By the time Chi Yujun recovered consciousness, half a day had already passed.
She did not remember the situation at the time in the slightest, and only felt it strange.
How had she come to be in a place like this, an unfamiliar room?
The moment she opened her eyes, Fang Guyuan noticed.
“Awake?”
He was sitting behind the desk, several feet from the bedside, and lifted his head to look at her.
Originally Fang Guyuan had wanted to use the time she was resting to clear away some of the official business, but the moment he thought of that grieving, lost expression when she had cried herself limp in his arms, he simply could not settle his heart.
His head was full of fury, and of a grief he could do nothing about.
Since he could not work, he simply watched her.
While he watched her, he also looked over the list of spoils gained from wiping out the Immortal King Sect, thinking which things she might be able to use, checking and marking.
“What is this place? How did we end up here?” Chi Yujun narrowed her eyes and looked over the furnishings around her.
She did not recognize them.
She had never been here.
Fang Guyuan hadn’t handed her off to someone else again, had he?
“A room near the storehouse, used for the disciples on duty to rest when they change shifts. You were too sleepy just now, and fell asleep, so I brought you over to sleep.”
“Really?” Chi Yujun stared at him, full of suspicion. “You brought me here to sleep? Only to sleep? Nothing else?”
“Really. Come, look at these lists. Is there anything you want?”
Fang Guyuan handed her the list, yet Chi Yujun only glanced a few times, then pushed it back and turned her head aside.
“Too many characters. I don’t recognize them. I can’t read it.”
She only recognized some simple, basic words.
Once the characters grew many and mixed, she could not make them out.
“It’s fine. Then we’ll go look directly. The things are all there. Whatever you want, we’ll keep a backup copy.”
When Chi Yujun followed behind Fang Guyuan and entered the storehouse once more, her heart was still drumming.
How could Fang Guyuan be that kind?
Hadn’t he sealed her Destiny Path as a gu master? And he wouldn’t let her eat people……
Not allowing this, not allowing that, so why was he allowing it now?
There was certainly something wrong.
Yet she truly could not refuse a temptation this large.
She could not press down the expectation in her heart.
She stood beside the racks of dazzling goods and did not dare move, only stealing glances at Fang Guyuan.
“Don’t be afraid. I won’t go back on my word.”
Chi Yujun tried stretching a hand to the rack, picked up a copy of “Marvelous Methods of Driving Gu”, then turned her head and carefully watched Fang Guyuan’s expression.
The looseness of that hand looked as if she meant to throw it down the instant she saw his face change.
Fang Guyuan did not stop her, and only said that if she wanted it, he could copy one out for her with a spell.
—There was really a good thing like this?
—Wasn’t Fang Guyuan opposing her at every turn?
Chi Yujun truly could not accept it, and could not understand what Fang Guyuan was doing either.
“…Why?”
She stood there for a long while, and at last squeezed out this one sentence.
“Cultivating gu arts is only a means. I have no intention of blocking your cultivation. And among these things, some ought to be of use to you, shouldn’t they.”
“……Thank you, Master.” Chi Xuewu answered, pretending to be obedient.
—Heh. This man was truly stupid. Once she had cultivated well, the first thing she would certainly do was…
Before Chi Yujun had finished muttering to herself, Fang Guyuan spoke again, as if he had seen through the thought at the bottom of her heart.
“There are matters in this world far more important than revenge, especially for a child like you who still doesn’t understand what ‘revenge’ means. At least that’s what I think at present…… All right. You go on and look for things you can use. There are also a few things I’m rather interested in that I want to see.”
Fang Guyuan waved a hand, and said no more.
He had looked over the item list.
There were several things that looked as if they had special uses, and he was quite interested in seeing them.
After all, these things were about to be sent to the Spirit Immortal Sect.
Looking first would do no harm.
When he went back to Qingxuan Peak at night, he would also have to reinforce the barriers and restrictions everywhere……
Thinking, Fang Guyuan let his gaze roam and examine these things, most of them related to gu, pacing back and forth among the wooden racks.
As for how the Phoenix Body saw him, he already had some guesses.
She had even taken the heretical cult for family, so what identity the one who had wiped the heretical cult out held, that went without saying.
Asking his own heart, if his family had been killed, he would probably also have wanted to kill the enemy with his own hands.
Then the Phoenix Body’s changes these few days could be explained.
She might have changed her strategy, and wanted to take revenge by some other means.
What means, specifically, Fang Guyuan did not know, but in any case caution came first.
In the sealed containers quite a few gu insects were wriggling or crawling, and there were also some that were only small eggs, pale green or milky white or gray-black, all stacked neatly on the racks, labels stuck on.
Some things could be recognized for what they were, and the names were clear enough.
Far more, however, were gu items the immortal-sect disciples had never seen, and they could only, by their rough sense of the things, guess out a name that seemed right and was not.
For example, “gray-black white-striped bristled caterpillar, possibly poisonous, effect unknown”…… There were many labels like this.
Fang Guyuan’s focus in looking was not here.
What interested him more was the Immortal King Sect’s research materials on gu items.
He had flipped through these materials roughly before.
Set together with the local records of missing people that the Great Wu Dynasty had given, the Immortal King Sect’s crimes were proven beyond doubt.
Only, looking at the Immortal King Sect’s trail of conduct, he always felt there was somewhere unreasonable……
Where, specifically, something was off, he could not say for the moment.
Fang Guyuan was thinking, yet when his gaze passed a row of wooden racks, it was caught by the things on them.
The things on them were precisely many sound-making instruments with complicated patterns.
There were xun, there were xiao, there were flutes, there were small drums, and there were bells.
Instruments…?
The Immortal King Sect was a sect whose core was manipulating gu arts. Why would it have so many instruments?
Fang Guyuan found it strange in his heart.
From behind those bottles and jars he carefully took these instruments, painted with blood-red patterns, out one by one to look.
The instruments that needed to be blown, Fang Guyuan found dirty, and was unwilling to try them.
He did, however, take up that palm-sized pellet drum and the delicate little bell and look them over.
He shook the drum and tapped it.
The drum sound was muffled, like a pellet-drum toy an ordinary small child would hold and play with, and seemed to have nothing special about it.
Then he tried shaking the bell.
The bell’s sound echoed in the storehouse, clear and pleasant, and also seemed to have nothing special about it.
Fang Guyuan looked at these instruments without understanding, sighed, shook his head, and prepared to put them back where they had been placed.
It was just then that Chi Yujun, things in her hands, came over, quiet and drifting.
Fang Guyuan heard the footsteps and paid them no mind.
He only put everything back in its original place, then turned his head to ask her.
“What’s wrong? Is there something you want?”
But the moment his body turned, and his eyes fell on the silver-haired woman’s face, Fang Guyuan’s color changed at once, and he was shocked to the extreme.
The highlight had gone out of her eyes.
Her gaze was scattered and muddy.
She had clearly already lost her wits, and had become a puppet like a walking corpse!