After Marrying the 'Long Aotian' in Drag to Counter Bad Luck - Chapter 10

“Little Eleven, did Junior Sister Nianxue actually bear to let you out?” The First Senior Brother asked, half-squatting with a deep exhale, two wooden buckets filled to the brim with water hanging from his raised arms.

Body tempering was no easy feat. Although they were sword cultivators, they still feared encountering situations where they could not use their inner spiritual energy. Therefore, as time passed, early morning body tempering became a routine everyone on Lingyun Peak was accustomed to.

Ye Xingchen frowned slightly. He felt extremely uneasy, constantly sensing that Rong Nianfeng might be stealthily lurking in some corner, tracking him.

He whirled around abruptly. Seeing no one, he turned back around.

“Does First Senior Brother truly not know what kind of inhuman torture I endure every single day?”

Sure enough, upon hearing this, First Senior Brother’s body stiffened slightly. Immediately, he adopted a solemn expression: “For the sake of your senior brothers’ happy lives, Eleventh Junior Brother has been wronged!”

Ye Xingchen was speechless. He knew it; every single one of them would just stand by and watch him suffer without lifting a finger.

However, there was a more pressing matter at hand. He let out a cold laugh: “Does First Senior Brother know where Song Xiuyuan is right now?”

Having trained for two hours, a thin layer of sweat covered First Senior Brother’s forehead. After slowly exhaling a breath of turbid air, he placed the wooden buckets on the ground.

Hearing the question, he could not help but recall how Song Xiuyuan had whined and begged them yesterday not to tell Eleventh Junior Brother about his whereabouts.

Struggling for a mere two seconds, he pointed in a direction: “Tenth Junior Brother said he needed to temporarily evade your deadly pursuit. He is likely hiding among the newly arrived disciples who came up the mountain for recruitment these past few days.”

Ye Xingchen smiled, but the smile did not reach his eyes: “Today shall be the day he dies.”

First Senior Brother and Rong Nianfeng, who was hiding in the corner, both felt a sudden chill run down their spines.

Perhaps because he had been tied to the bed by Rong Nianfeng every day recently, his inner energy had not been depleted as much. Combined with the strange medicines he had drunk, his body was indeed much better than before.

Ye Xingchen did not dwell on it. He picked a sword from his spatial bag, proficiently chanted the sword-riding spell, and headed toward the Xuantian Hall.

Once there was no more movement, Rong Nianfeng gently nudged away the lid of the wine jar over his head, coming face-to-face in a warm encounter with First Senior Brother, who had just walked back.

Rong Nianfeng waved awkwardly: “What a coincidence, First Senior Brother.”

“Junior Sister Nianxue, the way you appear truly makes my vision go dark.”

Rong Nianfeng laughed twice, thinking to himself, Who on earth knew you would come back!

First Senior Brother did not say much else. Instead, with a face full of righteousness, he pointed down the mountain: “Junior Sister Nianxue, Eleventh Junior Brother went down the mountain to look for Tenth Junior Brother.”

Rong Nianfeng looked at him with great gratification. After bidding him goodbye, he left without losing a moment.

He happened to run into Fifth Senior Sister, who had business down the mountain, and managed to hitch a ride on her sword.

There were quite a number of people inside Xuantian Hall. Many disciples had even set up stalls to do business: the personal secret manuals of Immortal Venerable Wuji, pills personally refined by the Peak Master of the Alchemy Peak, and little ghosts raised by the Corpse Sect Pavilion. Of course, there were also rogue cultivators who were not there purely to seek the immortal path, but had gathered various bizarre natural treasures to resell. If they could not enter the Xuantian Sword Sect, earning some spiritual stones to take back home was a good alternative.

The Xuantian Sword Sect pretended to be completely oblivious, tacitly permitting their behavior.

After all, many elders were chronically living beyond their means, so they naturally had to seize any opportunity to earn extra spiritual stones.

For instance, at this moment, Immortal Venerable Wuji was shouting to sell his self-created sword techniques. His snow-white beard had long since vanished. With sharp eyebrows, starry eyes, and a tall, straight posture, he looked exactly like a young man in his twenties. He was introducing his wares with great enthusiasm to the circle of people gathering around: “No cheating the young or old! High quality guaranteed! This sword technique was penned by Immortal Venerable Wuji himself!”

Forget about the people who came to the Xuantian Sword Sect from other regions, even the residents of Lingyun Peak themselves would not believe it. One of the outer sect disciples crossed his arms and asked, “Which peak are you from? Looking at your appearance, you do not seem like a core disciple of Immortal Venerable Wuji. How could you possibly come into contact with a figure like the Immortal Venerable?”

Immortal Venerable Wuji waved his hand and chuckled: “Oh, I am from the Corpse Puppet Pavilion! To tell you the truth, Ye Xingchen, the core disciple of Lingyun Peak, is a bosom friend of mine. But then I thought, what use does a Corpse Puppet Pavilion disciple have for a sword? So, I brought it out to share with everyone.”

Fearing the crowd would not believe him, he addressed the disciple who had just spoken: “Since you are from Lingyun Peak, you must be familiar with Immortal Venerable Wuji’s handwriting. Why don’t you take a look and see if it is real.”

The outer sect disciple from Lingyun Peak looked at him suspiciously, took the book from his hand, and flipped through it carefully.

As time slowly ticked away, the surrounding clamor grew louder and louder. Dense beads of sweat formed on the disciple’s forehead, while Immortal Venerable Wuji beside him looked quite confident.

“Could it really be written by Immortal Venerable Wuji?” someone in the crowd asked in a low voice.

“If it really was written by the old senior, I am willing to buy it for twice the price in spiritual stones!” another person chimed in.

Hearing this, Immortal Venerable Wuji’s eyes crinkled with joy.

Suddenly, as the outer sect disciple kept reading, he actually reached enlightenment on the spot! The spiritual energy around him shifted slightly, surging toward him.

This was a sign of an impending breakthrough!

The people who had been skeptical just a moment ago suddenly grew agitated.

Someone shouted, “I am willing to buy it for three hundred top-grade spiritual stones!”

“What is three hundred? I will give six hundred!”

The offers continued to climb. In the end, this secret manual was bought by the outer sect disciple, who grit his teeth and paid one thousand top-grade spiritual stones. The others could only leave the scene in disappointment.

Once the crowd dispersed, Immortal Venerable Wuji turned to the Elder of the Corpse Puppet Pavilion next to him, whose stall was completely devoid of customers. Pointing at the blood-stained display, he said with a smile, “Qiu Nian, look at your own stall. It would be a miracle if anyone came over.”

The man addressed as Qiu Nian wore a black robe. He turned around slowly, revealing a creepy, stark-white row of teeth. As he turned, a gust of cold wind actually blew past, lifting his black robe to reveal eerie, white skeleton bones.

Immortal Venerable Wuji was speechless. Only a ghost would buy his things!

As if they shared a telepathic connection, several little ghosts actually crawled out from under Qiu Nian’s black robe. They had sharp fangs and green eyes, with bells hanging around their purplish arms and necks, and fresh meat still dangling from their mouths.

It scared Immortal Venerable Wuji so much that, despite being over fifty years old, he broke into a cold sweat.

Qiu Nian pressed the uninvited ghost heads back down, his voice raspy: “Since you claim to be a disciple of my Corpse Puppet Pavilion, why don’t you call me Grandmaster?”

Immortal Venerable Wuji replied, “You can consider calling me Father.”

Seeing that the tension between the two was growing increasingly hostile, a head suddenly popped in between them. Rong Nianfeng looked at them with a face full of confusion: “Immortal Venerable, didn’t you say you were in secluded meditation? Why are you here?”

Having his cover blown so suddenly, Immortal Venerable Wuji looked astonished and lowered his voice to ask, “How did you know it was me?!”

“I just figured it out by looking.”

If the younger generation found out he was earning extra cash on the side, he would lose all his old face. Thinking of this, Immortal Venerable Wuji quickly coughed twice: “Cough, cough. I just came down to join in the fun.”

Worried about drawing the attention of the people around them, he said quite ungenerously, “Young man, I just saw Little Eleven carrying a sword and heading over that way.”

Sure enough, Rong Nianfeng cupped his hands and said gratefully, “Thank you, Immortal Venerable.”

With that, he dashed off like a whirlwind again.

What he did not know, however, was that after he left, Qiu Nian’s expression changed slightly, and he pressed the loudly clamoring little ghosts back under his black robe.

Rong Nianfeng’s head throbbed from searching for the guy. After wandering around aimlessly for half the day, he finally collapsed onto the ground in exhaustion, panting miserably.

Someone tapped him from behind.

Rong Nianfeng’s body stiffened. Ye Xingchen? Did I get caught?

He turned his head slowly. Fortunately, it was just an old grandfather with a white beard. Looking at the compass and soul-attracting banner the old grandfather held in his hands, he thought to himself, Ah, just another traveling charlatan.

Seeing him frown, the astrologer laughed heartily and pulled a tattered book from his robe: “Child, this book shares a destiny with you. Why don’t you accept it first?”

Rong Nianfeng was highly cautious. He nudged himself backward, waving his hands in refusal: “Prosperity, democracy, and a powerful nation! I am a thoroughly upstanding, patriotic youth!”

The astrologer fell into a rare moment of silence. Choking on his words for a long while, he managed to say, “You will need it in the near future.”

Before he could even react, in the very next second, Rong Nianfeng watched with wide eyes as the astrologer vanished right in front of him.

Left with no choice, he picked up the tattered piece of garbage with a look of utter disdain and glanced at it: Lecture One on Grasping Clouds, Lecture Two, The Method of Retrieving Spilled Water, The Method of Howling Ghosts and Wailing Wolves. What on earth was this?

Despite his disdain, he did not throw it away. Instead, he tossed it into his spatial bag to gather dust. After all, with white-bearded old grandfathers, who knew if they were trying to use him as a middleman to deliver secret manuals to a chosen protagonist?

It never hurt to be cautious.

Just as he thought this, he spotted Song Xiuyuan jumping a full eight feet into the air, wailing at the top of his lungs: “Murder! Murder!”

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