Chapter 25

Late into the night, Lou Yue tossed and turned in bed.

She rolled from her left side to her right, then back onto her back.

—There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you since last night.

—But given the circumstances, saying it now would sound like I was just trying to placate you.

—I like you.

“...”

She bit her lip, sparks of fury flashing in her eyes.

Xiao Rangchen had absolutely done it on purpose.

What did he mean, saying he liked her? It was all a lie. She didn’t believe a single word of it!

She abruptly sat up, deciding to meditate and sweep the “trash” from her mind.

A quarter of an hour later, she collapsed back onto the bed and stared blankly at the canopy.

What exactly did Xiao Rangchen mean?

If he was jealous of her and Liufeng Xin and had deliberately said it to make his beloved moonlight jealous, then he should have said it in front of Liufeng Xin. But in reality, Liufeng Xin hadn’t heard him at all.

Lou Yue ground her back teeth together. So he was definitely still messing with her, taking revenge on her and making sure she couldn’t eat or sleep in peace.

He wanted her to think of those words every time she was with Liufeng Xin, just to irritate her.

Lou Yue slapped the bed hard—

Tomorrow, she would definitely find him and make him admit that he had only been toying with her.

The family banquet was at noon. Once it ended, she would settle this matter with him!

The next day, the sun was already high in the sky, its rays shining straight onto Lou Yue’s face. She rolled over and half lay on her stomach to escape the light.

Something swayed beneath her loose, empty clothing.

In a daze, Lou Yue thought, Oh. I slept without wearing anything underneath. Of course it’s going to sway.

The next second, she jolted awake and looked down.

Because she was lying on her side and her clothes hung so loosely, the soft flesh at her chest had been pressed together, revealing a sliver of pale skin.

“?!”

She closed her eyes, then opened them again. The rise and fall was still there.

Slowly, she reached out and pressed her hand to her chest, giving it a squeeze. The sensation was real.

Lou Yue’s eyes widened. She immediately sat up and tried to pull open her clothes for a closer look, but at that moment, she met Xuanba’s gaze from the head of the bed.

She let go, grabbed Xuanba, and knocked it from side to side. Its shell was hard, solid, and in excellent condition.

She sighed. “You’ve finally woken up...”

“I was only asleep for a few days.” Xuanba still wore the same cold expression, as though someone owed it eight hundred taels of silver. “Did you cause trouble and rush to call on me?”

“I’m not that kind of person.”

Xuanba cast her a sidelong glance with its scarlet eyes. “You are.”

Lou Yue couldn’t be bothered to argue with it. Remembering the matter that still needed to be verified, she tossed Xuanba aside and reached over to feel her chest.

But her breasts had returned to their usual flatness. She pressed here and there, yet couldn’t find even the slightest swell.

“??”

She turned and glared at Xuanba. “Did you just see my breasts?”

Xuanba: “...”

“I touched them just now. They didn’t feel fake.”

“I saw them last time too. I thought I was seeing things.”

Lou Yue’s mind raced, and her heartbeat sped up. “Do you think it’s possible that... I’m actually a woman?”

She looked over anxiously. Xuanba’s eyes remained utterly calm, without a ripple.

“You’re supposed to say something,” Lou Yue said.

Xuanba slowly crawled onto the windowsill and glanced outside before saying, “You should leave the Xuantiandu as soon as possible.”

“Why?”

Xuanba looked at her calmly. The human and the turtle stared at each other.

Then Lou Yue watched as Xuanba set up a barrier. A message butterfly flew out from its body, its faint light flickering as it connected to the other end. Before long, Lou Chengfeng’s voice rang out from it.

“She’s awake?”

“Xuanba, you only enter tortoise-breathing when your power has been completely exhausted. What did you do?”

Lou Chengfeng’s voice had none of yesterday’s frivolity. It was as cold and sharp as an ice blade.

“With Wuxiang in place, she couldn’t possibly advance to the Nascent Soul stage! Xuanba, what have you been hiding from me?”

Lou Chengfeng was furious.

“You’re harming her! Have you forgotten what you promised Jing He?!”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Xuanba replied evenly.

“Haven’t forgotten? Heh.” A tremendous crash suddenly came from the other end, as though some object had exploded. Then Lou Chengfeng roared, “Did you remove Wuxiang?!”

Xuanba fell silent.

“Just as I thought...” Lou Chengfeng’s voice turned icy, each word cutting like a blade. “Xuanba, you’re signing her death warrant.”

Xuanba’s voice remained calm. “Have you ever considered that perhaps she doesn’t want to follow the path we arranged for her?”

“This was decided the moment she was born!”

“But no one ever asked her.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end, followed by a derisive laugh.

“With a choice, do you think I’d want my own daughter to live as a man? Would I suppress her talent and let her live an ordinary life forever?”

“When she was five, she looked up at me and asked why she couldn’t sense the spiritual energy everyone else talked about, and whether that meant she had no spiritual veins. I lied and told her that cultivation was too difficult, and that it would be better to remain a mortal.”

“She said she wasn’t afraid of hardship and asked whether there was any way. I told her all the advantages of not cultivating. She understood what I hadn’t said aloud and never asked me again.”

“Then, one night when she was eight, she suddenly ran in, brimming with excitement, and told me she could sense spiritual energy. That was when I realized that for those three years, she had still been meditating every day like the other children, even though she couldn’t sense a thing...”

“Do you think I wanted this? If there had been any choice...” Lou Chengfeng choked up.

“All I wanted was for her to be happy. It didn’t matter if she was carefree and foolish, or if she lived an ordinary life.”

His tone suddenly turned fierce.

“But now that you’ve undone Wuxiang, all the suffering she endured over the years will have been for nothing! You—”

“It was me who asked it to,” Lou Yue suddenly said.

The message butterfly fell instantly silent.

“What exactly is Wuxiang?” she asked.

“...”

After a long, awkward silence, Lou Chengfeng suddenly shouted, “Xuanba, you damn—*#¥%!”

Once he had finished cursing, Lou Yue folded her arms and leaned against the headboard. She raised an eyebrow and gave a cold laugh.

“Go on. I’m listening.”

Lou Chengfeng faltered. “Son, actually...”

“Actually what?”

“...”

He couldn’t think of any way to patch things up.

“You’re still planning to keep hiding it from me even now? Are you waiting until I’m dead so you can weep and confess your regrets at my grave?” Lou Yue asked coolly.

“Bah, bah! Don’t say things like that!”

Lou Yue said nothing, simply waiting for him to come clean.

Neither father nor daughter was willing to back down, and they remained locked in a stalemate. Finally, Xuanba interrupted.

“I merged half of my core into the Wuxiang secret pattern. For now, they still won’t notice.”

It glanced at Lou Yue’s chest and added, “As long as she doesn’t reveal her feminine appearance.”

Lou Chengfeng said, “Why didn’t you discuss something this serious with me?”

“You would have agreed?” Lou Yue snorted. “You might as well have kept the secret for the rest of your life and never told me.”

“Wuxiang is an ancient secret technique. It can conceal one’s true appearance so completely that no one can see through it, but it also suppresses one’s perception and absorption of spiritual energy from the outside,” Xuanba explained. “The reason I sent you to find the Land of the Five Elements last time was so that, after undoing it, it could still be maintained for a while.”

“What do you mean by half your core?”

“Wuxiang requires an enormous amount of spiritual power to maintain. I gave you half of my core, so you can rely on it to keep the technique running.”

Lou Yue stared at its palm-sized body. “When you say ‘merged it,’ you mean it’s gone?”

Xuanba gave a calm “Mm,” as though the thing that had disappeared hadn’t been its core at all.

Lou Yue knew that an inner core was just as important to a beast as a golden core was to a human. Losing half of it meant that Xuanba’s cultivation would be frozen forever.

She had never expected that regaining her senses would come at the cost of Xuanba’s future.

“It’s nothing.” Xuanba looked at Lou Yue calmly.

Lou Yue’s long lashes lowered slightly. “Aren’t you afraid all this will be in vain, and that you’ll have wasted half your inner core?”

“I’m looking forward to seeing you make it so that ‘no one will even dare covet you in their dreams.’” His usually flat voice held a trace of gentleness.

From the other end, Lou Chengfeng felt a pang of jealousy and interrupted them. “Forget this ridiculous family banquet. Leave Xuandu immediately, before the old man notices something’s wrong.”

“Why do I have to pretend to be a man? What does it matter if he notices?” She knew that the Lou family bloodline passed down the gift of perception, but what did that have to do with gender?

“Son, I’ll tell you straight. The women of the Lou family possess the power of a furnace cauldron. From birth, they’re destined to marry the men of the clan, help them cultivate, and bear their descendants. We didn’t want you to take that path, so we had you disguise yourself as a man. If the old man finds out, he won’t just stop you from leaving—he’ll force you to marry. That’s why you must leave at once.”

Lou Yue looked at Xuanba. “Is that all?”

Lou Chengfeng assumed she was asking him and immediately replied, “Son, at a time like this, how could your father possibly lie to you?”

Xuanba remained silent for a long while before finally giving a quiet “Mm.”

Lou Yue instinctively sensed that they were still hiding something from her, but she couldn’t grasp what it was.

“Son, once you reach the peak of the Nascent Soul stage, don’t use ‘Heaven and Earth Manifestation.’ It’ll expose your true appearance. Your father really would like to live a few more years. After the fright you gave me today, who knows how many I have left...”

His endless stream of warnings was cut short when Xuanba severed the communication.

“Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Just be who you are.” As Lou Yue’s contracted beast, Xuanba could more or less sense her emotions.

“I’ll go to the family banquet with you.”

Lou Yue nodded. As she rose from the bed, she asked as if making casual conversation, “You’ve always been called ‘Xuanba,’ haven’t you?”

Xuanba gave a quiet hum.

“Your father wasn’t lying to you. It’s only that your furnace-cauldron power is more effective than other women’s.”

“Don’t overthink it. Don’t let it become a shackle.”

**

It was called a family banquet, but there were actually more than a hundred people present.

The seating had been arranged in advance. Lou Yue was led to the third seat on the right side of the main table, directly opposite Lou Weixiao.

Her arrival drew plenty of attention and discussion, but since she was merely there to go through the motions, she didn’t care. At first, some people came over under the guise of concern, though they were really trying to sound her out. After Lou Yue gave them a sharp tongue-lashing, no one approached her again.

Bored, Lou Yue counted down the time while her thoughts ran in every direction.

Although Xuanba and Lou Chengfeng seemed to be hiding something else from her, the fact that she wasn’t a man was already enough to make her happy for quite some time.

As for the furnace-cauldron power, as long as she was strong enough, anyone who dared treat her as a furnace cauldron would get beaten down. One would be beaten; two would be beaten together—until no one dared covet her again.

Besides, the novel contained no plotline involving furnace cauldrons. Otherwise, there would surely have been such a character in Long Aotian’s harem. Compared with changing the deadly fate awaiting her, the matter of being a furnace cauldron wasn’t important.

Her first priority was still to increase her strength, so that she would always have the power to fight Xiao Rangchen on equal terms.

At the thought of Xiao Rangchen, Lou Yue pressed her lips tightly together and viciously jabbed her chopsticks into the vegetables in her bowl several times.

Once she went down to Xuandi City, her main purpose would be to see Xiao Aiai and the others and arrange what came next. Finding him was only incidental—just incidental. She merely wanted him to admit that he had been lying. She absolutely was not going there specifically to look for him!

At long last, when the banquet was nearly over, someone hurried in and whispered a few words to Lou Weixiao.

A look of surprise crossed Lou Weixiao’s face, and he even glanced deliberately at Lou Yue.

After dismissing the messenger, he rose and reported to Lou Mo, “Patriarch, we’ve just received word that someone close to Cangya Xun died in Xuandi City. Not even his bones remain, and his soul lamp has gone out. Cangya Xun seems convinced that he knows who the murderer is and is demanding that the Lou family hand the person over.”

Lou Yue’s chopsticks paused.

Lou Weixiao’s father frowned. “Who died?”

“Cang Wu, Cangya Xun’s right-hand man.”

“He’s dead. What does that have to do with us handing anyone over?” The original body’s second uncle, seated to the lower right of Lou Mo, spoke up.

“Cangya Xun believes that Cang Wu died at the hands of someone under Brother Yue.” As Lou Weixiao spoke, his gaze settled on Lou Yue.

Lou Yue put down her chopsticks and looked back at him. “He believes someone did it, so that person is the murderer?”

“Who did Cangya Xun say it was?”

“Xiao Rangchen, the one who placed second in yesterday’s competition.”

“The one who came down last after comprehending the Dao beneath the ancient tree?”

“Yes.” Lou Weixiao turned toward Lou Yue. “Brother Yue stood up for him in Xuandi City before and even injured Cangya Xun. That’s why he has come to the Lou family to demand the man now.”

“What a joke. Does Cangya Xun think Xuandu belongs to Cangya Cliff? Not to mention whether he was the one who killed the man—even if he was, there’s no reason for him to demand anyone from the Lou family!”

“He isn’t my man. We have no connection whatsoever.” Lou Yue’s tone remained utterly calm.

“I’ll relay Brother Yue’s words to Cangya Xun. However, since the man died in Xuandu, the Lou family should at least find the murderer. Besides, someone dared to act in Xuandu, which clearly means he has no regard for the dignity of the Lou family.”

“If you ask me, we should simply find this Xiao Rangchen and hand him over. I previously sent people to recruit him, but the man was arrogant and conceited, showing not the slightest regard for us. He isn’t worth damaging our relationship with Cangya.”

“We should investigate first and find out who the murderer really is.”

...

Lou Yue sat there through it all. Apart from her first couple of remarks, she didn’t speak again. As for Lou Mo, he remained silent from beginning to end, revealing nothing of his thoughts or emotions.

After the banquet ended, Lou Yue found Lou Zhongyan.

“I promised to stay for a month, but I’ve always been used to wandering. Living in Xuantiandu has left me feeling uncomfortable all over.”

Her brows lifted slightly, and her tone was careless. “I’m afraid that one day I’ll get an itch to destroy some flowers or plants. Let’s leave that month for another opportunity.”

Lou Yue handed him a jade box. “A birthday gift. I picked it on a whim.”

“Young Master Yue, why not give it to the patriarch yourself? He’s inside,” Lou Zhongyan urged.

Lou Yue shook her head. “It doesn’t really matter whether he gets it or not. Do whatever you like with it.”

She turned to leave, but paused and looked back. “For the sake of my being surnamed Lou, I’ll give you a piece of advice that isn’t quite advice—

“Don’t help Cangya deal with Xiao Rangchen. Leave him some room. In the future, that may give you another way out.”

With that, she walked away. Even when Lou Zhongyan called after her, she didn’t turn back.

Lou Zhongyan pushed open the door and entered. He placed the jade box on the table, let out a soft sigh, and withdrew. Lou Mo, a Soul Transformation cultivator, could hear everything that had been said outside; there was no need for him to say anything more.

The door closed again, and silence settled over the room.

Only after a long while did Lou Mo, who had been standing with his back turned and his hands behind him, walk over to the table and open the jade box.

Inside lay a small wildflower. Lustrous spiritual energy curled around it. Its petals were fresh and vibrant, its leaves a brilliant green, all of it radiating vigorous life.

**

Lou Yue returned to the Cloud-Sleeping Courtyard in Xuandi City.

Little Qiu was overjoyed to see her, but before he could report what had happened over the past two days, she went to find Xiao Aiai.

Lou Yue got straight to the point. “Aiai, did your brother come to see you yesterday?”

Xiao Aiai shook her head and took out a letter. “A child delivered this to the Cloud-Sleeping Courtyard this morning.”

The three characters “Xiao Aiai” on the envelope were vigorous and sharp, their strokes seeming to pierce through the paper.

Lou Yue stared at the handwriting, her voice hoarse. “Can I read it?”

Xiao Aiai hesitated for a moment before nodding.

A storage ring fell out of the envelope. She slipped it back inside, then unfolded the letter.

The handwriting on the page was as bold and vigorous as the words outside.

“Aiai, your brother is leaving. I’m sorry to leave you behind. I haven’t been a good brother, and I failed to fulfill Mother’s last request. From now on, take good care of yourself. There are spirit stones and money in the storage ring—keep them and use them. Don’t miss me.”

“Did something happen to my brother in Xuantian Capital? Why did he suddenly leave...?” Xiao Aiai’s eyes reddened.

Lou Yue did not tell her about Cang Wu’s death. She only said, “No. Perhaps there was something he wanted to do, and that’s why he left.”

She folded the letter, put it back into the envelope, and handed it over.

“Aiai, do you want to stay in Xuandi City? If you do, I can have Little Qiu look after you. Or, if there’s somewhere you want to go or something you want to do, just tell me. I’ll arrange it.”

“What I told you before still stands. If you’re willing, you can be my little sister from now on. If you haven’t made up your mind yet, I can also send you to my father. He’s always wanted a daughter by his side. He’d surely be happy if you went to him.”

Xiao Aiai stared blankly at Lou Yue. Seeing that her expression was sincere and that she wasn’t joking, her nose stung, and she said softly, “I... I’ll think about it. I’ll give you an answer later.”

Lou Yue knew she had sprung this on her too suddenly and was afraid of frightening her, so she softened her voice. “Aiai, there’s no need to hurry. Take your time.”

“Mm...”

After leaving Xiao Aiai’s room, Lou Yue returned to her own. The moment she closed the door, she leaned back against it and stood there in a daze.

Xuanba leapt down from her shoulder, climbed onto the windowsill on its own, and waited for the moonlight.

After a long while, a low curse rang out in the room, its final syllable trembling slightly:

“Bastard...”

-----------------------

This chapter dragged the plot along with great effort, all so I could write the reunion in the next one.