Now placed before Chi Yujun there were two choices.
Either accept her father’s killer’s food given with a sneer, set down her dignity, wag her tail and beg pity like a pitiful dog, and accept the other party’s charity.
Or stiffen her spine and refuse the other party.
Even if she had fallen on hard times, she had not fallen to the point of lowering her head and showing goodwill to the person before her eyes.
She looked back at his earnest gaze, and in her heart there was only a cold laugh.
Hmph. Truly fake.
Why had she fallen to today’s situation if not all thanks to him?
If he had not killed her father at the time, would she at least still have had a home to return to?
The moonlight was cool as water.
The bright, clear, cold, boundless moonlight passed through that small square of wooden lattice above Chi Yujun’s head, struck the floor, and reflected a subtly cool and thin color, as transparent as her silver-white hair color.
Under the deathly pale moonlight, Fang Guyuan clearly saw this beauty who possessed the bearing of a heavenly being.
On that peerlessly beautiful pretty face floated dark negative emotions that should not have been there.
Extreme resentment.
Extreme venom.
Extreme enmity.
Honestly speaking, he was a bit dumbfounded.
He did not remember where he had provoked her, and also did not understand why she was angry.
After a brief astonishment, he immediately felt relieved—
This girl seemed to not have a very good brain.
Before she had even said she wanted to eat people.
She was afraid she saw everyone about the same, saw everyone as her food.
He was a normal person and would not lower himself to her level.
“Do you want it or not?”
He asked again.
Chi Yujun snorted in contempt.
The calves of her little legs could not stop trembling from fear and cold, yet she still turned her head aside, retaining an inexplicable reserved arrogance, or else the guilty conscience of being fierce outside and weak inside.
—Simply like some family’s young lady who has clearly already fallen from heaven into the mortal dust, yet still has not figured out her own situation, so she is throwing a young-miss temper.
Fang Guyuan thus slandered in his belly, and the next instant began to soothe himself and forgive this Phoenix Body who did not know good from bad.
Be a good person to the end.
After saving her from the Spirit Immortal Sect, either send her home, or keep her at his side.
Though originally there should still have been one option of sending her to the Fang family of Penglai, the moment Fang Guyuan thought of that person of the Fang family, that group of people, he subconsciously excluded this option.
Even normal people the Fang family could force into madness, let alone this girl before his eyes who was already mad.
“Whether you want it or not you have to take it. Just treat it as doing me a favor. If you fall ill, the one who will look after you then will still be me.”
Whoosh.
That body of black clothes was like canvas filled with air, emitting sound in the air, then falling just right onto Chi Yujun’s body, covering her arms, shoulders, and spine, with a portion still dragging on the ground.
The body temperature belonging to her enemy immediately passed faintly through the black cloth onto the girl’s fair skin.
Fortunately Chi Yujun could not smell scents, otherwise her entire nasal cavity would now be Fang Guyuan’s smell, and she would probably vomit hugely and specially on the spot.
It was indeed warm.
This thought flashed through Chi Yujun’s mind and vanished, but was quickly replaced by reignited hatred.
He couldn’t think this bit of small kindness and small favor could make up for the despair of her losing her kin and having no home, could he?
Chi Yujun resisted it greatly in her heart, yet her body, because of the cold, unconsciously began to linger over this bit of residual warmth.
Perhaps in this world no one was more contradictory, more twisted than she.
Chi Yujun was not clear on this point, but her inner heart suffered torment.
Clearly before the man entered the room she had considered whether to accept adversity and please others in order to seek a chance to live on in humiliation, yet facing merely such a small matter she still could not help hating and spitting on her own indecision.
In the end, she hated the other party, was nauseated by the other party, yet she feared death.
If her strength were sufficient, she would long since have charged up, wrung this man’s neck, and then turned his flesh and blood into a part of her own body.
Was it not still that her strength was insufficient, bullying the soft and fearing the hard.
As for backbone?
Perhaps on a certain night long, long ago it had already been smashed, melted into the long river of memory, turned into foam, and become a part of some unnamable great sheet of shadow’s process of digestion and excretion.
How would Fang Guyuan know this Phoenix Body had so many plays in her heart.
He thought that since they would have to get along for a period of time anyway, he should first draw a little closer.
“I don’t know whether you still remember me. I am Fang Guyuan of Dust Sword Palace… I previously offended you in many ways, and still hope you will pardon the crime.”
There was some guilt and apology in his tone, yet his gaze could not stop falling on Chi Yujun’s face to observe the changes in her expression.
Fang Guyuan said these words for a reason.
From previous dialogue with the Phoenix Body it could be inferred that she was not clear she had been cultivated as a human gu, and still thought she herself was a gu master.
If she were a gu master, then being unwilling to reveal her own name to outsiders would be understandable—
Even the Spirit Immortal Sect’s Shao Feng and Shao Jun, father and son, those two names were also false names.
What gu masters most tabooed was telling others their true names.
The reason was that within the arts of controlling gu, there was a very heretical technique.
[Echo Gu]
Facing clear water and silently reciting another person’s true name without a single wrong character nine hundred ninety-nine times, then adding eighty-one kinds of poisons such as golden-winged ants and immortal-ascending spiders and a little of the controller’s natal gu, one could transform and form a gu insect named Echo Gu, and turn the person who had been hexed into a walking corpse.
This kind of gu was extremely vicious, and refining it was also extremely difficult.
Under ordinary circumstances only when one had provoked an enemy and wanted to vent anger would one use this method of insulting a person and controlling a person’s mind.
As long as you called his true name or used the artifact tempered when refining the Echo Gu, he would immediately lose the method and ability to think, become a dog that only obeyed orders, and even if told to suicide or self-harm would absolutely not hesitate to blink an eye.
Regarding this kind of gu, the jianghu also had a corresponding name—”lowering a hex.”
In short, for a gu master, being willing to tell you a name meant already absolutely trusting you and entrusting life and death to you.
“You’re… not asking my name anymore?”
Chi Yujun felt as if she had received a great pardon and opened her mouth with difficulty.
“I won’t ask. I choose to respect your wishes.”
Chi Yujun hummed dully and did not pick up the conversation.
Who knew whether this man was deliberately using clever words and ordered colors here.
Anyway she would absolutely never tell him her name.
Right, and also that thing…
“Do you know the sect master of the Spirit Immortal Sect here wants to take you as his wife?”
Fang Guyuan asked again.
“……”
Chi Yujun’s face became extremely unsightly.
Her stomach began to feel unwell again, and before her eyes she hallucinated the appearance of those few gu insects struggling to the death in filthy, dirty sour water.
Precisely stepping on a landmine.
This was the matter Chi Yujun recently thought of and then wanted to vomit.
From beginning to end she firmly believed she was a man.
Even if the skin-bag had produced some slight changes, that heart would not change.
Yet she had also thought that this cowardly self of hers, though her heart resisted to the death, if some man used her life to threaten and force her to submit, who knew, she might truly for the sake of living smash that last bit of dignity as well, lingering on and receiving pleasure beneath a man.
In the end, the meaning of her living was also only obeying others.
How she herself thought seemed from the beginning of having consciousness to have never been cared about by anyone.
Father told her to love, so she loved.
Father told her to hate, so she hated.
Her thoughts drifted aimlessly to a very far place.
“…to save you and get you out.”
Her scattered consciousness was pulled back by Fang Guyuan’s few words.
Chi Yujun’s gaze that had been staring into the void returned to Fang Guyuan.
“What did you say?”
“I said, I came today in order to save you and get you out.”
“……?”
“I know you don’t want to marry. Then don’t marry.”
“……?”
“What are you looking at me so shocked for. A young woman in her twenties not wanting to marry a forty- or fifty-year-old old man she hasn’t even seen a few times is very normal, right.”
Chi Yujun did not mean this.
She was only surprised.
No.
She was shocked.
—Why, if she doesn’t want to marry, can she not marry?
This enormous impact left her with hands and feet having nowhere to put themselves, her mind stalled, even forgetting that the person before her eyes was one of the people she hated most, one of the people she most wanted to flee.
“…You, aren’t you on his… their side?”
Her voice was even trembling.
Yet her body had clearly already warmed a great deal because of that piece of clothing.
Wh-what was going on?
Chi Yujun’s mind was mixed and chaotic.
She seemed to have forgotten where she was, forgotten who she was, only feeling she was like a duckweed in the great sea, overturned by fierce ocean currents, swallowed, then finally thrown high, and between trance and shock seeing a blurred, dazzling sun.
“I am only on the side of my own heart.”
“Perhaps I am not the most suitable person to come save you, but I am the person who most wants to save you… Be at ease. With me here, there is nothing to fear.”
She saw the man before her eyes speak these words with a face of ease and leisure, his body even slightly leaning forward as he extended his right hand toward her.
And she, as if possessed by ghosts and gods, could not help also extending her hand and placing it upon his.