Notes: Instead of indicating things I’m not sure about with superscript like this^a, I’ll use a question mark like this^? instead. 

Also, thanks to my friend Poppy for helping me how to Chinese :’^) 

—

Xie Lian asked, “What’s the matter?”

San Lang sat, raised a hand, and also asked, “What’s the matter?”

Fu Yao frowned. “Who are you?”

Xie Lian said, “He’s a friend I just met. Do you two recognize him?”

San Lang’s expression was one of absolute innocence. “Gege, who are these two?”

Hearing him call Xie Lian “Gege”, Nan Feng’s mouth turned sharply downwards while Fu Yao’s eyebrows shook. Xie Lian raised a hand at San Lang and told him, “Don’t worry.”

Nan Feng exclaimed, “Don’t talk to him!”

Xie Lian said, “What is it? Do you know him?”

After a moment, Fu Yao said in a cold voice, “We don’t.”

“If you don’t recognize him then why are you two being…” Before he could finish his sentence, something bright glowed at the corner of his vision. When he turned to see what it was, he saw that both boys had raised their right hands, each holding a ball of white light. A foreboding feeling rose in his chest, and he quickly said, “Stop, stop. Don’t be so rash right now!”

The balls of white light that had been made so recklessly in the boys’s hands, glowing and growing brightly, looked exceedingly dangerous, and definitely not something a regular human could ever produce. San Lang clapped his hands twice and said, “Magical, amazing, wow.” He sounded completely insincere.

Xie Lian had just managed to get a hold of the boys’ wrists. Nan Feng turned back to look at him, fury aflame in his face. “Where did you meet this person? What’s his name? His family? His history? Why is he with you?”

“I met him on the road. He’s called San Lang. I don’t know, he didn’t have anywhere to go, so I let him come with me. Please don’t do anything rash.”

“You…” Nan Feng’s breath seemed to stick in his throat, and he looked like he really wanted to scold Xie Lian. With tremendous effort, he pulled himself back and only asked, “You ‘didn’t know’, so you just let him inside?! What if he had bad intentions? What would you do then?!”

Xie Lian thought Nan Feng sounded like a worried father. If Xie Lian were a different heavenly official – scrap that, if he were anyone else at all, hearing someone so much younger than him scold him like this would definitely ruffle feathers. But Xie Lian had long since abandoned such a proprietal way of thinking. Besides, he knew that the boys meant well.

At this time, San Lang asked, “Gege, are these two your servants?”¹

Xie Lian answered in a mild voice, “ ‘Servants’ isn’t quite the right word. It would be more appropriate to call them my assistants.”

San Lang laughed. “Really?” He stood up, grabbed something, and tossed it in Fu Yao’s direction.  “Then lend a hand?”

Fu Yao didn’t even glance at what was being tossed when he caught it in his hand. When he saw what he’d caught, however, his face turned black with indignation.

The jerk had tossed him a broomstick!!!²

Looking at his expression, one would expect Fu Yao to immediately turn both the broomstick and the young man into fine powder right there on the spot.

Xie Lian quickly intervened and took the broom away from Fu Yao. “Calm down, you two, calm down. This is my only broomstick.”

Before he’d even finished speaking, however, Fu Yao had raised a hand full of white light and commanded, “Reveal who you are!”

San Lang put hardly any effort into dodging. He still sat there in his casual posture, arms relaxed, and simply leaned aside. The white light hit the shrine table instead, which teetered crookedly before part of it shattered into dazzling white shards.

Xie Lian rubbed his forehead, thinking it would simply not do for this to continue. He raised a hand, and Ruoye shot out to bind the arms of both Fu Yao and Nan Feng. The two of them struggled, and Nan Feng shouted in fury, “What are you doing!”

Xie Lian kept his hand suspended in the air. “We’ll speak outside.” He waved his hand, and Ruoye flew out the door, taking the two boys with it. He turned to say to San Lang, “I’ll be back in a bit,” before going outside. He closed the door behind him, picked up the sign beside the decrepit temple, and approached the two boys. “Please read this, and tell me what it says.”

Fu Yao read, “ ‘A decrepit temple. Asking good folks: please donate for the renovation, please come give your blessing and prayers’.” He looked up at Xie Lian. “Decrepit temple, donate for renovation? You wrote this?? You’re a heavenly official that ascended thrice, how can you write this? Have you no shame?”

Xie Lian nodded. “Yes. I wrote this. And if you had kept up your fighting inside, I’d have to start asking for donations for construction, not just renovation. I’ll have even less shame.”

Nan Feng pointed a finger at the Pu Ji Temple. “Don’t you feel that man is kind of odd?”

Xie Lian said, “Of course I do.”

“Then if you’re aware that he might be dangerous, you’re still keeping him by your side?”

Xie Lian, seeing that the two had no intentions to donate anything, carefully put the sign back. “Nan Feng, that’s not the right thing to say. There are thousands upon thousands of different kinds of people and circumstances in this world. Being odd does not equal being dangerous. In the eyes of most people, I seem odd too. But do you two think me dangerous?”

Nan Feng and Fu Yao didn’t say anything.

His words were hard to refute. Xie Lian had quite the elegant and sage-like bearing, and yet he did nothing but beg for rubbish all day long. Was this not the exemplar of oddness!

Fu Yao asked, “So you’re not afraid he has any ill intentions?”

Xie Lian asked back, “What sort of ill intentions can you possibly think someone would have against me?”

At this, the boys were at an immediate loss for words.

Xie Lian wasn’t wrong. Ill intentions were usually wrought on a victim who attracted too much of the wrong sort of attentions. Fortunately – or, unfortunately, if one thought about it, there wasn’t much of any attention that Xie Lian attracted. He had no money, no treasure. He ony had rubbish – would someone want to steal his rubbish?

Xie Lian continued. “Also, it’s not like I didn’t check him out.”³

The two boys stared at him.

“How did you examine him?”

“What did you find?”

Xie Lian told them about all the times he’d checked him out. “Nothing. And as I’ve already taken these measures, if he really isn’t a regular mortal, then there’s only a single possibility left.”

A demon of the ‘Devastation’ rank!

Fu Yao laughed grimly. “What if he really is a Devastation demon?”

Xie Lian replied, “You really think a demon king of the ‘Devastation’ rank would laze about with folks like us? Keep me company while I begged for rubbish?”

“We don’t laze about!”

“That th-that…”

On the small hill, the three of them could hear the young man puttering about in the small shack of a temple, sounding like an exceedingly content person without a care in the world.

Nan Feng lowered his voice. “No, it’s not fine. We should still find a way to test that he’s not a ‘Destruction’ demon.”

Xie Lian rubbed his temple. “Fine. You can test him if you wish. But don’t be too rowdy about it. What if he really is just a runaway young master from a noble family? Besides, he and I are getting along quite fine. Please be nice. Don’t bully him.”

Hearing that last sentence, Nan Feng made a complicated expression while Fu Yao, as was customary, nearly rolled his eyes into his brain.

Finally having brought the two to their senses, Xie Lian opened the door to the temple. San Lang had his head lowered as he examined the leg of the broken shrine table. Xie Lian asked in a gentle voice, “Are you all right?”

San Lang smiled. “I’m all right. Just seeing if there’s any way to fix the table.”

“It was just a misunderstanding back there. Please don’t be offended.”

San Lang said with another smile, “Since you’ve said it like that, how could I be offended? Perhaps they are the ones that saw something familiar in me.”

Fu Yao said cooly, “Yes. A little. We might have been mistaken.”

San Lang laughed. “Aye. What a coincidence. I also thought the two of you looked somewhat familiar.”⁴

“…”

Although the boys were still quite alert, they no longer rushed to do anything dramatic. Nan Feng said in a tight voice, “Clear a space, I will draw the array for ‘Shrinking of A Thousand Miles’.”

“Shrinking of A Thousand Miles” was a method to shorten distance, as the name suggested. It could shrink a thousand li to a single step. Aside from the fact that it required a lot of spiritual energy per use, it was a very convenient spell to have in one’s sleeve.

Xie Lian cleared his sleeping mat and said, “Draw here.”

The last time Fu Yao was in the temple, he hadn’t taken a good look around him. This time, he scrutinized the entirety of its interior. After he’d stood there for a while, he said with a very uncomfortable expression, “You live in a place like this?”

Xie Lian brought a stool over for him. “I’ve always lived in places like this.”

Hearing this, Nan Feng faltered for a brief moment, before continuing to draw the array. Fu Yao didn’t sit down, though he also seemed to falter for a moment. It was hard to say what was in his expression; most of it was of terrible shock, while there was some schadenfreude, too.

However, he quickly cleared his face of this pecular expression and asked, “What about your bed?”

Nan Feng raised his head to eye the sleeping mat, before looking down again.

Fu Yao glanced over at San Lang beside them, and asked, “You and he sleep together?”

Xie Lian asked, “Is there a problem?”

After a long while, the two boys didn’t speak another word, and so it seemed like the matter was finished. Xie Lian turned to San Lang to ask, “Before, we were interrupted. What is this Ban Yuan Demon cultivation?⁵ Would you please continue?”

San Lang had been staring at the two boys with a pensive, stormy expression. However, hearing Xie Lian talk to him, he turned around with a smile and said, “Sure.”

After a moment, he continued. “The Ban Yue Demon cultivation was the GuoShi of the ancient country of Ban Yue. One of two demon cultivators^?.”

Xie Lian asked, “ Who is the other one?”

“The other one has nothing to do with the ancient country of Ban Yue. This one is from Zhong Yuan⁶, and known as Fang Xin GuoShi⁷.”

Xie Lian’s eyes widened, and he continued listening.

Apparently, the people of Ban Yue had extraordinary strength and fierce, belligerent temperaments. And since they had enormous power around their territory, they had influence on an important trade checkpoint on the west side of the Zhong Yuan regions. The two territories often skirmished along the border, constantly in conflict, always on the brink of war. The GuoShi of Ban Yue was extremely skilled in sorcery, and the soldiers of Ban Yue held complete faith in their GuoShi, willing to follow their leader to their deaths.

Then, two hundred years ago, tensions rose so high that the dynastic family of Zhong Yuan finally sent troops out for an attack, provoking Ban Yue.

While Ban Yue was conquered and perished, the resentment of its GuoShi and soldiers did not disappear, and remained to haunt the land. Ban Yue was once an oasis, but had now been eroded by evil as well as swallowed on all sides by the surrounding Gobi desert. Reportedly, people have seen figures of large stature roaming and hunting around that area at night, holding spikes in their hands. There used to be tens of thousands of residents there, but over time people couldn’t continue living there and gradually migrated away.

At the same time, tales of disappearances arose and spread. As long as the people who passed by the area were from Zhong Yuan, they all had to pay a price to enter: half their lives!

With a fake smile and an insincere tone, Fu Yao said, “Young master, you seem to know a lot.”

San Lang smiled. “No, no. It’s just that you don’t know much, eh.”

“…”

Xie Lian couldn’t helping laughing, thinking that this kid was really too sharp and witty.

San Lang continued, “But this is all hearsay, stuff of conspiracies and old legends outside of official history records. Who knows if there really was such a GuoShi? Perhaps even the country of Ban Yue is a fiction that never existed.”

 

 

1 – seeing as how San Lang’s questions are usually to help Xie Lian in a way/insert his own opinions without saying them directly, this is probably San Lang’s way of saying “stop talking to him like that bitches he’s your senior” – bc why would this question be the first you ask when the interaction you saw was obviously not of that sort

2 – remember his general mu qing’s broomophobia

3 – ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) the Chinese was “试探” which means “to feel out” ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

4 – future flashback foreshadowing alert!!!

5 – before it was “Ban Yue demon territory” in the previous chap but I think this fits the translation better

6 – Zhong Yuan (中原) is the Central Plain in China, the middle and lower regions of the Yellow river, including Henan, western Shandong, southern Shanxi and Hebei

7 – Fang Xin (芳心) means the affection/heart of a young woman; Guo Shi means “national cultivator” – I’m assuming the top cultivator of that kingdom

 

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