Chapter 152

Chapter 152

Deng Liqian’s grandmother held the book in both hands. Looking at me through her cloudy old eyes, she asked once more.

“Sir, you must keep your promise.”

“Don’t worry. I’m a righteous practitioner.”

“Swear it before the Taoist Three Pure Ones!”

Uh…

This old woman was certainly cautious.

But I truly had no intention of going back on my word. Since I had called it a trade, a trade it would be!

Without the slightest burden on my conscience, I curled my thumb and little finger, raised the three middle fingers, and solemnly swore an oath before the Three Pure Ones.

Master had said the teachings of our lineage were rather eclectic and difficult to define clearly.

But our ability in the talisman arts did genuinely belong to orthodox Taoist magic.

Deng Liqian’s grandmother had seen me use talisman casting and ignite talisman fire, so naturally she wanted me to swear before the Three Pure Ones.

Once such an oath was broken, some mysterious power within the unseen order of the world would strip the oathbreaker of every Taoist art and all the qi they possessed!

It was deeply mysterious.

But it truly existed.

After watching me finish the oath, the old woman finally seemed to relax. She placed the black book in my hands.

My palms immediately felt something cold and smooth.

It was like touching the glossy shell of some kind of armored insect… extremely strange.

At the same time, an unfathomable, mysterious aura spread from the book.

My heart jolted.

This book is definitely a treasure! It’s clearly some kind of cultivation manual for the gu arts.

Outwardly, however, I remained calm and casually flipped through it.

Four intricate characters appeared on the cover, resembling some form of writing. They were probably the title of the gu book, but I didn’t recognize them.

“Ma’am, what do these four characters on the cover mean?”

I asked the question.

The old woman shook her head.

“Young master, I don’t recognize them either.”

Oh?

Puzzled, I asked, “Isn’t this the Miao language?”

The old woman nodded, then shook her head.

“It is, and it isn’t.”

She didn’t try to hide anything. In accordance with our “trade agreement,” she recounted the origins of both herself and this ancient gu book…

The Miao people were divided into assimilated Miao and traditional Miao.

What were assimilated Miao?

Their villages lay close to towns and Han communities. Most of the villagers had become assimilated into Han culture, spoke Chinese, and could read Chinese characters.

Traditional Miao, naturally, were Miao people who retained a completely traditional way of life.

Most residents of such traditional Miao villages could hardly speak Chinese and knew few Chinese characters.

There were generally two reasons. Either the Miao village itself lay too deep in remote mountains to communicate conveniently with the outside world, or its people clung to old customs and deliberately avoided extensive contact with the Han.

The mysterious and uncanny gu arts of the Miao people existed primarily in these traditional Miao villages!

Of course, in modern society, such villages had become exceedingly rare. Most had existed only before the founding of the People’s Republic.

Deng Liqian’s grandmother had been born in a large traditional Miao settlement called Leidong Miao Village.

The village had a history spanning more than a thousand years!

In the old society, it had been famous and extremely powerful throughout southwestern Guizhou. According to legend, it had accumulated a considerable fortune over the centuries…

During the later years of the Republican era, a local Guizhou warlord ordered his men to launch a direct assault on Leidong Miao Village.

The village had fierce Miao warriors and many gu practitioners. In ancient society, they had been extremely formidable. Whether the forces of different dynasties attacked or bandits tried to slaughter them, they had never shown fear.

With complex terrain and their strange, unpredictable gu arts, they had often repelled invaders.

But against industrial weapons such as rifles, howitzers, and explosives, neither the fiercest traditional Miao warrior nor the most powerful gu practitioner amounted to more than paper before modern guns and artillery.

They suffered a crushing defeat!

The vicious warlord’s forces destroyed the entirety of Leidong Miao Village.

Not only did they plunder all the gold, silver, and treasure accumulated over a thousand years, they intended to kill every person in the village!

At the time, Deng Liqian’s grandmother was only ten years old–a little girl.

As it happened, her older sister was a gu maiden of Leidong Miao Village.

While the warlord’s troops besieged the village’s sacred grounds, her sister seized the moment when the Gu Saintess was holding the invaders at the entrance. She hurriedly removed the cultivation manual for the gu arts that their people had passed down for generations and secretly gave it to Deng Liqian’s grandmother.

After instructing the girl to guard the gu book at all costs, she sent her out through a hidden passage in the sacred grounds.

Unfortunately, that secret passage was too narrow. Only a child of around ten could escape through it…

Thus, Leidong Miao Village, with its thousand-year inheritance, was ultimately destroyed. Only a single ten-year-old child survived.
At first, Deng Liqian’s grandmother had been consumed by thoughts of finding some way to take revenge!

Unfortunately, she had never possessed the talent to become a gu practitioner…

In traditional Miao villages, every girl was tested by the current Gu Saintess at the age of three to determine whether she had the talent to practice the gu arts.

If she possessed the talent, she became a gu maiden. Her training began in childhood and included techniques for refining, controlling, and commanding gu insects.

Most important of all, she had to learn gu script!

That’s right. To distinguish themselves from ordinary people, the Miao’s gu practitioners possessed a special written language of their own.

This script was extremely complicated, and only gu practitioners could read it. Learning required dedicated study beginning at the age of three.

Of course, boys could become gu practitioners too.

For reasons no one understood, however, all the most powerful gu practitioners throughout history had been women. Overall, men seemed far less capable in the practice of the gu arts and remained at a disadvantage.

A gu maiden couldn’t marry outside her village. Instead, a man from another village had to marry into hers.

A girl without talent for the gu arts could simply live her life as an ordinary traditional Miao woman…

Deng Liqian’s grandmother had been one of those without talent.

She had also been only ten when Leidong Miao Village was destroyed. Surviving alone through that chaotic era of war had already required tremendous luck and every ounce of her strength.

How could she possibly take revenge?

Besides, only a few years later, the chaos ended and the People’s Republic was founded.

The world gradually became peaceful, and ordinary people settled into stable lives and work. At that point, plotting to kill someone for revenge would itself have been a crime, and the police would have arrested her.

Of course, the main issue was that Deng Liqian’s grandmother had no ability to take revenge whatsoever. She had been only ten and didn’t even know who her enemies were!

In the years that followed, she could only work hard to integrate into society. She learned Chinese and performed harsh, exhausting labor for wages so she could support herself…

In her twenties, her wandering eventually brought her to Sichuan and Chongqing. There she met a Han man who treated her well, and the two married before long.

Traditional Miao custom forbade marriage with the Han.

But Leidong Miao Village had already been destroyed, and she had long since learned spoken and written Chinese. Who remained to stop her?

More importantly, her husband treated her extremely well and cared for her deeply.

The couple soon had a son. Although the family of three was poor, they lived a decent life.

Deng Liqian’s grandmother also seemed to forget that she had been born among the traditional Miao and lived like an ordinary woman.

Who could have known that her fate would be so cruel?

At the end of the 1970s, her husband died of illness, leaving her and her son dependent on each other.

Fortunately, her son was hardworking and married a few years later.

Several more years passed, and the couple had a daughter, Deng Liqian.

But unexpectedly, her son was another unfortunate soul destined for a short life… Not long after Deng Liqian’s birth, he died in an accident. Finding life too difficult, his wife abandoned her daughter and ran away.

The old woman had no choice but to raise Deng Liqian alone. Eventually, the two settled in Lianghe Town.

Perhaps because life had been so difficult, the old woman normally had a violent temper. Although she loved Deng Liqian dearly, she scolded and beat her at the slightest provocation. She also constantly complained about the family’s poverty and how hard money was to earn, threatening to punish the girl for wasting any.

As a result, Deng Liqian developed an insecure, timid, and increasingly extreme personality…

In the end, she committed the horrifying act of using gu to poison Yao Nan!

“Young master, my granddaughter and I both know we were wrong.”

The old woman apologized repeatedly, looking utterly pitiful.

I didn’t respond to that. I merely asked in an indifferent voice, “So all the writing in this book is the gu script used by gu practitioners?”

“Yes.”

“But if you can’t read gu script, how did you refine those hornet-like gu insects you used earlier? And what about your granddaughter, Deng Liqian? She secretly read the book and still learned to raise a kind of gu capable of making someone mute.”

The old woman smiled bitterly, pointed at the book in my hands, and answered.

“Young master, flip through the actual contents and you’ll understand. A small portion of it has notes written in Chinese. I can’t read gu script, but I learned written Chinese later. Because of that, I could read some of the methods for cultivating gu insects.”

Oh?

Surprised, I carefully leafed through the contents of the thick and peculiar ancient gu book.

Sure enough, about one-fifth of it truly did have Chinese annotations!

They appeared beneath the gu script, written in small, delicate, and extremely elegant characters.

Although still perfectly legible, the Chinese annotations clearly had some age to them.

“Were they already there when you received the book?”

The old woman nodded and continued explaining cautiously.
“Yes. But at first, I could read neither gu script nor Chinese characters. Only when I grew older and learned written Chinese could I understand the notes.”

“In the beginning, I didn’t want to learn anything from the book. I had no talent for the gu arts. Even if I studied it, I could learn only some superficial and crude methods for raising and refining gu insects. I could never master the true art of controlling them with my mind. Trying would only invite disaster.”

“But after my husband and son died, I was a lonely old woman raising my granddaughter… I worried local thugs and hooligans might bully us. So I secretly learned a little and tried cultivating several gu insects.”

She was right about that much.

The gu arts were divided primarily into two major parts: cultivating gu insects and commanding them.

Cultivating gu insects required no special ability or talent, nor any power resembling qi.

An ordinary person needed only to follow the written instructions mechanically and possess sufficient patience. By repeatedly attempting the complicated methods recorded in the manual, they had a chance of success.

But controlling and commanding the gu insects with one’s mind after raising them required supernatural power!

That depended on talent.

The ability to become a gu practitioner hinged above all on that particular talent. I was sure that when Leidong Miao Village tested its children, as the old woman had described, this was the gift they valued most.

That was why I had said Deng Liqian could never possess the ability to remove gu!

Without my help, Yao Nan absolutely would have become mute.

Moreover, the old woman looked pitiful now, but not because she was truly gentle by nature. She had attacked people the moment a disagreement arose and even tried to release gu insects against us. Clearly, she was no harmless soul.

Of course, if she had been harmless, she never could have survived alone through a chaotic era of war from the age of ten and lived all the way into modern society…

Ordinary people could scarcely imagine what she had experienced.

But!

No matter how tragic your life, how much you suffered, or how weak you were, none of it gave you a reason to hurt someone else–especially someone who had always treated you as a good friend and done everything possible to help you.

That made the act even more despicable!

So no matter how pitiful the old woman and Deng Liqian appeared, I would never soften in the slightest. I would simply follow the rules of the esoteric world that governed practitioners of the esoteric arts.

“If you had no talent for the gu arts, how were you able to command those gu insects to attack me just now?”

“The truth is that my Black Bee Gu weren’t refined into a pure form. They retained some of the habits of ordinary bees… So I commanded them using several beekeeping techniques my husband taught me when I was young.”

So that was it!

I nodded slightly.

The old woman was actually quite clever. The impurity of the Black Bee Gu she had cultivated became an advantage instead.

Despite lacking any talent for the gu arts, she had managed to command a swarm of impure gu insects and use them as a “secret weapon” to protect herself.

Unfortunately, she had used that weapon for the wrong purpose.

If local thugs had seen a widowed old woman and a weak middle-school girl living alone, deliberately bullied and humiliated them, and then suffered revenge from those gu insects, that would have been entirely justified and beyond reproach.

But we had come to demand justice, which meant her attack on us was an evil act.

Burning the entire swarm with one blast of fire counted as a small punishment.

I put away the mysterious ancient black gu book, slipping it into the backpack behind me. Then I looked at the old woman.

“I’ll keep my promise. Now that I’ve accepted this book, I won’t take any further action against you or your granddaughter.”

The old woman immediately grew emotional and hurriedly bowed to me with clasped hands.

“Thank you, young master! Qianqian, hurry over and offer your thanks to the young master too…”

I waved a hand. “There’s no need to thank me. This was a fair trade. But as I said, she still has to be punished.”

The expressions of the old woman and Deng Liqian changed slightly.

I turned toward Yao Nan, who had remained silent throughout, and looked somewhat apologetic.

“I’m truly sorry, Deskmate. You’re the victim and the injured party, but I took the liberty of deciding for you.”

Yao Nan hurriedly shook her head. “It’s all right, Wu Zhong. You’re the one who saved me.”

“But now you can punish Deng Liqian. I only promised not to use occult methods to cripple her in revenge. You can still give her a serious beating or impose some other punishment that doesn’t cause especially severe injury.”

I looked directly into her eyes as I spoke.

At that moment, Wang Dachun became enthusiastic.

The guy picked up a short wooden stool beside him and exclaimed excitedly, “Here! Use this to hit her. This’ll really hurt! That ungrateful traitor is infuriating.”

But Yao Nan shook her head and refused to take the stool Wang Dachun offered.

She merely turned and slowly walked over to Deng Liqian.

Deng Liqian looked frightened. She hunched her shoulders and instinctively shrank backward.