Lin Qingyun tilted his face to look at He Zhuoming and asked, “Plot? Clues?”
He Zhuoming: “…”
Damn it, she forgot the male lead was right beside her.
He Zhuoming silently sat up on the bed, feeling the night breeze blowing in through the broken window. She rested her chin on her clasped hands, putting on an expression of deep, earnest thought.
Lin Qingyun smiled—the smile lacked any warmth, not even reaching his eyes. “I had no idea you actually knew of the Pear Palace Earth Immortal, Xiao He; after all, you can’t even tell the difference between a True Deity and a Corrupt Deity.”
Feeling a bit guilty, He Zhuoming looked down at the floor, her voice weakening. “I… I can’t really say I ‘know’ about him… I just read about him in a storybook somewhere.”
“What storybook?” Lin Qingyun pressed.
“Oh, it was a book I read a long time ago. I forgot the title!”
Lin Qingyun walked unhurriedly over to He Zhuoming and pressed a hand on the top of her head, forcing her to look up—eyes meeting, He Zhuoming saw Lin Qingyun’s smiling face, those brilliantly dark eyes staring coldly at her.
“Aren’t we good friends? Xiao He, if you disrespect me and play me for a fool, I will break off our friendship.”
The second half of the sentence was exactly what He Zhuoming had said to him when they had argued previously. After throwing those words back at her, Lin Qingyun suddenly felt his breathing become much smoother.
His mood even underwent a subtle shift toward clarity. He released her head and half-squatted down in front of her—I can be harsh to Xiao He, too! he thought.
He just needed a trigger to be harsh. This was perfectly normal; he wasn’t a person who made trouble without reason, so naturally, even being harsh required the right catalyst.
He Zhuoming couldn’t hear his inner thoughts, nor did she notice that his mood had already softened.
In fact, even if she told him a lie right now, Lin Qingyun would have easily overlooked it and moved past the topic because he was in a good mood.
She twisted her fingers, first frowning, then wrinkling her nose, until her entire face was clearly scrunched up—her gaze shifted from the floor to her knees, hovering there for a long time before she slowly looked back at Lin Qingyun’s face.
Lin Qingyun’s fingers twitched, ready to snap his fingers in front of the tangled-up He Zhuoming to startle her, then tell her considerately that he was no longer interested in the matter… Xiao He would surely be incredibly grateful and might even cry.
The more he thought about it, the better his mood became; his eyes crinkled in delight.
However, He Zhuoming spoke faster than he could snap his fingers: “This is my secret, and I don’t want to tell you—but I can guarantee that I didn’t disrespect you or play you for a fool… Friends can have secrets, and I didn’t use this secret to lie to you.”
“A secret you can’t tell me?”
He Zhuoming nodded heavily and said earnestly, “You can have your own secrets, too, and you have the right to refuse to answer me.”
“…Tsk, fine.”
The corners of his mouth drooped, the good mood he had just cultivated evaporating instantly, replaced by a wave of irritation.
Lin Qingyun didn’t know why he was annoyed, so he attributed it to the bailiffs who had just run in and this dilapidated post station.
“Why did you press on my head again just now?” He Zhuoming asked after a moment.
“I didn’t press that hard.”
He Zhuoming touched her head, retorting, “That still affects my growth!”
“You weren’t looking me in the eyes, either. It’s impolite to avert your gaze while speaking.”
Mentioning the lack of politeness reminded He Zhuoming of something—she slapped her thigh suddenly and said, “Sigh! I meant to tell you this from the start, but then you started talking about some ‘Pear Blossom Deity’ and made me forget!”
“It’s the Pear Palace Earth Immortal! Not the Pear Blossom Deity!”
“Whatever, that’s not important… You shouldn’t just go around telling people they were ‘born without a mother.’ Her mother would be very sad if she knew.”
Lin Qingyun raised an eyebrow, pulled the corners of his mouth into a sneer, and scoffed, “Her mother isn’t my mother; why should I care if she’s sad? Besides, she didn’t refute me—maybe she really doesn’t have a mother…”
Frowning, He Zhuoming covered his mouth with her hand. “I told you not to talk about people’s mothers! Why are you getting even more extreme? Even if her mother really has passed away, if she heard someone say that about her child from heaven, she’d still cry.”
She spoke with righteous indignation, her hand pressed tight, her palm flush against Lin Qingyun’s nose and lips, forcing his breath to snake along the creases of her palm’s fate line.
Lin Qingyun suddenly went quiet, blinking his eyes twice, the long, narrow lids making him look strangely well-behaved and innocent.
He Zhuoming continued to exhort him earnestly, “Even though I hate her, too, put yourself in her shoes. If someone said you weren’t raised by your mother, your mother would be heartbroken if she heard it.”
Lin Qingyun: …
He didn’t know if his mother would be heartbroken, but he did know that the person who said those words would definitely end up a dead man.
He Zhuoming let go, her arm resting on the edge of the bed, her fingertips barely half an inch from his hand.
She waited for him to respond, but for some reason, Lin Qingyun fell into a sudden silence—he just sat there quietly, his long lashes casting shadows onto his skin.
When he was quiet, not speaking, not smiling, and not staring coldly, he actually looked quite pitiful.
After waiting for a while, she asked in confusion, “Qingyun, why aren’t you speaking? Are you deaf?”
Unable to keep up the act, Lin Qingyun laughed out loud. “Why would I put myself in the shoes of someone I hate?”
After he had played the part for so long, Xiao He hadn’t noticed a thing? Was her whole mind just stuck on their previous conversation?
Xiao He’s eyes were practically useless.
“Because everyone has a mother, and you have to think of her,” she said.
Lin Qingyun found it incredibly boring and suspected he might have caught a cognitive disease from her—why was he sitting here discussing such dull questions with her?
Regardless of how trivial the matter was, it was easier to just go along with her to avoid the trouble.
He stood up abruptly. “Fine, fine, I’ll ask about her father next time.”
“What if her father has passed away, too?” she suggested earnestly. “What about her father…”
This time, Lin Qingyun clapped a hand over her mouth, smiling as he said, “Don’t worry, the chances of us meeting them again are near zero. Stop worrying about other people’s parents in heaven or on earth and worry more about when you’ll get to see your own parents.”
To get revenge for her covering his mouth earlier, he deliberately applied similar pressure—the distance between his palm and her mouth was nearly zero, yet she still tried to speak in that narrow space.
The fragmented sounds were compressed against his palm, making it impossible to hear what she was saying.
But he could feel her lips moving, her damp breath soaking into his skin. He trance-like for a second, then recoiled as if electrocuted—he thought she had bitten him.
In the second before he withdrew his hand, he genuinely felt the pain of being bitten by teeth.
However, when he pulled his hand away and looked at it, he saw it was only slightly damp. There were no tooth marks, and naturally, he hadn’t been bitten.
He Zhuoming peered at him, concerned. “What’s wrong?”
He pushed her head away with one finger. “Nothing. What did you say just now?”
“I was saying, about the Pear Garden matter—you haven’t finished—does it matter that they enshrine the Pear Palace Earth Immortal? Isn’t the Pear Palace Earth Immortal a True Deity, too?”
She remembered the old manager at the post station had been quite polite to Lin Qingyun. If the Earth Immortal were a “Corrupt Deity,” surely the staff wouldn’t have let him in.
Lin Qingyun lowered his eyes, squeezing his own palm, and answered distractedly, “There are only nine officially canonized True Deities; all the other chaotic, messy ones are just Lesser Deities, vast in number and with mixed abilities. As for the Pear Palace Earth Immortal, he is indeed a True Deity, but he is a highly controversial one.”
“There are two conditions for becoming a True Deity: first, ascension in the flesh; second, the accumulation of ten lifetimes of merit. Both are essential. Those who can achieve the former are already in the minority; ‘one-in-a-thousand’ isn’t even enough to describe their rarity. To stack that on top of the second condition—that the human race could even scrape together nine of them is the greatest miracle in heaven and earth.”
Though he used words like “the greatest miracle,” his casual attitude made it sound as mundane as talking about “the largest radish.”
Fortunately, his listener was He Zhuoming, whose standards for atmospheric tension were nonexistent, so he continued.
“But the Pear Palace Earth Immortal didn’t satisfy either of those conditions. His predecessor was the Goddess of Gu She, who was dying of exhaustion. He selected a youth from his sect whose age and talent were suitable as a vessel to extend his life.”
“Whether the life extension succeeded wasn’t disclosed to the outside world. However, from that point on, the Goddess of Gu She changed his statue and name, abandoned the sect he had originally protected, and established a new one. Because of this, many cultivators doubt his status as a True Deity, and many sects that enshrine ancient True Deities feel that the Pear Garden, which only enshrines him, is unworthy of being mentioned in the same breath as them.”
“Oh, I get it,” she realized. “So the Pear Garden is just that… new sect founded by the ‘Goddess’?”
“Right.”
“And the vessel? Is he still alive?”
Lin Qingyun stopped massaging his palm and looked up—she was gazing at him, her round eyes full of nothing but curiosity.
Lin Qingyun had told this story to many people on a whim, but they were all more concerned with whether the Goddess had truly resurrected, whether she had lost her sense of self as a True Deity in the process, or whether she had fallen into a Corrupt Deity…
He Zhuoming was the first person not to care about the deity, but instead to chase down the fate of the vessel.
He stared at her for a moment, then suddenly chuckled. “Who knows? Just a vessel, a scrap of the story, not worth recording for posterity.”
“He’s a person, too,” she frowned. “How can a True Deity use human sacrifices? That’s just like a Corrupt Deity… whoa!”
Before she could finish, Lin Qingyun flicked her forehead, eliciting a cry of pain.
“Say that to me if you must,” he said gloomily, “but keep your mouth shut outside. If disciples of sects that enshrine True Deities hear you, they’ll fight you to the death.”
She was baffled, thought about it, and became perplexed. “Doesn’t the Pear Garden enshrine the Pear Palace Earth Immortal? You’re a Pear Garden musician… you don’t care?”
He spread his hands dismissively. “I don’t care. I’m not really a Pear Garden musician; I’m just using the name to get by.”
“You can do that?!” she gasped.
“If the money is right, a lot of things that shouldn’t be possible become possible.”
“How corrupt!” she exclaimed, heartbroken. “Why would you do that?”
Amused by the comment, he fell backward onto the bed, laughing.
“Is that sentence so funny?” she asked, bewildered.
“It’s just hilarious—not the sentence, but Xiao He, you are just so funny when you talk—hahaha—”
She still didn’t get what was funny, but she noticed his eyelashes were shining.
He was laughing so hard that tears were caught on his lashes, his curved eyes looking like the crescent moon hanging in the night sky.
Remembering how he had wiped her tears with his sleeve when she had cried before, she pulled her own sleeve out, wrapped it around her hand, and wiped the corner of his eyes.
Lin Qingyun closed the eye she was wiping, while the other remained open, his pupil fixed on her.
As she carefully wiped his tears away, she said, “With one eye open and one eye closed like that, you look like you’re winking.”
Hearing this, he really did close one eye and gave her a flirtatious wink.
“Your eyelid keeps twitching; it looks like you’ve got sand in your eye.”
“…”
She thought for a moment and added, “You’re so different today compared to yesterday.”
He immediately opened both eyes. “How am I different?”
“You didn’t talk yesterday, and today you talk a lot.”
She discovered that when Lin Qingyun didn’t talk, he was just a pretty boy, but when he talked… talking made it very easy for her to ignore the fact that he was the opposite sex.
But she didn’t want to say that. She felt it would be strange to tell him that his speaking made him seem less like a boy.
He asked with a smile, “Is it better when I talk a lot? Guys who don’t talk are just putting on an act.”
“You didn’t talk yesterday, either.”
“I was putting on an act yesterday,” he decided decisively.
She started to feel that his way of talking was also becoming strange.
But they didn’t chat much more about this—she had slept enough and eaten her fill, and since it was a clear night, the moonlight made the road very distinct.
They decided to leave the post station—this place of right and wrong—and walk the night road to Wen County.
With a bundle containing all her worldly possessions on her back and her wooden sword in hand, she spent the trip pondering the swordsmanship he had taught her, occasionally pestering him with endless questions whenever she hit a snag.
Lin Qingyun was surprisingly patient—he had never taught anyone before, and in the past, he only ever thought others were stupid in their own unique, dull ways.
Now that it was his turn to teach Xiao He, he found that her stupidity was actually more interesting than anyone else’s.
Teaching and learning, they arrived near Wen County before they knew it. He Zhuoming found the large stone engraved with the characters “Wen County” and pointed at it excitedly with her wooden sword.
“This is it!”
Lin Qingyun looked at the stone and asked, “Do you still remember where exactly in Wen County you appeared? And how you met… Tang Shuayu?”
He was still getting used to saying that name out loud; he always had to pause whenever he mentioned it.
Unaware, she spun the wooden sword in her hand, trying hard to recall. “I remember… the place I first appeared… was by the river! A river with lots of willow trees, and a bridge.”
It seemed she had been on her way out of school when it happened, but she had forgotten what exactly she had been doing.
All she remembered was kicking a pebble intently while walking, thinking about something else entirely—the school’s end-of-day bell had rung, but only halfway through.
She had been feeling strange about it, and when she looked up and scanned her surroundings, she found herself in ancient times: everyone passing by was wearing traditional robes, and the ground had become dirty and grimy.