn’t she a bit too cold?”
“We’re humans in a territory that we shouldn’t be in,” Gui Yin said. “If a ghost cultivator who supposedly had no ill will were in our Yunjing Pavilion as an honored guest, how would you treat them?”
Ye Liuxing propped himself up. “You think we’re that bad to them?”
“Kunlun has always been closed off and wary of outsiders. While I don’t think they believe we would suddenly slaughter their young, I’m sure they are still cautious enough to entertain the possibility,” Gui Yin said. “Which is why—”
“We do our duties and leave. I get it, I get it,” Ye Liuxing said. He waved his hand noncommittally as he fell back down. “Why do you keep saying ‘we’ though? I’m just here to get a breath of fresh air. You don’t know how long it’s been since I left my room!”
“My birthday was just a month ago.”
“Not being able to leave my residence for a month!” Ye Liuxing exclaimed. “Imagine how suffocating that is!”
Gui Yin glanced at Ye Liuxing and patted the man’s chest. “My condolences.”
Ye Liuxing met his shixiong’s gaze and lightly shuddered in disgust. “Haha…well…it—it wasn’t that…serious…”
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
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Ye Liuxing groaned and rolled to the side. “Gui-shixiong, don’t even remind me of that headache. And it really wasn’t my fault this time, okay? I assigned those duties to my disciples this time, but when I went over it—which admittedly, I did last minute—I found out there were so many things that were wrong!”
“Yet, you pushed the job to them again before following me?”
“That was a different job,” Ye Liuxing said, his eyes empty as if there were nothing left to live for. He rolled his head to the side and tugged on Gui Yin’s sleeve. “Tell me, how can such a competent man like me raise a peak of useless disciples?”
“Mr. Competent Man, have you done your monthly report for Sect Master-shixiong yet?” Gui Yin asked.
Ye Liuxing turned onto his stomach, his face directly on the bed. “I’ll do it when I get back.”
“I meant last month’s.”
“I said what I said.”
Gui Yin sighed. He leaned back, laying body across Ye Liuxing. “By the way, Shidi.”
“What?”
“Can you be a good little boy and leave your shixiong alone for a few hours?”
Ye Liuxing immediately sat up. “Why?! Are you sick of me already?”
“I’ve been around people for too long.”
“Shixiong, am I also people? We’re brothers! We’re family! Aren’t I at least a little different from them?”
“Which is how I haven’t kicked you out yet,” Gui Yin said. He sat up and shifted to the side to let Ye Liuxing leave the bed. “Now go.”
Ye Liuxing stared at Gui Yin like a betrayed dog. “Shixiong…”
“I just want to take a nap,” Gui Yin said, staring at Ye Liuxing in disbelief.
The younger man let out a loud sniffle. He stood, fake cries tumbling from his mouth as he escorted himself out of Gui Yin’s room. He lingered by the door and looked over his shoulder at Gui Yin.
“Get out,” Gui Yin emphasized, picking up the pillow behind him to throw at Ye Liuxing.
Ye Liuxing yelped and quickly ran off.
Gui Yin scoffed in amusement before falling back onto his bed. He closed his eyes for a moment—just a moment. But before he could drift off to sleep, before his thoughts could even find a comfortable place to settle on, he heard the window of his room slowly creak open. His eyes immediately snapped open. He sat up and walked to the window.
As he suspected, a single note laid on the wardrobe below the windowsill.
Gui Yin scoffed and unfolded it.
“For your safety. Please do not misunderstand.”
“Rather than misunderstanding, I would like to know when you had gotten the time to put your scent on me,” Gui Yin said, neatly folding up the note. He waited by the window until another note lazily drifted in.
“Secret.”
Gui Yin stared at the one word. He reread it multiple times in silence. He looked up, poked his head out the window and looked into the forest behind his room, his eyes even scanning the darkened skies. He pulled back in and irritably folded the note until it was only a tiny square.
“That just makes you more suspicious. How do I know you’re not the one trying to harm me?” Gui Yin said.
He stood in front of the window for a long time, yet no note came. Gui Yin scoffed and headed for his bed. He took his shoes off and just as he was about to get under the covers, a paper crane floated through the still open window and fell onto his chest. It bounced once before settling again.
Gui Yin glared at the window, but sat up anyway and unfolded the crane.
“In Devil’s Desert. Don’t be mad, Lord Immortal.”
Gui Yin’s lips pursed. Amusement blossomed where his irritation had been. Devil’s Desert? So, he finally admitted it? He glanced at the window and put the note aside. He laid down and closed his eyes, the response the other party was waiting for not arriving.
When Gui Yin woke up again, it was well past midnight. His eyes were still heavy, but the summer heat was beginning to get to him. His brows furrowed tightly before he woke up, his blanket kicked off from the bed. He groaned and reached down to pull it back up. When his fingers grazed the ground, he paused.
The candles in the room flickered on. He shifted and looked at the notes that were neatly folded and placed on the ground, just by his shoes. He glanced at the window, but it was already closed.
Tentatively, Gui Yin scooped the small notes into his hands and unfolded them one by one. Some were short apologies, other weres longer explanations. Some mentioned Yalun, the odd centipede demon, and others brought up the debt the Huigu Palace Lord still supposedly owed him. The notes added up to only five in total, but each made Gui Yin’s smile grow little by little.
He had never been so amused by a man he had never met before or, rather, had never spoken face to face with before. He thought about the person who had helped him in Devil’s Desert and tried to link that suave man to the man who wrote these little notes.
“Silly,” Gui Yin said, a light chuckle in his tone. He waved what he assumed to be the last night in the air, his gaze flickering towards the shut window. “‘In the end, no matter what, I will still find a way to repay Lord Immortal’—you sure are persistent.”
However, although Gui Yin had been skeptical before, after hearing what Hu Ze and Xiongsan had to say about the Huigu Palace Lord, at least about eighty percent of his wariness had vanished. Not to mention, even Elder Shan had vouched for him. If this man truly was the Huigu Palace Lord, then he wasn’t a man of bad character. At most, he was just extremely eccentric. But an eccentric man who kept his promises and wrote silly little notes like these was better than an erratic and unpredictable one.
Erratic and unpredictable. Gui Yin frowned at the description. As he gently folded up each note and temporarily stored them in his Qiankun pouch, he inexplicably thought about Yalun.
Although Kunlun was a place for spirit cultivators who were more in tune with the Heavenly path, Gui Yin wondered if any of them knew about the centipede demon, nearly turned demigod, Yalun. For nights after Gui Yin had left Qi Du Tower, he had dreams of that demon. Sometimes, it would be a lingering disgust from when he gently caressed Gui Yin’s face; other times, they were dreams of unfamiliar scenarios with Yalun as the centerpiece. Although Gui Yin never remembered what happened when he woke up, he still remembered how he would feel; pain, hopelessness, and unbridled anger.
Was that how his victims felt? Were those dreams formed by the feelings of Yalun’s victims? Had he accidentally attracted some of their resentment when he was in Qi Du Tower?
That was the only explanation Gui Yin could think of for those dreams. Because, before then, he had never met Yalun.
But…hang on.
Qi Du Tower worshipped Yalun and it was this tower that supposedly brought down Huigu Palace. So, that must mean that the Huigu Palace Lord knew a thing or two about Yalun, right?
The last of the notes were put away. Gui Yin left his bed and stepped out into the courtyard.
It was the dead of night now and most people were asleep. He sneakily glanced around before slinking to the back, where the window had opened to the forest path. It was a stretch, but Gui Yin still wanted to give it a shot.
“…Huigu Palace Lord?” Gui Yin’s voice was exceedingly loud in the silence. When nothing answered, he felt a rare embarrassment prodding at his huge ego. He cleared his throat again. “Huigu Palace Lord, are you still there?”
Gui Yin had napped for a little over five hours. He didn’t know what the Huigu Palace Lord would be doing now that, to the public, his sect was destroyed, but he was almost certain the man didn’t have all the time in the world to be watching him.
After a few minutes of silence, Gui Yin closed his eyes and huffed.
Of course. How silly.
It was normal to try in the day time, when he felt the presence of eyes upon him, but past midnight? What was he even thinking?
Gui Yin rapped the butt of his fan onto his forehead as he began to head back to his room. At that moment, like the beginning of an unfortunately cliché horror movie, a sharp shriek caught Gui Yin’s attention. He paused, his foot hovering a centimeter above ground. He glanced over his shoulder into the dark forest and turned back around. His foot settled and his surroundings became quiet again. However, his mind was loud as his morality began to argue against his reason.
“I could die,” Gui Yin said out loud as he put one foot in front of the other. “I seriously could.”
He paused and shook his head. “But I’m a cultivator. I’m the genius cultivator inventor. I’m one of the top three? Who would be able to kill me?”
He took another step forward. “This is the premise of a horror movie. It’s always the overconfident jock that dies first—you’ve seen those!”
“Yes, but what if someone is out in the forest right now, gravely injured?”
“They screamed so loudly, someone else is bound to have heard them!”
“It’s well past midnight and they’re in the middle of the forest. Kunlun is so large, what if I’m the only one nearby who heard the shriek?”
“If not a horror movie, then this has to fall into the detective mystery genre. Gui Qinle, if you step into that forest right now, the first murder suspect will be you!”
“Gui Qinle, if you don’t go into that forest right now, how could you still call yourself Lord Immortal Ninglan?!”
Gui Yin tottered back and forth. Despite being on the brink of running away this “back and forth” movement actually brought him closer and closer into the forest. As he arrived on the forest’s edge he looked up. The looming shadows towered over him, reminding him of the skyscrapers of massive cities. He had read once that, when faced with objects larger than yourself, you would experience a sense of fear—a type of realization that you are nothing but an insignificant speck of dust…
Gui Yin scoffed. “They’re just trees.”
One foot in front of the other.
“This is a bad idea,” Gui Yin mumbled under his breath, his footsteps quickening towards the sound of the shriek. “This is a bad idea. I’m going to arrive, I’m going to find a corpse, and then someone else is gonna get there and they’re going to see me hovering over the corpse and then all of Kunlun is going to condemn me and then I’m not going to be able to leave this place and they’re going to hold a trial and they’re going to—”
Gui Yin’s mutterings stopped short. He held his breath as the stench of blood filled his nostrils. He closed his eyes and activated his spiritual sense. Slowly, like the tendrils on an octopus, his spiritual energy began to spread out.
There had definitely been a fight and the fight was not over.
Gui Yin approached the scene with greater caution, his breathing quieted and his steps lightened. His brows were furrowed as he listened to the clashing. He held Fenghua close to his chest, his other hand getting ready to summon Shui Meng.
He emerged from the trees, just in time to see a familiar face slam into the trunk beside him. His eyes widened as the person limply fell to the ground, blood pooling at the side of her face. The sound of the guqin echoed through the forests of Kunlun. The attacker just narrowly avoided the attack by Shui Meng as Gui Yin threw Fenghua out to rein the attacker back in.
Gui Yin glanced back at He Peiyao. Her breathing was shallow, but it was clear that she wouldn’t die. After that split second of hesitation, Gui Yin flew after the assailant.
His feet barely skimmed the top of the trees as he chased after the assailant dressed in black. The sound of Shui Meng seemed to surround them. Each note was placed just to rein the assassin back in until they were forced to face Gui Yin.
A sword lurched out. Gui Yin blocked it with his fan. He closed the fan around the sword, yanking the assassin forward with it. The sword fell from the assassin’s grasp, but, in return, they pulled out two short knives from their boots. The sounds of metal clashing disturbed their peaceful surroundings. Flashes of spiritual energy illuminated the night sky. Patches of the ground exploded from the force of their fight.
Gui Yin’s eyes narrowed as he propelled himself forward. He reached out a hand to snatch away the cloth that covered the assassin’s face, but the assassin dodged away. Just as they moved, Gui Yin struck with his knee, sending the assassin flying downwards.
A loud boom! echoed through the valley. Gui Yin plunged downwards. He grasped the assassin by their neck and shoved them against the nearest mountain. The mountain wall cracked. Flecks of dust and debris trickled downwards, dirtying their robes and their hair.
He reached out a hand and pulled the veil aside, his eyes widening in surprise when he saw who the attacker was.
“You’re…”
Xiongsan’s face was deathly pale. The veins on his neck were surging purple and his eyes bulged unnaturally. This was obviously an overexertion of spiritual energy.
Gui Yin quickly hit two acupoints on Xiongsan’s back to block the surging of his spiritual energy. He caught the bear spirit as he collapsed into his arms. Although the man was heavy, Gui Yin was still able to carry him. He lugged the bear spirit back to where he had left He Peiyao. He dropped Xiongsan onto the ground and clicked his tongue as he silently fanned himself.
Why was Xiongsan fighting He Peiyao? And why had Xiongsan been strong enough to take on Gui Yin?
Just as Gui Yin began to ponder these questions, he heard the rustling of foliage and the sounds of living beings.
The sounds all came to a stop, right behind him.
Gui Yin let out a long breath, his eyes closing. Be strong. Be brave. You’re the innocent one. They have to listen to you.
After a bout of motivation, Gui Yin slowly turned around. He faced the crowd, who were all sloppily dressed, and attempted a smile.
“You…”
“I…” Gui Yin glanced at the two unmoving bodies behind him. He lightly coughed behind his fan and faced the gentleman at the front. “I was out on a stroll and I saw these two fighting.”
“…Yes?” the gentleman’s eyes narrowed, but it seemed as if he were still willing to listen.
“Xiongsan was attacking Heiress He,” Gui Yin explained. “And just as he was about to finish her off, I found them. Then, he tried to run off. I’m sure you heard the sounds of our fighting.”
“Yes?”
“…And then, I managed to subdue Xiongsan,” Gui Yin said. “He didn’t seem to be himself, so I knocked him out and brought him back here.”
“Yes,” the gentleman nodded. He took a few steps forward until he was just in front of Gui Yin.
When he was further away, Gui Yin hadn’t noticed, but now that they were toe to toe, Gui Yin realized this man was much taller than himself. On top of that, his hair was stark white, as were his brows and lashes. His skin glistened with silvery scales and the antlers on his head stood proudly to show he was a descendent of the dragons.
He leaned lower and tilted his head. “And who are you?”
Gui Yin smiled. He cupped his hands over his fan and bowed. “This humble one is named Gui Qinle, Lord Immortal Ninglan. I am part of the delegation Beidou Alliance sent.”
“So, you’re the human?” the gentleman raised a brow.
“…Yes.”
“And you expect me to believe that you, of the delegation, happened to be on a stroll. Then you happened to witness a fight. On top of that you happened to be the only one left unscathed?”
“…It seems unbelievable, doesn’t it?”
“In fact, if the one you said you were fighting against wasn’t that bear spirit, I would believe you,” the gentleman said. “But for you to fight that bear spirit for so long…well. My apologies, but I’m a skeptic.”
“It is totally understandable,” Gui Yin said, his smile weakening by the second.
“So,” the gentleman straightened, his arms crossing over his near bare chest. “You’re either in cahoots with the bear spirit, which is why the fight dragged out for so long, or you’re lying and the one you were really fighting was Heiress He.”
“…Very reasonable.”
The gentleman raised his hand. A guard by his side knelt down, attentively waiting for his order.
“Take the bear spirit and Heiress He to our infirmary. Get the best physicians on them,” the gentleman said. He turned to Gui Yin. “As for you, Gui Qinle…you’ll have to come with me.”
Thank you for the update ❤️💯
thanks for reading!!
welp;; at least we were aware at the shriek that that ending was gonna happen akxbakxhs;;;;
but aaaaawwwww Known Note Guy is too cute (๑˃ᴗ˂) still leaving little notes cause he doesn’t want Gui Yin to misunderstand or be mad!! [brain processing] WAIT! didnt Huigu Palace Lord come here before to chat with the dragons? they might trust- [remembering how Gentleman Dragon seems] …tolerate his opinion! potentially even consider it!! good luck!!!
nooo he’s innocent big brain
Thanks for the chapter 🥳
Rigghhht! I wonder why the mc didn’t finish the centipede dude off!! Is it because he doesn’t confidence enough to take him down?? I’m kinda can’t accept it!😅