Volume 2, Chapter 81 – Discovery

By the time she returned to the dojo, it was already deep into the night. Bai Xiang had a certain school’s gifted backpack dangling from one hand, while the other was free so she could draw her sword at any moment. After a glance around, she headed up the long flight of steps.

Halfway up, she heard a commotion from above. She frowned and stopped in place. A moment later, a group of people appeared at the top of the stairs, their heads popping into view—when they saw her, they all jolted hard.

“Sis Xiang!” A white blur shot out from the crowd, actually leaping straight off the high platform and flinging itself at Bai Xiang, arms waving wildly.

Bai Xiang’s brow furrowed even deeper, but she still reached out her right hand into empty air and caught that white blur, an arm circling the girl’s waist as she turned half a pivot. She let the girl hook both arms around her neck, half her body draped in Bai Xiang’s arms.

“Waaah!”

Hu Hu, watching from above, saw the whole scene and immediately gasped in awe together with the others.

The white blur was, of course, Bai Zhuqing. Their little group had originally planned to gather for dinner, but once they met up they realized Lian Feng was missing. After comparing notes, they found out he hadn’t shown up at all that afternoon, so they’d panicked and rushed out to look for him—only to run straight into Bai Xiang.

To be honest, saying they’d gone out “to look for him” was a bit generous. They had no idea where to even begin.

It was the middle of the night, pitch-black all around. Aside from the southern side, the circuit city had almost no streetlights anywhere else. They didn’t even know where their little junior brother had gone off to. How were they supposed to search like a headless fly?

On top of that, with Demon Pools acting up, there was an unspoken “curfew” in the circuit city. On the way here to the stairs, some people—like Bai Zhuqing—had already come to their senses that this really wasn’t something a bunch of juniors like them could handle.

When kids run into trouble, what do they usually do?

Answer: ask the parents for help.

That was why she’d been so excited when she suddenly spotted Bai Xiang—she’d basically found the pillar of support in an instant, and launched herself over without a second thought.

But something felt off!

Clinging to Bai Xiang’s neck, her eyes full of emotion meeting Bai Xiang’s cold gaze, Bai Zhuqing stared for a few seconds before it finally hit her that this was not how she’d pictured things going.

N-no, shouldn’t I be the one holding Sis Xiang in my arms like this?

And why is she so smooth at catching girls who throw themselves at her… just how many has she caught before?

“What happened.” One look at their faces and Bai Xiang knew something was wrong. After letting go of her little sister, she gave her a once-over, relaxed her brow slightly, and asked.

Ten-odd minutes later, in the main hall, the eight inner and resident disciples of this generation, Bai Xiang included, sat down in a row and began describing everything that had happened today.

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“Little junior brother went out today to handle the procurement task,” Ma Yue said. “I was supposed to drive and do it, but he insisted on doing something for the Dao… I saw he had experience, so I stopped tagging along after a while.”

Ma Yue was eaten up with guilt, because strictly speaking the task was still assigned under his name. He’d only given it to Lian Feng because he wanted to temper him a bit. Procedure-wise this counted as “outsourcing,” the only difference being that he wasn’t charging a fee.

“His legs are on his own body. If he wants to run, it doesn’t matter how you try to look after him.” Bai Xiang’s tone was as icy as ever.

She had more or less figured out the situation.

Put simply, their little junior brother’s head had gotten messed up. On the surface, he’d used the procurement task as a pretext to embezzle funds and run, but no one believed he was that short-sighted. There had to be some deeper cause.

“Little junior brother’s been off these last few days!” Hu Hu raised his hand. “I sparred with him this afternoon, and it felt like he had something on his mind the whole time!”

“Could it be what the Dao Lord mentioned before?” Chen Shi said, eyes going round. “He wants to go be a biotech soldier?”

That really was the most plausible direction. The room immediately filled with chatter as they all speculated that whatever Lian Feng had done was because of some outside stimulus.

It was the only way to make sense of it. His state had been getting better bit by bit before this. Everyone knew how hard his life had been, so they’d gone out of their way to look after him. Here he had no worries about food or shelter and could improve his strength at the same time. If he hadn’t been hit with something, why would he suddenly lose his head like this?

“Could it be because of Senior Sister?” Xu Shu suddenly blurted out.

Senior Sister?

The others all paused. He meant today’s big Qizhou University exchange match that had caused such an uproar?

That incident had indeed put Bai Xiang’s name back in the spotlight—very big, very brutally so. It had straight-up pushed her media label from a “once in five hundred years” talent to “once in a millennium.”

Strictly speaking, if you wanted to be pedantic, the phrasing wasn’t even that exaggerated. After all, in the history of Great Yu there had only been one recorded girl who approached the Purple Core realm at age seventeen.

“In the year 116, in Huangzhou, there was a girl named Cheng. At sixteen, Cheng dreamed of a celestial serpent at play. Upon waking from the dream, she transcended the mortal and entered sagehood.”

Translated, that meant: in the 116th year after Great Yu’s founding, there was a girl named Cheng in Huangzhou. At sixteen, she had a dream where she became a celestial serpent—some versions said a white serpent—frolicking in an immortal realm. When she woke, she directly transcended her mortal body and reached the realm of Sage and True Person, that is, Purple Core and embracing the core.

Nowadays that kind of story sounded pretty far-fetched. Most people didn’t believe it. But it was carved into the official histories all the same, and so could be used as a point of comparison for today’s Bai Xiang.

“Don’t talk nonsense!” Bai Zhuqing’s face went dark at once. “How could it possibly be because of Sis!”

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“I don’t think so either.” Chen Jing spoke softly and cautiously from the side. “If Junior Brother Lian were that kind of jealous person, he never would’ve been drawn here in the first place.”

“My bad!” Xu Shu immediately realized he’d been a blockhead—everyone knew Lian Feng had set his sights on the Shenming Sword Dao precisely because of Bai Xiang. He’d come after being awed by Senior Sister’s talent and brilliance.

How could someone like that storm off in resentment because the person he admired shone even brighter? It made no sense at all.

“Other than Lian Feng, did anything else happen today.”

Bai Xiang turned to Bai Zhuqing and asked quietly.

Because the sequence of events wasn’t normal.

It was one thing for Bai Lianzhou to be absent, but for Grandpa Bai Shengju to be gone as well—this was the first time she’d seen that.

“Mm…” Bai Zhuqing hesitated, then decided to lay it all out. “Something happened with my dad’s company.”

Once the story was out, Bai Xiang understood the whole chain of cause and effect.

Bai Guanshan ran a small company outside that did assembly-line packaging work.

Packaging wasn’t anything special and didn’t have much technical content. But Bai Guanshan’s company had imported foreign machinery very early on and achieved mechanical automation. That had given him a solid first-mover advantage, and he’d made some money off that edge.

He’d always wanted to use that advantage to climb higher, but the wife he’d married, Zhu Ying, wasn’t from an official family. Once the company grew to a certain size, it stopped being able to move up.

Any further, and it wasn’t a question of vision and ability anymore—it was about status and bloodline. And those were exactly what Bai Guanshan lacked.

Forget climbing. If Bai Lianzhou hadn’t sacrificed his own ambitions to marry Shen Xuelan, with Bai Maoxu’s wife’s family quietly supporting them from the shadows, Bai Guanshan wouldn’t even have been able to keep what he had. His company would’ve been seized from him and swallowed whole.

This time, the incident they’d run into was neither huge nor small: a Demon Pool had appeared in the factory, and over a few days three people had died. The victims’ families had gathered at the factory gates to make a scene.

As of today, the troublemakers had already been paid off and driven away, but the Demon Pool problem still hadn’t been resolved. Even the Inspectorate couldn’t find it—it was as if it had evaporated into thin air.

And by “coincidence,” this had happened right as Bai Shengju broke through in his cultivation. So he’d had Bai Lianzhou go along with him to “throw his weight around” on his eldest son’s turf.

It was human nature. On the Nanping side streets, Zhang Daoming and Commandant Huang had both given them special attention. Inspectorate patrols and the Chilong Army were everywhere, so Bai Shengju wasn’t worried about the dojo’s safety at all.

“Have you called Grandpa yet.” Bai Xiang asked again.

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Bai Zhuqing shook her head. “I was about to, but then I ran into you outside.”

“Help me put my things back.” Bai Xiang passed the backpack to her younger sister, stood up, and swept her gaze across the others. “You don’t need to get involved in this. Go eat, and then get some rest early.”

Phew~

The moment she said that, everyone—Chen Jing included, who’d once shared a desk with her—let out a sigh of relief.

They were all the same age, and Bai Xiang was actually younger than some of them, yet no one felt there was anything odd about this.

Because she’d long since stopped being the same as they were.

She’d long since become the real “parent.”

After sending them off, Bai Xiang took a moment to plan things out in her head. If Abbess Li Sheng’s manuscript could give her enough insight, she’d find an opportunity to refine the introductory path for the Transforming Qi method.

She honestly didn’t mind being an enemy of the whole world; she even faintly felt a bit eager to give it a try. But she had to consider the feelings of the people around her—she wasn’t going to go looking for trouble herself.

She stepped outside alone and called Bai Shengju from the small grove by the gate. She learned that everything on his end had gone smoothly.

The harmful Demon Pool had already been tracked down and destroyed. It had been brought in by an out-of-town worker who’d gotten drunk; its outer Aspect was “a bottle of beer”—one of those cheapest green-glass bottles. When they found it, it was sitting in a hallway of the workers’ dorm, lined up with a bunch of empty bottles. You wouldn’t notice it at all if you didn’t look closely.

“That thing was cunning!” Bai Shengju’s voice was full of high spirits. “It hid there, waiting for people to notice it and drink it! But the liquor inside never ran out! Anyone sober should’ve realized something was wrong fast, but by then all the victims were already drunk, and they just kept drinking and drinking, until their bellies literally burst!”

That was why the Inspectorate hadn’t found the Demon Pool at first. Zhang Daoming’s manpower was tight—he couldn’t send his best people out the moment a case was reported. And to ordinary Inspectorate Police, a few bottles lying next to a corpse weren’t worth paying attention to. They’d check them over, find nothing wrong, maybe lift a few fingerprints, and then toss them aside.

Hearing that nothing serious had happened to Bai Shengju, Bai Xiang relaxed a little. She then told him about Lian Feng, which drew his full attention.

“What are you planning to do?” Bai Shengju asked.

“He said when he first came in that he used to work up north, so he should still have some social ties there,” Bai Xiang said. “I plan to ask Chief Inspector Zhang to send someone to take me there to check it out.”

“Be careful on the road.” Bai Shengju thought for a moment and didn’t try to stop her. “North or south, any fringe area has gangs entrenched. That kind of darkness is beyond what you can imagine. It’d be best to also report to Commandant Huang and have the Chilong Army put in some effort too.”

So this was Condensing the Aspect—he didn’t even talk the same anymore. Asking the Chilong Army to move was like saying they’d add an extra dish to dinner. Bai Xiang couldn’t help finding it a bit funny.

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She agreed simply a few times, confirmed that Bai Shengju and Second Uncle wouldn’t be coming back tonight, and then planned to return, brief the others on the situation, and head out alone.

But just as she was about to move, her brows knit together.

Late autumn, the night air was thin and cold.

Yet this little grove was filled with a faint metallic stench. If you didn’t sniff carefully, you’d never notice it.

I didn’t smell this here before… is this due to the heightened senses from the path of embracing the core?

Following the smell to the fake rockery, Bai Xiang crouched and sniffed again. She couldn’t shake the feeling that some rotten corpses were buried in the soil underfoot.

She tried scraping at the dirt with the toe of her boot, but found nothing at all.

Is there really corpse-dissolving solution here?

Bai Xiang raised her brows.

It couldn’t have been Grandpa—he’d have no reason to hide it from her.

It couldn’t be outsiders either. If it were, it would mean they harbored ill intent toward the Bai family, and to avoid alerting their target they would’ve taken the bodies away.

With each possibility eliminated one by one, Bai Xiang quickly locked onto the last one.

It must have been Xiang Xian… must have been Master.

That was bad news.

Her expression didn’t ease up at all just because she’d reasoned her way to an answer.

Because that indirectly pointed to two things: first, that someone really had set their sights on the Bai family, and those intentions were probably very nasty. Second, that Xiang Xian hadn’t told her any of it.

Did she think it wasn’t necessary?

Or… did she not dare…