Fourth Master Rong swore up and down that he had never once overstepped with Ren Yao — yet Lang Jiuchuan did not believe it. She simply pointed to the dead silence pervading the estate.
“This residence is saturated with the resentment of over a hundred wronged souls — undissipated for more than a decade. The despair and terror they felt in the moment of their deaths all lay before me, rendered in their blood-light and grievance.” Her voice suddenly rose: “Ren Yao never married. She was here — here, beneath the scorched earth under your wheelchair. Fourteen years ago, she and her father and mother, her brothers and sisters, her kin and household servants — over a hundred people in total — were slaughtered here. Blood flowed like a river.”
Lang Jiuchuan’s voice turned ice-cold: “And you stand there telling me she married, bore children, had a comfortable life? Someone who long since turned to bare bones, her soul scattered to the winds — how could such a person marry and bear children, and after surviving the annihilation of her entire family, still be living comfortably? Even if she had lost her mind entirely, she could not be well. If what you say is true, then that so-called Ren Yao you saw with your own eyes can only be an impostor wearing Ren Yao’s face — a fabrication tailored specifically for someone like you, who is blind-eyed and blind-hearted, a false performance played out to deceive.”
Fourth Master Rong was struck dumb by those near-cutting words. His mind went entirely blank — and he actually began to doubt himself: had he truly been mistaken? Or was it as she said — had he constructed a false image of a happily living Ren Yao, a phantom he’d built to soothe his own conscience?
“Two years ago Master still sent me to spy in secret,” Sande said. “It’s exactly as I described — a son and a daughter, both growing up splendidly, though they don’t much resemble Ren Yao. Probably take after their father.”
Fourth Master Rong nodded. Yes, that was right — he had not deceived himself.
Yet looking at the cold expression on Lang Jiuchuan’s face, why did his sense of foreboding only grow stronger?
And this estate — if it were as Lang Jiuchuan said, the entire household annihilated in a single night, could Ren Yao truly live in peace as a young mistress of some household, shut her doors and enjoy her comfortable life? Impossible. She had been a woman of brightness and magnanimity, raised with fine virtue — she was decidedly not the kind of cold-hearted, heartless person who could do such a thing.
And this — this was Ren Yao’s parents’ home!
Fourth Master Rong stared at the dilapidated estate, a stabbing ache piercing through his heart. He fell again into doubt — was he the one who had been wrong, or had Lang Jiuchuan and the others mistaken the person?
Gong Tinglan watched his expression grow bewildered, and felt himself puzzled in turn. He asked, “Fourth Master, if you say Ren Yao was the person you loved, how could you not know where her parents’ family home was?”
“I met her in Luzhou, on that side of the country. Her mother was of the Qinghe Cui Shi lineage — she grew up there. As for where her true family home was, I genuinely didn’t know it was here in Wu Jing, nor did I know the Ren family had been so devastatingly destroyed.” Fourth Master Rong gave a wry smile. “What you both say is not untrue — what I called deep love is indeed rather cheap.”
Gong Tinglan said, “What you saw was Ren Yao living well. But what Jiuchuan describes is her long dead — and having borne you a daughter, which you knew nothing of. There’s something strange in all of this. Arguing back and forth doesn’t really help. It would be better to verify. If Jiuchuan is truly your flesh and blood, then whether the Ren Yao in the Li household of Longxi is the real Ren Yao — or merely a deception manufactured to divert your attention — would be another matter worth examining.”
How to verify — not something so crude as the blood-recognition drop, but rather by Daoist technique: the tether of blood lineage.
In truth, if Lang Jiuchuan’s soul were that of the original body’s owner, there would be no need for technique at all — one could discern something from the face alone. But the difficulty was this: the flesh belonged to Ren Yao’s daughter — yet the soul was Lang Jiuchuan’s own. That was the complication.
But to verify blood lineage — having the body was sufficient proof. The body, flesh and blood, was received from one’s parents — there was no falsifying that.
Lang Jiuchuan did not argue further. She had not sought out Fourth Master Rong in order to rush forward and claim a father — to play the dutiful daughter. What she had wanted was to find an external force to use.
The provocation and probing in her earlier words had already told her what she needed to know: setting aside the question of how much his devotion was worth, his feelings for Ren Yao had been genuine. That was enough.
To lose the one he loved, then discover he had lost a daughter as well — that was grim enough to drive anyone to madness. It was more than enough to send him into a frenzy, help her turn the Rong Family inside out, and bring everything crashing down.
So Lang Jiuchuan resumed her usual cool, detached composure.
Sande gave a quiet sound of admiration. This face-changing skill was even sharper than his master’s.
Fourth Master Rong hadn’t noticed the shift in Lang Jiuchuan’s expression. He felt only a tearing ache in his spirit — as though something long sealed away were breaking through the surface of the earth, making his heart constrict.
With Gong Tinglan present, Lang Jiuchuan didn’t need to perform the ritual herself. She offered only a strand of hair and a drop of blood — but the talisman was drawn with her Panguan’s cinnabar brush. That brush, which could inscribe the Book of Life and Death, carried an authority more absolute than anything else.
Fourth Master Rong, for reasons he couldn’t quite name, felt a deep reluctance. He sensed that the result of this verification would be cruel beyond bearing.
Lang Jiuchuan couldn’t resist landing another needle: “Surely Fourth Master doesn’t lack even the courage to seek out the truth? Don’t worry — I am not rushing to claim a father. I won’t ask you to bear the burden of being one.”
Fourth Master Rong: !
This stubborn, contrary temperament — it was exactly the same.
But when had he and Yaoyao ever…
Hmm.
A sharp pain knifed suddenly through Fourth Master Rong’s head — like an ice spike driven straight through — agonizing beyond endurance.
Sande, without ceremony, took his master’s fingertip blood directly, and pulled out a strand of hair to hand to Gong Tinglan. If it turned out to be true, it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Fourth Master Rong did not resist. A flash of imagery crossed his mind — so swift that even he himself couldn’t catch it — yet his entire body had begun to tremble. He stared without blinking at Gong Tinglan’s movements.
He watched him twine together the blood and hair of the two of them. He watched him intone the Daoist incantation. He watched the talisman wrap around the blood and hair and ignite without fire. He watched a thread — dense and crimson as blood-bond — emerge from his own body and stretch in a straight, unwavering line toward Lang Jiuchuan.
Fourth Master Rong’s body shook violently. His eyes went unfocused. How could this be — how was it possible?
Ren Yao — what had happened between them? How could he have known nothing of this?
A vast tide of pain and self-recrimination crashed over him — and Lang Jiuchuan, who had already known what the result would be, watched him with unbroken calm. A surge of desolation rose within her.
Was it the lingering grief of the original soul? Or the stirring of blood-bond?
She had no desire to examine it closely. But watching Fourth Master Rong — his face twisted and contorted by the violent surge of his emotions, utterly on the edge of collapse — her pupils contracted slightly, and she instinctively reached out and caught Gong Tinglan’s sleeve, directing his gaze there.
Gong Tinglan looked over as well, and his expression shifted in surprise. “Someone has tampered with his spiritual soul and memories.”
Lang Jiuchuan met his eyes. The Dizhong bell rose from her hand — and she struck it down into Fourth Master Rong’s completely unguarded spiritual soul.
Clang.
The bell’s tone rolled like thunder, shattering every layer of conspiracy and artifice.
Boom!
The tightly wound string in Fourth Master Rong’s mind snapped with a sharp twang. He threw his head back and let out a broken cry. Fragment after fragment of imagery flooded into his mind. In the aftermath of slaying a malevolent entity, the soul-guard he had placed on Ren Yao stirred — she had been drugged by Qi Yun and sent to the bed of an Elder. He had rushed to her, and what he found was Ren Yao — her face flushed scarlet, coughing blood, having even driven a wound into her own thigh to preserve her last shred of rational self-control — throwing herself into his arms.
They had belonged to each other. Only each other. Just once. It had not been without crossing that line.
But why had he forgotten something so important? Of course — he had killed that Elder surnamed Wan. He had killed his way straight into the old bastard’s cultivation sanctum. Qi Yun had stood there holding that evil child, her face breaking into a grotesque and triumphant smile. He had seen the Family Head’s condemning gaze. He had deployed a formation plate — trapped himself within it, illusion upon illusion layering around him, until the moment when his spiritual soul was on the verge of total collapse. That was when he had glimpsed a corner of a dark violet robe embroidered with the ten-thousand-fold pattern, and heard a voice: “Such a pity…”