Chapter 305: Chapter 305

Li Xun hesitated for a second, then walked over and knelt beside Qi Bi the way she did. Being that close, he noticed a light scent on the warm, damp air. It was her fragrance, and it was actually really nice.

He suddenly had no idea what to say.

But Qi Bi wasn’t in any rush to speak either. She lifted a hand and gently smoothed a few loose strands of hair near her temples.

Pale skin, dark hair, and a graceful gesture like that belonged in a quiet boudoir in front of a makeup mirror. Whether she meant to or not, doing it out here in front of someone else changed the mood between them.

Li Xun could not help certain thoughts from drifting through his mind, none of them innocent. But just as quickly, he shoved them away.

The silence dragged on for a while. They were almost back to where Ying Ning was resting when Qi Bi finally spoke, her voice calm and even. “If you were in Senior Brother Wen’s shoes right now, how would you look at me?”

Just from that one line, Li Xun could guess what that bastard Shan Zhi must have been said to her.

Seeing the hint of bitterness at the corner of Qi Bi’s mouth, he sighed inwardly. “My experiences are different from Senior Brother’s.” His voice stayed calm. “And I have no idea what he is going through right now. But to me, Senior Sister Qi is simply Senior Sister Qi. What he thinks has nothing to do with me.”

His tone sounded cool, but the words themselves were so damn close, so intimate. There was no way to miss it. Qi Bi pressed her lips together in a small smile, and it looked like her mood actually lifted a little. But her next question caught Li Xun completely off guard.

“You don’t care what your Senior Brother Wen thinks… so you also don’t care what your Senior Brother Shan does, is that it?”

Li Xun couldn’t possibly shoulder that accusation. He shook his head right away, denying it with a wry smile. “ Senior Brother Shan’s thoughts… I only have a rough idea, honestly. I never in a million years thought he’d actually go through with something like that. But come on, even if I wanted to, I can’t control what’s in other people’s heads. I’m not the god of heaven and earth.

“And if we are being honest, among all the senior and junior brothers on the mountain, he’s probably not the only one who has feelings for you…”

He was throwing up smoke and fog, nothing more, but it worked almost too well. Qi Bi’s face flushed scarlet, then went pale, then red again. She froze for a long moment before she realized she had lost her composure. She cursed him for talking nonsense, pushed herself to her feet, and stood up abruptly.

Li Xun jumped up after her. His expression stayed composed, with not a hint of joking around.

“Senior Sister Qi, I know you don’t like hearing this, but cultivation is a long path and everyone stumbles or goes astray at some point. You have been at it longer than I have, so you must understand what I mean. Senior Brother Shan has simply taken a wrong turn right now. And you, Senior Sister, are you really any different?”

“Me?”

A sharp glint flickered in Qi Bi’s bright eyes as she met Li Xun’s gaze, but she was the first to look away. “Yes. How am I any different?”

Her voice faded softer and softer until it disappeared. Li Xun was still wondering whether he should press his point while he had the chance when he heard a quiet murmur near his ear.

“…That is why the person I admire most is you, Junior Brother Xun.”

“Huh?”

Qi Bi did not look at him. She turned her eyes toward the sky full of swirling snow. Through the heavy curtain of flakes, Zuowang Peak appeared and disappeared. More vast and mysterious than on any ordinary day.

“I know that ever since what happened on Tiandu Peak, a heart demon took root in me. I have tried to fight it, but whenever the night grows quiet, the past comes crashing back and I lose control. My mind gets torn apart by demons, and I would almost rather die. For decades now, my cultivation has barely moved an inch.

“But you, Junior Brother Xun… back then you were still so young and what you went through was even worse. Yet in these decades you pushed forward with incredible focus and became one of the brightest rising talents in this entire world. Is the gap between people really that big?”

Li Xun frowned. Qi Bi had spoken without any real intention behind the words, but she had casually brushed against the exact reason his cultivation differed so much from others. If her insight had been a little deeper, she might have uncovered something more.

Li Xun was not worried anymore. He only smiled. “My temperament is different from yours, Senior Sister. Maybe that is all there is to it.”

“Maybe.” From her tone, it was clear she had no interest in digging into the topic. That had not been her purpose to begin with.

After stopping Li Xun from explaining, she lowered her voice. “My cultivation has been stuck for so long. If it only affected me, that would be one thing, but it ended up dragging him down too. All these years, he kept getting distracted and made barely any progress. I knew it, but I never wanted to think about it. In truth, I should thank Junior Brother Shan. If not for him, I might never have seen things clearly. Still, lately, I really do not want to see him again.”

Her words jumped around a bit and she clearly struggled to pull herself out of it. That last line sounded fierce and final for once, but even so, it was still wrapped in the same old self-punishing, self-wounding pattern she always fell back into. Li Xun sighed quietly and gave up on trying to persuade her. Besides… why the hell should he care if someone else wanted to keep hurting themselves? It had nothing to do with him.

It was all so strange.

Realizing his own shift in attitude, Li Xun started to worry again. From up here looking down, he could already see Ling Ji pacing back and forth outside the cave mouth. With that face that showed everything he was thinking, Li Xun knew it would be hard to smooth things over quietly.

However you look at it., at least things didn’t spiral any further downhill. Shan Zhi behaved himself this time, maybe because he had been scared. He requested permission from the sect to go into seclusion, and by the time Li Xun and the others came down the mountain, he had already gone off to “focus on cultivation.” With him out of sight, Qi Bi and Ling Ji finally managed to look somewhat normal again.

After seeing Qi Bi and Ying Ning back to their place, Li Xun felt absolutely exhausted. All he wanted was to crawl back to his house and collapse. But then he noticed Ling Ji trailing behind him with a frown, following step by step with no awareness of how annoying he was being.

Li Xun was torn between wanting to laugh and wanting to snap at him. He turned and said, “Why are you still here? Planning to treat me to that expression of yours?”

Ling Ji’s face did not improve. After a long pause, he muttered, “It’s all my fault today. I was too impatient…”

“He got himself stuck in this obsession; who else is there to blame?” Li Xun first made sure to clear everyone else of any responsibility, then continued. “I’m worried about his state of mind too, obviously. But what’s done is done. Going up to him face-to-face and trying to talk sense into him isn’t an option anymore. All we can do now is watch him from the shadows, keep an eye out, make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid in a moment of weakness.”

While saying that, he was already laughing coldly in his heart: “Something stupid?” He might do something worse than that.

It was a thought, but then he remembered the look Shan Zhi had when he’d scolded him and sent him down the mountain. A flicker of concern stirred in his chest. Still, he didn’t stop talking, adding: “Anyway, this whole mess could actually turn into a turning point. If he manages to wake up and snap out of it because of this, then you’d be the one who did him a huge favor, you know?”

Ling Ji knew Li Xun was trying to lift his mood, so he curled his lip and forced a couple of laughs. His face darkened again almost immediately. Li Xun rolled his eyes. He was seriously out of ways to deal with how soft-hearted this friend could be.

After some more effort, he finally managed to calm Ling Ji down enough to send him off to rest. Watching him fly away on his sword, Li Xun suddenly found his own fatigue gone. He stood there frozen right outside his own door for a good long minute. The vague worry he’d been carrying earlier sharpened into something crystal clear. That idiot Shan Zhi… he’s not actually going to do something drastic, is he?

Once the thought surfaced, Li Xun could not sit still. After a brief hesitation, he flew off on a cloud toward the base of Zhiguan Peak.

Among the third-generation disciples of the Mingxin Sword Sect who had already become full disciples, only Qi Bi and her husband, and Li Xun lived on Zhiguan Peak. The others were scattered across the various peaks and valleys of Lianxia Mountain.

Shan Zhi lived down in a low valley not far from Zhiguan Peak. It took Li Xun only about thirty minutes to get there, and he pushed the door open as soon as he landed.

The valley was blanketed in pale snow that covered most of the shrubs and landscaping. At first glance, it looked surprisingly clean and neat.

In Li Xun’s mind, Shan Zhi should have rushed at him the moment he showed up, crying and begging for advice. That would have been the normal reaction. But to his surprise, all the way into Shan Zhi’s home there was not a single sound.

The sky had already darkened, and no lamp was lit inside. Shadow swallowed most of the room, mixing with the faint snowy light from the window. The result felt grim, and so quiet it was hard to get a sense of anything.

Li Xun frowned, his pupils adjusting after a few quick contractions. His eyes soon adapted to the dimness, but he still had to scan the room twice before he finally spotted Shan Zhi. The poor bastard was curled up in a corner, body tucked tight, his whole body swallowed by the darkness.

Li Xun stepped forward and was about to speak, but when his eyes landed on Shan Zhi, he shut his mouth again.

Shan Zhi was shaking. In the heavy stillness, the sounds seemed painfully clear. The patter of falling snow outside, the chattering of his teeth, and a strange rattle that seemed as if his bones were coming apart. All of it blended together into a thin, trembling whimper that seeped into the growing darkness.

Li Xun just stood there, watching quietly. He saw the miserable wreck biting his thumb, trying without awareness to choke back the noise until the sobs broke into scattered fragments. The half of his face that wasn’t buried in shadow was already a mess of tears and snot running together. And that twisted expression… it was impossible to tell what was really driving it: terror, despair, or just aching grief.

This scene felt strangely familiar.

Lately Li Xun sometimes caught himself feeling like a dying old man. Everything he saw somehow bled into old memories, all muddled together. And his heart… in that foggy, not-quite-real haze, he didn’t even know what it had turned into anymore.

The human heart really is the strangest thing. Right at that moment, Li Xun realized that all the disdain, disgust, and boredom in his chest faded away fast. What was left behind was some vague, hard-to-name feeling. And in the end, even that feeling simply turned into a long sigh.

The sigh felt like someone stabbed a needle right into his scalp. That flash of pain yanked him awake from the chaotic swirl of thoughts. He rushed out of there, refusing to stay another moment in a place that had just become so suffocating it was choking him.

Once outside, he took a deep breath in the freezing snow and fog. Only then did he feel a little better. He slapped his cheeks a couple times, trying to shake himself back to normal. But those sunken, wasted, utterly hopeless eyes of Shan Zhi kept flashing in his head anyway.

Those eyes had no focus whatsoever, yet they clamped onto his heart. It trembled in response, as if tied to some strange rhythm.

“Damn it!”

With that curse, Li Xun shot to his feet and took off toward Zhiguan Peak without looking back.

He was climbing higher and higher without stopping, but deep down it felt the exact opposite. Like he was plummeting off the edge of some cliff. One moment he’s lording it over the whole world, acting like nothing can touch him. Now, the ground gives way and he’s crashing down, ending up eye-to-eye with that miserable piece of shit. Same fucking level.

Yes. Even though he hated to admit it, the truth was right there. Shan Zhi in this moment was exactly what Li Xun had been sixty-four years ago. There was no real difference between them at all.

This is fucking ridiculous… Li Xun basically fled back to Zhiguan Peak. He was pissed off beyond belief, his blood kept boiling and pounding against his heart. Both his rational side and the hot impulsive part were screaming the same thing. Right now he needed to do something; whether it was to prove himself, to blow off steam, whatever. He had to pull off something that pathetic loser could never in a million years manage. At least that would be some kind of… comfort.

But once he got back to the little building, he just stood there blankly. He needed to do something, but what?

Driven by that lost and frustrated state of mind, Li Xun drifted around like a wandering soul. He walked from downstairs up to the second floor, then back down again. He paced three or four times and still could not find a goal.

The veins at his temples were already throbbing hard, pulsing like they were about to burst. If there’d been a sword anywhere within reach, he would’ve yanked it out without a second thought. First hack this little building to pieces, then carve his way through every single person on Zhiguan Peak, top to bottom, just to finally let out all the poison choking his chest.