I Don’t Care What You Think. I Care What I Think.
Poor Liu Ruyi. Poor, poor Liu Ruyi.
Shu Fu had always considered herself a rather shameless person, but at this very moment, all she wanted to do was write the word “Poor” across his forehead and silently recite an “Amen” in her heart.
As for Jiang Xuesheng and Wu Yao, both of them were doing their utmost to hold back their laughter. Their entire bodies were shaking like sieves.
They were dressed alike today: black cloaks, black sunglasses, and tall, straight figures. At first glance, they looked like two gangster overlords straight out of a movie.
But now that they were trembling like this, they had completely ruined their original aura. They no longer resembled two fearsome gang bosses. Instead, they looked like two frozen quails shivering in the bitter wind.
Shu Fu found the sight both infuriating and hilarious. She ignored the two quails and walked straight over to Liu Ruyi.
“Sister Liu… are you all right?”
Liu Ruyi’s heart was already dead. She was too devastated to even feel pleasantly surprised at seeing Shu Fu. Clutching that crudely made brassiere tightly in her hand, she turned and gave her a smile more tragic than a sob.
“My dear little sister, do I look like I’m ‘all right’?”
Shu Fu: “…Uh, sorry?”
Liu Ruyi shook her head. “What are you apologizing for? This isn’t Junior Sister’s fault. Even if you apologized to me, I wouldn’t feel any happier.”
Shu Fu: “Then… please accept my condolences?”
Liu Ruyi: “…Sigh. Forget it. You’d better stop talking.”
Shu Fu wisely shut her mouth.
A thousand sorrows and hidden regrets were born; at this moment, silence spoke louder than words.
But the auction continued, and Nan Gongming continued staring fixedly at Liu Ruyi. His gaze was blazing and ardent, his face filled with determination to win.
He could tell that one brassiere was not enough to move the heart of this panda beauty.
—If that was the case, then he would buy her another one!
The thought process of a domineering CEO was just that simple and crude, shallow and innocent.
What happened next was enough to go down in history and be compiled into a book entitled The Modern Record of Beautiful Men and Women in Distress.
He Xiuwen and Nan Gongming—two Demon Lords who had absolutely nothing to do with each other and who occasionally played the roles of victim and perpetrator respectively—now joined forces, working together wholeheartedly and sparing no effort to make Liu Ruyi’s life more miserable.
To put it simply, one of them truly dared to sell, and the other truly dared to buy.
Besides the “brassiere of Perfected Chenbi,” He Xiuwen proceeded to bring out, one after another, “the honey peach that fell onto Ling Shanhai’s head while he was comprehending the Dao” (Shu Fu: Was he comprehending the law of universal gravitation? A peach that could remain perfectly intact in the aura of a Great Vehicle cultivator must have been a celestial peach from Heaven, right?), “the dragon-headed cane once used by Xie Fangnian” (Couldn’t you at least have gotten him a phoenix-headed one?!), “the rouge once used by the Great Demon King Xiao Tieyi” (And it was deathly Barbie pink, at that! For heaven’s sake, buddy, make a mock-up of yourself wearing it and see whether you still think it doesn’t look ridiculous!)…
“…”
Every time a new item appeared onstage, Liu Ruyi and Shu Fu were unable to control their expressions. The corners of their eyes and mouths twitched together, and their features involuntarily twisted out of shape.
At a glance, their faces were crookedly spelling out four words:
“Shocking. My. Damn. God.”
Yet in Nan Gongming’s eyes, those four words underwent several layers of rewriting and elaboration, automatically transforming into another sentence:
“Big Brother, I want this! Buy it for me!”
Nan Gongming was rolling in money. With a grand sweep of his hand and a flick of his black card, he declared: “I’ll take everything!”
Liu Ruyi: Seeing stars.jpg
Shu Fu: “…Isn’t that, um, nice?”
Although the gifts were all counterfeit, his feelings were genuine…
My foot.
Other people had “traveled a thousand miles to send goose feathers: the gift may be light, but the sentiment is heavy.” Nan Gongming, on the other hand, had “traveled a thousand miles to send goose feathers and stuffed them up your nostrils.” Every move was blistering, every strike fatal, leaving one unable to breathe within minutes.
Fortunately, He Xiuwen’s “warm-up segment” was limited in duration and soon came to an end. The auction finally began displaying items of genuine substance.
As one could imagine, “genuine substance” from demonic cultivators was, for the most part, unlikely to be anything good.
Poisons, venomous insects, cursed artifacts, magical weapons refined from living humans and spirit beasts, unspeakable objects specially designed for the Harmony Sect…
Faced with such merchandise, Liu Ruyi naturally had no pleasant expression to offer. She had seen it all before and was not even shocked. From beginning to end, she remained expressionless, treating everyone who came and went onstage as if they were invisible.
Nan Gongming had, for once, learned to read the room. Seeing that the beauty had lost interest, he temporarily stopped adding things to his shopping cart.
As for his two companions, one a Demon Lord and the other a bitter-faced attendant, they had watched him spend money without hesitation on piles of rubbish. Their faces had turned as green as a meadow, and they desperately wanted to rush over and chop off his hand.
Demon Lord Ninglu finally could not bear it any longer and said, “Demon Lord Nan Gong, the things you’re buying may not necessarily please that young lady…”
Nan Gongming’s face instantly darkened. He raised his thick brows and shot her a sideways glare, assuming the lofty, icy, overbearing majesty of a domineering CEO.
“Demon Lord Ninglu, are you trying to tell me what to do?”
“No, you—”
Ninglu nearly toppled over from sheer exasperation. She felt that ice-cold summer insects were impossible to reason with, and that a rustic country CEO had no business talking about romance.
“This is based on my experience. Demon Lord Nan Gong ought to know about my track record, does he not?”
Nan Gongming said blandly, “I know. You’ve slept with a lot of men.”
The statement was rather vulgar, but Demon Lord Ninglu did not take offense. Instead, she wore it as a badge of honor, puffed out her chest proudly, and gave him the contemptuous look of an experienced driver sizing up a virgin.
“That’s right,” she drawled.
Nan Gongming said solemnly, “Then have you ever slept with a woman?”
“No.”
Ninglu did not understand what he was getting at. She asked in return, “I don’t have any interest in women, so why would I sleep with one?”
“Exactly. Neither do I.”
Nan Gongming admitted this with complete composure. “Since that is the case, how are you any different from me? When it comes to pursuing women, do you really have more experience than I do? Do your words carry any weight?”
“…”
The Thousand-Man-Slayer, Demon Lord Ninglu, was rendered speechless for the first time in her life by a stubborn, hopelessly old-fashioned virgin.
“I am a woman,” she said. “Naturally, what I say carries weight.”
Nan Gongming: “You are a Demon Lord. Women should not become Demon Lords. Once you become a Demon Lord, you are no longer a woman.”
Ninglu: “…”
Damn it. He had actually constructed a flawless closed loop of logic!!!
Within Nan Gongming’s logic, no one could ever defeat him!!!
With the conversation having reached this point, Ninglu was gnashing her teeth with hatred for Nan Gongming and naturally had no desire to concern herself with whether he lived or died. She simply threw down one final warning.
“I can guarantee this, Demon Lord Nan Gong: you will never win that young lady’s heart. For all you know, she is already so fed up with your advances that she is desperately plotting how to get away from you.”
“Impossible.”
Nan Gongming was brimming with confidence. “No woman can escape my charm. The previous two hundred and forty-seven women were all shallow, vulgar creatures. They valued money more than they valued me, which is why I discarded them.”
Ninglu: “…”
No, wait. Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?
Shouldn’t it have been that, for the sake of his money, they had reluctantly endured his atrocious taste, only to discover that they truly could not bear it and flee one after another with his money?
At least the women of other CEOs would run away while pregnant. Your ex-girlfriends were the only ones who ran away with your money. Could you not reflect on yourself just a little?
…
As it turned out, Ninglu’s prediction was correct.
Whether it was the matter of Nan Gongming's ex-girlfriend, or Liu Ruyi's current mental state.
"No, I have to reject Nan Gongming clearly and squarely. No one can stop me. What clues, what overall situation, are any of those things more important than my life?"
Faced with the death-by-Barbie-pink rouge, Liu Ruyi's eyes welled up with tears, his voice trembling, feeling as if his aesthetic sense had just been violently assaulted:
"Take a good look at these, all of you! What on earth are these things? My eyes, my pride, none of them will allow me to put this garbage on my body. If this keeps going, either he dies, or I do."
[Hmph, now you know how bad it is?]
Wu Yao let out a cold snort, taunting him from dozens of meters away, [Liu Xiao, you've been playing around with people's hearts all this time, this is your comeuppance.]
He did want to move closer to have a good laugh, but if he dared to approach rashly, he would be chased away by that overbearing president.
[What the hell have I been playing around with?] Liu Ruyi said plaintively, [Junior sister taught me a word, "stereotype". It's all of you who made assumptions first, thinking that anyone wearing a flowing skirt, hairpin, and having a full chest must be a woman, that's what caused all this misunderstanding...]
Wu Yao: [No, under normal circumstances, people like that are women, right?!]
Seeing that his train of thought had drifted, Shu Fu seized the chance to cut in: [The current Daoist companion of the Lich King, does she look a lot like Senior Brother Liu?]
Wu Yao: [They do look somewhat alike, but she's way better than him. She, even though she has a sharp, bold personality, she's always treated me with total honesty, never lied to me, and has looked out for me for all these years. But I never imagined that it turned out she...]
[—Wait a second, you were fishing for information from me???]
Shu Fu: "..."
C'mon, you are way too easy to trick. If everyone was as naive as you, even Jiang Taigong could get rich just by selling fish.
But now that the fish had bitten the hook, Shu Fu was even more confused.
She had always known that the Lich King shared the same straight-man, terrible taste in aesthetics as Nan Gongming. The only difference was, Nan Gongming had a soft spot for delicate, white-flower-like girls, while the Lich King preferred the gentle, caring, ideal wife type.
What on earth could have made him switch preferences out of the blue in the past twenty years?
Or, was he actually forced against his will, taken by force by some overbearing female president just like Nan Gongming, forced to swallow his humiliation and too embarrassed to say a word?
[What Daoist companion? If you ask me, that's just a character Wu Yao made up in his head,] Liu Ruyi chimed in to take a dig at him, [Junior sister, don't believe him. Last time he slipped up in front of me, saying he already had a dual cultivation partner, but when I asked who it was, he stuttered and couldn't get a single word out.
You know, some special individual Cloud Dragons of Wushan are naturally hermaphroditic, they can complete dual cultivation all by themselves...]
Shu Fu: "?????"
Weird cultivation world biology knowledge just added—wait no, who even needs this kind of knowledge!
Shu Fu was just about to follow up with another question, when a wave of commotion broke out in the venue, many demon cultivators stood up cheering, roaring in wave after wave of wild excitement:
"Amazing! This is great! Brilliant!!"
—Brilliant? What's brilliant?
Shu Fu craned her neck to look at the stage, and saw the host hopping around like a rambunctious monkey, yelling at the top of his lungs:
"Everyone, quiet down! Please quiet down! Yes, you heard that right! Our Demon Lord, after decades of non-stop research and hard work, has finally developed a magic artifact—once you put it on, it can perfectly mask the demonic energy on your body, letting you sneak into the very core of all the major orthodox sects!"
[What?] Shu Fu was jolted in shock, the sunglasses perched on her nose almost slipped off, [That artifact that even Senior Shi poured all his effort into and went through so much trouble to refine, the demon cultivators have managed to develop one too? How do they even have that kind of technology?]
[Theoretically, it's not entirely impossible,] Jiang Xuesheng said calmly, [The ore that Shi Xiaolou used is called "Obsidian Black", which can generate fake demonic energy. There's another kind of ore called "White Luminance", whose effect is exactly the opposite—it can absorb demonic energy. But to forge these two kinds of ores into a usable artifact, and make it go undetected, that should be extremely difficult.]
[I see. The demon cultivators' strength really can't be taken lightly—]
Shu Fu's voice transmission got stuck right at her cerebral cortex.
The "artifact" the demon cultivators had carried up to the high platform was not a pair of sunglasses, not a weapon, a piece of jewelry, or a magic robe, nothing that she could have possibly imagined.
It was a suit of armor.
To be precise, this armor was several zhang tall, blindingly white, glowing with a built-in highlight, and in Shu Fu's mind, this thing could only be called a Mobile Suit Gundam.
It's not that the orthodox sects aren't doing their job, it's that the demon cultivators have Gundams... wait, why Gundam?!
The host rubbed his hands together regretfully and said, "According to our calculations, to fully mask the demonic energy of a Golden Core stage demon cultivator, we need to use a huge amount of ore. That means, at the very least, you have to wear this whole set of armor to achieve the effect of eliminating your demonic energy.
This is just a prototype, we will keep making further improvements..."
Shu Fu: "...What the hell is even the point of that?!"
As expected, the demon cultivators' black tech can never hold a candle to what Shi Xiaolou made!
Qingluan, is forever the absolute best!
