Hua Qing and Zhuo Fengru agreed on three terms: stay calm in the face of trouble. Do not hastily flee. Do not reveal your location. Hence, when Hua Qing came across the scowling monk, he spun around and yelled, “Holy!” then spun around to make a dash for it. Alas, the large monk singlehandedly pulled Hua Qing back by the collar and yelled, “Charge!”
Hua Qing felt a digging pain in his chest. Before he completely lost awareness of his surroundings, he heard someone groan.
The first thing Hua Qing picked up on when he regained consciousness was a damp and spicy scent – a product of the dawn dampness on the mountain. Judging from the placement of the sun, a night had gone by. “… I-I’m alive?” he blurted.
Where’s the monk? How am I still alive? I still remember the pain of my chest seemingly break… What happened in the end?
Hua Qing wasn’t just free of pain; he even felt lighter and more energetic than ever.
Is the air around here magical or something?
Hua Qing looked down, only to immediately cover his mouth so that he wouldn’t scream. The monk’s chest had sunken, while his face was ghastly white and wrinkly, but Hua Qing identified him as the monk who attacked him last night.
Hua Qing performed a visual audit of the surroundings once he was sure the monk wouldn’t move. He was told about the glowing boulder, but it turned out to be a dull black colour.
I’m… not in the wrong place, am I?
Hua Qing’s stomach growled, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten for a day. Even though he had rations on him, it wasn’t the time and place to be thinking about food. Unfortunately, his stomach wouldn’t have any of it.
Wait a second. That wasn’t my stomach.
Hua Qing heard another growl that didn’t come from his stomach.
The hell?
There was nobody in front, behind or to his sides.
Suddenly, Hua Qing heard from his feet, “Brother, if you’re not going to eat, how about letting me have the food?”
“Holy!”
***
The monk ate the shortcake as though he finally found food after days of starvation. There was no mistake he was the one who attacked Hua Qing last night; however, compared to when his eyes were bloodshot, his physique and demeanour had changed in the reverse direction. In this case, his form last night might’ve been his actual mutated form.
Three shortcakes later, the monk choked, “Do… Do… you…”
“Water? You choking? I’ll go fetch you some.”
The monk shook his head as he forced himself to swallow. “Do you have vegetarian buns? This one is getting sick of cakes.”
“… No.”
The monk stared at the shortcake in his hand, sighed, then resumed eating. In no time at all, he finished three days’ worth of Hua Qing’s food, yet he still licked his fingers to get every crumb.
Hua Qing didn’t take issue with sharing his rations since he didn’t have the appetite for it. “Nobody… will come here, right?” He kept looking around in the darkness so that he could run if some bald men ever jumped out to harm him.
“In the year that I’ve been here, only one person comes, but he no longer has a reason to come.”
“You’ve been here for a year?”
“And haven’t eaten in a year.” Once he finished cleaning his fingers of crumbs, the monk jumped up and placed his hands together. “Thank you for saving this one’s life.”
“Y-you don’t have to thank me. It was only a couple of cakes.”
“That was not what this one was thanking you for.”
“You bloody baldy. You’re a dine and dasher?! You ate three days’ worth of food!”
“My junior brother ruined my Wugou State. I was able to resist the formation after I lost it, but that resulted in me losing control over my energy. In turn, my energy wrecked my mind. I believe it was my brother’s intent. I can’t leave the formation, so he may as well let me become my own maker. The more nervous I was about the situation, the faster I fell. You happened to barge in when I was suffering from qi deviation.”
“And then I scared your senses back into you?”
“If only it was that simple. I had no control over my mind; I doubt I would’ve stopped even after slaughtering people for three days’ straight, let alone stopping with just you. Indeed, you saved me. More precisely, the relic on you saved me.”
Hua Qing instinctively reached for the brocade pouch in his shirt. “Are you talking about my Repository Jade?”
“That would be what you call it in the Central Plain, yes.” The monk smiled. “When I hit the relic by your chest, my energy siphoned into the relic. Since I wasn’t my usual self, I kept pouring energy into the relic. By the time I regained self-awareness, I had given up over 90% of my energy.”
“You… filled up this ball with your lifetime of energy?”
“Although I’ve lost the majority of my energy, I avoided committing a grave sin and saved myself. Is there anything I can complain about?”
Though they still had things to say to each other, approaching footsteps cut them off. The odd part was that the interval between when they noticed the footsteps was incredibly close despite their difference in training.
The monk pushed Hua Qing to the back. “There’s a cave in the back. Hide there.”
Hua Qing did as he was told, not daring to even bob his head out for a peek.
“You ready to surrender, damn monk?”
