"Teacher... are you going to kill little Senior Brother?"
Bai Yingyue kept her voice pressed low — and glanced first, deliberately, at Luo Fanchen where he sat cross-legged by the fire consolidating his cultivation.
Making sure he couldn't hear.
"Oh?"
In the dark, the corner of Di Weiyang's mouth lifted into a cold, lovely curve.
"Why would you ask that?"
HOLY HELL???
Yes! Excellent question! WHY WOULD ANYONE KILL ME?
Eavesdropping from the fire, Luo Fanchen's heart and liver rattled in their moorings. He'd sensed it all day — something off in the way the two women looked at him.
So there WAS a problem. A fatal one, apparently.
Yingyue chose her words with care:
"Devouring the blood and vitality of living things to feed oneself — only evil soul masters use such methods. And you have always hated evil like a personal enemy, Teacher. Seeing how... merciless Senior Brother's martial soul is, I was afraid you'd harden your heart, cut him down for the greater good — end him before he begins."
Di Weiyang didn't answer. That flawless face stayed cold and august, unreadable — and she turned the question around:
"And you, Yingyue? What do YOU think?"
"Ah... I..."
The girl stalled, eyes dropping to her toes.
The Pontiff was decisive slaughter incarnate where evil was concerned — and Yingyue herself hated evil soul masters with everything in her.
The old memories rose. Her small hands began to tremble.
Fifteen years ago: her parents, her grandparents — all of them drained alive by evil soul masters, their bodies withering hollow while they screamed.
Her older brother had hidden her in the cellar, shielding her. They were found anyway. The two of them were to be swallowed alive — and it was a passing Pontiff who struck, and saved them, and that was the entire margin by which she existed.
On the surface she was sunshine and mischief. Beneath it lived a wound and a shadow that fifteen years had never once dislodged.
Bai Yingyue drew a long breath and lifted her head. Her eyes were already rimmed red.
"Teacher."
"Senior Brother's martial soul... truly does feed exactly the way the evil soul masters fed. If anything — more overbearingly."
Wonderful. So I'm an evil soul master now?
Luo Fanchen groaned inwardly. He didn't know precisely what an evil soul master was — but the name alone told him it was nothing you wanted stapled to your file.
HEY. A little care with the labels — labels KILL people! One sentence from his junior sister had as good as measured him for a coffin.
Di Weiyang nodded. "True. Fanchen's martial soul is more sinister and more fearsome than any evil soul master's art — it plunders life itself, harming others to feed its own."
Hissss!
Luo Fanchen listened with his skin crawling.
The Pontiff's confirmation was a verdict — coffin lid lowered, and, while she was at it, nailed shut.
No. Steady. STEADY.
He crushed the urge to leap up and start explaining, and kept listening. He needed to know what, exactly, the two of them planned to DO about him.
Yingyue hesitated several breaths, then bit her lip. "Teacher... could you spare him? Just this once?"
"Oh?" An eyebrow rose. "You're interceding for him?"
She nodded, and found her courage. "His soul's methods match the evil soul masters', yes. But I believe Senior Brother is a GOOD person."
Listen as I say... thank you...
Luo Fanchen was genuinely moved. For the first time in two lifetimes, being handed the 'good person card' by a girl felt absolutely WONDERFUL.
Di Weiyang's voice went colder:
"Good NOW does not mean good LATER. Most evil soul masters were not born wicked either."
"A soul that can drain beasts can drain PEOPLE just the same."
"Drained blood feeds the soul's evolution — and hastens the master's own advancement too."
"Once a man has tasted advancement bought by draining people — tell me, how many under heaven could still settle their heart and grind out honest cultivation?"
"Every evil soul master was once someone chasing power, who took the shortcut, lost himself along it, and ended in madness."
Luo Fanchen had no rebuttal. Honestly — setting aside the small matter of his own neck — the Pontiff's logic was airtight.
His old world knew smoking kills. How many managed to quit?
And this was worse: draining people beat smoking for pleasure AND carried zero cost to your own body. Subtract morality, and it was a same-day express elevator to the top.
"Teacher — I know it's only been days, but I believe Senior Brother isn't like that scum. Don't you praise him yourself? Steel-willed, above the common run of men?"
Yingyue shot a glance toward Luo Fanchen and her lip pushed out in fury.
That IRON-SKULLED senior brother of hers — his master and junior sister were negotiating his EXECUTION, and there he sat, blissfully cultivating!
Di Weiyang said, "Yingyue. Understand what his talent means. If a gift like his ever walks the crooked road — if HE becomes an evil soul master loose upon the world — the land will drown in blood."
Luo Fanchen was touched to the marrow by his little junior sister. He also did not dare move one muscle, because his beautiful master appeared thoroughly resolved to cut him down.
"Tap—"
"Tap!"
Yingyue's eyes contracted: the Pontiff had begun walking, step by unhurried step, toward Luo Fanchen.
No.
She's doing it NOW?
She knew her teacher's iron methods better than anyone. When Di Weiyang killed, her hand never once softened.
Luo Fanchen's heart climbed into his throat.
Holy hell — MERCILESS!
A heaven-collapsing opening hand: barely apprenticed, and the master's already drawing on me? What do I do — asking online, it's URGENT.
Although... by everything he knew of the queen-type psyche, the Pontiff shouldn't be in this much of a hurry to carve him. Should she?
"NO!"
"Whoosh!"
Bai Yingyue called out and flash-stepped squarely between them, chin up, something mulish setting in that pretty face, voice ringing clear:
"Teacher — the ones we OUGHT to kill are the evil soul masters who actually do evil. Aren't they?"
"If a man has not yet done wrong, we cannot take his life on supposition and suspicion alone."
"'Better to kill a thousand in error than let one slip through' — if we act on THAT, how exactly do we differ from the evil we hunt?"
Di Weiyang stopped. The phoenix eyes settled on her — and Bai Yingyue did not give back a single step, standing her whole small ground.
She had never once defied her teacher. But her senior brother was a good person — and good people shouldn't die early.
The air went still. Only the fire cracked and spat. Two young hearts hammered in two chests.
The Pontiff moved.
She nodded — slowly — and the cool royal voice came down like a gavel.
"Good."
"THAT is what a Holy Maiden should look like. All that daily giggling — utterly without dignity."
The open approval in her teacher's eyes broke Yingyue's brain completely. "Teacher... you... you're NOT planning to kill Senior Brother?"
Di Weiyang's red lips curled into an arc of pure mischief — frost-lovely, maddening. "When did I ever SAY I would kill your senior brother?"
Ah. That.
Yingyue's lovely eyes glazed over.
She... actually hadn't. Ever. All of it — every word — had been Yingyue's own extrapolation.
"But — but you've never had ANY tolerance for sand in your eyes," she managed.
Di Weiyang shook her head, and the imperiousness rolled back in:
"He is my disciple — the senior brother YOUR own mouth named. He is not sand."
"Your teacher's eye holds all the teeming masses of this world. It cannot hold ONE disciple of her own?"
Yingyue pressed on, amazed: "And his martial soul — it doesn't trouble you at ALL?"
Di Weiyang said:
"Methods know neither good nor evil. Used rightly, they are right. Used wickedly, they are wicked."
"The blade is guiltless. Look always to the hand that holds it."
"Moreover — when the disciple goes untaught, the fault is the teacher's. Your teacher trusts herself to teach him WELL."
Yingyue's cherry lips parted; small stars of open worship kindled in her eyes.
Luo Fanchen's mood had just completed a full roller-coaster circuit. Magnificent, he marveled — a Pontiff for the ages. That breadth of heart would leave most of the world's MEN eating dust.
Then the Pontiff continued: "And above all — I trust my disciple. Why else would I have taken him?"
"Isn't that right, Fanchen?"
The sudden name-drop went through him like a bolt. She'd known he was awake — the ENTIRE time. Known, and let him eavesdrop on every word.
DAMN it!
He hadn't died after all. Only the social death. Again.