The youth’s hand roamed over her small face, and with that sinister smile still hanging on the corner of his mouth, Rong Yao couldn’t help but feel her scalp tingle.
Rong Yao didn’t even know how she eventually managed to leave.
When she returned to Pure Dust Palace, Taotao immediately flew up to her, asking worriedly, ”How did it go? Did that big bad cake get eaten or not?”
Rong Yao glanced at the food box she’d brought back and shook her head. ”No. He said he doesn’t like sweets!”
“What?” Taotao said. ”Even your honey trap didn’t work? How can that damned stinky man be so difficult! How infuriating!”
Rong Yao looked like a wilted little cabbage.
This trip, not only had she failed to poison him, she’d also learned that he had planted a Love Gu in her.
A Love Gu of the Nine-Tailed Fox Clan.
Rong Yao instinctively reached up to touch her neck, where the spot the youth had bitten faintly burned.
“Taotao, do you know anything about the Nine-Tailed Clan’s Love Gu?”
“The Nine-Tailed Clan’s Love Gu?”
Taotao rested her cheeks in her hands and thought for a moment. “I think I read about it in a book once. It’s said that the Nine-Tailed Clan plants a Love Gu in the person they love so they can love each other forever. Once the Love Gu is planted, neither can be apart from the other, and a member of the Nine-Tailed Clan can only plant it in one person in their entire life.”
“Does the book say how to remove this Love Gu?”
“I don’t remember that part.” Only after finishing did Taotao suddenly realize something was off. “Why are you suddenly asking about this?”
Rong Yao lowered her head and slumped lifelessly onto the table. “Yin Yanxiu planted a Nine-Tailed Clan Love Gu in me…”
Taotao: “What?”
Late at night, in the Library Pavilion.
One big and one small figure stayed in the pavilion, flipping through books about the Nine-Tailed Clan’s Love Gu.
Taotao floated in the air hugging a book, puzzled. “Speaking of which, isn’t Yin Yanxiu a half-demon born of a human and the Crimson Snake Clan?”
After learning that this man would become the Demon King who would plague the Three Realms in the future, Taotao had made a point of looking up Yin Yanxiu’s disciple records. “If he’s a half-demon born of a human and the Crimson Snake Clan, how could he have the Nine-Tailed Clan’s bloodline? Three kinds of bloodline in one person—that’s just too strange!”
Rong Yao found it extremely strange too. Even now she couldn’t understand why Yin Yanxiu would have the Nine-Tailed Clan’s bloodline, when in her past life he had merely been a half-demon born of a human and the Crimson Snake Clan.
“Did he have the Nine-Tailed Clan’s bloodline in your past life too?” Taotao asked.
Rong Yao answered, “In my past life, I didn’t know him at the sect. I only heard from fellow disciples that he was a half-demon born of a human and a Crimson Snake. By the time he became the Demon King, he had already inherited a pure Crimson Serpent Bloodline. According to his subordinates, he had gone to Hundred Demon Cave to replace his Evil Bone.
“Maybe he did have the Nine-Tailed Clan’s bloodline in my past life, but he hid it too deeply and no one knew. Just like in this life—I only found out he had half Nine-Tailed bloodline after he planted the Love Gu in me.”
If he hadn’t planted the Love Gu in her, she would never have known he had three bloodlines.
“Never mind why he has three bloodlines for now. We need to hurry and find a method of gu-worm removal in these books!”
Otherwise, the Love Gu would flare up once a month. Thinking of her own reactions when the Love Gu flared up, and the two methods the youth had mentioned for easing it, Rong Yao was truly about to go mad!
She didn’t want to drink his blood, and she certainly didn’t want to do that kind of thing with him!
The two of them flipped through countless books until, at last, they found a method for gu-worm removal.
“I found it!” the girl cried out. Taotao immediately flew over to her, eyes landing on the book she was currently reading.
The Nine-Tailed Clan devotes their entire life to a single person. Love becomes the gu, the full moon is the deadline, and love itself is their sustenance—bound together in life and death.
Seeing those final words—bound together in life and death—Rong Yao’s heart trembled.
According to the book, since Yin Yanxiu had planted a Love Gu in her, their lives and deaths were now tied together. If either one of them died, the other could not survive either.
“I understand.”
Rong Yao spoke in a low, hollow voice. In the next second, no one knew where she produced a dagger from, and she moved to slash it across her own throat.
Taotao was terrified and hurriedly blocked her. “You brat, what are you doing?!”
“I’m going to kill myself!” Rong Yao trembled, tears falling despite herself. “For the sake of the Immortal Gate Sect and all living beings under heaven, worst case, I’ll just perish together with him!”
“Ptui, ptui, ptui!” Taotao quickly snatched the dagger from her hand. “No one’s asking you to sacrifice yourself for the world! Read the very bottom—there’s a method for removing the gu!”
At those words, Rong Yao immediately looked to the last line of text: The method of gu removal: a period of ten months. If Dual Cultivation does not occur, the gu will dissolve on its own—but the one who planted the gu will be vulnerable to backlash.
Rong Yao said, “So the book means that as long as the two of us don’t Dual Cultivate within ten months of the gu being planted, it will dissolve on its own.”
Taotao nodded.
Rong Yao then looked at the final passage. For her, having the gu removed would be freedom—but Yin Yanxiu would suffer backlash, and no one knew what kind of backlash it might be.
With that thought, Rong Yao violently shook her head, sending her hair flying. Whatever the backlash was, it had nothing to do with her!
Just ten months. Hold out for ten months, the gu dissolves, and then she would kill him!
“I heard a disciple committed a grave offense—he actually shattered the Seven-Treasure Glazed Mirror in the Treasure Pavilion. Elder Jingming is furious and is interrogating him in the Heavenly Dao Hall right now.”
“Who was it, to actually break the Seven-Treasure Glazed Mirror?”
“I think it’s that half-demon disciple Elder Jingming took in.”
A half-demon disciple?
Early in the morning, as Rong Yao passed the front hall, she suddenly overheard two disciples who were sweeping nearby. Hearing that familiar description, she instinctively stopped in her tracks.
She remembered that Yin Yanxiu’s master was Elder Jingming—so if that half-demon disciple wasn’t Yin Yanxiu, who else could it be?!
Rong Yao rushed to the Heavenly Dao Hall, where a crowd of disciples had already gathered outside.
She finally managed to squeeze her way in, and the moment she did, she saw a young man kneeling in the center of the hall, his back covered in bloody welts.
“I will ask you one final time, disciple. Do you—admit your fault?”
Elder Jingming, dressed in white robes, sat above, coldly regarding the kneeling young man.
The youth’s back was bent from the beating, his back a shocking mess of fresh blood. His dark eyes were like pools of dead water. “This disciple does not admit fault.”
Elder Jingming closed his eyes and uttered two flat words. “Punish him again.”
At the command, the disciple administering the punishment raised his bloodstained whip once more and brought it down upon the young man.
Crack—
The whip tore through the air, lashing heavily across the youth’s blood-soaked back.
The young man kept his head lowered, fists clenched as he knelt on the ground. He didn’t let out a single cry, silently chewing up and swallowing all the pain he endured.
“Heavens, how many lashes has it been now?”
“Close to twenty, I’d say. This half-demon is stubborn too—if he’d just confessed early on, at worst he’d have been expelled from the sect. Why insist and suffer all this pain?”