“As things stand, I have little left to teach you.” Master Yuan sighed in quiet admiration after reading through the essay at hand. Looking at Cen Xianyun, his eyes could not help but carry a trace of subtle regret.
If only such an exceptionally talented child possessed good health.
Having lived to his age, Master Yuan possessed an open-minded outlook, so his regret lasted only a fleeting moment. He waved his hand and said, “Old me has an appointment to go fishing with an old friend today. Go and rest now. Do not delay me from keeping my appointment.”
With that, Master Yuan flicked his sleeve and departed directly.
Cen Xianyun covered his mouth and let out a yawn only after stepping out the door, as an overwhelming wave of drowsiness washed over him.
Everyone knew the struggle of waking up at eight in the morning, but who understood the sheer misery of a six-a.m. riser?
Cen Xianyun wiped away the tears at the corners of his eyes and walked out of the study with bleary, sleep-deprived eyes. He could no longer hold out and needed to go back for a morning nap.
“Ah!”
Cen Xianyun had barely set foot over the threshold of the study when a piercing, miserable scream rang out. The sharp, agonizing cry banished most of his sleepiness. He turned his eyes toward the direction where the sound originated.
If he remembered correctly, that was where Wang Ting was giving lessons to Xie Lingyou.
An ominous premonition rose from the depths of his heart and spiraled out of control. Cen Xianyun lifted his foot, intending to run away.
Nobody was going to stop him from returning to his warm, comfortable bed.
“Young Master!”
Cen Xianyun’s steps faltered slightly. He struggled for a long moment between playing dumb and meekly accepting his fate. In the end, he sighed inwardly and turned around, forcing his exhausted body forward.
How did the old saying go? What is meant to be a blessing is no misfortune, and what is a misfortune cannot be avoided.
He saw Uncle Wu running toward him out of breath. The very first words out of his mouth contained the name Cen Xianyun least wanted to hear: “Young Master Lingyou bit Master Wang!”
Perhaps drowsiness had clouded his mind, or perhaps the matter sounded far too absurd. Cen Xianyun was stunned for a moment, and only after quite a while did he offer his insightful opinion: “Isn’t he a cat? Why is he learning from a dog and biting people?”
Uncle Wu failed to catch the young master’s words clearly and subconsciously asked back, “What?”
“Nothing. What happened?” Cen Xianyun asked, his expression remaining completely unchanged.
Once his mind cleared, however, he could not help but feel secretly relieved that Uncle Wu had not heard him clearly.
A few days ago, he had merely uttered the phrase “kitty” to the wet nurse. When it reached Master Yuan’s ears, he was subjected to an ideological lecture the very next day. If these words were to reach Master Yuan again today, a single written debate would not be enough to settle it.
“Master Wang was entrusted with teaching Young Master Lingyou, and things were going well at first.” Uncle Wu led the way, explaining the origin and course of the event to Cen Xianyun as they walked: “Who would have thought that after half an hour, Young Master Lingyou suddenly became restless, looking all around as if searching for something.”
“Master Wang asked him, but he did not answer. After looking around for a long while, he lowered his head and tried to bolt outside. Master Wang immediately went to stop him.” Uncle Wu recalled the scene he had witnessed in the room, his mood turning complex for a moment. “Young Master Lingyou’s movements were exceptionally nimble, so Master Wang was unable to catch him for a time.”
Cen Xianyun, however, did not find it strange.
Wang Ting was no ordinary, frail scholar. He possessed an ancestral background and had practiced techniques passed down from his forefathers since childhood. Even in a place like the lower realm where entering the Dao was difficult, he had successfully drawn Qi into his body and cultivated to the third layer of the Qi Refining stage.
This meager amount of cultivation, though better than nothing, could not grant him longevity or the ability to ride clouds, but it allowed him to be far sharper and more agile than ordinary people.
Even so, how could he alone catch Xie Lingyou, who possessed half the bloodline of a spiritual cat?
“Seven or eight servants outside the hallway heard the commotion inside and came to help.” Walking at a fast pace, thin beads of sweat inevitably broke out on his forehead, and Uncle Wu wiped the side of his brow. “We thought Young Master Lingyou would not be able to escape this time, but who would have known, who would have known…”
He let out a heavy sigh, his brows furrowing into a deep frown. After hesitating for a long moment, he lowered his voice and said, “Who would have known that Young Master Lingyou struggled endlessly and actually bit Master Wang! He even drew blood and refused to let go…”
While they spoke, the two arrived at the doorway of the room where Wang Ting gave lessons. The inside was an absolute din. The clamor of the servants’ chaotic persuasion was mixed with Wang Ting’s suppressed, low groans. Clearly, Xie Lingyou had still not let go.
Cen Xianyun stepped inside. After being disrupted by the crowd, the quaint and elegant study was left in complete ruin. Tables, stools, and scroll sets were scattered everywhere, leaving barely any space to step.
He saw Wang Ting clad in a lake-blue robe that was heavily stained black by large patches of ink. The jade hairpin atop his head was askew, barely catching a few strands of hair, threatening to fall off at any moment.
With half of his arm pinned down by Xie Lingyou, he was forced to sit kneeling on the ground, his contorted expression revealing the agony of his struggle.
Looking at Xie Lingyou, he resembled a small beast that had been starved for ten days to a half-month, his eyes gleaming with fierceness. Ignoring the tugging of three or four servants, he pounced on Wang Ting, biting onto Wang Ting’s arm and refusing to let go no matter what.
“Xie Lingyou!” Cen Xianyun pushed aside the three or four servants blocking his path, letting out a stern, low shout with a frown.
Xie Lingyou’s entire body shuddered. He raised his head and looked in the direction of the voice. With a single glance, those pitch-black eyes were instantly filled with tears.
His mouth opened slightly, revealing a small tip of his blood-stained tongue. Unintelligible whimpers bubbled up from his throat, making him look as pitiful as could be.
Had it not been for the ring of bright red blood hanging around his lips, onlookers might have mistaken him for the victim.
Xie Lingyou stared longingly at the person standing just a few paces away, mumbling incoherently from his mouth: “Ya, Ya…”
He called out a few times, yet remained unsatisfied. Wiggling his body, he struggled, wanting to slip away from the servants’ grip.
How could the servants dare to let go? Master Wang’s arm was bitten into such a bloody, gruesome mess, and the young master was frail and delicate; he could not withstand such a bite.
“No, Ya, Young, Master!” Xie Lingyou widened his eyes, babbling and shouting frantically, “Don’t…”
Cen Xianyun did not spare him even half a glance. He waved his hand and said, “Take Master Wang down first to dress his wounds.”
The clever servant behind him stepped forward to support Master Wang, who was sitting slumped on the ground and gasping in a low voice. Blood had soaked through his lake-blue outer robe, staining it a deep brown color.
Cen Xianyun did not miss the cold sweat on Wang Ting’s forehead. It seemed the wound was quite deep; Xie Lingyou, this wild cat, indeed possessed a good set of teeth.
Once everyone had walked out and closed the door, Cen Xianyun righted a chair that had fallen on the ground, found an open space to sit down, and looked down at Xie Lingyou from above: “What happened?”
Xie Lingyou froze for two seconds, then opened his mouth wide: “Boo-hoo-hoo, ah-ah-ah!”
“Ya, Boo-hoo-hoo, Ya, Don’t, I, I, boo-hoo-hoo!”
The teardrops accumulating in his eye sockets fell like broken strings of pearls in large drops, forming a small puddle on the ground in no time.
A half-grown child was pressed to the ground by several servants, crying at the top of his lungs. Far from feeling even a shred of sympathy, Cen Xianyun felt his head throb severely with a sharp pain.
“What are you crying for? Don’t tell me you are the one feeling wronged?” He rubbed his temples and spoke in annoyance.
This was only the first day of lessons, yet he had already bitten and injured the master. Cen Xianyun did not even know how he was going to offer an apology.
Perhaps hearing the familiar voice, Xie Lingyou stopped his crying. He choked back two sobs and began to nod incoherently.
Between Xie Lingyou not understanding the meaning of nodding and him genuinely believing he was wronged, Cen Xianyun hesitated for only a second before decisively choosing the latter.
They say you can judge a person’s adult character by how they are at age three. Could the future ruthless, scheming Long Aotian really not know a few tricks for playing dumb in his early days?
None of this fell within the scope of Cen Xianyun’s concern, however. What he cared about more was whether Wang Ting would leave in anger because of this.
Having an important plot node occur earlier or later did not have much impact on the overall direction of the story, but if it were deleted outright, that would be quite troublesome.
Cen Xianyun lowered his eyes to look at Xie Lingyou, who was still shedding small pearl-like tears, pondering how to deal with him. After thinking for a long while without reaching a conclusion, he simply emptied his mind and stopped thinking altogether.
The one who bit someone was Xie Lingyou, and the one injured was Wang Ting. How to punish him was best left for Wang Ting to consider.
“Young, Young, Master…” Xie Lingyou stretched his head out with great difficulty. The dust had turned his chin a murky gray, making him look somewhat as wretched as he had been in the alley.
With a blink of his eyes, large drops of tears rolled down his cheeks. As they slid past the corners of his lips, they washed away the bright red blood, restoring the initial illusion of innocent purity in a short moment.
“Don’t, don’t, throw…” He spoke stutteringly, nearly biting his tongue several times. Halfway through his sentence, he wriggled his lips and teeth, unable to squeeze out the remaining words. Anxious, he uttered frantic noises of “ah ah”, his whole small face scrunched up into a ball.
The tears that had just barely stopped burst forth again. Whether out of anger or something else, the tip of his nose turned bright red.
“Don’t, don’t, don’t throw me away, Young Master…”
The tiny child was held down by three or four hands pressing his arms and lower legs into the ground. Tilting his head up, his water-glistening eyes were filled entirely with pleading.
He was crying so hard that his frail, slender body shrank in tremors, resembling a stray cat that had just grown comfortable with its owner, only to face the threat of being abandoned a second time. He begged with all his might, hoping his master would show mercy and keep him.
Cen Xianyun’s mind drifted for a brief moment. In an instant, a flood of unfamiliar images seemed to surge into his mind. The blurred scenes appeared covered by a thick white veil, flickering vaguely and eluding clear sight.
The strange memory arrived surging like a rising tide, and disappeared just as rapidly like an ebbing tide. In his daze, he saw nothing clearly, except for those pitch-black eyes that resembled the deepest night.
They were filled with…
Numbness and despair.
The eyes in his mind gradually merged with reality, and the fist-sized organ beneath his chest inexplicably skipped a beat.
Cen Xianyun had an intuition that he had once again missed a clue to finding the truth.
He did not care, however.
Could you expect a salted fish whose sole desire was to retire and slack off to enthusiastically uncover the truth of the world?
That was obviously impossible.
In the blink of an eye, Cen Xianyun composed his mood, waved his hand, and said, “Let him go.”
“Young Master…” Uncle Wu immediately stepped half a pace forward, wanting to stop him. Although Young Master Lingyou seemed to have returned to normal at the moment, what if he suffered another sudden outburst and injured the young master?
Xie Lingyou’s eyes lit up instantly. Having just quieted down for a moment, he began struggling again, squirming on the ground like a worm: “I won’t bite, really.”
As he spoke, he nodded forcefully to show his certainty, his head knocking against the ground repeatedly, making crisp thudding sounds.
One could tell at a sound that this was a sturdy skull.
Seeing this situation, Uncle Wu could only swallow his unspoken words silently and dismiss the remaining few servants. He still had not let his guard down entirely, standing behind the young master, ready at any second to…
Before the thought could fully form in his mind, a dark shadow flashed swiftly across his vision. In the next moment, the young master’s arms were filled with a bundle of…
Uncle Wu did not know how to describe it, inexplicably remembering a stray cat he had encountered a few days ago from who knows where. It was exceedingly sharp, disappearing like lightning at the slightest noise in the blink of an eye.
He stared at the young master, marveling in his daze: It was not without reason that the wet nurse had said the young master was raising Young Master Lingyou as a cat.