Chapter 229 – Making Choices

“You wanna play chess with me? Hoho…you’re not qualified to do so yet!” As though he had overheard the conversation between Xia Yun, the scholar, and Tang Xiaoyun, Gu Suihan suddenly chuckled from a distance of thousands of kilometers away, raising his head slightly to reveal his feminine facial features.

“Where am I?”

Li Yu finally regained consciousness after a long time. The excruciating pain from his body hit his brain again and again in waves. The wounds that had dried up and hardened while he lay unconscious broke open as he moved in agony, causing them to bleed all over again.

“Why…why didn’t they kill me?”

After a good hour or so, Li Yu slowly managed to sort out his messy memories. This was the first question that came to him.

But he had no answer. Perhaps I’m too weak. So weak that they didn’t even bother to look at me, thought Li Yu with a sad smile.

“Esteemed One, what should I do now? Why did I suddenly lose consciousness? What happened in between?” he murmured as he instinctively rubbed the ring on his finger with a confused look on his face.

“One of the Nascent Change cultivators cast a hypnotic spell on you, which made you lose your senses and stab that girl. After that, the cultivators began quarreling among themselves. The barrier broke once there were only four of them left, so they all left,” said the Esteemed One in a slow voice as he explained what supposedly happened.

In any case, Li Yu was only at Foundation Establishment, so he could exaggerate the abilities of a Nascent Change cultivator as much as he wanted, and Li Yu would believe him without question. The difference between these two stages was way too large. Nascent Change was a stage Li Yu dared not even dream of ever attaining.

“Wait, I…what? How is she now?” asked Li Yu in a panicked voice as his face paled.

“She left you a letter, you can read it yourself,” muttered the Esteemed One in an annoyed voice before falling back to silence.

“A letter?” Li Yu looked down and found a small, fragrant jade slip alongside several bottles of pills right next to him. He hurriedly sent his spiritual sense into the jade slip to read the information inside.

Fifteen minutes later, he put the jade slip down with a dejected look on his face as he murmured to himself, “That woman didn’t die? Instead, she teamed up with her subordinates to attack you and capture you? And to avoid implicating me, you forcibly cut the karma line between us so that I would have to hide our past?”

“At the end of it all, I’m the one who’s too weak. If I weren’t so weak, Rou’er wouldn’t have died. If I weren’t so weak, I wouldn’t have let them take you away. If I weren’t so weak…”

“You’re trapped in an evil cycle of thinking,” the elderly voice of the Esteemed One suddenly rang inside Li Yu’s brain and pulled him out of his self-blaming thoughts. “Since you think you’re weak, then you ought to focus on cultivating. A big reason why you’re still alive now is because that girl put in quite a lot of effort. Did you think you would have survived all that purely by luck?”

“You’re right. I’ve got to work hard and cultivate. I’ll revive Rou’er someday and save you from the clutches of your enemies.”

Li Yu’s previously dazed eyes lit up at once and shone with great determination.

“You’ve been waiting especially for me?” Gu Suihan accepted the white jade wine cup from the other person and fiddled with it as he smiled.

Su Yuqing raised his cup as a friendly gesture even as he furrowed his brows and stared straight at the handsome yet gentle-looking young man in front of him. A little fear filled his heart, and he felt even less confident of getting what he wanted out of this visit.

A moment later, he said solemnly, “You…have reached Nascent Change?”

“Hoho, is that very surprising?” asked Gu Suihan as he raised an eyebrow and smiled faintly.

Su Yuqing’s heart sank when he heard Gu Suihan’s reply. After a long time, he put aside his aloofness and got up to bow solemnly, and said in a respectful voice, “Sir, please have mercy on me and save my daughter.”

He didn’t dare to be impolite to this young man. Based on what he had read and his own experience, the fact that this man was able to recuperate this quickly meant he had some sort of trump card or plans set up well ahead of time. After all, no cultivator who’s survived this long could have done so without approaching life like this. Before they did anything, they would have considered all possible consequences beforehand.

But Gu Suihan’s face didn’t even flinch.

There were only two possibilities. One, Gu Suihan was now secretly capable of fighting him without losing. Two, Gu Suihan knew that he needed Gu Suihan’s help and would not attack.

Either possibility dismayed him. Someone who had lived this long would be capable of so many insane things. If one wanted to fight such a person, one had to be mentally prepared to die as well.

“That little girl? There’s nobody among you who can settle the problem?” Gu Suihan seemed to have suddenly realized what Su Yuqing was talking about. He went on in a somewhat insinuating tone, “Actually, you’re not very emotionally attached to Shuang’er. Furthermore, Shuang’er is a girl, so even if you decided to take over her body, it would clash greatly with your cultivation technique. Yet, for her sake, you were willing to give up your future. Clearly, the person backing her is someone you’re wary of, or rather, someone you’re afraid of.”

Su Yuqing couldn’t hide the shocked look on his face and only calmed back down after a few moments. He said in a deep voice, “You…are truly an expert at reading the hearts of others. You’re right – I’m at Divine Soul, but I don’t have any method to reach the next stage. Besides, I married into my wife’s family, so I don’t have sufficient standing over there either. If something bad happens to Shuang’er, I will meet a pretty bad end.”

“Actually, there’s one more way.” A strange glint flickered in Gu Suihan’s eyes, and his voice was as soft as a mosquito’s as he said, “If you stabilize your current stage or even hit Peak Divine Soul, the other party will not be able to do anything about you.”

“Get to…Peak Divine Soul!”

Su Yuqing’s mind trembled, and his heart began to race, but his expression quickly fell, and he sounded depressed as he said, “You’re at a stage where you can see that I’ve used an unorthodox method to get here. I found a high-grade spiritual weapon and sealed my physical energy, qi, mental energy, and even my three hun and seven po inside it to forcibly gather my spirit. Then during the fight in the Lower World, I had no choice but to undo the seal and turn it into a sword domain. Even though I’m considered to be at the Divine Soul stage now, I’m a lot weaker than cultivators at the same stage. Besides, this sword…still bears the seal of that family. In other words, they still have control over my life.”

“Using an item to gather your spirit is a good idea, but it’s too bad that your heart is still a mortal one, so you can’t control the brightness of a sword’s blade. You…are not suitable for a sword,” said Gu Suihan slowly as he finally raised the wine cup and looked at the slow, rippling navy blue alcoholic drink inside.

“I’m…not suitable?” Su Yuqing looked lost. He still had trouble putting his roots aside.

“I can help you, and I…can also help your daughter. The price will be the same.”

Gu Suihan’s tone held heavy implications, and he drank the wine down as he stared at the older man. He smiled and patted the older man’s shoulder, then disappeared without a trace as the wind blew past.

From the start to the end, Gu Suihan had steered the entire conversation. And once he was done speaking, he left without giving Su Yuqing the chance to even respond.

All that was left was two plates of side dishes on the well-worn table and chairs beneath a simple shelter at a small eatery. Su Yuqing sat quietly at the table and stared at the jade slip that Gu Suihan had left beneath his wine cup. A pained look seemed to fill his eyes.

It was clear that he was struggling to decide between the choices Gu Suihan had given him. Gu Suihan said he could help him and help Shuang’er. Su Yuqing did not think Gu Suihan was lying, since Gu Suihan had no reason to do so.

“The same price? What have you set your eyes on?”

In the evening sun, Su Yuqing’s long shadow looked especially sorrowful, lonely and tragic.

Gu Suihan was a very simple man. He didn’t have the ambition that most people had and had no desire to go after fame or status. Relationships and desires were all stupid. They were like a passing mist to him.

Who cared if one succeeded or failed? Who cared about what was right and what was wrong? That had nothing to do with him.

You could say that as long as you didn’t stand in his way, he was a perfectly harmless cultivator.

But that came with another caveat, which was that you’d better not have something he wanted. Or rather, even if you did, don’t be stupid and stand in his way.

Otherwise, he was more than happy to kill you off, no matter who you were.

He didn’t understand why he should care about the opinions of ignorant, foolish, idiotic and pathetic ants.

He was able to tolerate the existence of ants, but he would not tolerate these ants if they thought too highly of themselves and did something that would bring harm to himself.