Ah, the man who just got "promoted"
The fierce battle between Wei City and the demonic cultivators had raged on since early morning, dragging all the way until dusk fell.
Funny enough, halfway through the fight, a no-holds-barred full-map illusion suddenly descended from the sky. Both sides were caught completely off guard, and had to retreat in a hurry, channeling their spells and deploying their artifacts to set up defensive formations to fend it off.
By the time Shu Fu and Jiang Xuesheng broke the illusion, the demonic cultivators cautiously poked their heads out from their formations, assuming the worst was over—only to hear:
"Lay down your weapons! You are completely surrounded!"
Demonic cultivators: "???!!!"
As for what went on in their heads after they learned the truth, mentally tearing Ling Fengqing's entire family into eight hundred pieces, that's a story for another time.
All in all, this grand, over-the-top drama full of dramatic fanfare and clamoring gongs and drums finally came to a close, leaving behind a mess of loose ends.
……
While Wei City was wrapping up the aftermath, Jiang Xuesheng and Shu Fu were sitting on a flying-rug-shaped artifact (which was, of course, Jiang Xuesheng's own creation), drifting back leisurely as if they were sightseeing in a hot air balloon.
"Alas. Moments like this make me miss Ruyi," Jiang Xuesheng sighed softly. "If he could give us a ride, we'd save so much spiritual energy, and we wouldn't have to bother controlling the artifact ourselves—we could even divert our attention to do other things."
"……"
Shu Fu huffed and leaned back hard, the back of her head knocking right against his chin. "'Other things'? What exactly are you planning to do? Mr. Jiang, we are respectable cultivators. Show some respect, please."
Jiang Xuesheng simply pretended not to get the hint, and sighed again right after. "Alas, before, you used to call me 'Sir' all the time, so sweet and well-behaved, singing my praises nonstop. Now you've turned your back on me, and you even have to add a 'Jiang' in front of 'Sir'."
"Besides, where am I being disrespectful?"
He smoothly rested his chin on the top of Shu Fu's head, pulling her a little closer into his embrace, his eyes crinkling into bright, cheerful crescents. "I always tell you exactly what I'm going to do beforehand. If you don't want it, I won't touch you."
Shu Fu: "……"
When it comes to having no shame, Ning really takes the cake—I've said that so many times I'm sick of repeating it.
Come to think of it, why on earth would she ever compete with Jiang Xuesheng on that front?
Jiang Xuesheng hadn't even done anything particularly out of line. It was just that after she hopped onto the flying rug, he casually remarked "This spot is more comfortable to sit on", flicked his sleeve to sweep her whole body over, gently set her down right on his lap, then stretched his arms out and pulled her snugly into his embrace with a satisfied look on his face.
His movements were so smooth and practiced, like a total old hand—you'd never guess he was a thousand-year-old virgin dragon.
Shu Fu: Why are you so good at this?!
If it had been anyone else, she probably would have blurted out "How many other women have you held like this before?"
But with Jiang Xuesheng, his whole life had been spent either toiling day and night at his duties, or trapped in the shallows, his romantic history was so blank and obvious that the only possible retort she could come up with was:
"How many times have you simulated this exact scenario in your head?!!!"
For some reason, Shu Fu couldn't shake the feeling that his whole set of slick moves was exactly like a mother hen grabbing a chick by the back of its neck, hurrying to tuck it back into the coop, then spreading its wings to wrap the chick up tight, covering it completely.
"What's wrong?" Jiang Xuesheng looked down at her, his gaze as clear as spring water. A strand of his sleek, pitch-black long hair fell down, brushing soft and light against her neck like a warm spring breeze that never chills your face.
"……"
Shu Fu swallowed hard, and swallowed the "mother hen" nickname right along with it.
Ugh, why even bother thinking about whether he's old or not, or caring about his inner qualities?
The thing that really matters is the outside!
Or to put it simply, the face!
As long as he looks young, nothing else matters!
That line sounds a little off, but whatever.
"Alright, Sir, stop messing around. Let's talk properly." Shu Fu had a whole pile of questions for Jiang Xuesheng. Some of them had been answered after they encountered the illusion, but a whole bunch of new ones had popped up instead. If she didn't get everything out in the open, she'd probably never sleep a wink that night.
Jiang Xuesheng nodded agreeably. "You're right, we should talk properly. The perfect time is right now. Fuer, let's keep things simple, and you can officially graduate today. You've always wanted to be Ming Xiao's disciple, right? I'll introduce you to him—no need to be polite."
Shu Fu: "…… That's not what I wanted to talk about!"
And how did you switch gears that fast?!
Is this what men are like right after they get what they want? That's so realistic!!!
"This is important," Jiang Xuesheng said earnestly, his expression shifting to a solemn one in a heartbeat, though the smile still seeped out from the corners of his eyes and brows. "I don't care what the world thinks, but if we head back like this, Master Qiu is going to lose a whole lot more hair worrying. I'm in such a good mood right now that I'm willing to cut him some slack and put on a little trivial show of proper form for him."
…… Wait, so there are times you wouldn't be willing to do that?
Shu Fu was getting more and more annoyed by how shameless he sounded, so she couldn't help but grab a lock of his hair and tug it hard downwards. "Sir, even though you're not human, Master Qiu has it hard enough. Can you at least act like a decent person for once?"
"Hey, that's unfair," Jiang Xuesheng leaned forward from her tug, laughing as he begged for mercy, and pulled her even tighter into his arms. "I'm already going out of my way to think about Master Qiu, what else could you possibly be unsatisfied with? Fuer, you're being so biased towards another man, you know. I'm going to get jealous."
"As if. You're already oozing jealousy all over the place. I don't believe you could get any more jealous than you already are." Shu Fu ignored his teasing, and turned his face away with her hand, so she wouldn't fall for his unbeatable seduction act. "Besides, that's the sect leader we're talking about! Master Qiu isn't just any man. He's a saint, a living Buddha, a pure lotus that rises unstained from the mud. Don't use shallow concepts like 'gender' to drag down his noble, lofty soul."
Hundreds of miles away, Master Qiu: "A-CHOO!!!!!!!!"
"…… What's going on? Is Tan Hua cursing me again?"
……
For a while after that, even though Shu Fu tried her hardest to steer the conversation back to the main topic—the Five Phoenixes, the seal, and the Heavenly Demon—Jiang Xuesheng was in such a great mood, his head was full of "I have my little bird here to share all the good times", he didn't want Zhao Jiuge, that thousand-year-old lifelong singleton, to spoil his fun at all.
He chatted and joked around with Shu Fu for a good long while, before he finally, unhappily, like a little kid being nagged by his parents to start his homework, stopped smiling.
"Ugh, what's there to talk about with Zhao Jiuge? Compared to our own business, he's just so……"
Shu Fu shot him a cold glance. "Sir, I hate men who are completely blinded by love."
Jiang Xuesheng: "Fine, we'll talk about Zhao Jiuge right now. What do you want to ask?"
Shu Fu: "……"
…… Ugh, men!
"Start from the beginning." Even though Jiang Xuesheng was still pressed up against her like a little back charm, Shu Fu barely felt any weight from him. He felt as light as a floating petal or a feather, so she didn't bother pushing him away, and blurted out three questions in one go.
"After the seal was completed, what exactly happened? The dragon and phoenix bloodlines have dwindled — is that related to the reincarnation of the Heavenly Demon? How much do you know about the whereabouts of the Feng and the Yuezhuo now?"
"..."
Jiang Xuesheng's triumphant smile froze slightly. He pondered for a long moment before letting out a helpless sigh. "You are sharp, hitting the nail right on the head the moment you open your mouth, leaving me no room to fudge the answer."
"Fine then. I promised I would never hide anything from you again, so today I'll lay everything out clearly for you."
Shu Fu's three questions, neither overly grand nor trivial, essentially filled in the gaps of the past three thousand years, connecting the past to the future.
The five phoenixes of three thousand years ago, and the scattered, declining descendants of those five phoenixes drifting apart now.
What exactly happened between then and now?
"This story goes way back..."
What Jiang Xuesheng recounted slowly confirmed Shu Fu's suspicions.
Not only was it a long story, it was also the kind that made people want to curse out loud.
Back in the day, Jiang Xuesheng, Feng Yuandu, and the other four clan leaders threw themselves into the seal, using the innate spiritual energy of the dragons and phoenixes to suppress the demonic energy that had run rampant across the five states, locking it deep within the earth's veins so that not a single wisp had leaked out for a thousand years.
However, even the wise are not always free from error.
They say "fate plays tricks on people", and in the eyes of ordinary folks, fate is just a perverted thing that loves to toy with people's hearts.
Lord Yinglong made one tiny oversight: he never expected that the Heavenly Demon, already tough and tricky to deal with, was basically a cheater with a built-in golden finger. After he died and reincarnated, he did not forget all his past life memories as most beings do — instead, he retained a part of his memories from his previous life!
That was why, after the Heavenly Demon was reborn as Zhao Jiuge, he immediately went into hiding in the shadows, and at the same time began investigating the whereabouts of all the dragon and phoenix descendants, secretly plotting to harm them.
Based on Jiang Xuesheng's speculation, Zhao Jiuge most likely did not know the full secret of the seal, but he remembered very clearly that those colorful little "chicks" were all his sworn enemies he would never stop hunting down.
Compared to Jiang Xuesheng, who only woke up a hundred years ago, Zhao Jiuge had been planning for far longer, at least nine hundred and ninety-nine steps ahead.
Luckily, the Heavenly Demon's cheat power had its limits. All his profound cultivation vanished after reincarnation, and it was said he was reborn into a pretty bad situation, so he had to start all over from Level 1, honestly drawing in qi, training his body, and practicing basic stances. It took him over a thousand years just to level up.
If not for that buffer period, the mortal realm would have long been drowned in blood and chaos.
Even so, the remaining dragon and phoenix clans in the mortal world still suffered greatly.
You have to understand that divine beasts already had a terribly hard time bearing offspring — laying eggs was like pulling limited gacha cards, with a fertility rate lower than the drop rate of a limited SSR card. On top of that, people kept coming to dig up their nests, steal their eggs, or even burn down the forests they lived in. That was basically like hacking into your account and smashing all your rare cards — who could possibly put up with that?
Add to that the fact that the dragons and phoenixes (including the previous generation of Yuanchu) never insisted on pure bloodlines, and intermarriage between different clans was common. As a result, their divine beast bloodlines got more and more diluted, like wine watered down until it barely tasted like anything more than fruit juice.
"Actually, it's no big deal if the bloodline dies out. Divine beasts are no nobler than anyone else," Jiang Xuesheng said calmly, his words enough to make the Lord of Lingxiao City spit three mouthfuls of blood in anger. "But unfortunately, the method we now have to purify demonic energy has extremely strict requirements — no one but a descendant of the five phoenixes can pull it off. You don't need a pure bloodline, of course, but at the very least... right, at the very least their bloodline can't be weaker than that winged cat over there."
Shu Fu's mind turned, and she cut in: "The whole bunch of bird people in Lingxiao City don't even have wings. Are they worse than an orange cat?"
Jiang Xuesheng answered immediately: "Yes. But a slightly thinner bloodline can be compensated for with higher cultivation and more people. That's the reason I spared Ling Qingyue and her family."
"To put it simply, the purer the five phoenix bloodline, the higher their cultivation, and the more of them there are, the higher the chance of success."
"Over the past hundred years, I've used every resource I had, traveling all over mountains and rivers to look for the descendants of the five phoenixes... but unfortunately, the Feng and Yuezhuo clans still have no trace at all. I have no idea if any of their bloodlines have survived to this day."
"Why?" Shu Fu frowned with worry when she heard how serious he sounded. "Only those two clans have no news at all. Is it because they were too unyielding, so the demonic cultivators persecuted them extra harshly?"
Jiang Xuesheng said seriously: "No. Because the leader of the Yuezhuo clan was Zhong Bukui, and the later leader of the Feng clan was even worse than Zhong Bukui."
Shu Fu: "..."
Why are you suddenly insulting people out of nowhere?
Jiang Xuesheng wasn't done ranting yet: "Sometimes I think Feng Yuandu, instead of obsessing over competing with me his whole life and pouring all his effort into making the Poyue Qin, might as well have settled down earlier and raised a couple of capable kids who could hold their ground."
"He didn't understand music at all, so learning it from scratch to forge a spiritual instrument qin was harder than climbing to the sky. All just to one-up me, he wore himself out racking his brains, and in the end what happened? That qin ended up as your heavy sword."
Shu Fu: "..."
Stop it, please stop.
I can almost hear Brother Feng crying his eyes out underground, both at your ridiculous roasts and at my sword. If he ever came back to life, I wonder who he'd want to kill first, you or me.
...
Flirting and bantering always made time fly. Before they knew it, Wei City was right in front of them.
"Fuer, come here."
Jiang Xuesheng lowered the flying carpet to prepare for landing, and naturally wrapped his arm around Shu Fu's waist, pulling her close as they leaped down from the clouds together.
"..."
Shu Fu felt a little regretful seeing him switch to this intimate dynamic so smoothly. She thought that her moment of softness earlier had let this dog man get his way far too easily, giving him no end of bragging rights. She couldn't help but snipe at him sourly:
"Sir, don't you think there's still something missing between us?"
Like a proper confession.
And another confession.
Oh, and a third confession, for that matter.
"Missing something?" Jiang Xuesheng landed gently with her, and when he looked down he caught sight of the fair skin on the girl's forehead. He leaned closer and chuckled, "What, you thought that was too rushed, and you want me to do it again properly now?"
Shu Fu immediately got what he meant, made a disgusted "Ugh!" sound, leaned back dramatically and slid three steps away, throwing her arms up in a mock defensive gesture. "No way, bro! Even if you're just acting, that's way too cringey and cheesy!"
Clang.
Jiang Xuesheng had just pulled off that deliberately over-the-top cheesy act for fun, before he even had time to drop the act, a dull, heavy thud rang out nearby.
".................."
Not far from them, an exquisitely crafted wheelchair had toppled over.
And the owner of that wheelchair — Xie "Medical Miracle" Fangnian — was standing straight right next to it. His expression shifted over and over, his gaze flickering between dark and bright. His hand, strung with jasmine beads, rose and fell again, like he wanted to whack Jiang Xuesheng over the head, but was worried about getting his spotless, pristine robes dirty.
"You... Master Tanhua, I came on a whim to check if you two were safe and sound. I never imagined that beneath your dignified, unworldly facade, you have such a weird hobby, preying on your own young disciple like that."
Jiang Xuesheng: "Wait, no, let me explain."
Shu Fu: "No, he never had a dignified, unworldly facade in the first place. He's a total dog through and through, and I won't let you give him undeserved praise like that."
Xie Fangnian: "?"
Jiang Xuesheng: "?"
