After they’d lured the tiger from the mountain, Gu Huaiyang and his forces overcame Dazhou Mountain. Dacheng Sect fled in a panic. There were quite a few experts among the scattered cultivators who’d joined the Redscarf Army. They used their mastery over arrays to the utmost, successfully trapping and slaughtering the Xuan Sect disciples.
Master Banya of the Xuan Sect perished, as well as over half their elites. In the course of a single battle, these Daoists, coming from poor, humble sects that they’d never deigned to acknowledge before, became infamous. It was apparent that sometimes, heroes weren’t made by the power of their sects nor the training they received. Most of the time, it was because they possessed certain innate qualities.
Those who were able to rise to the occasion had the ability to forge a place for themselves anywhere in the world; that wasn’t something a sect could teach.
They had among their numbers, people who were intimately familiar with their sect’s secret records, who had preserved the truest, most unadulterated historical record on the continent, such as Xia Duanfang; they had people who delved deeply into the practice of martial arts, yet didn’t know a single spell, their vanguard officer, like Zhang Hang; they had people who hardly spoke, were cringing and cowardly, yet could commune with the netherworld, such as Zhao Aliang, the ghost…..
Some practiced undistinguished, obscure arts, some had incomplete knowledge of spells, and some were like Shi Wuduan, who was inept at both scholarly and martial pursuits, yet was able to construct thousands of permutations of arrays that were capable of unimaginable feats.
Suddenly, they turned from pitiable riffraff, looked down upon by their fellow cultivators, into people who could overturn an era.
Rebellion. Why would they rebel? Why wouldn’t they rebel?
Why should an era that had no future to speak of, that was riddled with holes, that had already burned its lifespan into cinders, continue to dominate the land, propped up by those who held despotic power?
Why was it that the poorest, most unfortunate people, those who’d been abandoned, degraded, subjected to ghastly perils, had to pay the price for dragging out this era’s death?
They’d been silent for thousands of years until finally, even their silence was not enough to let them live.
Inevitably, people would stand up, people who’d rather straighten their spines and die proudly on the battlefield than live without dignity as they tried to scrape a living between the heavenly calamities and human disasters that could befall them at any moment.
One day, I’ll make this crumbling world hear my roar, even if it’s the last sound I make in this life.
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.
And then we’ll die together with all those old, rotten things so that everyone can live according to their own desires.
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During the proceedings of the “conferment ceremony,” Lu Yunzhou, who’d been lying in wait, suddenly sprung his ambush. He coordinated with the Redscarf soldiers within the city to trap the “officials” of the “Great Country,” who’d run into the mountains whenever they were attacked, within the palace. They instantly reneged on their alliance, refused their surrender, placed the city under martial law, and killed every last one of them.
Just when Gu Huaiyang’s mood was at its finest and he was planning to clean out the surrounding mountains as well, Li Rushuang’s message arrived. Shi Wuduan was in trouble.
His face grew solemn as he read the missive, but his only reaction was to silently store it away before he ordered, “Clean up!”
Lu Yunzhou frowned, “Eldest brother, Little Sixth….”
“He’s not important.” Gu Huaiyang paused, then continued in a softer, more reassuring tone, “He’ll be fine. Little Sixth… as long as the rock weighing on his heart isn’t broken, as long as he feels he hasn’t seen the light of day, he’ll be fine. That resolve is enough for him to tear the heavens apart; isn’t it more than enough to let him push through a small injury?”
That fury and suffocation was something only a person who’d been truly oppressed by the whole of an era would understand. Others wouldn’t understand why he was so unyielding, why he yearned for some ineffable kind of freedom. But every day, every second, he truly was relentlessly tormented by that agitation and repression.
When a child who’d once been so intrigued and enthusiastic about the great wide world saw with his own eyes the lighting of the seven mountain lanterns, the rise to power of those who were clearly in the wrong; when that tiny bit of stubbornness and unruliness had become the source of bitter anguish; when he’d been exiled, forced to hide, obligated to put on a mask and feign compliance…
Gu Huaiyang understood that yearning. It was the yearning that a man lost in the desert had towards water; it was the yearning that a man who was drowning had towards air.
Those who had that kind of yearning were all insane. They wouldn’t have gotten so far without their madness.
In his hazy state of consciousness, Shi Wuduan thought he heard a voice talking nonstop into his ear. He almost felt that there was a pair of eyes peering at him up close. His mind was clear one moment and muddled the next. Pain and hallucinations plagued him every moment. It seemed that someone very familiar was sitting on his bed, looking at him with a gaze that was buried deep in long-forgotten memories.
Just who did that person… resemble?
Was it shifu? Shi Wuduan dimly tried to figure it out. It didn’t seem to fit. He realized that he couldn’t quite remember what his shifu’s gaze was like. Perhaps his eyes had been too unfathomable for him to understand back then, and that was why he didn’t remember.
Then… who were they like?
He returned to a time when he was very, very young, when he’d scaled a tall tree in just a few hops. Someone at the bottom was hollering, “Stop fooling around, hurry and get down, you’ll fall! I don’t want the fruit anymore!”
He said, smile for me, and that person would beam brightly for him. He laughed mischievously and said, “Ah, wife, you’re so pretty when you smile.” That person didn’t scold him for being a smooth-talker. They just held his hand as the two of them ran off into the distance.
Shi Wuduan unconsciously reached out his hand, but he wasn’t able to grasp anything. Thus he became anxious. There was a fire scorching his insides, the pain tearing away at him from within.
Is it because I’ve done too many bad things, that I’ve been thrown into a frying pot after I died? Shi Wuduan thought as the heat cooked his brains. Someone wiped his body and his forehead for him. He curled up into a ball reflexively.
“It hurts….”
Li Rushuang, who’d just been feeding him medicine, stopped as she saw his lips move. She called over a servant girl by the side and said, “Doesn’t it look like he’s saying something?”
That girl was also a pitiable person. Her mother had died when she was young, and her father had passed away not long ago from sickness. She was left with no choice but to sell herself for money in order to give her father a burial. But in times like these, how much money was a girl like her worth?
Luckily, fate had smiled upon her. Just as Li Si-niang had gotten news that something had happened to Shi Wuduan, she’d handed the military affairs to Meng Zhongyong, and rushed back with a few soldiers. She’d bumped into her along the way, and seeing that she looked decent and was hardworking, she took her in as her personal attendant and named her Lanre.
She hadn’t imagined that Shi Wuduan would be injured to this extent. Although, it was just the occasion for Lanre to prove her worth.
Bai Li’s arrow had nearly pierced his heart. It was only because it’d passed through a “mirror” that it had veered just slightly off course, merely nicking his heart. Still, his lungs had been damaged, and he became feverish a few days later.
Lanre dabbed the sweat off his forehead, kneeled by his bed, and carefully leaned closer. She listened for a moment and said, “Si-niang, I heard lord sixth say ‘it hurts,’ and every once in a while he calls ‘shifu’ and someone else’s name. It sounds like something ‘Li,’ is it a maiden’s name?”
Li Rushuang stilled for a moment before sighing and handing the medicine bowl to Lanre, “Get him to drink the medicine. If you’re having trouble, just pry his mouth open and dump it in.”
“Huh?”
“Relax, an injury like this won’t kill him.” Li Rushuang stood up, a hint of worry flickering across her face. She turned and left, silently wiping a tear at the corner of her eye.
A massive rabbit that barely woke for a few days each year was squatting by the door, its unblinking, bean-like eyes staring at her. There was a large, colorful bird flying circles above the roof as well.
She stepped aside from the doorway, unsure whether the rabbit really was intelligent enough to understand her words, and said, “Go on in then.”
A bird and a rabbit squeezed into the room. The Cuibing bird cried out and stood quietly by his bed. The rabbit scooted agitatedly to the foot of the bed. It arduously lifted its head that was so fat it almost didn’t have a neck.
Li Rushuang bent down, picked the rabbit up, and put it onto the bed. The rabbit glanced at her, then it used its stubby little legs to burrow into the blankets and nudge its head against Shi Wuduan’s hand.
Perhaps noticing something, Shi Wuduan’s fingers twitched slightly. As if soothed, his frown faded, along with the sleep talking.
For a moment, Lanre almost thought there was a soul within the rabbit’s body, for the warmth within its eyes was so very gentle
Li Rushuang lightly sighed again, “These things sure are affectionate and loyal. They do nothing more every day than eat, sleep and shit, and they’ve got only one person in their hearts. There’s no one making them do this or that, so it’s even easier for them to be faithful unto death than it is for people.”
Lanre didn’t answer. She felt her heart throb with pity as she looked upon the handsome, pallid young man laying on the bed.
Half a month later, still going in and out of fever, Shi Wuduan woke up for the first time.
Thank you so much 🙏👏💐❤️🧨
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