Chapter 3: The person staring at me?

Out of curiosity, I quickly walked into the room and saw Tao Bai lying on the large bed under the window.

He was lying flat on his back, covered by a thin quilt. At first glance, he looked peaceful and comfortable, but as I walked a few steps into the room, I frowned.

If an ordinary person came here, they might not feel anything, but cultivators are especially sensitive to all kinds of energy, not to mention someone with my outstanding spiritual acuity. At that moment, I discovered that the energy in this house was abnormal.

Lu Shan leaned against the door and said to me, “Did you feel it?”

“Yes, this room is filled with the leaking pure yang qi. What’s worse is that with Tao Bai’s breathing, as he inhales and exhales, anyone who notices something wrong will know that it has something to do with Tao Bai.” I said as calmly as I could, but I was already shocked. A cultivator with profound skills can control his qi and momentum, and if he goes further, he can control it at will.

In Tao Bai’s case, he should not be able to control his yang energy well, causing his breath to leak out. But it is rare for it to be exaggerated to such an extent that it almost fills the entire room.

“Actually, I was prepared for this situation.” Lu Shan came over and pointed to a corner of the room, where special runes were carved. Lu Shan continued, “There, there, and there too! These runes are meant to prevent the release of the aura, and they are also the secret of my lineage… but they can only prevent the aura from escaping the room. All abnormal phenomena will only be restored when Tao Bai wakes up.”

“Hmm.” I casually responded. Tao Bai’s secrets were even more intriguing than Lu Shan’s. When I thought about the various things he had done in the Lake of a Thousand Demons, it could be explained.

But even so, I always felt that this person was special. He didn’t seem like a master with a lot of practice, but on ordinary days, he could suppress his breath so well that I didn’t even notice his abnormality.

Seeing me thinking, Lushan walked over to me and said, “Chengyi, I know you’re curious. But there are some things that it’s better not to know than to know. Knowing is very tiring, really, just like me.”

“Like you?” I looked at Lushan. Could it be that his calm, restrained, and profound nature was forged by such suffering and hardship?

“Yes, just like me.” Lu Shan smiled wryly and said, “Look, you can feel something is wrong when you enter the room, let alone Jiang Yi? If he wants to investigate further…”

As he spoke, Lushan walked over to Tao Bai’s bed and lifted the quilt covering him. I was shocked when I saw it. I found that the part of Tao Bai covered by the quilt was a bright red, an exaggerated red, like a ball of fire burning. The red color was also faintly flowing, like the texture of feathers. I was in a trance and felt that there was a thin layer of red light on Tao Bai’s body.

“This is not bad. At first, his whole body was bright red, like a boiled shrimp. Now it’s faded on his limbs and face,” said Lushan.

“When did this start?” Tao Bai was still normal at Lake of a Thousand Ghosts.

“It started when his soul came out of the pillar of light at Lake of a Thousand Demons. You just didn’t notice it. Usually, his seizures start in the chest, spread to the whole body, then slowly fade away, shrink back to the chest, and finally return to normal. It was just the beginning at Lake of a Thousand Demons, so you didn’t notice it. Later, you fainted, and by the next morning, most of your body was like this. Fortunately, it hadn’t reached your head and face yet, saving me some trouble.” Lu Shan explained with a bitter smile.

What kind of strange symptom is this? I have never heard of it before, but thinking of Tao Bai’s various things and the power of the Vermillion Bird that was later summoned, I couldn’t help but ask in a mumble, “Is he a human? Or a Vermillion Bird?”

This is a silly question. Tao Bai is obviously a living person. Is it possible that the Vermilion Bird exists? Even if it does, it is probably the same as the legendary dragon, and it is simply impossible to exist in this space.

But in the face of my question, Lushan became serious. He said to me, “The truth is not what you think! Without the Red Bird, where would the Red Bird come from?” At this point, Lushan’s attitude became a little agitated.

I don’t understand why Lushan is so excited. To be honest, this is not at all like Lushan’s style of doing things. I guess he also noticed his own emotional fluctuations, and suddenly sighed and said to me, “Chengyi, I’m sorry. I just want to say that there are so many out-of-the-way immortals in this world, real and fake, and the world can’t tell the difference. But we always know… Taoists never provoke the out-of-the-way immortals for many reasons, but don’t they know in their hearts? Out-of-the-way immortals are also people. Can you say they are a snake? Or a weasel?”

Lu Shan’s words may sound strange to others, and they have nothing to do with the topic we want to talk about, but I know that this is already a little answer from Lu Shan to me. This answer is vague and cannot be investigated in depth.

The only thing I can be sure of is that Tao Bai is indeed a living person, not some kind of mess?

I nodded and patted Lu Shan on the shoulder and said to him, “I will help with this favor, and Tao Bai is a good kid. Regardless of whether he is human or if he really is a zhuque, I will treat him as Tao Bai. Although I am extremely unimaginative and cannot accept the fact that there are zhuque in this world,

Lu Shan looked at me and smiled. For the first time, his eyes revealed a deep sense of emotion. He patted my shoulder and said nothing. After a moment of silence, he said, “Shall we go to the front courtyard? Others have been waiting for a long time and should have said all sorts of unpleasant things. There are many strange and arrogant cultivators.”

“That’s true,” I said with a smile, and then I walked out of the room with Lushan.

I have never liked socializing, especially when a room full of strangers pretend to be familiar with each other, asking each other how they are, chatting nonsense for a while, and then acting like they are brothers.

But socializing is the most helpless thing in the world. After all, people are solitary social animals. They have both the nature of self-defense and the desire to maintain a safe distance, as well as the social attributes of group communication. Therefore, this is something that everyone cannot avoid, unless they have completely withdrawn from the world.

The circle of cultivators is mysterious in the eyes of ordinary people, but in fact, this kind of social interaction is no different from the ordinary world.

I was feeling a bit dizzy, dealing with one stranger after another. This pulse, that door, had already made my brain nearly jam, not to mention those names and numbers. Even my excellent memory was beginning to get tangled up.

As Lushan said, it was lively, really lively! A hundred or two people filled the courtyard, much like the scene when we first took refuge in Hucun.

Lu Shan was being restrained in his description of the hustle and bustle. In my heart, I thought it was already noisy.

No matter what I did, in the circle of cultivators, who are extremely particular about their seniority, I was still a junior, and I represented the sect of the unworldly, which could almost be considered a mysterious old Li sect in their eyes. So no matter how I collapsed, I still had to smile and deal with them one by one.

Chengxin was standing behind me, looking at me with a look of schadenfreude and ‘sympathy’. I had come forward to relieve the others of the burden, and they had already found an excuse to leave. Only Chengxin had stayed, according to him, to see how the big brother of the ‘Shan Zi’ school suffered.

This kind of socializing lasted for more than an hour, and I was so thirsty from talking nonsense that I was about to burst. It wasn’t until the banquet was about to start that people began to disperse from me. Taking advantage of this gap, Brother Chengxin handed me a cup of tea.

“I never thought that my family, the Li family, would have such a low profile, but you, the third-generation master, have finally created a lively reputation for us,” said Chengxin, grinning next to me.

“Are you gloating? You know very well that we don’t usually associate with people in the industry. Even if it’s a lively gathering today, it will be over tomorrow, and we won’t really be in the industry because of it.” I put down the cup in my hand.

“Yes, we have always had little contact with people in the circle, and even if we do, it is always for the good. But some people don’t necessarily think that way.” Chengxin’s words seemed to be pointing at something.

“What do you mean?” I frowned and thought carefully. Apart from some entanglements in the matter itself, the only one who really targeted my old Li family was Xiao Daxia’s family. Could it be someone else?

“Don’t turn around, just pretend to look at it casually. In the northwest corner, there is a kid staring at you. I have been quietly observing him. Since you appeared, he has been staring at you for almost two hours. If it weren’t for the fact that his gaze was really not very friendly, I would have thought he was in love with you.” Chengxin said to me with a smile, while saying hello to others, asking Chengqing and the others to come out and sit down.

“Really? It can’t be that he’s in love with you. You’re putting it on me. You know, you’re a fox, a man who can kill both men and women.” I also joked with Chengxin in a low voice, but I pretended to look casually at the northwest corner.

It was so unintentional that I also directly bumped into a gaze. In this situation, it can only be said that, as Chengxin said, someone has been observing me.

When I looked at him, I didn’t see his face clearly, but he immediately turned his head away. But I suddenly thought of him before.