Chapter 343: Other People's Clothes (Part 1)

Pei Ye finished writing the last stroke seriously, handed the letter to 【Liu Feng】 to send away, then picked up the Zhaoyou again, and entered the high and cold realm of decades ago once more.

——

Three days after the incident.

In that strange courtyard, Qu Zhu sat under the sparse and cold stars of the night, his eyes shining faintly in the pitch darkness.

Qu Zhoufu pushed the door and entered gently, bringing a candle flame. Qu Zhu did not look back, still leaning on the back of the chair, his eyes reflecting the night sky.

"Brother..." Qu Zhoufu called out softly, but did not get a response.

He carried the fire lamp, came to the man's side, and sat down gently: "Master is also doing it for your own good... He told me that the Hushan Jianmen has been like this for thousands of years, it doesn't need any revitalization, and you don't have to put this burden on yourself... Your talent is so good, whether in array, artifact, or saber, you are enough to stand at the top layer of Western Long."

Qu Zhu said nothing.

"Master said, my mind is steady, and my vision is not that high." In the quiet courtyard, the junior brother was silent for a while, lowered his head, and said softly, "Being a person who guards the business is quite suitable."

"I think Master is also right. I don't like going far. I just go to Yangzhou City when I want to play on weekdays, and I am very satisfied... Unlike you, going all over the world. You go to the foot of Tianshan Mountain to listen whenever you hear about sword lecturing, and you go to the south whenever you hear about an interesting auction... It seems like the entire Western Long Road is just a small city in your eyes." Qu Zhoufu continued, "Letting you go to pursue your future like this doesn't affect anything, right? You still go out when you want to go out, and come back when you want to come back. If the Hushan Jianmen needs help in the future, I will write to you... By then, you will definitely be a famous grandmaster in Western Long."

Qu Zhoufu looked at the man who still didn't speak and hesitated: "And you can still tell me what you want the Hushan Jianmen to be like. We can still discuss it."

Qu Zhu finally glanced at him: "Do you want to be a puppet sect leader? I can do whatever I want?"

"... That, that won't do." Qu Zhoufu said in a muffled voice, "Master said, the ancestral teachings of past generations—Hushan Jianmen, does not leave Hushan."

"Heh."

"This is an ancestral teaching... I think you shouldn't blame Master anymore." Qu Zhoufu said, "He has to follow the ancestral teachings and consider your future... There is no other way."

Qu Zhu still didn't speak and fell into silence again.

For a long time, he said softly: "No, Zhoufu, I understand him."

Qu Zhoufu looked at him, and the man's cold face turned, his gaze as sharp as a sword: "The Hushan Jianmen must hide some things that only the sect leader can know."

"..."

————

Next, Pei Ye watched what happened to Meng Li also happen here.

A huge shadow suddenly covered a simple, see-through small sect. The proud genius who regarded himself as the pillar of the sect would never sit idly by and turn to flee.

It was just that Qu Zhu's path was much more difficult than Meng Li's. There was no cave suddenly discovered to guide him. To find a hidden secret in a place where he had grown for more than twenty years, standing at the top of the mountain valley and looking down, he only felt that there was no way to start.

Qu Zhu groped in such a pitch-black night, measuring the land of Hushan inch by inch, flipping through the books in the library volume by volume... He had once spent nine years on a sword style, and no one could doubt his determination.

Finally, on a late night, a pair of old footsteps walked to the lonely candle in the library.

Qu Zhu raised his head, and the old man was looking at him with some fatigue.

"... You haven't even practiced the saber recently." The old man said softly.

"I can practice at any time." Qu Zhu withdrew his gaze and continued to flip through the books in his hand.

"... Why must it be like this." The old man sighed, "The Hushan Jianmen has existed for so long, it has its own way of surviving... Keeping its secrets, and you and Zhoufu living your own lives, isn't that good?"

Qu Zhu stopped what he was doing.

"This is indeed something I only found out recently." His face was very cold. Since that night, the rising anger had never dissipated, "In this library, there are actually isolated books passed down from the Han and Wei dynasties... How could a sect that has existed for such an ancient time be cowardly in such a small place?"

"... Everything has its rise and fall."

"Oh? Then when did it flourish?"

"..."

"In the Jianghu records of Western Long eight hundred years ago, there is no trace of 'Hushan Jianmen'!"

"..." The old man sighed for a long time, "We are a hidden sect—"

"You can't promote to the Mystic Gate, right?"

"..."

Qu Zhu looked at him with icy eyes: "Less than sixty, body withered and life exhausted, tottering... You stepped into the Eighth Life thirty years ago, why are you still lingering before the Mystic Gate."

"..."

"... I don't know why you are wasting your life so much." Qu Zhu said coldly, "But you handed such a fate to Zhoufu... actually saying it's letting him live his own life? True Qi is the second kind of blood for humans. If it is always drained, the pulse tree will always draw energy from the body to manufacture it. Day after day, the expenditure exceeds the income... Only when True Qi fills the body can one have the opportunity to push open the Heaven and Earth Gate. Now that life is not even guaranteed, how can you step into the Mystic Gate?"

"..."

The old man was silent for a long time.

"... Not everyone has your ambition, Wuhai. And not every darkness is better revealed." He said softly, "Don't continue down anymore. I'm not worried about it... I'm worried about you."

The old man looked at him: "Consider it Master begging you, okay?"

Qu Zhu's face was taut. At this moment, his eyes really flickered, but when he looked directly at this old face again, the water light condensed into solid ice.

"No." He said.

————

Qu Zhu pushed forward with his investigation regardless of everything.

Pei Ye watched him become more and more straightforward from the vast sea of information. He no longer searched the bookshelves row by row, nor did he walk on this land inch by inch. He began to look for and read some ancient books, began to go precisely to some calculated points, and occasionally went out of the valley, always bringing back some books and magical artifacts.

His eyes became brighter and brighter. Finally, after the last complex calculation, the man stood up on the cliff top of the mountain pass, looking quietly at the ring-like mountain valley.

"So, it's an array." He muttered.

After putting all his energy into this field of natural talent, Qu Zhu showed breathtaking talent. Almost no problem could stop him. The problems recorded the night before would definitely be solved within two pages the next day.

Pei Ye didn't understand the man's work in these days, but as step by step progressed, what appeared was no longer bright confidence, but more and more silence.

In the quiet, deserted middle of the night, he often stared at the scattered papers on the desk without a word, staying for half an hour at a time.

Pei Ye saw a kind of hidden heaviness on him for the first time, and when some steps were verified, there was even a flash of disbelief and fear.

But he still pushed forward. On a clear autumn night, the man finally built the array he had envisioned.

Designing a Mystic Array according to a purpose is like creating a sword technique to defeat an enemy. This is an absolutely genius act, which cannot be done without both overflowing talent and mature, profound insight. However, here, the result of this genius was just a window to peek at divine traces, a light bell to wake up the sleeping.

Under the sparse, cold, and boundless starry sky, the windless lake was like a black jade mirror. Qu Zhu stood by the lake, with a high, cold, and lonely forest behind him.

He outlined the array patterns on the lake surface. Pei Ye watched this dreamlike scene. The man bowed slowly, his fingers tapped lightly on a cold, immersed micro-star, and all the reflected starlight was pulled, connected one by one by winding thin lines.

The Array of Starlight, on the high mountain of array paths, it was also one of the most difficult dangerous peaks to climb.

On this quiet night more than twenty years ago, only two people were lucky enough to see this beauty.

The moment it was connected, everything was still silent. Pei Ye looked back subconsciously at the motionless peak cliff in the distance, thinking that nothing had happened.

But when he turned his head back, he saw this scene that Meng Li would never have the chance to see in his life.

Passed down for thousands of years, guarding the 【Buried Star Tomb】 of the Immortal Relics... in its complete and intact appearance.

The "lake" occupied a quarter of the land in the valley. One qing is one hundred mu, and it was nine qing in size. Seven or eight small boats were tied to the shore, from small to large. Every summer, they would go boating and playing, and the lake surface reflected half of the Hushan Valley.

Now, an ancient and majestic head rose silently from the lake surface. The boats were like sunflower seeds in its shadow, the stars and moon were blocked by it, and the high and vast forest looked like a clump of withered grass.

Cast entirely of bronze, it looked neither like a dragon nor a jiao. It had no eyes or ears, because the entire grand array was its ears and eyes—every shape cast on this head was for battle or decoration. When it lowered its head to overlook, it was like a giant python overlooking a young mouse.

In more distant places, some huge arcs floated out from the mountain cliffs. A spine more than ten zhang high arched on the top of the mountain pass. The pitch-black huge shadow looked like an archway cast for giants, and in the more distant background, such shapes floated out from the mountain cliffs, with more than ten places.

Hushan was indeed like a ring, and now a thin worm was entangled around it.

The part it revealed was less than one-tenth. After a while, as if confirming the complete safety of the tomb hall, it slowly submerged back into the mountain lake.

Everything seemed to have not happened. Only the young array master raised his head stiffly. In the trembling that his body could not suppress, he seemed to have seen the first enemy in his life worth paying his life for.

——

The Hushan Jianmen changed in Qu Zhu's eyes. All the pure nights became cold, dangerous, and heavy. In the countless days of the past, Qu Zhu never liked to light candles after sunset, but in the days that followed, many times the man almost couldn't sleep without the candles lit.

He always dreamed that the surrounding mountains turned into fences, they were kept in captivity, and every once in a while, a giant worm would probe its ferocious and cold mouthparts in and chew one of them to pieces.

After he finally wrote a few lines of angry words to Qu Zhoufu, Master called him into the main hall.

Qu Zhoufu was sitting there quietly again, but this time he didn't lower his head, but looked at his senior brother with a kind of sorrowful calmness. Qu Zhoufu looked over, and the note was in the old man's hand.

"Qu Zhoufu, Master's life is decaying early, and the Mystic Gate is blocked, all because the star worm needs to eat Qi every fifteen days! Tomorrow is White Dew. If you don't believe it, try a palm strike on him and see if he, this Eighth Life, can withstand your Seventh Life!"

So you knew it all along.

Qu Zhu looked at this junior brother quietly. At this moment, he suddenly realized that some things could never go back to the past.

"No need to test." The old man said softly, "Everything you discovered is true."

"You call it a chain, I call it a mission." The old man looked at him, and in the flickering candlelight, told everything softly to this disciple who shouldn't have known, "... That's how it is. We have guarded this immortal object for generations, consuming some future and lifespan for it, which is not worth mentioning."

"Stop here, Wuhai." The old man lowered his brows and said wearily, "I have told you everything you need to know."

"..." In the silence with only the sound of fire, the man's voice was hoarse, and his tone was simply absurd, "... So for such a thing of unknown origin, for a 'savior' of unknown name to take it at any time, we fed our own cultivation and lifespan of thousands of years to a worm?"

"What kind of shit is he?! —Our Hushan Jianmen! I, Qu Wuhai!" The man's voice was hoarse, staring at the two people in front of him, almost pouring out all the fear and anger of the past few days in this one sentence, "Why the fuck should we be someone else's watchdog?!"

In the old man's stunned and angry raising of his head, Qu Zhu said the last sentence hoarsely: "This is the thing of the Hushan Jianmen... Why doesn't our Hushan Jianmen use it ourselves?!"

——

Qu Zhu paid thirty days of confinement for this sentence.

When he came out of the dark mountain cave, he just became more silent. Those fears seemed to have settled down, and the man never stopped his work.

He continued to use various means to calculate its movements. After countless verifications, those trajectories were finally implemented into a ring drawn on paper.

This was also one of the few results that Pei Ye could understand.

The outermost part of the disk was divided into twenty-four solar terms, the inner circle was divided into twelve star positions, and the innermost was the four directions of heaven and earth. This bronze giant object rotated in the cliff with such a calm and mysterious law, walking around once a year, thus recording I don't know how many days and nights for thousands of years.

He believed that this was a unique ancient array, which must have come from a sect saint who left his name in the array path a thousand years ago.

He summarized the laws of this array, looking for the coming and going of its energy, "Mountain drinks and lake leaks, human Qi leads the stars"; combing its flow, "Winter does not wither, summer does not overflow, lake is the heart, forest is the pulse."; he wrote down its tail that is always easiest to be discovered, because it is always tilted, "Swimming in the cliff, seeing the tail in two days; Winter Solstice is in Ding, Summer Solstice is in Gui."

And so on.

Pei Ye knew what he was going to do, because in countless lonely middle of the night, he would neurotically mutter softly: "As long as it is an array... it can be dismantled."

(End of chapter) ===== CHAPTER 344 =====