Chapter 116
Chapter 116
Master remained silent.
Her exquisite face was expressionless beneath the dim yellow light. She looked extremely grave, and the pressure radiating from her was suffocating.
I sat there obediently, hardly daring to breathe.
After a long while, she finally sighed. The slender fingers of her right hand flicked through several seals.
It felt like some kind of divination art, though Master had said she wasn’t skilled at such things and had never taught me any.
Then she looked at me with a complicated expression.
“Ah-Zhong…”
“Hmm?”
“You little rascal. Your luck is so…I don’t even know what to say. That thing on the riverbed outside Xiaowan Village isn’t something even I want to become involved with, much less you.”
My face fell.
“Master, I don’t want anything to do with it either. But when Li Miao came to us and Old Cao and I accepted the job, we had no idea it would become this troublesome.”
Seriously, did that even need saying?
The River God coveted it, and upright drowned corpses surrounded it.
Those strange phenomena alone proved that this problem was complicated enough to make anyone tear their hair out.
But we had already accepted the Xiao family’s money. In a sense, that formed an unseen contract.
Among ordinary living people, contracts were sealed with money or goods.
If an ordinary person broke one by taking the money and failing to do the work, the worst they would usually face was a lawsuit and punishment under mortal law.
For people like us, though, the unseen consequences were far more serious.
It could create inner demons or other obstacles, making it easy for a practitioner to lose control during cultivation or even stray onto a wicked path.
That meant we had to find a proper solution for Xiao Sheng, the living corpse.
And to solve his problem, we first had to understand exactly how he had become a living corpse–which meant learning what that black plant on the riverbed actually was.
Master sighed softly again, which was very unusual.
Even when Wang Fei had turned into a drowned revenant, she hadn’t been this troubled.
“You’re right,” she said. “Since you took the Xiao family’s money, you have to see this through. Fortunately, I just calculated that the thing’s time to appear fully has not yet arrived. Its occasional appearances lately have only been accidents.”
What did that mean?
The more I listened, the more cryptic it sounded.
At least I could finally be certain that Master knew what the thing was.
That made matters much easier.
She was my own master. There was no reason to feel shy about asking her.
So I came right out with it. “Master, could you please tell your disciple what that thing is–the thing even the River God covets? Is it some exceptionally rare miraculous medicine?”
After all, the black fragment Bai Su had eaten was most likely a piece of it.
By that logic, it had to be some kind of black plant.
To my surprise, Master shook her head and answered in a grave voice.
“Don’t ask for now. I won’t tell you. That thing…doesn’t belong in the mortal world in the first place. I don’t actually know much about it myself. I certainly never expected it to appear within Fubei County.”
Something that didn’t belong in the mortal world?
My scalp prickled.
I had no idea how advanced Master’s cultivation truly was.
But Old Cao had spent decades working as both a coffin bearer and a funerary-paper artisan, yet he treated her with the utmost awe. Her abilities had clearly reached an unimaginable level.
If even she was this wary, the origin of that thing had to be horrifying beyond belief.
The Golden-Thread Netherbloom was already an incredibly precious treasure, yet Master had spoken of it quite casually, as though it were nothing particularly remarkable.
I gave her a helpless look.
“But Master, the Xiao family’s son has become a living corpse. We have to solve that problem. If we can’t learn what lies beneath the Chuan River outside Xiaowan Village, what are we supposed to do?”
I gazed at her as pitifully as I could.
Yes, I was shamelessly pestering her.
This might have been my own problem, but if Master was ordering me to stay away from that thing for now, she had to offer me some kind of solution, didn’t she?
Half annoyed and half amused, she reached out and smacked me on the head.
Smack!
“You little schemer. You were waiting for exactly this moment to ask, weren’t you? Since you already know that thing might be a black plant… As I just said, its time to appear fully should not have arrived yet. Otherwise, strange phenomena would fill the sky, visible at night from anywhere in Fubei County. Right now, it should only be appearing intermittently.”
What?!
A plant could produce strange phenomena in the sky simply by appearing?
That was absurd.
The more I heard, the more terrifying it sounded.
Master continued, “I estimate that it will appear fully in another two or three years. As for the exact timing, I don’t know either.”
I nodded thoughtfully.
“So what you mean is…it might disappear again in a few days?”
“That’s right.”
Thinking I understood, I said, “In other words, that astonishing black plant hasn’t matured yet?”
I assumed that was what Master meant.
It would be like the Golden-Thread Netherbloom, whose time to mature had not yet arrived.
But Master shook her head.
“That’s not what I mean. That thing… No one actually knows whether the concept of maturity even applies to it. In any case, you don’t need to think too much about this for now. You’re too weak. In two or three years, your own abilities should be fairly impressive. We can decide what to do then. Telling you too much now would be useless and might even harm you.”
Master had made herself perfectly clear.
A weak little rookie like me wasn’t even qualified to know.
In her eyes, Old Cao and Li Miao were probably weaklings too.
After all, to a ferocious tiger, a chick was still a chicken whether it was tiny or a full-grown rooster.
Unless the chicken became a spirit, anyway.
Master suddenly asked, “Ah-Zhong, what are you thinking about? Why do you have such a strange look on your face?”
“Nothing! Nothing at all, Master.”
I shook my head and waved my hands frantically, denying everything.
Good grief.
If Master found out I had compared her to a tigress in my mind, I might get to experience firsthand just how vicious a tigress could be.
She might make me practice talisman arts without pause until every last bit of my strength and qi was exhausted and I passed out.
That was the sort of cruelty she called “educational punishment.”
Afraid she would press the matter, I quickly changed the subject back to Xiaowan Village.
“Master, you still haven’t told me what to do about the Xiao family’s living corpse son. Keeping him in the cellar like this is pretty risky.”
Her beautiful eyes glared at me. Then she slowly reached inside her clothes, took out a round black pellet, and placed it in my palm.
It was obviously some kind of medicinal pill.
But what did it do?
“Master, this is…?”
“A medicinal pill.”
I was speechless.
“Master, I’m asking what it’s called and what it’s for.”
She gave a cold snort.
“If you don’t understand it, stop asking questions. All you need to know is that it’s something good. Have the living corpse swallow it. It will seal and suppress the vicious corpse aura inside him for two or three years. He still won’t be the same as a living person, but he’ll essentially lose the ability to fight.”
I was overjoyed.
“So once Xiao Sheng takes it, there won’t be any risk of him turning into a vicious corpse like the living corpse Zhou Mu in the *Fubei County Gazetteer*?”
“More or less. As long as he doesn’t go near the river bend outside Xiaowan Village again, there shouldn’t be any problem. Otherwise, the thing on the riverbed might influence him. It may disappear, but its presence will linger.”
That meant Xiao Sheng’s problem was solved for the time being.
At least we no longer had to worry that we had taken the money without doing the work.