“Yun Yuan, I can help you.” Ye Wujiu raised his eyes to look at her. An unreadable expression flickered in them. “But the consequences are not something you can bear. Are you certain you want to choose this path?”
“Senior Brother, do I have a choice?”
Ye Wujiu was speechless. He had calculated it for her—she had no choice.
In the divination he had performed for her, every step and every choice was clearly correct, yet in the end, every result led to a dead end—a conclusion in which she was certain to die.
It was as though an invisible pair of hands, just as the clouds were about to part and spring warmth and flowers were about to appear, had pressed everything back into an inevitable death.
Ye Wujiu had been born into a family of divination practitioners, after all. His talent was carved into his very bones, and he had never seen such a strange and treacherous divination image.
At first, he had thought his own skill was lacking. That was until he sent this divination image to his elder brother, who was thousands of miles away. His brother was widely experienced and would certainly be able to decipher it.
Yet to his surprise, the instant his brother saw the divination image, his expression changed. He furiously berated Ye Wujiu, asking whether he wanted his brother dead, and told him that their father had nearly lost his life because of this very divination image back then.
How could a mere divination image possibly involve peering into the Heavenly Dao?
Ye Wujiu said, “I can help you, but your spiritual meridians have been nourished by Junior Brother Xie’s spiritual blood for ten years. It will be very difficult to stop taking it in the short term. What’s more, your damaged spiritual meridians have not yet been completely restored. How are you going to persuade your elder brother?”
“My elder brother is currently in the northern border searching for medicine for me. He won’t be returning anytime soon.” After saying this, Shen Yun Yuan quietly looked at Ye Wujiu.
She knew that since Ye Wujiu had gone into seclusion for five whole days, he would not have come to find her if he had no solution.
From the girl’s gaze, Ye Wujiu knew that she had surely realized he had come to her with a solution.
Ye Wujiu rubbed his forehead and sighed. “If I’d known I was destined to suffer such a calamity, I never should have followed that old man to your Qingxuan Sect back then.”
The old man Ye Wujiu was referring to was naturally his Master, Elder Qiansheng. He had once been hailed as the finest healer in Qingxuan. The method of making young Xie Zhao serve as her medicinal primer had been proposed by Elder Qiansheng.
Elder Qiansheng and her father, Shen Xuanqing, had been close friends for many years. If Elder Qiansheng were still alive, Shen Yun Yuan might have been able to glean some hints from him.
Unfortunately, Elder Qiansheng had passed away six years ago. That was why Shen Yun Yuan had been forced to seek Ye Wujiu’s help—because he was Elder Qiansheng’s only disciple.
Ye Wujiu took a small porcelain bottle from his sleeve and handed it to her. “These are pills that can suppress the pain when you stop taking the spiritual blood.”
Upon hearing this, Shen Yun Yuan reached out to take it, but the hand holding the medicine bottle withdrew slightly.
Looking seriously at the girl before him, he said, “Yun Yuan, medicine is toxic in some measure. You’ve developed a dependence on Xie Zhao’s spiritual blood. If you want to stop taking his blood completely, you’ll still have to rely on yourself.
“There are only three pills in this bottle. They’ll help you get through the painful first three months of withdrawal. Once they’re gone, you’ll have to rely on yourself for the remaining middle and later stages.”
“All right.” Shen Yun Yuan nodded and closed her hand around the medicine bottle. Then she asked him, “I want to forcibly repair my spiritual meridians. Senior Brother, do you have a method?”
“Forcibly repair them?!”
At her words, Ye Wujiu’s expression changed instantly. “Do you not want to live? I already told you before: once you stop taking Xie Zhao’s blood, the spiritual blood currently in your body will only be enough to keep you alive for another three years. If you take more nourishing immortal herbs and medicines during that time, you might be able to extend your life by another year or half a year.
“But if you forcibly repair your spiritual meridians, and something goes wrong…”
Shen Yun Yuan immediately seized on the key point. “So you’re saying that forcibly repairing my spiritual meridians is possible?”
Only afterward did Ye Wujiu realize that the girl had pried the truth out of him.
His face darkened. “Shen Yun Yuan, I will not help you forcibly repair your spiritual meridians. Don’t even think about it!”
If it failed, she might not even live out the three years he had mentioned. She might be gone in three days.
Shen Yun Yuan said, “As long as my spiritual meridians remain unrepaired, A-Zhao absolutely won’t agree to stop giving me the medicine. Neither will my elder brother.”
Ye Wujiu’s expression was grim. He wasn’t smiling at all.
He closed his eyes, his tone cold. “Yun Yuan, forcibly repairing your spiritual meridians is far too reckless. If something goes wrong… you’ll die!”
“I trust you, Senior Brother,” the girl said solemnly.
After all, Ye Wujiu had inherited Elder Qiansheng’s teachings and was one of the foremost medical cultivators in the world. If even Ye Wujiu had no way, then there was probably no medical cultivator who could do it.
Ye Wujiu looked at her, and the words he had calculated earlier involuntarily surfaced in his mind: calculate his life, bear his burden.
“In the future, I’ll have to ask you to take good care of this life of Yun Yuan’s, Senior Brother.” The girl clasped her hands and bowed to him.
“You—” Seeing her like this, Ye Wujiu opened his mouth, but could not say a word.
No matter what, he was Shen Yun Yuan’s Senior Brother. He had watched her grow up from childhood.
He knew that she was trapped in a dead end, yet he was powerless to help her in the slightest.
O Heavenly Mandate Master, Heavenly Mandate Master—so what if you could calculate everything? To know everything while being unable to change the outcome, was that not a form of cruelty to Heavenly Mandate Masters like them?
“Knock, knock, knock—”
At that moment, a knock sounded from outside the tightly closed door, accompanied by the familiar voice of a young man. “Senior Sister, are you asleep?”
Hearing Xie Zhao’s voice outside, Ye Wujiu thought of the divination he had calculated earlier and said to the girl, “The divination concerning you and Xie Zhao is extremely ominous.”
Not merely greatly ominous, but extremely ominous!
What Ye Wujiu found even stranger was that he had also calculated Xie Zhao’s fate. There was nothing there—not that he had been unable to calculate it, but that there was simply nothing.
As long as all things in this world existed, they were part of the myriad things, and their causes and effects could be calculated.
Yet there was nothing concerning Xie Zhao. Nothing could be calculated about him at all.
There was only one possibility when nothing could be calculated.
Xie Zhao stood outside the door, his heart full of delight as he watched the doors to the bedchamber open. When he saw the man standing before him, however, the smile at the corners of his mouth stiffened.
“Wu… Senior Brother Wujiu?”
Looking at the disheveled man before him, the youth had nearly failed to recognize him.
Ye Wujiu saw the flowers in the young man’s arms. Without paying any attention to how disheveled he himself looked, he said, “Oh? Are those flowers for your Senior Sister Yun Yuan?”
Xie Zhao nodded, but seeing Ye Wujiu appear in his Senior Sister’s room in the middle of the night, he could not help but grow somewhat wary.
Ye Wujiu paid no attention to the way the young man was staring at him as if he were a romantic rival. He casually plucked a flower and held it in his hand.
He raised it to the tip of his nose and sniffed it, then chuckled. “Nice flowers. Thanks.”
Xie Zhao: “?”
The youth stared in shock at the flower Ye Wujiu had so unceremoniously snatched from the bouquet in his arms.
Those were the flowers he had intended to give his Senior Sister!
“A-Zhao.”
Hearing his Senior Sister call to him from inside the room, Xie Zhao decided not to quarrel with the flower thief, Senior Brother Wujiu. He carried the flowers in his arms into the room.
“Senior Sister, are you feeling unwell?”