Chapter 124: Smooth Sailing
Chapter 124: Smooth Sailing
As they neared the ruined temple, Ding Songyan handed the cloth bundle wrapped around Yan Peng’s head to Zheng Zhuxi.
She took it without hesitation.
Strictly speaking, she had dealt Yan Peng the killing blow herself. She had only withdrawn her sword in time to give her junior brother another round of practice.
Inside the ruined temple, Lü Huaijin and the others waited anxiously, fearing another turn of trouble.
At last, they saw the moonlit young woman walk in carrying something round and bulky, with the young man in the scholar’s headscarf still at her side.
The young woman smiled faintly, held up what she was carrying, and said in a light tone, "Miasma Poison Saber has been dealt with."
Escort Leader Yu collected himself, sword in hand, stepped forward, and cupped his hands in salute.
"It is thanks to both of your swords that we came through unscathed.
"I am Yu Jinhong of the Long Road Escort Bureau, and I extend our gratitude on the caravan’s behalf. May I be so bold as to ask your names? We will find a way to repay you in the future."
Zheng Zhuxi understood her junior brother’s intent and smiled.
"This matter seems to involve the Huangliang Sect. We only stepped in because we saw an injustice. We have no wish to be drawn into such affairs. We are strangers who happened to cross paths, so there is no need to exchange names.
"As for repayment, say no more. We won’t be giving you a single coin of Miasma Poison Saber’s bounty."
Yu Jinhong’s expression flickered with surprise.
He looked to Ding Songyan and lowered his voice deliberately, "Are you not from the Huangliang Sect?"
Earlier, Miasma Poison Saber Yan Peng had inexplicably fed everyone the antidote. His eyes had been half-opened, his expression vacant and dazed. It was clearly the work of the Huangliang Sect’s Great Dream of Three Thousand Years.
As someone who had dealt with the Huangliang Sect on many occasions, Yu Jinhong knew enough to recognize it.
Ding Songyan smiled easily.
"Escort Leader Yu, the Great Dream of Three Thousand Years is not the only art capable of making Yan Peng administer the antidote of his own apparent free will. There are quite a few others."
The Celestial Heart imprint, for one.
Junior Brother hadn’t denied using the Great Dream of Three Thousand Years. He had simply raised other possibilities, and that’s entirely true... Zheng Zhuxi watched with quiet attentiveness as her junior brother told the truth in a way that amounted to a lie.
She didn’t want to imitate it. She wanted to commit it to memory so that when she encountered similar wordplay in the future, she would know how to see through it.
Yu Jinhong wore a thoughtful expression, offered another bow, then turned back to one of the campfires, where he addressed the guards and escort guards who had only recently recovered.
"Everyone stay sharp. We cannot afford carelessness spending the night at the foot of the mountain."
He had nearly been tempted to hire the young pair to deliver the Fuyu Mountain Cinnabar Grass to Qisong Prefecture’s city directly, to sidestep any further interceptions. They were not only far more capable, and as a duo, were nimble and fast unlike himself—he had to mind the entire caravan and could only cover so much ground each day.
Since the two had refused to reveal anything about themselves, he let the idea go. His plan now was to reach the next city, send a message by carrier pigeon to have the bureau dispatch another escort leader overnight, and then break away from the caravan himself to focus solely on delivering the Fuyu Mountain Cinnabar Grass.
What a business this is... Yu Jinhong muttered to himself.
The Chen Caravan had transported Fuyu Mountain Cinnabar Grass for the Huangliang Sect more than once before without incident since it wasn’t a priceless treasure. It was vital to the Huangliang Sect, but of little consequence to anyone else. Yet this time trouble had found them, and the whole affair was murky and baffling.
Ding Songyan and Zheng Zhuxi returned to their horses, fed them some black beans, then settled back down, sitting side by side against the same beam and warming themselves by the crackling campfire.
"Junior Brother, why did Yan Peng’s miasma have no effect on us?" Zheng Zhuxi was going over the events in her mind and asked with mild curiosity.
During her own bout with Yan Peng, she had simply held her breath, keeping her swordwork fast and sharp in hopes of a quick finish.
"Miasma is dispersed by wind. I only needed to affect the void around us to push it away or dissolve it." Aside from not mentioning the Chaos Realm by name, Ding Songyan hid nothing from his senior sister.
What lay ahead might involve clashes at the Dharma Realm level. If he kept too many things hidden, Zheng Zhuxi wouldn’t be able to make the most accurate judgments, and might miss the best moment to act. The one who would suffer for it would be Ding Songyan himself.
After the affair with the Nine Feng remnant soul, Ding Songyan had grown considerably more cautious.
His Chaos Realm’s Bringing All Things Into Unity ability was still quite weak, and the changes it caused in the void were slight. Against weapons and true qi, it could only exert a limited influence. But miasma was a form of vapor, and the toxins within it were light and diffuse. They were the sort that was easily dissolved.
Even if the dissolution was incomplete and trace amounts of miasma entered his body, they would be swiftly absorbed into the Presence-Absence Myriad Forms Qi.
So when Yan Peng had released miasma through the mist, Ding Songyan had used shifts in temperature to generate strong gusts and blow the toxic vapors well away, keeping his senior sister safe. Once he was sparring directly with Yan Peng, he had switched to using Bringing All Things Into Unity instead.
Zheng Zhuxi thought back carefully and confirmed she had indeed felt wind—only, inside the ruined temple, cold gusts had been blowing in constantly from outside, masking anything unusual.
"I see..." The young woman spoke with her junior brother quietly, reviewing what the sword practice had yielded. Then the two of them took turns regulating their breathing and resting.
Escort Leader Yu remained on guard throughout the night. Camping at the foot of the mountain meant watching out not only for mountain bandits and lone thieves, but also for mountain spirits and bloodthirsty beasts that might attack.
Yet to Yu Jinhong’s surprise and bewilderment, the whole night brought nothing but rain. Later even the rain stopped.
The surrounding forest was eerily quiet without a single strange sound.
Even for a rainy winter night, this isn’t normal... Escort Leader Yu felt a chill run through him.
The moment the sky began to brighten, he hurried the caravan into motion and over the mountain pass.
The journey went more smoothly than Yu Jinhong had dared hope. Not a single lone thief or mountain bandit appeared. It felt almost as if they were traveling through the capital’s home territory.
Zheng Zhuxi, trailing the caravan at a distance, glanced at the city gates and said with quiet amusement, "When we travel the outskirts on our own, we can’t find anyone named on a wanted warrant. And now, even following a caravan, we still can’t."
Apart from stumbling into Yan Peng by chance last night.
Ding Songyan laughed.
"Senior Sister, you are extraordinarily striking in appearance, and you carry yourself with a commanding presence. For two people bold enough to travel rough roads and barren ridges, I would think twice if I were a bandit. This pair is clearly not to be trifled with, and there must be something more to them.
"Except for the kind driven by lust or sheer recklessness, it would take at least a third-rank Form Transfigured unorthodox powerhouse to dare come after you and me. And how often does one run into someone like that?"
All the way south, the two of them had not found a single person named on the wanted warrants, aside from Yan Peng.
This was understandable. If such bandits were so easily found by wandering heroes, they would long since have been wiped out. There would be none left by the time Ding Songyan and Zheng Zhuxi came along. These weren’t chaotic times, after all, and the orthodox far outnumbered the heretical.
If the two of them had spent a month or two in areas where major bandits were active by gathering leads and drawing them out, they could have claimed bounties. But that wasn’t Ding Songyan’s purpose. Opportunities to test his swordsmanship were welcome, but their absence was no loss either. His reason for heading south to Qisong Prefecture was primarily to refine his Dream Sword, and there was no need to linger too long along the way.
......
The journey that followed went so smoothly that Escort Leader Yu found himself unsettled by it. He didn’t breathe easy until a second escort leader from the Long Road Bureau arrived.
He disguised himself, concealed the three-colored markings on his skin, broke away from the caravan, and set out for Qisong Prefecture carrying nothing but the Fuyu Mountain Cinnabar Grass.
Within a few days, he arrived at the Qisong Prefecture city at the foot of Springwater Mountain.
Without pausing to settle in, Yu Jinhong went straight to the Huangliang Sect’s trading house in the city and was shown to a room on the second floor.
Moments later, a Huangliang Sect steward he recognized walked in and greeted him with a smile.
"Escort Leader Yu, it’s been a while. I trust you are well?"
"The mission is complete." Yu Jinhong finally let himself relax fully. He reached into a hidden inner pocket and produced a palm-sized brocade pouch.
Inside was the Fuyu Mountain Cinnabar Grass.
Yu Jinhong was about to hand the pouch to the Huangliang Sect steward when he noticed a candlelight flicker to life in the corridor outside the door.
The flame was tinged yellow and gave off only a faint warmth, yet it illuminated the entire room in an instant. The rugs, screen, paintings, shelves, and furniture rapidly lost their solidity, turned hazy, and then fell apart entirely.
The candlelight swept over Escort Leader Yu’s sea of consciousness, and he jolted awake, eyes snapping open.
He saw a figure wearing a pale-white mask smeared with red, and found that he himself had already produced the brocade pouch with the Fuyu Mountain Cinnabar Grass and was on the verge of handing it over.
At the same time, the voice of a storyteller drifted up from the inn’s main hall below, faint but audible. It was a story about Xu Shilin joining the Divine Empyrean Sect and mastering the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths Thunderbolt Lightning Palm, another about how the Fifth Young Lord Xie of the Xie family in Flame Capital had kept his word, pursued his targets all the way to the north of the river, and at last eliminated the Three Fiends of Xiao City.
It all felt to Yu Jinhong like waking from a dream.
No, he had just been in a dream—a real one!
He was still in the county town a day’s journey from Qisong Prefecture City, and the bureau had not yet sent another escort leader; yet, he had dreamed he had already reached his destination and was about to hand over the Fuyu Mountain Cinnabar Grass.
Great Dream of Three Thousand Years! Escort Leader Yu felt a jolt of alarm and fixed his gaze on the figure before him.
The figure was 1.7 meters tall, dressed as an inn attendant, but wore a sinister Meng Po mask over its face.
Then Escort Leader Yu saw two more figures—the stunning young woman and her male companion they had encountered in the ruined temple a few days earlier.
Both were dressed in unmarked black combat attire, standing with their backs to the corridor wall. One had already drawn her sword; the other still held a scabbard cradled in his arms.
Candlelight... Candlelight Sword Intent? Brightnight Sect? Zheng Zhuxi? Yu Jinhong was in Ning Province and was not entirely unfamiliar with the Brightnight Sect’s martial arts.
He had also heard that Brightnight Sect’s Zheng Zhuxi was a beauty of rare quality whose swordwork was ruthlessly precise, and that less than a year after entering the Great Proliferation Realm, she had killed Escort Leader Xie Zi’an, a fourth-rank Mortal Surpassed.
The man in the Meng Po mask stood perfectly still, which struck Zheng Zhuxi as odd. She raised her sword and flicked the mask away.
Behind the Meng Po mask was a face with eyes closed, still deep in sleep.
Not the mysterious figure Yan Peng had described—just an inn attendant who had also been caught in the Great Dream of Three Thousand Years... Two people in one dream at the same time? Seeing that both sides of the "transaction" had been sleepwalking, Ding Songyan was momentarily stunned.
That was beyond what he could do.