Yin Xuanlin secretly employed forbidden arts and gravely injured a fellow disciple and for this he was punished with six months of confinement.
The purpose of such confinement was, naturally, to make him shut himself away, reflect on his actions and sincerely repent.
Yet reality proved otherwise: the longer a person remained alone in a cramped, suffocating place, the darker their thoughts tended to become.
When he had first been locked inside, Yin Xuanlin had indeed been genuinely sorrowful, grief surging like an overwhelming tide, his junior disciple had been pierced through the chest by Bai Yan; how much pain must he have been in? It made him ache to think of it.
But only a few days later, he began to come back to his senses.
Something wasn’t right.
To begin with, that day he had never truly intended to harm Xie Chen.
And even if he had acted, when all was said and done, wasn’t it Xie Chen who had provoked him first, for the sake of that Bai Shuangcheng?
If Xie You hadn’t scolded him for that little white lotus when she was injured last time, he wouldn’t have started finding everyone around Xie Chen unbearably irritating and if he hadn’t found them irritating, he wouldn’t have deliberately set things up to make Xie Chen see the truth and if that hadn’t happened, their argument wouldn’t have escalated until Xie Chen made a move and if they hadn’t come to blows, he wouldn’t have lost control and accidentally injured him.
So if one traced everything back to its source, who was really to blame?
Xie Chen.
And yet he was the one locked in this sunless, miserable place, wasn’t that an undeserved calamity?!
Over the following six months, Yin Xuanlin’s thoughts only spiraled further and further,
If not for Xie Chen’s thousand year fire spiritual root always overshadowing him, if not for the way Xie Chen treated everyone with courtesy and warmth yet remained cold as frost toward him, if not for the way he seemed to care about everyone else,
In short, Yin Xuanlin had not been wrong in the slightest. Everything was Xie Chen’s fault!
Thus, when the six months of confinement finally ended and Yin Xuanlin emerged, he had become a thoroughly venomous man.
He let out a cold laugh. Since reconciliation was no longer possible, they might as well go their separate ways, he would walk his broad, sunlit road, while Xie Chen could cross his lonely plank bridge.
However, before Yin Xuanlin’s grand road could even begin to take shape, he was effortlessly pinned to the ground and utterly overpowered by his junior, whose strength had advanced at a terrifying pace.
“H… heretical cultivator!”
In truth, much later, people would all say, “As expected of Zhaoye jun, truly farsighted.” But when Yin Xuanlin accused him of being a heretical cultivator, he hadn’t genuinely believed it in his heart.
He simply refused to accept that a thousand year fire spiritual root could really allow someone’s cultivation to advance so rapidly. He refused to believe it!
Even with the truth laid bare before him, he still wouldn’t believe!
At that time, he was the only one who didn’t.
No one paid him any attention.
And that once cold and taciturn junior disciple, as his strength steadily grew, seemed to develop edges of his own, gaining a temper.
Now, whenever Yin Xuanlin provoked him, he would expressionlessly haul him up and hang him from a tree.
Those days of being repeatedly hung from trees could be summed up in a single word for Yin Xuanlin’s state of mind:
“Grievance.”
Grievance at the vast gap in strength, leaving him with no chance of victory.
Grievance that Bai Shuangcheng, that wretched little thing, would always stand beneath the tree, eyes half lidded, smiling.
And even more grievance at his own foolishness,
For amid that indignation, in the dead of night when dreams returned, he would sometimes find himself unable to resist recalling, again and again, each time Xie Chen had reached the end of his patience and strung him up on a tree.
He would suddenly feel how close Xie Chen had been, strands of hair brushing lightly against his cheek.
A warm palm would press through the thin fabric of his clothes, swift and precise as it seized his waist. The strength behind it carried a certain… perfectly measured support, firm yet never rough, never truly hurting him.
Sometimes, long, slender fingers would even brush inadvertently across the hollow of his spine, sending a faint, tingling shiver through him.
Many times, Yin Xuanlin would already have been hanging there for quite a while yet he would still drift into a daze amidst the dappled shadows of the tree.
At the tip of his nose lingered a fleeting trace of sandalwood, cool and austere yet faintly warm, while the skin at his lower back, where he had been touched, seemed to burn subtly beneath the thin layer of his clothing.
For such a version of himself, Yin Xuanlin felt nothing but profound indignation.
So indignant that he ran off once more to enter seclusion.
Enough.
He would go into closed door cultivation. He would train in bitter earnest!
When his divine skills reached perfection, he would utterly annihilate that group of people who mocked him and then hang Xie You from the southeastern branch as well!!!
Yet that particular period of seclusion ultimately ended in failure.
Because instead of diligently cultivating, he had slackened and spent a full seven days reading through a storybook inside the cave, all while stewing in grievance.
That storybook spoke of a certain kind of person in the world, known by the scholarly term: Long Aotian.
Long Aotian, it claimed, were individuals blessed with all the fortune of heaven and earth. Their greatest defining trait was that they would never suffer from any ordinary troubles. Things like hair loss, styes, shoes rubbing their feet, or tripping while walking on flat ground, none of these would ever happen to them. Even when injured in battle and coughing up blood, they would somehow manage to present an exquisitely beautiful angle, forever clad in white robes unstained by the dust of the mortal world…
As for who exactly this description resembled, Yin Xuanlin said nothing.
The storybook also stated that every Long Aotian was a protagonist favored by destiny.
At the same time, there existed another type of person in the world, those who constantly opposed the protagonist, known as the “vicious male supporting role.”
Their ultimate fate was nothing more than being utterly defeated by the Long Aotian, expelled from their sect and left to fend for themselves in some forgotten corner, where they would quietly fade away.
And in the protagonist’s radiant, unrestrained life thereafter, they would not even remember that such a person had ever existed.
Yin Xuanlin had never imagined that there might come a day when his relationship with Xie Chen would show even the faintest sign of easing.
The Tianyuan Trial consisted of ten consecutive secret realms, each linked to the next, fraught with peril at every turn.
Yet for Yin Xuanlin, it felt as though time had reversed, as though everything had returned to the days within the Green Crystal Secret Realm, when he had been carefully protected at every step by his junior disciple.
He had almost forgotten that period of time.
However, that fleeting warmth, so brief it was almost an illusion, tinged with a trace of bittersweetness, shattered completely the moment they stepped out of the trial realm.
Outside, Bai Shuangcheng immediately rushed forward, his face full of concern as he hovered around Xie Chen, asking after him with genuine care and tenderness.
Yin Xuanlin was so infuriated he nearly exploded, letting out a cold laugh on the spot.
Just seeing that little white lotus nearby irritated him to no end, if he ever took the initiative to speak to Xie Chen again, he’d be a dog!
No taste. No taste. No taste.
He truly could not understand in what way he was inferior to Bai Shuangcheng, was it that he wasn’t hypocritical enough, or not weak and pitiful enough?
Reconciliation? Reconcile my foot!
That damned Xie Chen could spend a lifetime being lovey dovey with that white lotus for all he cared!
And not long after, that damned Xie Chen just had to go and play the hero again, venturing alone into danger to deal with the Purple Crystal Secret Realm at the foot of the mountain.
Impressive, truly impressive! Admirable! What fearless courage!
Heh, was it to protect your beloved Junior Brother Bai? Or to repay some supposed debt of gratitude to those fellow disciples you treat as family?
But in any case, it certainly wasn’t for him.
Fine, then.
If Xie Chen died, there would be no more thousand year fire spiritual root. In the future, the sect would naturally fall into his hands.
He must have been out of his mind to go down the mountain to look for Xie You!
As expected, retribution came. Wronged and falsely accused, he truly became the sort of dull, peripheral figure from those storybooks, the malicious senior brother who, out of jealousy, sought to harm his junior; ridiculous, pitiful and utterly defeated.
What was even more laughable was that, despite things having already reached this point, in that torrential rain at the foot of the mountain, rain that seemed as though it would never cease, he had still, futilely, tried to find excuses for his junior brother.
“Senior Brother, if I tell them that everything is my fault… would you be willing to stop here and turn back?”
When he first heard those words, Yin Xuanlin had been so enraged that his blood surged violently; he had raised his fan and struck without hesitation.
But after dozens of days had passed and his mind had cooled, he found himself unable to make sense of it, no matter how he thought about it.
“If I tell them that everything is my fault.”
Yet within that secret realm, it had clearly been Xie Chen, together with that little white lotus, who had schemed against him and attacked him, it had been Xie Chen’s fault to begin with.
Then why was it that Xie Chen, from the bottom of his heart, did not believe himself to be in the wrong?
Could it be, could there truly be even the slightest possibility, that there had been some strange illusion within that secret realm, something that had blinded them all and prevented them from seeing the truth?
But…
The sect leader had personally investigated. There had been no illusion.
And as the years passed, he had never once been granted the chance to clear away the misunderstandings. No matter how hard he tried, exhausting every means at his disposal, he had not been able to win even the smallest measure of Xie Chen’s favor.
Everything had gone against his wishes. What was there left to hope for?
In the end, there was only the relentless downpour, the heavens dimmed into darkness.
Once again, they faced each other with weapons drawn. All the unwillingness, all the struggle, flared briefly within the gray curtain of rain before vanishing without a trace.
In the instant when he drove the fan’s rib toward Xie Chen, it seemed that he had not been thinking of anything at all.
It felt as though he had simply gone mad for a moment.
Driven insane by the endless rain and the bone deep cold, driven insane by those years of youth spent chasing something that would never be returned.
The rainwater surged upward, submerging his body. He could not open his eyes; a ringing filled his ears; before him, there was only a blurred expanse of spreading crimson.
From childhood until now, even back when he had been a beggar child fighting stray dogs for scraps, he had always fought desperately to stay alive and yet, in that fleeting instant, with tears brimming in his eyes, he found himself thinking hazily, what was the point anymore?
No one was willing to listen to his grievances.
After all these years of reckless arrogance, no one had ever liked him.
Even when his true feelings had spilled out, no one had cared.
In a few more years, he would likely be completely forgotten.
In that case, he might as well die here. At least Xie Chen would forever remember that there had once been a life stained upon his hands.
But would Xie Chen truly remember?
Through the sound of the rain, it seemed as though someone lifted him up, their voice hoarse and distorted.
Yin Xuanlin’s consciousness gradually drifted away. His fingers moved faintly in the mud, grasping a fallen rib of his fan.
Hidden.
The Nine Luminaries Flowing Light Fan had been something they purchased together when they participated in the Tianyuan Trial and the radiant spirit stone embedded in its rib had been his own private portion of the reward.
With all the strength he had left, he drove it in deeply.
This strike… would leave a wound upon Xie Chen that was terribly deep.
Then, in the future, each time it rained and the ache returned, each time he touched it while bathing, his junior brother would think of him, wouldn’t he?
Amid the heavy scent of blood, this was his selfish and desperate final mark.
In this way, his junior brother would continue to hate him, wouldn’t he?
That was good.
After all, everyone knew,
Hatred lasted longer than love.
✦ ✧ ✦
Fleurveil
[Translator]
☕ A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR THE TRANSLATOR
The translator has entered their coffee-deprived final form. (╥﹏╥)
☕ BUY THEM A COFFEE →
✧ (づ｡•ㅅ•｡)づ ☕ ✧
✦ thank you for reading ✦
← PreviousNext →
ChaptersChapter 1 · Once a chosen one of heavenChapter 2 · Why didn’t you crawl in the shadows?!Chapter 3 · They would rather fight each otherChapter 4 · I’ll do a handstand and run naked three times!Chapter 5 · So what if I’m showing off!Chapter 6 · If you look again, I’ll gouge your eyes out!Chapter 7 · The young couple is fighting again.Chapter 8 · I’m back at the Jinchan SectChapter 9 · Sour, sourChapter 10 · To seize credit for someone’s workChapter 11 · The Golden Toad Sect has come to our aid to annihilate the Demon LordChapter 12 · Sect Leader’s HusbandChapter 13 · The stone, fox, tree, and scarecrow are named XuanlinChapter 14 · My junior and I have had sweet moments in private!Chapter 15 · The truth behind their first falling out back thenChapter 16 · Hate lasts longer than loveChapter 17 · Xie Chen was actually the Demon LordChapter 18 · Slaying the Demon LordChapter 19 · From resistance to enjoymentChapter 20 · Xiao Xie’s perspective begins!Chapter 21 · Only because it was Yin XuanlinChapter 22 · Xie Chen was not a foolChapter 23 · The End