Chapter 289

Master Xuanmiao said: "If you can obtain either the ordination scroll or the license to take the exam, I'll let you go."

Pan Yun thought these were no problem at all and immediately agreed loudly.

Master Xuanmiao frowned and said: "You should go to the Mountain God Temple."

Pan Yun agreed, picked up her things, saw the red fox basking in the courtyard, and went over to flirt with her: "Sister Hong Yan, are you coming to play at the Mountain God Temple?"

Sister Hong Yan lifted her head at once, then slowly lowered it back down; in her original form, she spoke in human speech: "That's a temple—I won't go."

Pan Yun: "It's my master's temple. My master is an immortal crane. He has no prejudice against animals that have cultivated into spirits. Look, you've even entered the Three Pure Ones Monastery."

Sister Hong Yan instantly raised her head. "Your master is also a spirit?"

Pan Yun paused, then said: "The Mountain God… should be a deity, but he really is a crane."

Sister Hong Yan sprang up in one swift motion, flicked her fiery red tail, and tilted her small head: "Then what are we waiting for? Let's go."

Pan Yun took her down the mountain. "Tuck your tail in—just let one show."

Sister Hong Yan shook her tail. "A tail is grown to be seen."

"To humans, a fox with one tail is an animal; two or more tails makes it a spirit," Pan Yun said. "Humans either fear the unknown or crave it—and some feel both."

"Their fear and greed won't help your cultivation. Why invite trouble?" she said. "Better to hide—and pretend to be a pig while eating the tiger."

Sister Hong Yan: "Pretend to be a pig while eating the tiger?"

"Yes," Pan Yun gave an example. "You're so beautiful—if someone covets you and tries to capture you, you can reveal your power, show your second tail, and slap his face. How satisfying would that be?"

Sister Hong Yan: "But that won't help my cultivation, will it?"

"It won't help directly—but it's your natural form. Walking among humans is your right and freedom. If someone denies you even this basic freedom, you must resist."

Sister Hong Yan said bluntly: "I don't understand. Say something a fox can understand."

"If someone captures you with one tail, you whip him yourself. If someone captures you with three tails, call for backup first, then strike."

Sister Hong Yan: "Are you saying when I have three tails, I can't beat the people who come to capture me?"

Pan Yun: "When I see a fox with three tails, I avoid it—because I know I can't beat it. I only think of capturing you when I believe I can."

Sister Hong Yan pondered, learning a new trick: "So this trick is called 'pretend to be a pig while eating the tiger'?"

Pan Yun nodded. "Exactly."

She asked Sister Hong Yan curiously: "When you're captured, do you hate humans?"

Sister Hong Yan dismissed it: "No. Humans like to capture me, just as I like to catch chickens—isn't that natural? We can't control it."

So she didn't hate humans. Being captured meant she hadn't trained well enough; but if she killed them in return, it meant they hadn't trained well enough.

Pan Yun froze, then burst into laughter. "You're right—I thought too much."

Sister Hong Yan still followed Pan Yun's advice and tucked away both tails, hopping down the mountain with only one tail swaying.

The trick "pretend to be a pig while eating the tiger" was excellent—she liked it.

As soon as they reached the Mountain God Temple, Pan Yun burned incense and paid her respects, then pulled out brush, ink, paper, and inkstone from her spiritual space and began writing a letter to her father.

The fox was right: some people's greed cannot be restrained—they are destined to be enemies.

They won't spare you just because you've grown weak.

But after you've grown weak, their attention and power toward you will inevitably lessen—because of cost.

Sister Hong Yan: No, I never said that.

Pan Yun wrote to her father, telling him she had broken through and was now incredibly strong: "Father, please tell me the truth of what happened back then. I am searching for those involved in the case. By no later than two years, I will go to Jingcheng to prepare for overturning the case."

To overturn a case—even in the 26th century—requires long preparation and investigation, let alone in Great Ming.

Communication is slow. Finding people, investigating—minimum three months, sometimes endless.

Pan Hong's case was not complex, but those involved were either dead or exiled; their families might not even have survivors left.

Pan Yun was young then. Tian Yixin obsessed over cultivation. She only knew her father came home later and later, his study lamp burning all night, sometimes returning with suppressed rage.

She knew the case involved the Embroidered Uniform Guard and the eunuch Wang Zhen—but nothing more.

The events happened suddenly.

Three months after her father had closed the case, it was suddenly declared a wrongful conviction, implicating Wang Zhen, the Embroidered Uniform Guard, the Censorate, and the Court of Judicial Review.

Pan Hong was arrested in his official office. Her eldest brother somehow learned the news, ran home from the academy, bundled her up, hid her in the servants' quarters, then had Pan Ershu set up a memorial tablet for her, removed her household registration page from the registry and burned it on the spot, and forged an imperial red approval on the head-of-household page, striking out her name.

That same day, Pan Ershu took a large sack of money and left, using connections to erase her registration and backdate her death to the winter-spring season.

Before Pan Yun could ask what had happened, the Embroidered Uniform Guard stormed into the Pan household and arrested everyone to throw them into prison. Only Pan Ershu's furious rebuke, citing numerous passages from the Great Ming Code and brandishing the Da Gao, saved Pan Ershu's family and the servants.

Oh—because her father earned too little, he felt guilty toward his younger brother's family, so all servants were registered under Pan Ershu's name, and most land and shops were also under Pan Ershu's name.

Pan Yun had always doubted her father's explanation. She believed he sensed his downfall was coming, so he separated from Pan Ershu early, transferring nearly all property—except ancestral home and ancestral land—into Pan Ershu's name.

The imperial court's decree stated that ancestral property and ancestral land were exempt from confiscation. So when the Embroidered Uniform Guard raided the house, they only lost some valuable items and cash—nothing else.

Pan Hong was poor, Pan Tao wasn't extravagant. The most valuable things in two scholarly households were books—but the Embroidered Uniform Guard didn't care for them…

Anyway, they left that day furious.

Only then could Pan Yun ask Pan Ershu what had really happened.

But everyone treated her like a child—a sickly child—and simply said: "The case your father closed three months ago was declared a wrongful conviction. The court accuses your father of accepting bribes, colluding with Xue Shaoqing of the Court of Judicial Review to exonerate the murderer, and even conspiring to frame Wang Zhen. Your father, Xue Shaoqing, a Ministry of Justice clerk, and a Court of Judicial Review clerk have all been imprisoned."

Then events moved swiftly. Before Pan Ershu could find connections to investigate whether the case was truly wrongful, the court issued its verdict.

Xue Shaoqing was sentenced to immediate execution. Pan Hong was exiled. The two clerks were dismissed.

On the day Xue Shaoqing was to be executed, he didn't die—because Wang Zhen suddenly pleaded for mercy before the Emperor, and many ministers opposed Xue Shaoqing's death sentence, so the Emperor halted the execution.

He ordered Xue Shaoqing dismissed from office and banished from Jingcheng for life.

Thus, the ones most harmed in the end were her father and her family.

This novel has been updated recently in ##!! UPDATE!

Wang Zhen, for some reason, suddenly had a change of heart and spared Xue Shaoqing—but vented his fury on their family, making the Pan household's suffering even worse.

Previously, Pan Yun knew they were innocent—they had stood against Wang Zhen. Knowing Wang Zhen's nature and methods, she realized that to overturn the case, she must overpower him with power—only by surpassing him or matching him could she reverse the verdict.

Before the First Marquis, Pan Yun had no confidence.

But now, she did.

Pan Yun was confident that as long as she went to Jingcheng to see the young Emperor, she could definitely replace Wang Zhen and become a generation's treacherous eunuch—oh, no, a generation's powerful eunuch.

By then, she could overturn her father's case.

But before overturning the case, she still had to know exactly what the case was about.

Pan Yun finished writing the letter, carefully checked it once over, found no problems, blew the ink dry, then took out a blank booklet, steadied her heart, and began silently transcribing the martial arts manual.

This martial arts manual was called Eight Directions Break, a saber manual, a hard-style art.

They were currently soldiers in the army camp, and their weapon was the saber. She had looked at it carefully—Eight Directions Break was not only formidable in one-on-one combat, it could also be used by two people fighting together, three forming an array, and five forming an array, perfectly suited to the ranks.

Besides Eight Directions Break, Pan Yun also found them a relatively simple internal cultivation method, unnamed, a very common breath-regulation method in the jianghu.

Based on her own understanding, Pan Yun combined it with a cultivation true method and readjusted the breath-regulation art.

Unlike Zhang Liuzhen's radical method, the greatest merit of Pan Yun's set of methods was that it was steady and easy to enter.

The drawback was that it was slow.

The speed of cultivating internal force would be very slow in the early stage, but this set of methods paired very well with Eight Directions Break.

Pan Yun did not write them separately, but combined them into one book, writing the internal cultivation method at the front, and at the back writing the saber techniques, drawing the saber manual.

It had to be her—an array and talisman expert, most skilled at drawing lines; otherwise, even if she could practice Eight Directions Break out, she still could not draw it.

Pan Yun was immersed in drawing the cultivation art, while Hong Yan paced around on her legs, tail swaying, touring the Mountain God Temple.

After a round of touring, she squatted at the threshold, looking up at the Mountain God's statue.

She discovered that this statue indeed possessed divinity, proving it acknowledged this Mountain God Temple.

So… she really could wander freely inside the Mountain God Temple without being driven out.

Hong Yan happily ran and jumped around the room.

When Pan Yun rested, she could not help looking up at her. "Why are you so happy?"

Hong Yan: "I've been to many Daoist temples and monasteries. Apart from Earth God temples that would accept me, other Daoist temples and monasteries were unwilling to let me through the door, and some people even tried to catch me when they saw me."

Pan Yun: "The Earth Gods are great love."

Hong Yan nodded and said: "The Earth Grandfather and Earth Grandmother are indeed not bad, I like them very much."

Hearing this, Pan Yun grew curious. "You've met them?"

"Never met them," Hong Yan said, "but I know they are there."

Just as the one person and one fox were chatting happily, a village woman with a basket slung over her arm held onto the door frame and nearly collapsed. "X-Xiao Pan, were you just talking to a fox?"

Pan Yun turned her head, saw her, her eyes lit up, and she immediately nodded and said: "That's right, Auntie Wang, are you here to offer incense? I was born able to talk to animals—not just foxes, I can talk to chickens, ducks, and geese too."

Auntie Wang: …

Her legs immediately stopped being weak, her hands stopped shaking, her back straightened, she held the door frame and stood up, tidied the things in her basket, stepped over the tall threshold and walked in, changing the subject: "This fox is quite good-looking—who brought it back?"

Sigh, hadn't seen her in over half a year, the little Daoist priest was still this innocent and romantic, just that what she said was getting more and more off the mark.

Today I decided to adjust my schedule and sleep earlier, so there's only one update, the remaining one update will be made up tomorrow

(End of this chapter)