Chapter Ninety-Two: Who Can Tell the Real from the False?

A rainbow crossing the sun!

Old Hu gave a sour laugh. "That so? Then you were awfully lucky."

If Lu Yanzhang was telling the truth, then back when he was still confused and green, not even knowing he possessed a spiritual root, he had stumbled into the cave dwelling of a senior with a metal spiritual root. And this rainbow-crossing-the-sun move was no ordinary thing either; it was the foundational method of the Heart Sword.

Seeing that Lu Yanzhang had ultimately been locked away in the Demonic Suppression Prison, it was plain he had done quite a lot after setting foot on the path of cultivation. That meant this move, even if it was not exactly what he needed, could not have been far off.

That was more than lucky. It was practically heaven-defying.

Such coincidences were rare in the world, though one could not say they were impossible. Old Hu stopped insisting and told Lu Yanzhang to continue.

"At the time, I figured that since I had learned sorcery, the next step ought to be to seek the great road to immortality. So I settled all the worldly affairs I had, and went wandering through the famed mountains and great rivers where immortal beings were said to appear. Later, I really did run into two of them, one man and one woman, both looking very young. I followed them from afar, not knowing how to strike up conversation, but the man actually came over to me first. That was when I learned the cultivation world was much like the martial world: there were clans and sects, and also the divide between righteous and evil. In any case, I traveled with them along the way and gained quite a bit of knowledge."

"The man’s surname was Zhao, with a metal root. The woman was named Wen Xueqian, with a wood root."

Old Hu snorted. Lu Yanzhang paused, and his voice took on a lewd, knowing tone, as if to say, "You ought to understand."

"Back then I had never heard the saying that the water and wood lineages of the cultivation world produced beauties. It was the first time I had ever seen a young female cultivator with a wood root, and she seemed prettier by far than any shrew I had known before. No wonder people say a beauty is like a celestial maiden. Celestial maidens really are lovely. Naturally, I could not help paying her a bit more attention."

Hong Jian could not help suppressing a smile. She could almost imagine Lu Yanzhang flitting around the young woman, making a great fuss over her.

"Zhao said that he and Miss Wen were both from cultivation families. Their two families had long-standing ties, and after they established their foundations they were sent out to gain experience. By chance they met, so they traveled together. When they saw my situation, they found it very strange. After I told them what had happened, they asked me to take them to that cave dwelling to have a look."

"I was dealing with cultivators for the first time, while those two were just young master and young lady who had never left their clan before. They had no idea that every move we made was already under someone’s watchful eye. After the three of us made the long journey to the cave dwelling, we were trapped inside by a cultivator in the late foundation-establishment stage."

At this point Hong Jian began paying close attention. She felt that everything Lu Yanzhang had said before was only preparation; the real story was coming now.

Sure enough, Lu Yanzhang let out a sigh and said with feeling, "In my whole life, if I were to speak of danger, what happened in that cave dwelling was probably the most dangerous. They say cultivators fear inner demons, but I never thought that man would be even more ruthless than ordinary people. For some reason or other, he attacked without a word. The two of them shielded me behind them. In the end, the young man surnamed Zhao was no match for him and was killed on the spot. I risked my life to hold the cultivator off and told Wen Xueqian to run. Instead, she stubbornly stayed and fought alongside me. At the critical moment, I used a martial technique to conceal that move, Rainbow Crossing the Sun, and actually managed a successful ambush. I struck the cultivator. The two of us took his life together and avenged Zhao."

With that, the first story was finished. Old Hu asked a few questions about the details of their fight and then fell silent in thought.

Lu Yanzhang complained first. "All this talking has dried my throat out!"

Then he began calling on people one by one. "Come, come, let’s start with the smallest number. Old Hu, do you think it’s true or false? Give me an answer."

Old Hu said, "The whole sequence of events is just too coincidental. Usually, the more something sounds false, the more likely it is to be true. But since it’s you, I figure you definitely played tricks. False."

He muttered through a long tongue-twister of "true or false" before finally reaching a conclusion.

Lu Yanzhang gave a chuckle of unclear meaning, then asked, "And the brother in cell twelve?"

The taciturn man spoke up. "True."

Lu Yanzhang laughed again, and before he could ask her, Hong Jian said, "I also think it’s false."

She gave no reason. After witnessing so much deceit and betrayal, she could not quite believe that the female cultivator in Lu Yanzhang’s tale would knowingly remain when she was no match and fight side by side with a lecherous man she had known only a few days.

Old Hu immediately praised her loudly. "Good, Miss Fang, great minds think alike. Looks like someone’s judgment was clearly off. Out, out!"

From cell twelve, the man gave a cold laugh but did not engage.

Lu Yanzhang, however, kept them in suspense. "Fine, I’ll go on with the second part."

Ignoring Old Hu’s protests, he continued, "The second story is what happened after we killed that cultivator. Wen Xueqian came from a cultivation family, and one of her paternal uncles, a Golden Core cultivator, was a member of the Cloud Terrace Grotto. Seeing that I had nowhere to go, she introduced me to join Cloud Terrace Grotto, where I became the direct disciple of that metal-rooted uncle of hers. I thought I would never see her again after that, who knew that decades later, after I formed my Golden Core, she would appear before me once more, now my junior sister."

Old Hu could not help saying in a strange tone, "Senior brother and junior sister? Could it be that the girl simply never forgot you for all those decades and came straight for you?"

Lu Yanzhang brazenly said, "Hard to say. Pity I can’t show you. Your humble servant here cut quite a figure, handsome enough to rival Pan An and Song Yu. She was only at the peak of foundation establishment, and I had originally thought that since she had that connection to my master and had shown me kindness, I would let her be my senior sister. But she insisted otherwise, saying that although she had cultivated since childhood, she was not older than me, so it would be better for her to be my junior sister. See? For a woman to say something like that, how could she not have feelings for you?"

Old Hu cursed, "Damn it." No one knew whether he was cursing Lu Yanzhang for his luck with women or Miss Wen for lacking eyes.

Who would have thought that the story Lu Yanzhang told next would astonish everyone.

"After Wen Shimei came back this time, her temper turned very strange. Whenever I so much as looked at some female cultivator longer than usual, she would get angry. Whenever I left the sect to do anything, she had to follow me. Later my master spoke up and wanted the two of us to become dao companions. If I had agreed, she would certainly have managed me even more harshly in the future, and then life would have become unbearable. I, Lu Yanzhang, was never going to give up all the beauties in this world for one woman, so I found an excuse to refuse."

"Who knew it would be such a tiny thing, but Wen Xuejing turned against me over it. The day after she formed her core, she hooked up with one of Cloud Terrace Grotto’s Nascent Soul elders, then turned around and accused me of being a remnant demonic cultivator. She even dug up what happened back then."

"Only then did I learn that the late-foundation-establishment cultivator I killed back then had actually been from the Talisman Diagram Sect. Wen Xuejing told the grotto master that she had long suspected that Zhao and that Talisman Diagram Sect cultivator had both been killed by my hand in the name of eradicating demons and upholding the Dao. But lacking evidence, she had endured in silence and only put on a facade while tolerating my harassment all those years. Damn it."

"So you were thrown into prison for no reason too? What about your master?" Hong Jian asked in shock.

"Hah, my dear master had of course already been in league with Wen Xuejing and the others." Perhaps because he had been locked up for too long, Lu Yanzhang sounded not so much resentful as vaguely unconcerned.

This... the two parts of the story, with Wen Xuejing so drastically different in each, brave and loyal in the first and despicable and vicious in the second, were truly hard to imagine.

Old Hu clicked his tongue several times and sighed. "Looks like this part is the true one. Just as I said: in this world, whether righteous cultivators or demonic cultivators, decent people are nearly extinct. How could a fellow like you have such good luck as to run into one?"

What followed made it clear enough that the people trapped in this prison were all rather prone to despair when it came to human nature. The three listeners reacted to Lu Yanzhang’s second story in strikingly similar fashion: they all felt it must be true.

Old Hu urged, "Hurry up. If Miss Fang and I guessed right, you’ve got to admit it. Let me think of something for you to do, boy!"

Lu Yanzhang snorted. "Dream on. Stop fantasizing."

Then he changed tone and addressed the man in cell twelve. "Though I still don’t know who you are or why you’ve been locked up here, a bet is a bet. Speak. As long as it’s something I, Lu, can do, I’ll certainly carry it out."

When Lu Yanzhang said this, there was still some reluctance in him. He felt that among the people here, aside from himself, only Old Hu seemed worldly and experienced. He had not expected to fool Old Hu, yet this taciturn man had gotten it right twice in a row, and he could not help feeling the other was merely bluffing at random.

The man had won this round, yet he did not look especially pleased. In a stiff voice he said, "Fine. I don’t want you to do anything else. When this bet is over, you just shut your mouth and stay quiet until the next meal is brought. You’ve been driving me crazy these past few days, shouting until my head is buzzing."

"Damn you," Lu Yanzhang blurted out.

Hong Jian found it somewhat unbelievable and could not resist asking for guidance. "Senior... could you tell us how you knew the first part was true? If the first part was true, then Wen Xuejing was surely not of bad character. Why were you so certain the second part was false?"

The man was reasonably courteous to Hong Jian and did not beat around the bush. He stated flatly, "The fact that you ask that already shows you are not of the metal root. Lu surnamed here had only just entered the cultivation world back then, so he could not tell good people from bad. If you asked him to think back now, I doubt he would still say the same. He was deliberately misleading everyone."

Lu Yanzhang gave a heh-heh laugh.

The man continued, "The metal root has a supreme technique called the Heart Sword. To cultivate it, one must first master Rainbow Crossing the Sun in the foundation-establishment stage, then a single sword of insight in the Golden Core stage. If I am not mistaken, Lu Yanzhang, what you obtained in that cave dwelling was not only Rainbow Crossing the Sun, but also the method for the Sword of Insight."

There will be another chapter tonight.