Zhu Zhuxia knocked on the gate, and shortly after, footsteps echoed from within. The heavy wooden doors slowly opened from the inside, revealing a round face.
Staring at the face that was an exact mirror image of his own, Zhu Zhuxia suffered a brief blockage of breath, standing frozen and unresponsive for a long moment.
“You… you… who are you?” Shocked completely out of his wits, his speech devolved into stuttering.
Hanzhou spouted nonsense smoothly, “I… I… I’m your long-lost twin brother, little bro.” Hanzhou mimicked Zhu Zhuxia’s stuttering cadence.
Hearing this, Zhu Zhuxia rushed forward two steps and grabbed Hanzhou by the shoulders. “Brother, is it really you? Mom and Dad searched for you for ages. You were snatched away by human traffickers when you were barely a month old. Mom and Dad worried day and night, terrified that human traffickers would chop off your hands and feet to use you as a begging tool.” Zhu Zhuxia meticulously examined Hanzhou’s limbs and facial features. “Phew, thank goodness your legs and hands are all here, and you haven’t lost an eye or a nose. The heavens truly have eyes!”
Hanzhou was momentarily stunned. ‘I was just talking nonsense off the top of my head who would have thought it would accidentally align with reality?’
“But, Brother, why did you come to Qingyuan Mountain?” Zhu Zhuxia asked with a puzzled expression.
Hanzhou adopted a grave, solemn expression as he launched into his explanation. “Oh, it’s like this: after enduring countless hardships, I finally managed to track down Mom and Dad. They told me you were cultivating here at Qingyuan Mountain, so I wanted to come up to find you. Along the mountain path, I even happened to pick up your identity jade talisman.”
As he spoke, Hanzhou unclipped the talisman from his waist to show Zhu Zhuxia, though he showed no intention of returning it. “I originally planned to hand the talisman back to you, but the mountain gate guards mistook me for you and let me straight through.”
Zhu Zhuxia experienced a sudden flash of enlightenment. “So that’s how you got assigned to Yunling Peak to handle chores for Immortal Yunling?”
Hanzhou nodded. “Yeah, how did you know?”
“Well, Manager Yu told me about it today too, so I’ve also come to work for Immortal Yunling.”
A sudden thought struck Hanzhou, and his face instantly contorted into sheer terror. “My dear brother, what do you think will happen if someone figures out my true identity? Will they chop off my hands and feet and toss me right out of the mountain gates?”
Hanzhou was citing the formal disciplinary code of the Heavenly Sword Sect: any unauthorized outsider who sneaked into the mountain territory faced the severe penalty of having their hands and feet severed before being cast out of the gates as a deterrent to future violators.
Because of this rigid statute, not a single person had dared to violate the prohibition over the past century, allowing the security monitoring at the mountain gates to remain relatively slack.
“Shh!” Zhu Zhuxia pressed a finger against his lips, signaling Hanzhou to lower his voice. “Let’s head inside first—it’s too crowded and eyes are everywhere out here.”
Zhu Zhuxia shoved Hanzhou across the threshold, stepped inside after him, and poked his head back out to scan the surroundings left and right. Confirming the path was completely deserted, he carefully latched the heavy doors closed.
“Let’s finish up our assigned chores here at Immortal Yunling’s place first. Nine days from now, the Heavenly Sword Sect will mobilize its troops to march against the Eastern Sea. I’ll go beg Manager Yu to assign me a logistics role, and you can take my place using my identity. Once the battle breaks out, the chaos will provide the perfect cover for you to slip away and escape. It’s just that…” As Zhu Zhuxia continued, an expression of profound embarrassment crept over his face.
“Just what?” Hanzhou inquired.
Recalling the storage pouch he had slipped into Manager Yu’s palm just moments earlier, Zhu Zhuxia felt too ashamed to voice the problem. “It’s just that… all the spiritual stones I managed to save up from treasure-hunting in the secret realm were entirely spent bribing Manager Yu. If I want to ask him for a logistics assignment now, it’s simply impossible without offering more spiritual stones.”
“Oh, spiritual stones? Small matter, I’ve got plenty of those.” With a casual wave, Hanzhou produced a storage pouch and handed it over to Zhu Zhuxia. “There are thirty first-grade pearls inside—take those and trade them for spiritual stones.”
Since the items inside a dream realm weren’t real, Hanzhou felt not a single pang of heartache.
Using his divine sense to sweep through the contents of the pouch, Zhu Zhuxia stared in absolute disbelief. “Brother, where on earth did you get all these pearls?”
“Oh, those? Well, you see, the Crown Prince of the Eastern Sea—no, wait, the Crown Prince of the North Sea Dragon clan and I are sworn brothers. He gifts me these things all the time, claiming they have an inexhaustible, endless supply of pearls down in the North Sea.”
Clutching the storage pouch tightly in his grip, Zhu Zhuxia asked softly, “Brother… have you had a good life all these years?”
Continuing his fabrications, Hanzhou replied, “Great, wonderfully well. I was adopted by a wealthy landowner—always well-fed, warmly clothed, and never lacking for wealth.”
“That’s good.” Zhu Zhuxia suddenly found himself feeling deeply grateful that his brother had been abducted back then; otherwise, he would have endured the exact same endless tortures and suffered through a living hell just like he did.
Because Hanzhou had already spent the previous day interacting with Immortal Yunling, to prevent exposing any flaws, the two brothers agreed that Hanzhou would continue doing the manual labor for the Immortal, while Zhu Zhuxia concealed himself inside the guest chamber, swallowing a Concealment Pill to mask his aura so Immortal Yunling would never discover his presence.
Hanzhou tucked Zhu Zhuxia safely away inside the very same guest chamber he had slept in the night before. Stepping outside, he ran directly into Yan Mingqiu.
Yan Mingqiu seemed to sense something amiss. “Did someone else just come in here?”
“No, nobody at all,” Hanzhou replied smoothly, spinning around to shut the chamber door behind him.
Yan Mingqiu glanced suspiciously at the room. “Is that where you slept last night?”
“Yes, Immortal! This room is fully stocked with bedding, charcoal braziers, and every amenity. The nights are bitter and cold, and I was afraid catching a chill would ruin my ability to work the next day.”
Yan Mingqiu let out an “oh.” “You certainly know how to pick a comfortable spot.” That room contained far more than just basic living supplies it was practically a replica of a dragon palace, glittering with wealth and absolute extravagance.
‘When I get a free moment, I need to pry every single precious treasure off the walls of that room and sell them off as compensation from that brat Hanzhou for ruining my life over a single mad night.’ Yan Mingqiu muttered internally.
Sword cultivators were notoriously impoverished. Initially, Yan Mingqiu believed he refused to take on disciples simply because of his aloof, reclusive temperament and aversion to noise, but after inspecting the treasury yesterday, he finally realized the truth: he avoided taking disciples purely because he was flat-out broke.
After all, a sword cultivator’s cultivation and equipment both required vast fortunes of spiritual stones to pile up; whatever meager family wealth Yan Mingqiu possessed was barely enough to sustain his own upkeep.
‘I’ll just have to wait until this imposter leaves before stripping the room. Otherwise, if word gets out that I’m selling off my own disciple’s private treasures, my reputation will be utterly ruined, and I’ll never manage to recruit another apprentice in this lifetime. And I certainly can’t explain to anyone that this wealth is the physical payoff of selling my body.’
The realization fueled a sense of urgent impatience within Yan Mingqiu, prompting him to issue a sharp command: “Alright, stop slacking off and get back to work! Clear out every single trace of debris within three days, do you hear me?”
That way, he could strip the crystals and gemstones clean before the army marched out, find an opportunity to slip away during the campaign, and hock them for cash.
Once he captured Hanzhou back to the sect for punishment and successfully liquidated the treasure stash, he would consider his humiliation thoroughly avenged.
Meanwhile, sitting inside the chamber, Zhu Zhuxia stared around the room in absolute, slack-jawed astonishment. Brilliant, dazzling crystals completely paved the ceiling, various colored corals decorated the walls into a breathtaking masterpiece, countless blue sapphires studded the bed frame, and even the chair legs were inlaid with precious gems.
“Why is the gap between people so absurdly massive? Is it because my brother is close friends with the North Sea Crown Prince that he’s grown so desensitized to such luxury that he didn’t even cast a single glance at these treasures just now? Did my brother really live like royalty all these years?”
Staring down at the storage pouch in his hand, Zhu Zhuxia remembered all the suffering he had endured in the past and his current dead-end cultivation life, and gripped the pouch fiercely.
“If only I had been the one carried away back then…”