Chapter Ninety-Eight: Where Life Brings People Together Again

“...Are you surnamed Yao, or Fang? I’m guessing Fang!”

Those words fell like a spell of immobility, and in an instant Hong Jian was pinned where she stood, unable to move.

After a moment she asked in a strained voice, “Who are you?”

Her voice trembled faintly. Then she asked again, “Do I know you?”

The man slowly eased his hand away from the pressure holding her down, a trace of amusement lurking in his tone. “I guessed right? Don’t fidget. Never mind, I won’t tease you. Behave yourself and let me light the lamp. You little wretch, you’re gripping me so hard it hurts.”

As he spoke, he released her.

Such a familiar way of speaking, carrying the joy of a long-awaited reunion—who was he? Which of the people she knew would appear in the Demon Refining Prison, and who would joke with her like this? Qin Baoxian? Clearly not. Senior Uncle Jing Baixi? Impossible.

Hong Jian slowly moved her numb, aching arms, thoughts flashing like lightning as she sorted through everyone she knew. Then, hearing the man tap the flint with a crisp click, a figure suddenly surfaced in her mind. Tentatively, she called, “...Senior?”

The man on the bed said nothing, but the tapping of the flint in his hands paused for a beat.

Hong Jian’s heart grew even more certain. Yes—besides him, who else could possess such formidable skill that even the elders of the Demon Refining Prison would be driven to headaches? Who else would play such a vile joke on her?

Shock and delight surged through her together. “Senior, is it really you? You didn’t die?”

The man cursed under his breath and snapped, “Can’t you say something auspicious for once?” With a sharp crack, the flint struck, sparks leapt, and the tinder caught.

Though she had misspoken and annoyed him for a moment, Hong Jian did not take offense. To her, this was simply an indirect admission.

Smiling in the dark, she said, “Not long after we parted, there was a disturbance in the Endless Sea. I guessed it must have been you forming your nascent soul, and I worried terribly. Later, when the Grand Elder and the sect master returned and lifted the ban on the back mountain, I thought... I was sad for a long time then. We hadn’t seen each other in so many years—how did you know at once that it was me who came in just now?”

It was as if she had held these words in for far too long; now they burst out all at once, and for the first time Hong Jian sounded like a little girl. More than two years of resentment and loneliness finally found release, and the nearly taut, nearly breaking strings of her heart at last loosened.

Even Hong Jian herself could not quite explain why she trusted this person so deeply, though she had met him years ago and only seen him a few times. Perhaps it was because his secret techniques of spiritual sense, his Return of the Ten Thousand Streams to the Source, and the magical tool called Blessed Borderland had made her who she was today. Or perhaps it was simply instinct.

Although he and Ji Youyun looked as if they had been carved from the same mold, in her heart they had long since become two entirely different people.

Hearing Hong Jian speak so much, the man gave a soft laugh. “Is that so? Then it was worth it that I recognized you by touch alone.”

He lit the oil lamp beside the bed, and the cell gradually brightened.

The largest object in the cell was the big bed before Hong Jian. Pillow and bedding were all in place, arranged so luxuriously that, in her eyes, it could almost be called sumptuous.

Sitting askew on the bed was a man looking at Hong Jian with a half-smile. Those features resembled Ji Youyun’s, but the expression was wholly different. If it was not the mysterious man she had met on the rocky shore of Mount Danya when she was thirteen, who else could it be?

The bright smile Hong Jian had just begun to show at him froze on her face. Her gaze fell in horror to the man’s lower body. The quilt had been pulled back, revealing two bare legs; from the knees down, they ended in emptiness. They had been severed by a blade.

Hong Jian’s mind went blank with a roar. “Th-this... who did this?”

The man laughed carelessly and shifted his upper body, making the chain on his shoulder jangle for her to hear. “Who else? They brought me back here because they were afraid I’d run off again.”

Only then did Hong Jian realize that the iron chain she had heard clinking in the dark all this time had actually been threaded through his shoulder.

Not hearing her speak, the man looked at her in the lamplight and saw her face smeared with the nosebleed from before, making her look pitiful and ridiculous; only those big eyes of hers were gradually filling with tears, as if she might burst into sobs at any moment.

He had not expected that after more than ten years apart, the little girl would not only still remember him, but be even closer to him than before. The mutilation had lasted so long that even he had grown used to it. To suddenly have someone grieve for it—there was no way he could say he was not moved. Yet all he did was point to the edge of the bed and tell Hong Jian to sit down, then said lightly, “Don’t make such a fuss. Tell me about yourself instead—how did you end up here?”

Hong Jian hesitated a moment, then sat slowly along the edge of the bed and lowered her head to wipe quickly at her eyes.

She could not help glancing again at the man’s severed legs. The wounds were old; the stumps had already shriveled and blackened. On the one nearest her, the marks of claws were still clear. It was obvious that when the man had been joking with her earlier and forced her hand to touch him, he had been making her feel his severed limb.

Hong Jian could not describe the feeling in her heart. She reached out and gently touched the marks again, saying guiltily, “Senior, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were teasing me just now.”

The man said impatiently, “Enough. What’s there to cry over? I can’t get out of here. Otherwise reattaching a severed limb would be no great matter. As for being locked up in here—since I can’t move about anyway, what difference does it make whether I have feet or not?”

Hong Jian let out a long breath. Only then did she finally manage to calm the emotions that had surged violently at the sight of him. Remembering that he had asked how she had come to be here, she began telling him everything that had happened since they parted.

Unlike when she spoke to Lu Yanchang and the others and cut the tale short, Hong Jian this time told it all, without concealment. When she reached the part about the god-formation cultivator at the Hall of Vast Grace taking a disciple and Ji Youyun appearing, she could not help looking up to see the man’s expression.

He resembled Ji Youyun so closely that to say the two had no connection and did not know each other would have been impossible.

The man listened with a furrowed brow, very attentively. Only when he heard that Ji Youyun had wanted to take Hong Jian as his disciple, and that Hong Jian had refused publicly, did a strange smile appear on his face.

Hong Jian restrained her curiosity and continued, telling him how Yan Changqing had accepted her as his disciple, and about Yao Zhen and Jian Hui.

She then remembered that in the dark earlier, he had asked whether she was surnamed Yao or Fang, and could not help asking him, “Senior, did you also go looking for Senior Sister Yao back then?” Lost in memory, her tone turned faintly wistful. “The Moon Radiance Pill you showed me—Yao Zhen must have given it to you, right? She’s dead.”

The man gave a soft “oh” and tapped gently at the bed with his fingers, as if pondering something. His face looked somewhat indifferent.

Seeing that he did not wish to say more, Hong Jian went on. She told him how the Ten Thousand Streams Return to the Source technique she practiced had advanced in the sect’s secret realm, and how she herself had broken through the barrier between the sixth and seventh stages of Qi Refinement because of Jian Hui’s self-detonation. She spoke for a full hour before she came to how she had killed Jing Li, and then been thrown into this prison by Master Gong and the others.

“Senior, later I saw that Ji Youyun once more. Not only did he bring up again the matter of taking me as his disciple, he was absolutely certain that the Heavenly Canopy would open again, and that he would find the Mirage Palace and become an existence surpassing Shang Qingzui. Senior, you and he...”

“Why don’t you continue? You think I look a lot like him, don’t you? My name is Ji Youfeng, and his is Ji Youyun. I was born two years before that bastard. I’m his real elder brother.”

He had sat for so long that perhaps he was tired, or perhaps for some other reason; he rested a hand on the bed and slowly lay down, his deep eyes turned toward Hong Jian.

Though she had long suspected as much, hearing him admit it personally still made Hong Jian’s heart tremble. Since childhood she had depended on her younger brother, Fang Zheng, and deeply believed that siblings should trust and love one another, with true affection between flesh and blood. She could barely accept the way Senior Uncle Jing Baixi’s uncle treated the lives and deaths of his own kin as a joke, let alone imagine there were people like the Ji brothers before her, who had personally mutilated their own brother.

“Find the Mirage Palace? Hmph, his ambitions are certainly grand. He’d better have the fate to match.” Ji Youfeng’s tone held a note of mockery as he added this. Mention of his younger brother Ji Youyun had soured his earlier good mood at seeing Hong Jian. He closed his eyes and said nothing more.

Hong Jian sat beside the bed and, in the lamp’s glow, studied Ji Youfeng carefully, comparing the man before her with the one from the rocky shore of Mount Danya so many years ago.

This senior with the metal spiritual root was like a divine weapon forged of ice and steel: whether trapped in a cage with iron shackles on his body or deprived of his feet and unable to move, no one dared slight him.

Only now, having shed his guard and lain there quietly, did he seem at once to become an ordinary person.

Hong Jian rested her cheek in one hand and idly gazed at his brows and eyes.

Ji Youfeng’s eyebrows were long and black, making the hollows of his eyes seem even deeper. What had left the deepest impression on her back then were these eyes of his—so profound, as though they concealed stars and an entire sea, making one willingly sink into them. When she had looked at Ji Youyun up close, despite those nearly identical features, his gaze had only struck her as eerie.

She thought: Strange, why had I once thought Senior was very old? Probably because back then his big beard covered half his face, and he wore that drab gray cloak, making him seem furtive. In truth, now that he has shaved, he looks all right. At least younger than Ji Youyun. But after not seeing him for ten years, his complexion is a little frightening, and he does not look well. How old is he, anyway? He was already at the peak of the Core Formation stage ten years ago, and that was after who knows how long he had already been imprisoned. Ji Youyun was already in the Nascent Soul stage by then. Counting it this way, Senior must be at least four or five hundred years old.

While she was wandering in thought, Ji Youfeng suddenly opened his eyes. Their gazes met, and at that moment Hong Jian heard footsteps approaching from far outside the cell.

Her hearing was keen; she immediately recognized that they were coming this way.

She turned alertly toward the door and heard the visitor stop outside the cell. Through the thick stone door, a respectful voice said, “Master, your medicine has arrived. Please reach out and take it.”